Found a Saturated Niche? Don't Run. Dive in!
How to turn a niche with "too many" creators into an opportunity.
🤩 Hey! I’m Alberto. With my newsletter I want to help you reach your full potential and live your ideal life with a content-based business.
A few weeks ago, one of the major YouTubers in my niche released a Notion tutorial. I panicked.
Notion is the main topic of my channel and a constant source of clients. For a moment, my lizard brain told me I was doomed. My views and clients would soon be gone.
Fortunately, I’ve been creating content for over 14 years. It took a few minutes, but I calmed down.
My experience, and the stories of countless creators I studied, taught me that competition from other creators isn’t a problem. On the contrary, it’s an opportunity.
But this is hard to accept for new creators. So, if you are one of them, here's why you shouldn't be afraid.
An unexplored niche is a mirage
I've worked with clients who believed they'd found a blue ocean, a pristine niche with no competitors. They got an idea, found no one talking about it, and got excited about dominating that market.
Once every decade, something truly new emerges, like AI. If you are very quick, you can grab a large slice of a new market. But 99.9% of the time, this doesn't happen. If no one is talking about it, no one cares.
Instead, a saturated niche is an opportunity. Why?
When multiple creators talk about something, they have large followings and their content gets many views, there’s high demand.
We’re so lucky. When a company launches a new product, they need to validate their idea. They have to run focus groups and experiments that cost six, even seven figures. But as creators, we need just to browse the web for an hour or so.
We still need to test our content to understand the exact recipe that can work or us. But we know at least there are people in the niche.
Learn from medical dramas
I fell in love with ER in the 90s. It was the first medical drama on TV. How many others followed? Grey's Anatomy has run for almost two decades, together with many competitors that are still releasing new episodes.
What does this have to do with content creators? When someone is interested in a topic, they don't watch a single video, read one article, or follow one creator. They keep consuming content around it.
When I want to cook a specific dish, I watch multiple videos. Every one teaches me how to avoid some mistake, perfect my technique, or make the dish more special.
Your competitors eagerly reveal their secrets
Just by doing their job (i.e., creating content), your competitors show you what works.
For example, on my Italian YouTube channel, I explain digital tools for businesses and freelancers. One day, I was doing competitive analysis, a fancy term for “scrolling through my competitors’ most viewed videos”.
I was surprised by the high number of views on a video about Google Calendar. I would have never considered that topic. It was too basic, but I trusted the numbers. I created my own tutorial about Google Calendar, making it much more detailed than my competitor’s.
It’s by far the most-viewed videos of the last 12 months. And I published it 7 months ago.
Successful creators in your niche are a resource. Regularly study their content:
find what performs best,
take note of the topic, the style, and the details covered,
look for questions and objections in the comments to find out what’s missing,
create your version of that content.
But you still need to stand out
I know what you're thinking: how can you give your audience a reason to choose you over competitors?
You can always make your content and your overall brand more unique. Combine these factors:
topics,
audience demographics,
content formats (listicles, interviews, tutorials, essays…),
content types,
your personality and experience,
your purpose (or mission).
For example, as I told earlier, my YouTube channel speaks about digital tools for small businesses and freelancers. Other channels cover those same tools and/or have the same audience. But I combine these traits:
I have a PhD in computer science, so I can go deep into the technical aspects, even create and explain code,
I avoid hype, the audience appreciates that I’m calm and down-to-earth,
my tutorials are almost always extremely detailed,
some of my competitors talk about the same tools but for a different audience, like students, or teams inside large businesses,
I often offer free templates based to replicate what I’ve shown in my tutorials.
But keep in mind: I didn’t plan this uniqueness. It emerged piece by piece after dozens of videos.
Are you still afraid of saturated niches?
I hope I've convinced you otherwise. If you're still undecided because you like a niche with too many creators in it, don't be scared.
Analyze their best content and find something you can emulate adding your unique spin. You have your initial content calendar. Start publishing, collect data, and refine over time.
If you're still scared, tell me in the comments. I really want to see more creators succeed.
If you need more help refining your niche, read my ebook, Stress-free Niche Finding, or join my paid subscription for personalized help in the chat.
Good luck and let’s go!
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Great advice, thanks
My niche is personal finance with a focus on investing. I often explain things to people who understand what makes a business successful. But I’ve also noticed some people are more eager to learn the basics like how to open a brokerage account. I would’ve never thought that could be useful for the already mature investors. Turns out, some of my readers are just starting out. I should also trust the numbers.