How to Find the Perfect YouTube Niche For Your Channel
- Updated November 25, 2023
- Alex Lefkowitz
Pinpointing the right YouTube niche for your channel is a challenge. It’s also an essential key to long-term success on the platform.
By definition, a niche is the particular (sub)topic that you specialize in: knitting or wartime history, vegan cooking or blockchain games.
When you launch your channel, picking your niche is a crucial decision.
But why exactly is it so important? How do you choose a niche?
And: What are some niches worth looking at in terms of monetization?
Here’s your run-down.
Why Pick A YouTube Niche in the First Place?
Niching down helps you in several ways, but especially when it comes to establishing an audience and winning over YouTube’s algorithm. Ultimately, your goal as a YouTuber is to establish a sizeable, loyal, and engaged audience for your content.
When someone comes across your channel, it’s likely because it’s related to a topic that interests them. Maybe they launched a search. Or one of your videos showed up in their recommendations because they’d watched similar content.
Either way, the easiest path to hooking someone who just discovered your channel is to give them more of what they like.
What they’re not looking for is an eclectic collection of all the various topics that may interest you.
Focus Builds Credibility and Engagement
When you focus on a niche, you will build credibility in that niche.
Here’s a concrete example.
Let’s say you’re out looking for advice on how to transition to a vegan diet, and you find an interesting video.
You check out the channel for more – and find it’s general nutrition advice, with just that one vegan cooking video. The next video even features chicken. So, you’ll probably look elsewhere next.
What if the channel had focused explicitly on vegan cooking? You’d be a lot more likely to stick around, right?
This channel would look a lot more useful for you:
In turn, having an engaged audience is key to ranking in YouTube’s algorithm.
The longer viewers watch your videos, the more they like, subscribe, and click through to your other content, the more your channel will show up in searches and recommendations.
Having a niche also makes life easier for you in general.
Instead of flailing for mass content, you can come up with a specific content strategy. That lets you go on very targeted hunts for inspiration.
The same also goes for building your business strategy around your niche.
How to Find Ideas for your Niche
Selecting the perfect YouTube niche for your channel depends on three elements: what you’re passionate about, your knowledge and skills, and whether there’s an accessible audience for a specific topic.
Your ideal niche is where these three overlap.
Start out by asking yourself what you’re good at. These could be skills that you acquired as part of your job or your hobby, or knowledge based on personal experiences. For example: If you’re obsessed with over law and crime, enjoy trawling through records for juicy details, and interviewing experts – then running a True Crime channel or podcast might be your thing.
Don’t hesitate to ask others about it, too! Quite often, they’ll perceive talents and skills in you that you’re a little blind to.
Note down all the knowledge and the skills you could share with your audience. It could be anything from interior design to hobby science.
More unique is usually better in this creator economy, so don’t hesitate to capitalize on your quirks.
Second, narrow down which of the topics on the list you are actually passionate about. Your audience can tell if you’re actually excited about the content you’re producing.
Consequently, genuine, authentic enthusiasm about a topic is a magnet for viewers. That’s why passion can outweigh a lot of other considerations.
For example, if you’re a lawyer by profession, starting a legal issues channel might seem like the most straightforward idea.
However, if you can already feel the case files sucking the soul out of you at the office, you’re much better off pursuing your undying love for pastry-making. Otherwise, you’re practically setting yourself up for creator burnout.
Plus, even if you don’t have a lot of skills in the area you’re passionate about, you can give it a shot and share your learning journey with your audience.
If you’re totally strapped for ideas, you can also check out what topics, niches, and creators are trending in the “Explore” section of the platform.
How to Choose the Best YouTube Niche Idea
Once you’ve compiled a list of ideas for YouTube niches, you have to evaluate them.
There are three major aspects to this: The audience, general profitability, and the competition.
Who Is the Audience of Your Niche?
First, ask yourself: Is there actually an audience for your niche?
Second, find out whether that audience can help you achieve your ultimate goals.
If you’re aiming to monetize your channel, for example, you have to make sure that there is a sizable target audience. Ideally, that audience also have disposable income to spend on you directly, or on the products of brands you might want to work with.
One way to check if a niche idea is viable is to dive into Search Engine Optimization (SEO). For example, you can take a look at the number of people searching for a particular keyword related to your niche on Google or YouTube.
While there are plenty of other tools out there, Google Trends can get you a first impression fast:
Or, you can check out popular groups on Facebook, Quora, or Reddit related to your potential niche.
Is Niching Down Here Worth It?
Just because a niche is popular, it doesn’t automatically mean that it’s profitable.
Examples of profitable niches include:
- personal finance
- gaming
- food
- health and fitness
- product reviews
- digital marketing
In contrast, travel, while hugely popular, might not be that profitable in the long run. It’s not that you can’t earn any money with it – but the production cost can be enormous.
Depending on what, exactly, they cover, tech channels often face a similar issue, especially if the content goes beyond a relatively basic review.
How Much Competition Will I Face?
Another very important consideration for choosing your niche is the level of competition.
The more content creators there already are focussing on the same topic, the harder it will be for you to build an audience.
One way around that is to make your niche (and therefore your audience) still more specific.
For example, instead of launching a general Yoga channel, you could create a channel that focuses in particular on the needs of a certain target group. That could be pregnant women, men, or stressed-out businesspeople.
While you’re checking out the potential competition, keep an eye out for how well they’re doing. If you don’t find many signs of monetization, that says something about the profitability of a (sub)niche.
Finally, also make sure that your niche ideas don’t violate any laws, YouTube’s extensive community guidelines, or its guidelines for advertiser-friendly content. Firearms channels, for instance, simply cannot monetize.
Final Thoughts
Picking the right YouTube niche for your channel is a cornerstone of success on the platform.
Consequently, investing the time and energy to pinpointing the best fit is absolutely worth it in the long run. Especially since switching niches later on can be tricky.
If you’re bursting with too many fantastic ideas, you can always keep some in reserve and start a second channel later on.
Ultimately, a well-chosen niche is one of your greatest assets, and a conduit for your passion.
