How to Be Relevant Outside Your Niche

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

Over the weekend I was talking with a couple of other bloggers over drinks and snacks. It became clear they were frustrated they weren’t getting more traffic and more opt ins from their blog.

As we talked I realized they were totally focused on people who were specifically looking for their product… which leaves out a LOT of people.

I started talking to them about how instead of targeting people looking for what you have, they could also start connecting with people who had problems or questions, that their product/blog answers.

It’s a bit of a mindset shift… but it opens up a TON of new people for you. I found this post I wrote a while back, and it addresses HOW you can do this so well, I figured it was unnecessary to write a new post… I’d just share this one again. The post is specifically referring to writing guest posts… but can be used for connecting anywhere really.

How to Be Relevant to People Outside Your Niche

It’s really easy to box ourselves into a corner. We start thinking “Oh, my blog is about this topic _____ [fill in the blank] so I have to find sites that are about that topic to post to”.

Not exactly.

Today we’re going to look at how we can be relevant in different markets, and yet tie it up in nice big bow to bring people back to our site. Of course your site won’t be relevant to EVERY other site, but you can spread it out more than you probably think.

Let’s look at some possible posting options we might have in different niches. Let’s say there’s blogs on the following topics:

Organizing
Life ~ in general
Spiritual life simple living/mom blog type thing

Now let’s look at some of our blog topics and see how we might be relevant to those niches.

Let’s first look at my blog ~ work at home niche:

Organizing: I could write a post on how to organize your day, your business, your time and then link  back to my squeeze page on how to use a simple low tech blogging platform to stay organized and focused.

Life: I could write a post about getting motivated,  staying motivated, fitting business into life, getting your family on board, dealing with friends who want to hang out in the middle of the day etc. Then link to the blog and also to a relevant category of posts on my blog.

Spiritual life: (I’m thinking about a site like tiny buddha here) I can talk about the changes I’ve been through personally to make this business work, I could write about the law of attraction, self esteem, etc. I would link back to the blog and again to one of the relevant categories on my site (if I can have 2 links).

Simple living/mom blog: How to create a balance between business and work, how to deal with distractions during your work day, how to get your family on board with working from home, how to get the kids on board with helping with housework. I would probably link to a specific blog post with a good call to action that moms would also appreciate.

So you see, not one of these is an internet marketing blog, but I could easily write relevant posts for the blog owner and get people to come back to my site. When you do this you open yourself up to a whole new stream of readers. You tap into people who may or may not have ever heard of you or your blog ~ you also open yourself up to THEIR network. It can be exponentially beneficial to provide content to sites that are outside of your direct niche.

Let’s look at another niche ~ how about Ride on toys ~ these tighter niches can seem a little tougher.

Ride on toys

Organizing: how to organize toys, steps for keeping toys out from under foot, toy organizing system

Life: the joys of playing outside, spending quality time with your kids, whole family activities

Spiritual Life: You can talk about how simple gifts can mean more than having all the toys/best toys, how to teach our kids about gratitude, teaching kids to give  (maybe giving to charity etc).

Simple living/mom blog: choosing an age appropriate ride on for your kids, the developmental benefits of ride on toys ~ or different kinds of toys, how to get kids to pick up their toys

So you can see someone even with a tight niche like ride on toys can still find ways to enter a variety of different niches for high profile content syndication.

Let’s do one more just for fun. Let’s take a look at Todd’s niche/lifestyle ~ he’s doing Primal Lifestyle.Let’s see if we can find a way for him to fit these categories as well.

Primal Living

Organizing: He could talk about how to organize a menu, planning a menu, how to manage different eating styles within a family, how to organize your budget when eating primal.

Life: he could talk about health benefits, exercise that goes with this lifestyle, he could talk about the mental shift it takes to live this lifestyle, he could give tips to getting started

Spiritual life: He could talk about mindset, living more naturally, will power, self esteem, self love, discipline

Simple living/mom ~ he could give some easy paleo/primal recipes, how to get kids to eat primal, benefits of starting primal lifestyle early in life, tips for shopping for primal eating, budgeting ideas for primal lifestyle.

There are tons of things!

You can see that you don’t have to box yourself in to looking for sites that are exactly a match for your niche. You just have to give it a twist, and make your site and what you have to say more relevant to a wider range of people.

I’d love to brainstorm with you ~ if you’re wondering how you can do this for your niche or your blog ~ let’s brainstorm! You can do it in the comments section, in my super secret facebook group or at the facebook fanpage or maybe you want to work directly with me… you can do that too.