Episode #120 - Finding Your Niche with Nate Wright - a podcast by WordPress business specialist Troy Dean featuring Seth Godin, Michael Gerber, Guy Kawasaki, Joe Pulizzi, Andrew Warner, James Schramko, Brian Clark, Ed Dale, Dan Norris and many more.

Nate Wright is a developer at heart. In fact, for the last three years as the creator and founder of Theme of the Crop, he’s built a suite of plugins using hooks extensively and has always designed his themes to deliberately integrate with his plugins.

When asked how he recommends finding the right niche for you, Nate has some advice borne of personal experience. The first thing he recommends if picking an area you are interested in, otherwise you might bore yourself working on something you don’t care about!

His next recommendation is to get a sense of who you will be dealing with within that niche. Is it mainly business owners, small organizations with lots of red tape, or hobbyists? Once you know that then you can get a clear idea of what the relationship will be like with your people. You can take it a step further and narrow the niche down even more once you know the groups within it.

Nate explains a struggle he’s experienced in his niche. He has discovered he has two very different audiences who want very different things: restaurant owners and web site developers for restaurants.

So he's settled on pitching to the niche on a broad level by targeting the owners and results-oriented people. From there he feeds in the details, which is what the developers are interested in. Because they are the ones looking for that kind of information he knows they will dig a little deeper to get it so he can put that content below-the-fold and the business owners/results-oriented people’s content is above-the-fold.

In essence, Nate says he tries to not overwhelm the restaurant owners with problems he solves but are problems they don't even know they have yet! He's clear and upfront about the results he delivers, and later on he gets into the details on how he delivers those results.

 

Speaking of content, I asked him whether he segments his content with one focus on developers and one on restaurant owners? Nate admits he does neither well; he has figured out he isn't good at content marketing!

While he does run a blog about restaurant web site tips and he sends those tips to his mailing list along with giveaways, he struggles to come up with ideas and to create content consistently. It's simply not his strong suit so he's pivoting towards an evergreen content strategy. Right now he is putting together the ultimate guide to Facebook for restaurants. It’s a step-by-step guide to help restaurants utilize Facebook.

I also asked Nate where he goes to find his audience and he said to date he's focused on channels that exist within the WordPress space. He does so because to use his products you need at least a basic understanding of WordPress, themes, and plugins. He doesn't want to educate his customers on the basics!

On today’s show he goes on to explain his biggest sources of inbound traffic, and any industry trends he sees currently. He shares what his biggest challenge has been to date and why he’s now focused on adding features like capacity management and table assignment. You’ll want to hear his reasoning behind that move and so much more on today’s episode of WP Elevation with Nate Wright!