My business coach posts about Robbie Williams (here's why)

I set up a live chat with some Substack subscribers the other day. I asked subscribers: What’s your number one question about writing online?

The responses were variations of this conundrum: “How can I find the right audience?”

Niche and audience selection kept me up at night for a few years, but I don’t worry so much about it anymore.

Creating niche-specific content is a smart approach if you’re building a website. I ran a food and drinks website (not under my personal brand) for a few years. We published recipes and equipment reviews. Publishing content about say, writing online or brand building, wouldn’t work for that site.

Audience selection is also a good idea if you’re working on a content marketing project for a business, a client or a corporate account. I worked on a content marketing campaign for an accounting software business for a few years.

We published content explaining why spreadsheets are terribly inefficient for preparing a tax return. Not sexy stuff, but leads ate this content up and turned into customers. Clearly, creating content about habit-building would be a waste of time and dollars for that company.

Creators writing and publishing online under their own name can and should mix things up more. It’ll build trust and relatability. A reasonable ratio is 70% business or on-brand and 30% personal stories. Or simply, create content about what you find interesting.

For example, I’m working with a business coach who specializes in LinkedIn. He regularly posts about how he helps clients with sales presentations. That’s on-brand for a business coach and very much in the vein of popular LinkedIn content.

He also posts “off-brand” content like his thoughts about the Robbie William’s biopic Better Man. And he gets lots of comments and shares for these posts too.

In my newsletters, I regularly drop in snippets about races I’m training for as running long-distance is one of my hobbies. I also write about life working from home with three kids… they’re off school today because of a big storm. These emails sometimes get more responses than my regular ones. So, I plan on doing this more in my social content too.

Mixing on and off-brand content helps followers and subscribers see you’re more like them and less like an unreachable guru or heartless business. Get the balance right and a niche will naturally form around you and your work. And that’s hard for a competitor or AI to reverse-engineer.