Assumptions:
1. You should possess the required editing and content creation skills to make short-form content by yourself.
2. You are willing and able to post at least once a day for 2-4 weeks to test your created niche.
Definitions:
- Borrowed-Attention: The act of taking what is already getting attention and using it.
- Creativity: The ability to take existing elements from any domain and to reorder those into novel combinations that are useful.
- Creating a Niche: The ability to identify trending topics, video styles, and pages and combining them in a creative way that makes it new and unique to you. **(this works)
- Faceless Short-Form Video (FSFV): A vertical video typically 60 seconds or less without a person on screen.
- Finding a Niche: A term that has been promoted and sold by influencers that are selling you a half-broken solution on creating a specific category of content for your social media platforms. (doesn’t work)
- High-Attention Authority Figure: A well-known and influential person with significant credibility.
- High-Attention Words: Popular and widely recognized terms or topics that easily capture public interest.
- Influence: Ability to grab viewers' attention and make them do something different.
- Influencer: Someone who can persuade or inspire others with their opinions, expertise, or popularity.
Introduction:
There has been this craze of “finding niches” that has promoted by many course sellers, gurus, and social media influencers. If you are not aware of what “finding a niche” mean, it essentially entails searching around on YouTube, discord and social media platforms to find someone to copy that has found success. I have been doing this for over 5 years and telling someone that “this niche is the best” and “do this niche” is actually horrible advice. If you “find a niche”, then typically that niche is already saturated. This strategy CAN WORK, but in my opinion is not optimal to grow something sustainable and see the most growth possible. In this document, I am going to share my mental framework on CREATING a niche, not finding one. After reading this document, you will be armed with the tools to be the guy that people copy, not the one who is hopelessly searching for the next big thing. You will be the next big thing.
Understanding Creativity
Before we dive into the framework, I want you to understand the most important term on this entire page Creativity.
💡 Creativity: The ability to take existing elements from any domain and to reorder those into novel combinations that are useful.
Simplified Creativity Definition: Take existing stuff and combing that stuff or shuffling that stuff into your own thing that is interesting and engaging to others.
“But why do we care about creativity?”
Because we are CREATORS. We need to be CREATIVE. Crazy thought, right?
This is one of my favorite quotes about creativity:
“It's not enough to just to make something different, for an idea to be considered creative, it must be new but also good or better than previous things in some way.”
Okay, so why am I sharing so much about being creative? Because in order for you to CREATE your own niche, you need to be creative. You need to IDENTIFY the reasons why existing niches/styles of content are going viral, “steal” aspects of what they are doing that is working and make it your own.
Examples of The Most “Creative” Things Ever Created:
1. The first iPhone: If you do not know the original Steve Jobs iPhone reveal speech, I highly recommend you drop what you are doing and watch [this presentation.] Pay close attention to what the iPhone really is (hint: Steve Jobs just “stole” existing things from other devices and combined them together to make them his own).
2. Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups: The Hershey company didn’t invent chocolate. They didn’t invent Peanut Butter either. But you know what they did invent? The novel and robust combination of the two and the brand behind Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. They “stole” from what was already high-attention and universally known/liked and made it their own.
3. Fortnite: “Wait, Fortnite too? This isn’t original. Well. kind of. Think about what they did. Is this the first OG third-person shooter game? Nope. Is this the first game where you can build structures? Nope. Is this the first game that you can find weapons and loot on a map? No. Is this the first player-versus-environment cooperative game? Nope. Was this the first battle royale? Nope, that was H1Z1. Hell, it probably wasn’t even the first attempt at combining all these preexisting ideas/concepts and putting them into one game; but it was the first game that did it right!
Now that we understand what it actually means to be creative, we can finally step into the framework of how you are going to CREATE your own viral niche.
Checklist To Create Your Own Niche:
1. Identify a Niche That is Saturated and Has Multiple Accounts Getting Success
2. Analyze the Accounts and Identify The Reasons Why The Videos Are Preforming
1. Analyze the Video Editing Style
2. Analyze the Actual Script (what words are spoken on screen?)
3. Who is in the videos? (high-attention authority figure)
4. What is the video style/editing style? (one-word captions? split screen? fast-paced? slow-paced? what type of music is being used behind the videos performing the highest?)
3. Compile the reasons why the content is performing and put your creative spin on it!