How to find the right level of specialisation for your newsletter

👉 Ask yourself this simple question

Uber-successful investor Naval Ravikant famously said that the key to finding your niche in business or life was to:

“Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.”

I’m not sure that’s always great advice.

From 1998 to 2009 Tiger Woods was the #1 ranked golfer in the world for all but one of those years.

But despite not being the best in the world, players like Phil Mickelson, Vijay Singh and Sergio Garcia did pretty darned well without needing to redefine what they did to be the best at it. Being the world’s #2 golfer was pretty cool too.

But I do think Naval’s advice is spot on for newsletters.

People’s inboxes are crowded and their schedules are full. They need a strong reason to cram reading your newsletter into their busy day. So no matter how important a topic you’re writing about, the way you do it has to be different to the dozens of other newsletters they could get on the topic.

So you need to focus. Specialise. Redefine what you do.

But how do you know what the right level of specialisation is?

Narrow down too far and your potential audience will be too small. Not enough and you won’t be different and interesting.

Here’s a simple question you can ask yourself for any potential specialisation that works really well to tell you whether it’s likely to be a winner:

• Will this specialisation lead people it’s focused on to think my newsletter would provide advice that’s a better fit for them?

Let’s make that concrete.

At my age I’m trying to stay healthy, so I’m open to reading newsletters about health and fitness.

If I had the chance to read a more specialised health and fitness newsletter, what kind of specialisations would lead me to think the advice in the newsletter would be a better fit for me?

• Fitness for men? Probably.

• Fitness for the over 50s? Definitely - I know your metabolism and other factors change as you get older.

• Fitness for people who prefer strength training? Definitely - I hate running and all those “get out of breath” activities and wouldn’t want to read about them.

• Fitness for people with beards? Nope. Makes no sense.

• Fitness for people who are a modest 5’8” tall? Don’t think so.

• Fitness for British people? Maybe for some if it related to facilities that were available here, but not for me.

• Fitness for people who want to work out at home? Yep.

You get the idea. Newsletters about home gyms or weight training for the over 50s would be first on my list to subscribe to.

And the same thinking process applies to every potential newsletter topic.

It’s almost always worth narrowing your focus to a smaller audience if it makes you the number one choice for that audience. And this simple question helps you figure that out.

You’ll notice, for example, that when I write about newsletters and emails (or any type of marketing) that I write primarily for people who don’t have marketing as their full-time job. They have businesses to run and clients to work with.

Does that make my advice more valuable to them than someone who writes about emails or marketing more generally? I believe so - because a ton of marketing and email advice is incredibly complicated, has a huge learning curve and often needs a dedicated team to implement. Advice that focuses on simple strategies that you can implement in a few hours a week is much more useful for my people.

So if you’re umming and ahhing about what to focus your email newsletter on - ask yourself that simple specialisation question.

- Ian