Find Your Niche Online, Part 2: No Imitations

This is part 2 of a 3-part series called Find Your Niche Online. Check out Part 1A to learn about the importance of influencers when looking for your niche, and Part 1B to check out the bunny trail of influence that helped me launch Abby Kerr Ink.

So you’re looking for your niche online.

How many ballet dancers on stilts does the blogosphere need? Photo by wisdomeur courtesy of Flickr Creative Commons.

You’ve found yourself some influencers, some bloggers whose sites resonate with you because of what they offer, how they look, and/or how they connect with their right people. You’re studying these sites and absorbing what they do that appeals to you and that appears to be working well for them.

You may have found your way to your bunny trail, the link-to-link, site-to-site journey through the blogosphere that’s teaching you so much about what type of enterprise you want to be. You’ve discovered some really cool things and some really awesome people. And you’re starting to feel like, yeah, I can do this. If he can write about his experience with that, I can write about mine. If she can put herself out there like that, that gives me courage to open myself up, too.

Now Comes The Hard Part

The hardest part, sometimes, is seeing ourselves objectively and realizing what makes us and our offerings unique.

‘Unique’ has got to be one of the most overrused words in the English language. Everybody says they’re unique.

The truth is, everybody is unique. But not everybody renders themselves unique online {or in any other marketing arena, for that matter}. If we can’t see how you’re unique, you’re not unique. We don’t just take your word for it. Unless you’ve clearly, vividly, and convincingly communicated the truth about why you’re unique — you could call this your Unique Selling Proposition, or USP. — you’re just another blog in the SERPS.

Emulate, Don’t Imitate

When you’re first starting out, or when you’ve just stumbled across someone in your niche who really impresses you, it’s easy to start, shall we say, absorbing their oeuvre. Mimicking their voice. Rehashing their best content. Jocking their style, as we rap and hip-hop lovers said in the ’90s.

Most of the time, we do this unintentionally. And sometimes, this is actually OK. When you’re finding your voice and your blogging legs, so to speak, sometimes we practice by trying other people’s identities on for size. It’s one way for us to see what feels natural and what feels dead wrong. We suss out which areas we feel we have the authority to speak into and in which areas we know we’re out of our league.

But sometimes the imitation is intentional and is done out of sheer laziness or schemey-ness. {Schemey-ness?}

And if you blog with dedication for long enough and produce good stuff, eventually you’ll be alerted to someone who seems, for all intents and purposes, to be imitating you.

This is beyond maddening. I think it’s grossly audacious, disrespectful, and sad.

It sucks to imitate. But it’s rad and smart of you to emulate.

Where’s the Line?

It’s okay to emulate. It’s good to emulate. One of the definitions of ’emulate’ is to try to equal or excel.

Take a good long drink of that blogger whose consistently great quality content you yearn to match, whose voice practically leaves goose bumps on your skin, whose influence is flippin’ irresistible.

You can be just like him or her in your own niche.

While writing your content. While sharing your particular experiences. While rocking out your ideas your way.

In the comments, I’d like to hear what’s hard about being unique or communicating how you’re unique as a niche-y enterprise. What flummoxes you?

Ready to set yourself apart from your influencers with a self-crafted niche of your own? Subscribe to Inklings, my weekly-ish e-newsletter, and receive some help with that in the form of my 10-part e-course called Creating a Truly Irresistible Niche. Look for the sign-up form in the righthand sidebar.