How many times have you read the old “you need to find a brand new niche to write in, or you’ll bomb” advice?

A bunch, huh?

Well here’s another little nugget of advice for you that might upset a few people. Want to know what it is? Let me elaborate…   For one thing, brand new niches probably don’t exist. For every topic you can think of, the chances are you’ll already find a blog, or ten, about it.

But that’s good. Trust me.

Because what’s the one thing that really drives growth in any business? Yep, competition, and the fear of getting your ass kicked by the rival company down the street.

So here’s my advice if you’re thinking about starting a new blog - find a thriving niche and steal it.

I don’t mean that you should lift the content. I don’t mean that you should plagiarise ideas. And I don’t mean that you should aggregate other peoples’ RSS feeds.

I’m talking about stealing an audience.

Because if you join an existing niche, the audience is ready made and packaged up nicely for you. What’s more, the revenue streams are in place. The advertisers are keyed in. And the market has been built.

But most importantly, there’s a bunch of people just sitting there waiting for something better to come along. All you need to do is steal those eyeballs away from your competitors - and today’s online environment means there are a thousand fantastic, imaginative, and innovative ways to do that. Put simply, people are always going to chase after new, exciting, and interesting stuff - and especially when that new stuff is clearly better than the old stuff.

Plus, you’ll be on your feet, fighting hard from day one. In a new or quiet niche, or virtually anywhere else where you don’t have any real competition, complacency sets in, you get lazy, and your blog, your business plan, and your revenue all suffer.

Sure, once you start getting noticed by your competition the standard of your competitors’ stuff will go up, too. So you simply raise your game again. Continuous improvements in quality spurred on by competition are great for any niche - and for blogging in general, too. More specifically, it means you and your competitors will all potentially benefit from a growing audience, and also from advertisers and sponsors who see value in increasing their spend.

So, instead of wasting your time searching for a new niche, spend it thinking of ways in which you can do something differently - read ‘better’ - in an existing niche.

That way, everyone wins. Especially the audience.
See, stealing isn’t all that bad.