16th March 2018 a coming soon page for a Kanye West themed dating site spread like wildfire, getting coverage from Fox, ABC, Highsnobiety, MTV, Complex, etc …
I made the Yeezy Dating site. This article talks about how targeting a niche market was the key to the viral attention I got.
The primary benefit of targeting a niche is that it’s far easier to get the word out about your product. Audience, press, and influencers are so much easier to access. Let’s go through it:
AUDIENCE
If your serving a niche it’s more than likely that someone has already built your audience for you. You’ve just got to find where they hang out and share what you’ve been working on.
For Yeezy Dating, the primary location was r/Kanye, a reddit forum consisting of 250 thousand Kanye fans. A simple post announcing the dating site rose to the top and I had my first 500 email address’ signed up for the prelaunch. It got reposted on r/HipHopHeads a few days later and I got another 500 emails.
When you are adding value to a niche it literally can be this simple!
PRESS
Another benefit of serving a niche is that it’s far easier to get press. There’s going to be some hardcore bloggers out there whose full time job is to write about your niche. And unlike mass market journalists, niche journalists actually want you to email them.
How do you find them? Well there’s a free tool called Buzzstream Discovery which is pretty awesome.
You enter enter a search term and Buzzstream spits back the names of all the journalists who have written stories about that search term. So, I enter “Kanye West” and get back a list of all 440 bloggers who have written stories about Kanye West over the last month. Easy!
You can then use Hunter to find their emails and in no time you’ve built your hardcore niche press list!
INFLUENCERS
In any niche market influencers are pretty well defined and easy to get in contact with.
For example, I emailed the dating site to two guys who host a Kanye fan podcast . They loved the idea and talked about it on their show. I also dm’d a bunch of Kanye fan Instagram accounts and they shared it on their Instagram stories.
BENEFITS OF A HARDCORE AUDIENCE
This leads on to the 2nd benefit of targeting a niche. Niches are full of passionate, hardcore fans.
You don’t get a tattoo saying: “I love football”. You get a tattoo saying, “Pompey till I die”.
The more passionate the audience the more likely they will help share your product. This is called the viral coefficient, and niche markets have high ones.
It measures the number of new customers that each existing customer is able to convert. For example, you’re never going to text your friend:
There’s a new dating app for music lovers
but if your both Kanye fans you might send:
OMG, there’s a new dating app for Kanye fans ????
and the sheer volume of friends telling friends definately played a role in it spreading so widely.
SUMMARY
It’s easier to go viral in niche markets because:
1. Audience, press, and influencers are easier to access
2. Hardcore fans will help share your product
And this stuff is applicable to every niche. Don’t write a cook book, write a pasta cook book. Don’t sell a health remedy, sell a sleep remedy. Don’t start a travel blog, start a Digital Nomad blog.
And how can you tell if it’s a good niche? Have a scout at the subreddit size:
r/pasta: 12k
r/sleep: 30k
r/digitalnomad: 446k
SUPPORT
If you liked the article sharing the thread on Twitter is really appreciated. Thank You!
Thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring. I rely on them to grow my own search traffic.