5 Blogs That Built Large Audiences By Intentionally Targeting Smaller Niche Markets

Niche marketing (or micro-marketing) is a form of strategy marketing that targets a specific group or subgroup of customers.

Its goal is to target a smaller portion of a market by defining the needs, wants, and requirements that aren’t being addressed well by big brands.

Ultimately, it’s what allows smaller brands to compete against giants with unlimited funds and hundreds of employees. It’s all about being a big fish in a small pond instead of a small fish in a big pond.

In this article, let’s take a look at some highly successful blogs that were able to build a large audience by strategically narrowing their target niche.

Succulents And Sunshine

When we’re talking about targeted niches, there’s probably no better example than Succulents And Sunshine. I’m betting most of you didn’t even realize this was a niche!

They’ve created an entire website for people looking to grow Instagram and Pinterest worthy succulents.

Their aim is to educate their market on the intricacies of planting, nurturing, and growing succulents in the perfect way.

Meet Cassidy, the founder of succulents and Sunshine. Every business sprouts from a story, and Cassidy’s came from her desire to keep her dying succulents alive.

The blog makes money through selling online courses and ebooks, each with a different subject on how to properly care for succulents.

With hundreds of thousands of visitors per month, this tiny niche that most people have never heard of is now a thriving 6-figure business!

Succulents and Sunshine is a prime example of a company targeting a niche market and excelling in the space.

They saw an opportunity to build a business targeting an underserved audience and grew a successful business out of it.

Wellness Mama

The “health and wellness” niche is one of the most competitive, saturated niches on the internet. Even so, Katie Wells was able to single-handedly build Wellness Mama into one of the leading blogs in the entire industry.

As a mother of six, Katie’s niche marketing strategy was naturally to target other mothers.

And today, they’re one of the most popular blogs in the world, visited by millions of women every month, and publish content about an array of topics ranging from health and beauty to family and travel.

Not only that, but they are one of the most trustworthy sources. While Katie has written the majority of the content herself, she makes sure that all of the information on the site is reviewed and fact-checked by a medical advisor team.

Wellness Mama monetizes through a variety of methods including, selling self-published ebooks, ads, and Amazon.

A lot of their content is around topics that can incorporate Amazon affiliate links to items such as lotions, soaps, essential oils, backpacks, tents, and just about anything else you can think of.

The hard work put in to making such a thorough resource surely pays off and the numbers show. With 2.74 million visitors per month, Katie has built a giant blog in one of the toughest niches to be successful in online.

Fatherly

Fatherly is another perfect example of “niche targeting.” In fact, their entire blog was born after realizing one particular audience was being completely ignored in the parenting niche.

Instead of focusing their content and message targeting towards mothers, like every other parenting blog out there, they decided to turn it around and target fathers instead.

More specifically, they targeted millennial males entering parenthood who didn’t want to follow the millions of mommy blogs on the internet.

What I really like about Fatherly is that they split up their content by dividing the sections into the age of the child. For example, if someone with a toddler is looking for an article, they will find it under the “toddlers” tab.

As we all know, the stages of life are all drastically different in the early years so dividing them makes the information much more relevant and convenient for their readers.

It seems they know how to identify gaps in the market. They’ve expanded their blog and now even publish news articles about children in the readers’ specific regions. This helps keep parents informed on the latest stories since most news outlets do not particularly talk about children and parents.

Fatherly makes money primarily from sponsored content, ads, and by promoting products through Amazon affiliate links. Their articles promote things like toys, clothing, appliances, backpacks, and more.

They write blog posts about the items they are selling then put in a link that says “buy now” at the bottom of the page. Some articles compare different items so that the reader can see which is best for them.

The blog itself is not the biggest parenting blog by any means, at around 2 million uniques per month.

But they’re crushing it on social media, reaching over 75 million people on Facebook each week.

And because they’ve been able to amass this laser-targeted audience, they were able to charge premium rates to advertisers who wanted to reach millennial parents.

In 2017, they generated $5.2 million in revenue. This is just two years after starting the blog.

Clearly, this is a niche that has been needed for a long time.

Nerd Fitness

Within the gigantic fitness industry, Nerd Fitness found a targeted niche that caters directly towards nerds. Yes, you read that right. They help bring out the fitness enthusiast in the people who never thought they never had it in them.

Steve Kamb, the founder of Nerd Fitness was once an unhappy nerd himself. He struggled for years while watching infomercials about fitness products and shortly realized that it is all just a big lie for companies to make money.

So, he decided to do something about it. During his fitness journey, he came across many products and pieces of advice that he wanted to share with the world because they actually worked for him. Steve built a business platform around honesty, he even decided not to put ads on the site.

Today, NerdFitness has 10 employees and even holds in person training for nerds all around the world to reach their goal of becoming healthier and happier.

Nerd Fitness makes an income by selling online courses and membership programs. They also offer online coaching from personal trainers who build personalized workouts and meal plans with their customers.

Can anyone join Nerd Fitness? Sure, I don’t see why not. Don’t worry, they don’t do any background checks to make sure you are a legit nerd. As long as your’e looking for this kind of laid-back, self paced training, anyone is welcome.

However, their true target audience is the everyday average Joe, and of course… the nerds.

To date, Nerd Fitness reaches 1.93 million visitors per month – giant numbers in a niche as competitive as health and fitness.

College Info Geek

What the internet doesn’t need is another generalized productivity blog written for the masses. That’s what Thomas Frank realized when he started College Info Geek.

In 2010, Thomas Frank was a student at Iowa University. During this time, he founded the blog to see if he could help other students be a quick learner like him by giving them access to the hacks he uses.

His productivity blog is targeted directly at college students (and high school students). The value proposition is to make students smarter by practicing being more effective and becoming a faster learner all while having to study less. Sounds good, doesn’t it?

There is an overflow of productivity blogs out there. And while most of them never grow popular, Thomas’ strategy to narrow down his target audience enabled him to rapidly grow College Info Geek into one of the most visited websites for students all around the world.

College Info Geek was getting 135,000 visitors per month back in 2010 and is now up to 778,000 visitors per month in 2018! I’d say that’s quite impressive considering just how many blogs in this niche fail to get any traffic.

Conclusion

Starting a blog centered around a narrow niche market is a lot easier than going after the masses.

Find an underserved audience within an industry and target all of your messaging, branding, and content for them. It may come with some disadvantages compared to the publishing giants that have the resources to target anybody and everybody, but the advantages are:

• Less competition
• Stronger customer relationships
• Free marketing
• Higher profits/ability to charge more
• Less resources required to grow
• Easier to establish yourself as an expert

If we look at all of the blogs analyzed above, we can see that they have all of these advantages. They just come naturally from choosing a niche market, narrowing their target audience, and building the best resource for them.