How to Position Yourself in a Crowded Niche

The first instinct when a niche gets crowded is to go narrower: instead of "marketing for small businesses," try "marketing for bakeries." Sometimes this works. More often it reduces the audience size without solving the real problem, which is that you still don't have a distinctive point of view - just a smaller territory to share with less competition.

The more durable positioning move is to find the thing you genuinely believe that most people in your space don't. Not a contrarian position for its own sake - an honest disagreement with the conventional wisdom that comes from something you've observed or experienced. That disagreement, argued well over time, is what creates a category around your name rather than sharing a category with everyone else.

Many crowded niches are crowded at one stage of the audience journey - the beginner content - and thin at others. If the space is crowded with "how to start" content, there may be far less "how to scale past your first hundred clients" content for the same audience at a later stage. Serving a specific stage of the journey with real depth is positioning that's both distinctive and hard to copy.