Finding Your Niche Writing Sports Could Be Finding Your Voice

A lot of places will advise you rather than write about everything sports-related or sticking with one of the leagues you should focus on a niche for your particular website or blog. Definitely good advice, this can become discouraging and waste your talent.

I’ll use me as an example for the discouragement part. You can be the judge for the latter.

I’m a Philadelphia Phillies fan. I honestly can’t write about them as often as I’d like to because of how incredibly boring they are right now. Sure, there are stories out there. I could continue to analyze Darin Ruf until I know everything about him from how well he hits against lefties to what we can project him to eat for breakfast in May. Instead of focusing on one team, since I pay attention to the MLB entirely, I chose to write about general baseball news on Innings Eaters. I also noticed how well fantasy baseball posts did and rather than start a new blog I made it a feature there. It’s not ideal, but definitely boosts my viewership.

By Dealphungo (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

As much as I would love to cover a team, I find it limiting to sit back and dig for ideas when there are plenty out there already that interest me. You’ll see blogs focusing on bad teams tend to run uninteresting pieces after continual losing because of how demoralizing the task can be to find something nice to say.

Instead of writing for a niche audience about a specific topic I find some people can benefit from writing for the sake of finding their voice. Make their style the niche whether it be having great analytical skills, a strong rant-style opinion, or humor.

An extreme example, let’s use Quentin Tarantino. He no longer makes gangster movies. Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and Jackie Brown were all films that could have easily taken place in the same universe. Furthermore, so could his more recent films deviating from the crime plots. However, the point is Tarantino found his voice. He has a style. He has a personality. You can watch a film and identify it immediately. This should be a goal in writing. Tarantino has achieved this through everything he does as a filmmaker. People see the movies because they know what they’ll get with him. People should read your work because they know what they will get.

While I acknowledge the importance of writing for a certain audience I think many suggestions to new writers are ill-explained. I see lots of writers who begin with a focus on one topic often trail off. Even if it ends up looking silly because of the blog name it doesn’t really matter as long as they’re writing and doing it well. If you’re successful writing about the Phillies then that’s great. But don’t continue with something if your heart isn’t in it.

By SD Dirk on Flickr (Originally posted to Flickr as “D7K_4969”) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Niches Shouldn’t Back You into a Corner

Your niche doesn’t have to be about a particular topic. I’ll encourage you to get very knowledge about one thing, but for the sake of not wasting your time on something nobody else really cares about, diversify yourself. Work at making your opinion what attracts the readers, not the specific topic. You’re trying to market yourself as a writer. You are what matters. Let your talents connect and shine through your writing.