If you are having trouble developing a presence in your marketplace, you may be going too wide. By trying to attract everyone, you appeal to no one. It is much more profitable, and easier to be a success online, when you focus on one type of individual in a smaller market, rather than a huge marketplace.

How can you tell if your niche is too broad?

Take a look at your blog or website. Are you writing about several topics? If you are an absolute stranger winding up on your Internet doorstep for the first time, could you quickly understand the topic or market being covered? This is one way to see if you are using a shotgun approach that is shooting for to large of a target.

How Many Words Define Your Niche?

What is the focus of your niche? If you had to put a name on your niche, what is it? Often times, if your market can be described in 1 or 2 words, you are trying to please too many people. This is not true in every case. However, if your market is “shoes” rather than “designer shoes for millennial men” then your market is probably much too large.

Refer to Your Most Popular Blog Posts

Try this. Check out your analytics and take a look at your most popular blog posts. Are they all on the same topic or subject? Is there a very tight, focused approach to the same subject on all of those posts? If not, if your top posts drawing the most traffic are all talking about different things, you may be marketing too wide.

How Much Traffic Are You Getting?

Are you having a problem attracting web traffic? In many cases, this is because Google and the other search engines don’t really know what your site or blog is about. Your focus is on so many different things, the spiders that crawl the web can’t tell their respective search engines what your true focus is.

This is a classic sign of marketing to too large of an audience.

Tighten your focus. Choose one topic instead of several. Build a blog about “organic nutrition tips to help you recover from a heart attack” instead of “nutrition tips”. You may think micro-niches with a tight focus attract very little traffic. However, you may actually find your traffic improving with a laser targeted approach, especially if you are currently trying to be everything to everyone.