Carving Out a Personal Niche

The Internet has led to many enhancements in the way we communicate, consume information and do business. This has been a great advancement in technology. In no other period could someone build and launch a product or service, and capture a target market in such speed.

The web has also led to a saturation of knowledge. With so many open channels, knowledge has become easy to access and consume. The chances that you have the same knowledge has someone else is now greater.

What does this mean?

It means that general knowledge is less valuable. The barriers to information access are thinning out. Is this a bad thing? You can arguably go either way.

On one hand, the old hat "information brokers" are going to die out. People will no longer seek general knowledge experts because they can access the information themselves. This could be bad for some businesses.

On the other hand, it actually enhances business. Businesses must adapt to the ease of knowledge accessibility by focusing on a specific segment of knowledge. It’s called a niche and anyone familiar with marketing knows what that is. But this goes beyond the traditional niche. Businesses need to become true experts in a very narrowly defined field. There are no experts in web design, for example. There are experts in landing page effectiveness, conversion strategy, social media measurement and so forth.

Another benefit of knowledge saturation is that talent is cheaper. Instead of learning a general set of knowledge, you can hire it out at a cost that is less than your time value. And you can easily scale on the concept to build a strong business.

My stance is to be at least superficially knowledgeable in as many things as possible without sacrificing the ability to be super knowledgeable in one or more very specific fields.