Why "You Are The Niche" Stopped Working in Content & Personal Branding

In this episode of The Power Table Podcast, Taylor Smith makes the case for why the popular advice to "you are the niche" is one of the most damaging things you can do for your personal brand — and breaks down what the most visible, profitable female entrepreneurs actually do differently when it comes to niche marketing and brand positioning.

This episode is a bold, direct conversation about marketing clarity, the real cost of avoiding a niche, and why personality without direction will always create confusion. Taylor challenges the idea that choosing a niche limits who you are, and reframes it as one of the most liberating business decisions you can make. She also addresses the ""multi-passionate"" identity head-on and explains why leading with everything you can do is exactly what keeps your audience from understanding what they should hire you for.

Listeners will learn why the only goal your marketing should have is to be as obvious as possible about who you are and what you do, how to lead with a defined niche without shrinking your capability, what it actually means to niche your marketing versus niching your life, and how to identify what you are willing to lead with so that your content, offers, and visibility all start working in the same direction.

If you are a coach, service provider, course creator, or content-driven entrepreneur who wants a personal brand that attracts consistent clients and converts without feeling like you are constantly starting over, this episode will give you a new way to think about positioning, niche strategy, and what makes a brand actually stick.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why "you are the niche" sounds empowering but creates confusion in your marketing
• The one goal your marketing should always be working toward
• Why calling yourself multi-passionate is avoiding the real cost of not niching down
• The difference between niching your marketing and niching your identity or capability
• How to identify what you are willing to lead with and make it the anchor of your brand
• Why passion projects and multiple revenue streams do not have to live on your public-facing content
• How clarity in your niche makes your content, offers, and visibility compound over time
• What happens to your brand when every decision is made in isolation from a clear positioning strategy

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Power Table. If you are leading your business with a big vision and you're ready for your visibility to match your ambition, you are in the right place. I'm your host, Taylor Smith, founder of the Power Table, serial entrepreneur, and international keynote speaker. I've generated millions in my business for speaking of personal branding and community building, and I'm here to teach you how to do the same as a founder-led brand. Each week, we dive into the business strategies, identity, and leadership work required to become the woman people recognize, trust, and choose again and again. Because your next level isn't just about what you do, it's about who you become in the process. This is your seat at the table. I wish people would stop saying you are the niche. I have so many thoughts on this topic. So people are probably going to disagree with me. And I'm very excited to have this conversation with you. Welcome back to the Power Table Podcast. If this is your first episode, know that we talk about all things visibility, leadership, personal branding, business growth, personal development. And those are kind of also under the same niche of what it takes to be a female founder and have a founder-led brand here in 2026 and beyond. I'm so happy that you're here. If this is the first episode that you've listened to, well, let me just say you picked a very interesting one to choose for your first episode. But let's go ahead and dive right into it. Welcome back to everyone who is a Power Table podcast subscriber. It's so great to be in your ears once again. So there has been what I will say is a massive identity crisis in the online space in the past few years when it comes to niching. Everyone has strong feelings about this word. So let's back it up to like five years ago. Actually, no, it's six because here we are in 2026. 2020, everyone's saying the riches are in the niches, right? They're saying pick a niche, niche down, or you will never grow. And that really worked. Like it was how I built my first six-figure digital product suite. It's how I grew my social media accounts really fast. And just if you're curious, like I taught small business marketing and selling products on Etsy was like one of my very first like niches that I focused on in the digital creator space. Mostly on the social media marketing side of your small business. But we did talk a bit about physical and digital products on that original podcast, on that original niche and original focus too. So there's a fun fact if you did not know that about me, long, long time ago. And the niche worked. And then in about 2022, 2023, it felt like things swung hard, really hard, in the other direction. People were more interested in you personally and less about the educational content. In fact, educational content as it was before, which was like five tips, do this, not that, began to work less and less. And people started saying, You are the niche. People just want to follow you. Just be yourself. People took that and I think used it as a shortcut in a lot of ways. You don't need to have a content strategy. You don't need to show up with a clearly positioned brand with clear expertise. Just be yourself and document your life and share your hobbies and share what you're interested in and share your hot takes and your rants. And and people just buy because they love you. They relate to you. And it kind of worked. It did work in some regards. Some people did this really, really well. But mostly, especially in the B2B space, smaller creators that didn't already have a big audience, when they tried to implement this, it didn't work because people are just confused. They don't know why on one social media feed you are trying to sell them into a done for you service. And then in the next post, you're talking about your favorite flea market finds. It's not clear to people. Because the advice was you are the niche, people ended up trying to be everything and it ended up being completely unclear. And I think that that is why a lot of people struggled with content in 2023, 2024, and parts of 2025, and they struggled to gain traction, is because they were being told the niche, be liked, be relatable, share everything, document your whole life, and people will just naturally buy from you. And that doesn't work as well as it appears to be. It is not as easy as that. And I think that we are now in a much more mature conversation around content strategy. And that is you are the face of your brand, but your brand still needs a niche. And today in this podcast, I'm going to talk about how do you actually choose that niche without boxing yourself in, without limiting your growth, without taking away the parts of your personality and your life and your goals that you do love to share, and without muddying the waters for potential buyers, collaborators, event, and podcast hosts who might want to have you on their stage or their show. So what we're going to go through is first of all, why is content marketing leaving you confused if you feel that way? What is the risk of not niching down? Because so many people are so resistant to it because you've been given bad advice for like three to four years of like, you are the niche that doesn't really mean anything. That's like getting on my soapbox here, but that's the same as like saying, charge what you're worth, charge what you're worth and add tax. Like you are the niche. It doesn't mean anything helpful. And then we're going to talk about the reframe like the niche is not your identity. How do you hold both? How do we make it super clear for people and AI to understand you and for you to feel that your business is in alignment and expansive and fun and interesting and you don't feel boxed in or limited by your clarity? What a strong niche should include, I want to vision cast for the future what I think that a modern founder-led brand looks like in terms of content and identity. So let's go ahead and get into this episode. And let's start with like, why is it that content feels hard? Why do people have such strong opinions about niche and marketing? And I can tell you that if content feels really difficult, it's probably because what is confusing is not how to make the pose, but how to articulate what you do. Or maybe you lack clarity on what it is that you actually provide for people. What is the actual result? Or it's because you've evolved from where you initially started. So you've had multiple offers by this point. Most people listening to this podcast, I can assume you are probably not on your first offer. You're probably not even on your first business anymore. You've probably had multiple social media accounts, multiple attempts at diving into something new. You've probably worked with different types of clients, and you've probably had more than one skill set that you have monetized in the past. 99% of people listening to this podcast episode, you are not new. And yet it still feels confusing. And now you're trying to figure out how do I communicate who I am now, what I do now, where I want to go in the future in a way that actually makes sense to someone else, in a way that also performs well in content. This clarity and defining your niche and defining your personal brand is not about limiting your capability or your personality. It's actually about making your value, your authority, your expertise, and what you stand for completely and totally obvious. Most people are not struggling with a lack of talent. It's a lack of positioning. And you want your brand to be obvious. You want your genius and your expertise to be obvious. You want your results that you can get people to be completely obvious. Business is not about being clever. It's not about being funny. It's not being about being trendy or smart or impressing people with your great social media content hooks and ideas. The only goal your marketing should have should be to be as obvious as possible who you are and what you do. Now, obvious doesn't mean surface level. We can build depth with obvious. We can lead people through a journey. We can educate people or shift their mindset, but we need to be explicit about what it is that we're actually doing. And when you say you are the niche, you're basically refusing to be explicit and obvious on what the result is. And you're making it more about yourself than about the people that you serve. And that will always be a point where you struggle with marketing. And it's both, right? Like we've got to be both. We have to lead with ourselves, lead with who we are in a way that feels good and it feels alignment, and be super clear on what we're who we're serving, why and how. And therein, that is not an easy thing to do. And it takes time and it takes multiple iterations and revisions to process. And so because it is hard, a lot of people simply won't niche down, right? They will not choose one, but there is a risk to that. When you don't define a niche, you're not simply saying, I'm not choosing a niche, I'm choosing to be multi-passionate. This is not the case. In fact, the word multi-passionate is fatal to successful marketing. I'm not afraid to be super bold in this episode. As I said, I have strong feelings on this. Saying that you're multi-passionate is avoiding the reality and the cost of not niching down. And the problem is you become forgettable. It becomes very difficult for you to get traction. It becomes very difficult for you to get the right clients to be known because the people who are going to get selected for opportunities like podcasts, stages, brand deals, clients, ideal clients, high-paying clients, clients on very big annual retainers selling out your offers, they are the ones who are easy to remember and understand. Not the most talented, not even necessarily the most experienced, the most clear. And if someone has to work harder to figure out what it is that you do because you're sharing everything under the sun about your life on social media, they won't. They won't work harder to understand you. They will instead move on to the person who made it obvious. And I think that this is the reason that so many people avoid going all in on a niche and being confident and certain in it and committing to it is because they think if I choose a niche, I am stuck there. I must be missing other things. The grass is greener on the other side. I'll have to turn down other things because I said I only do this one thing, and therefore I'll miss out on potential revenue, even though those probably weren't the clients' sales you wanted in the first place. They think if I choose a niche, I'm stuck here. Here's what I want you to understand. And this is especially true if you are a new business owner or if you are someone who has gone through multiple, multiple iterations of marketing and business and identities and offers, and you still feel like you're not getting traction and you know you're spread too thin across too many different ideas, too many different businesses or side hustles or offer suites. When you are choosing your niche, it is not the same as choosing your identity. Your niche is not you. When you choose a niche, we are not choosing your identity. We are choosing your entry point where you're going to plant your flag in order to gain traction. We've got to dig deep into one thing, gain traction, and then expand back out from there. So the niche is really just answering one single question. What do I want to be known for right now? Six months, 12 months, three years max, right? Right now. Not forever, not for the rest of your career, not the whole time you own your business, right now. Because the fastest way to expand, to have rapid growth is to first be known for something specific. And I want to give a little bit of a personal example here. So when I really started community building with a power table, I was actually pretty niche down in the beginning. It was like small business marketing, small business social media. And then after a while, that began to feel not very aligned for me. But I'd built a really strong community and strong audience because I like focus on that one thing. So I had gained a lot of traction. And then I was able to expand a bit more. And then I kind of got too broad. And I was like, we do business strategy and business coaching and marketing and community building and connection. And it was actually and personal development. And it got very, very broad. And that was a point where I didn't have as much clarity on what was next. And so there wasn't as much momentum happening for a brief period because, and this is also the time when I started hosting in-person events. I know you guys have heard me tell this story on the podcast, but as a result, I started trying new things and initially, like nobody was showing up to my events. And it was a time to process and to let myself move through that messy middle. And then it started to gain traction again. I started really focusing on talking about community building, networking, relationships to grow your business, because that also was what was working for me. Once again, that was what do I want to be known for right now? Focus on that community building component and how community helps you build referrals, ideas, decisions. Ended up like hitting the freaking gas pedal for the power table. We ended up rapidly scaling everything in the next two years, sold-out events, hundreds of thousands of dollars in brand partnerships. You've probably heard me say this on the podcast, but last year I did like 65 speaking and podcasting engagements. And it really helped to focus back in. And it's not that I wanted to do that forever, but it was like, what do I want to be known for right in this moment? Six months ago, now, seven months ago, at the end of the year, when I was really starting to do my end of the year audit in 2025, I began feeling like, okay, I'm still proud to be a community builder, but it's not the thing I really want to focus on next. And I started talking more about positioning, party building, ability, speaking. I was coaching on this. I had built out a program now called Leaders that you'll hear more about in the next few months on the podcast that teaches you how to get speaking, podcasts, and brand deals. And so now, because I've spent the last six months in my content and my offers and my personal brand focusing on this niche, visibility and positioning, speaking, personal branding. It's super, super clear. And I had a six-figure launch of an offer focused on this. Will I teach on how to get speaking and brands forever? Probably not. But it's the fastest way to gain traction is to become known for one thing and make that your singular focus for a short period of time. It is the fastest way for you to see results in your business. And in choosing to do that over and over again, I just walked you through three different things that three different niches that I've had in six years of working on community building in the power table. And that was small business marketing and then community building and then speaking and positioning. With each one of those, I also was making choices about how I would not water down my positioning and niche by talking about too many different things. So even though I have been an early adopter of AI, you won't see me talking about very much AI in my content. Occasionally, but very, very rarely, because I don't want to get distracted or water down or confuse my audience on what it is that I can actually deliver for them, even though it might be a passion of mine. You also won't see me talking about too many different personal things. I share personal stories that connect with people and move people, but you're not going to see me declutter my house or go shopping or how I meal prep. Like those to me would be a distraction from the niche that I actually want to be known for. And this is where you are the niche goes wrong because you think that you're trying to be relatable when what we need to be is obvious. What we're going to do next is talk about what a strong niche actually includes and how to avoid boxing yourself in. And I've already touched on this a little bit, but I think the old way of niching six years ago, the 2020 version, is like, I'm a business coach. Here are five educational tips. And that's really too broad to create any kind of traction. And instead, a strong niche has three very specific layers. And the last one is the most important. So the first layer is who do you work with? Not everyone. Do not say that everyone you can help is your niche, your target audience. Who specifically benefits the most from your work? The second one is what do you help them do? What's the outcome, the transformation, or the result? Every person has a result that they generate for their clients. And then the third and most important is where do you intersect with this person and this result and this conversation? What's the angle, your differentiator, your unique perspective, your unique framework or way of solving something or doing something? We also call this thought leadership. And it's what creates recognition for you. That is what you need to develop a strong niche for right now to gain traction and dig in and see results in your business instead of being in the same place with occasional results and occasional clarity and occasional opportunities in six to 12 months from now. And let's talk about before we wrap up this podcast, how to avoid boxing yourself in. I never really worried about this too much, but I know a lot of people do. In fact, I've even had clients tell me when I walk them through this format of what do you want to be known for. I have a specific framework called the Ripple Effect. We build out signature speaking topics inside of my program, which is called leaders. I've had clients be like, I felt like you were trying to box me in. I wanted to resist this. And it's the part that a lot of people are afraid of, or they they resist and it's not a bad thing. It's just that a lot of people think niching will be limiting the conversations you can have, limiting what's available to you. But that's not actually true. The right niche will expand you, your opportunities, your ideas, because it will build momentum from the traction. But more importantly, it will build depth. When you are quote unquote multi-passionate in your marketing, you talk about anything and everything, you end up being very surface level and you don't even realize it most of the time. But when you are willing to niche down and you stop being afraid of being boxed in, and you say, I will commit to this right now, being the expert, planting my flag right here, you actually build depth because you start going deeper in the conversation than most people will, which is then the way that you get invited onto top podcasts, you get invited into opportunities, brands reach out to you, clients are like, I've never heard someone really explain it that way. It builds depth. So as you think about your niche, here's how to do it without feeling stuck or boxed in. The first thing is like recognize niching is a business and marketing strategy. We are niching your marketing, not you or your capability. You can do many, many things. Many of them can be behind the scenes and they never need to make it into your content. You can have multiple streams of income that never make it onto your website. Side hustle, take on the side projects all you want, take on the passion projects all you want, but they don't need to make it into your marketing. What are you willing to lead with? That's what goes in your marketing. The second one is build the depth, go deep, not wide, or before you go wide. Expansion and expanding out into these new ideas works best when people trust you for one thing first. And if you feel resistant to that idea, I challenge you. Think about all the people you admire: business world, maybe professional athletes, maybe motivational speakers or writers. They all got known, I guarantee you it's 100%, for one thing first before expanding into multiple things. And I would encourage you to be honest with yourself and ask yourself, have I actually done that work first? Have I done the one thing first and went deep, not wide? And then the third part is recognizing and letting yourself accept that your brand will evolve in layers. We don't need to communicate all our passions, all our skills at once, all our interests at once. I've been speaking and educating on positioning and brand deals. I've been speaking for three and a half years, and I only started teaching the strategy on it last year. I've been getting brand deals since 2021, and I only started coaching on it in the last six months because I am okay with the fact that the brand will evolve in layered, and I don't need to communicate my entire skill set, my entire list of interests, all my passions or all of my value at one time. And a lot of people won't like when I say this, but truly, you have to earn the right to expand your brand. It's not that you don't deserve it. It's not that you don't deserve to be multi-passionate or deserve to share who you are. We're not talking about you or your identity. We're talking about how to gain traction with the marketing strategy. And that is to niche. And then you have to earn the right to expand farther once you already have that traction, once you already have the community and the people who trust you. And so as we wrap up the podcast episode, where we've landed right now is this. It is 2026. We're halfway through. The world is changing rapidly with AI, and people are more interested in connecting with humans and other people. They want to buy from people they trust and they want to see the person who runs the brand now more than ever. You are the face of your brand. People are interested in you. They do want to know your leadership, your perspective, your obstacles, your challenges, your goals, how you think. But you still need to have your brand operating in a singular, clear lane in order to get the results that you want. You are not an influencer, you are not just a person on the internet, you're a person who is known for one thing. And that is what will create for you authority, trust, and opportunities over everything else. So if you have felt confused about this process or you've resisted choosing a niche, this is your sign to stop thinking about it as a limitation and start thinking about it as a strategy. Because the people who are getting the most opportunities right now, the most speaking, the biggest brand deals, the biggest opportunity in collaboration, they're being invited into circles that you dream of. They're the people who are making their value easiest to understand by me. niching what they do and using their niche as a marketing strategy. And that starts with choosing what it is that you want to be known for. And if you want help with refining your niche, refining your messaging, how you're positioned for opportunities, this is the exact work that we do inside of the Power Table Mastermind. Would love to have you join us. You can check out the link below in the show notes. And I hope that this episode gave you food for thought. I would love to hear your thoughts. Send me a DM on Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe wherever you like to listen so that you get every single episode of the Power Table podcast. And in every episode we help you move towards becoming the person that people recognize, trust, and choose over and over again. Talk to you soon