Your Niche Isn’t a Topic, It’s a Person
The truth that's been keeping us trapped.
Sarah is 58. She’s sitting at her kitchen table on a Tuesday morning, laptop open, with her coffee going cold.
She’s supposed to be prepping for a meeting but she’s looking at flights to Lisbon again.
She does this a lot.
Sarah’s been in the same industry for 30 years. She’s good at what she does, well respected and reasonably well paid. She dropped to 4 days a week last year, and told everyone it was for “balance,” which is partly true and partly because she needed a day to breathe and figure out what comes next.
Because what Sarah actually wants is to sit in a cafe overlooking the Mediterranean and work on something that’s hers. She wants to spend a month in the south of France and not call it a holiday because it’s just where she is right now. She wants to wake up and not know what country she’ll be in next Tuesday, and for that to feel normal.
She doesn’t want a gap year. She’s not interested in “finding herself.” She knows exactly who she is.
She wants a life that fits the woman she’s recently become.
While her friends are talking about downsizing and her colleagues are counting the years to retirement, Sarah feels like she’s only just getting started.
She wants to challenge herself. Immerse herself in the world around her and get lost in places that smell different, eat things she can’t pronounce, and haggle badly in markets.
And she wants to build something while she does it. Something with her name on it, that keeps her brain sharp, and connects her to people who think the way she does. A business she enjoys growing and that gives her purpose and funds her freedom at the same time.
She knows she can. She’s bought the courses, started 3 blogs, 2 podcasts, and an Etsy shop that sold one candle to her sister. She’s not stupid or lazy. She just can’t figure out how to make the internet care that she exists.
Sarah closes the Lisbon tab, opens her inbox and gets on with the task at hand.
But not for much longer....
Who Are You Writing For?
In her recent (excellent) article - ‘Who Are You Writing For?’ Linda Caroll articulated something I’ve been pondering for a while.
She said, ‘I think niche isn’t a topic, it’s a person.’
And I think she’s bang on.
Sarah is my person. She’s my niche. She’s the person I think about every time I sit down to write.
What does she need to hear today?
What’s she stuck on?
What inspires her to take action?
What would make her close the laptop feeling like she’s a step closer to the life she actually wants?
Working that out changed everything about how I approach my content, my products, and my business.
Focusing on your who rather than your what is something the younger generation of creators figured out a while back, while us OG’s have been quietly boxing ourselves in without even realising it.
The Truth That’s Been Keeping Us Trapped
“The riches are in the niches.”
This is a genuinely true statement. I’m not going to argue with it.
You can’t build an audience around golf and then try to sell pet products. Specificity sells.
The more clearly you can speak to someone’s exact situation, the more they feel like you’re reading their mind, which is what makes people subscribe, buy, and come back.
So what’s the problem?
The problem is what people do with that truth. They hear “niche down” and they pick a topic. Travel. Fitness. Cooking. Online business. And then they build a cage around it.
That topic becomes their identity, their content boundary, the thing they’re “allowed” to talk about. Everything else gets filtered out because it doesn’t fit the brand.
I know this because I did it for 15 years.
I started out as the “Facebook Queen” (a name my old mentor Chris Farrell gave me, and I ran with it). Then I became the social media person. Then online marketing. Then ecommerce. Then lifestyle business.
Every time I evolved or my interests shifted, I had to tear the whole thing down and start again. New brand, new positioning, new website, new audience. Because I thought my niche was my topic, and when the topic changed, I had to change everything with it.
The ridiculous thing is, I was talking to the same person the entire time. They were always there. They wanted freedom, they wanted to build something online, and they wanted to feel like they were capable of doing it. Whether I was teaching Facebook ads or selling products on Amazon, they were always showing up.
If I’d realised that 15 years ago, if I’d just been Jo Barnes talking about funding freedom and living a life worth waking up to, I could have taken them on the whole journey with me. Every pivot, every new thing I learned, every phase of the business would have been content.
I wouldn’t have needed 5 different brands. I would have needed one, with one person at the centre of it.
And I think this is where a lot of people get stuck. They’ve picked their topic, they’ve “niched down” like they were told to, and now they feel boxed in.
They want to write about something else but it doesn’t fit.
They want to evolve but they’re terrified of losing the audience they’ve built.
So they either stay in the cage and slowly lose enthusiasm, or they blow it up and start again from scratch.
Neither of those options is necessary when your niche is a person.
What Changes When You Know Your Person
My content covers travel, growing portable income, and ageing disgracefully.
On paper, that looks like 3 different niches. Any content strategist would tell me to pick one. And if I thought about my niche as a topic, they’d be right. It would be a mess.
Travel stories on Monday, business frameworks on Wednesday, a rant about society’s obsession with beige cardigans on Friday. Seemingly no coherence or through line.
But I don’t think about my niche as a topic. I think about my person.
She (or he) is in their late 50s or beyond. They’re vibrant, funny, and full of energy.
They’ve likely hiked mountains, travelled to places most people only pin on a board, and still feel like there’s more, not less, to do.
They’re either working a job they don’t really love anymore, have semi retired and are looking for ways to supplement their pension and fund their ideal lifestyle, or are living off savings working hard to crack the online income thing, so they can travel and grab the next few decades by the horns!
Whatever their circumstances, they want to embrace life, build something that gives them freedom, purpose and choice, and they’re done shrinking into what everyone around them expects someone their age to be.
They’re looking for inspiration, practical ideas, and someone who makes them feel like they’re not mad for wanting more at this stage of life.
And that’s where I come in!
Travel stories to demonstrate the life they’re building towards.
Business content to help them fund it.
And ageing disgracefully riffs because without changing how they see themselves, they’ll never give themselves permission to do any of it.
3 pillars. One person. One life.
My topics may change, my person never does.
Your Boundary Isn’t Your Topic
So if you’ve been agonising over whether you’re a travel writer or a food writer or a business writer or a lifestyle creator, here’s the good news.
You don’t have to choose between the things you care about. You simply choose who you’re talking to.
When you really know your person, you’ll find your content is naturally broader than one topic. Because you’re serving a whole person, and whole people don’t live in a single lane.
They don’t wake up on Monday caring about fitness and Tuesday caring about mindset and Wednesday caring about nutrition as three separate interests. It’s all the same life. Your content should reflect that.
The boundary isn’t your topic. It’s your person. Write everything they need. Skip everything they don’t. That’s your niche.
Now, this doesn’t mean you can write about anything. I couldn’t suddenly start creating content about cryptocurrency for day traders and expect my audience to come along for the ride. That’s a different person with a different life and different problems.
The specificity still matters. It’s just getting specific about the person more than the topic.
Find Your Person
If this is resonating for you, try this. Sit down and describe your person. Not a demographics worksheet with income brackets and age ranges. A real person.
Give them a name.
What does their Saturday morning look like?
What are they embarrassed to admit they want?
What have they tried three times and walked away from?
What are the people around them telling them to stop chasing?
What do they google at midnight when they can’t sleep?
When you can see them that clearly, you’ll know what to write. You’ll stop second-guessing whether a post “fits your niche,” because if it serves your person, it fits.
You’ll stop trying to sound like an expert in a narrow field and start sounding like a person who understands their life.
Your niche isn’t travel. Or cooking. Or fitness. Or business. Your niche is a person who happens to care about those things because they’re all part of the same life they’re trying to build.
Find your person first and everything else will follow.
If this got you thinking about your version of Sarah I put together a course called “Start the Right Side Hustle After 50”. It’s for the person who’s had three blogs, two podcasts, and an Etsy shop that sold one candle to their sister, and is ready to figure out what really works. It’s the kind of thing I wish I’d had before I spent years picking the wrong business models and rebuilding from scratch.
Or if you’d rather just have everything, paid subscribers get The Backpack (a growing library of guides, courses, and tools to help you build your freedom), the members-only Funding Freedom articles, monthly live calls, and anything new I add. All for less than a questionable airport sandwich.
I love your perspective, and I need to consider who “my person” is. Thank you.
Terrific article Jo. You turned what could be a dry subject into a fun reading adventure! I relate to this character and I run into her frequently during our RV adventures.