As a blogger or vlogger you might find certain niche ideas are already covered before you think of them. Grr!
Popular niches get saturated – it’s a natural cause & effect of the popularity of blogging.
But what if other countries who speak your language still need that niche topic or idea!?
By simply tailoring your how-to post (for example) with keywords and imagery for a specific country, you can enter into a whole new and unsaturated arena.
In this post we’ll look at just one example of how I took a saturated U.S. topic and brought it to India, with hopes of reaching new audiences far and wide. Let me know if you think it will work out or not!
What Niche Ideas Can You Bring to Other Countries?
Note that by “bring” I don’t mean you have to pack your bags and hop on board a flight, but you could!
There are always some niche ideas that translate better across borders than others. For example jokes about Kelly Anne Conway might not be too funny in Japan. But how to make Swiss Chocolate truffles or how to beat level 5 of Mario, now those are topics people will want everywhere and probably translate.
Topics that blog well across borders:
- How-to gaming
- How-to tech
- Latest fitness advice
- Cooking how-to
- SEO
- How to make money online
- Travel guides
- Etc
There are obviously many more topics which people will want to read about regardless of the country you’re in. But if you’re looking to both help internationally and increase blog traffic on the home front, you’d be smart to pick topics that appeal widely or combine popular things.
If you look at the list above you can combine a few topics like SEO, how-to tech, and how to make money online into the topic of “how to make a website”, which is exactly what I chose to do for the Indian audience.
I wanted to attract as many viewers as possible and sometimes a certain angle like “how to make money through ads” leads people to actually be interested in your website tutorial, or gaming tutorial, or whatever it is. You gotta be your own salesman!
So here’s a little more into the bread and butter, the research and execution of how I think you can create blog content for an international audience.
8 Steps to Make Your Content Internationally Friendly
1. Find a contact living there
Your journey to make content that does great with a new audience starts by simply finding one of your friends of business connections living in that particular country. If you can’t find someone in your immediate network, Google the topic you want to focus on and connect with local bloggers, or even do a joint post! In my case, I was connected with a few super nice contacts at HostGator India who told me what hosting packages Indian uses like the most, and also explained places, themes and styles people in their city are proud of.
2. Establish the need
Your next step is to really understand the need for what you’re writing, filming etc. Do people need guidance on your topic? Which people? When do they need it? This kind of understanding is a bit of legwork up front but will make it so much easier to understand what you need to actually make once you start the fun process of creating. In my case there are very few tutorials to help people make a WordPress website in India, but there is a vast growing presence of WordPress websites in general, up to 47% of all websites using a CMS. Ideally you have the lack of content and the heavy need, but it’s not mandatory.
3. Research current competition
Once you have a contact giving you some inside info and know what people need, you should see who else is making your type of content so you don’t do the same thing (and so you can do it better!) Tools like ahrefs show you detailed competitor backlinks, rankings and other strategies they might be using, but simply knowing how to read the SERPs in Google and YouTube is often enough. Can’t say my competition here, but watch out 🙂
4. Hunt down all the necessary tools
Okay so you’ve realized your competition isn’t too stiff and you see an opening for your amazing new blog post or video. Before you just start creating, see if you can use local tools to get the job done. If you’re cooking, go out and buy exactly what that person in that country would be using to make it easier on them. In my case, we chose to go with a #HostInIndia trend and use HostGator, one of the largest web hosts in India with offices in Delhi and Mangalore. It was a bit tricky signing up from Minnesota onto their India servers, but it had to be done to show the process, and it actually went incredibly smoothly. It was crucial we go with Indian servers as their are faster for local audiences, often times cheaper, are paid for in rupees and these servers use Softalicious as opposed to Quick Install (if we had used Quick Install that would have potentially confused people).
5. Use societally accepted methods and standards wherever possible
Next, any purchases done in your tutorial (you might not have any, or may buy things on your own) need to be done in the local currencies with local providers. In my case we paid rupees through PayPal which redirected us to the Indian site merchant, who then exchanged our dollars for rupees and made it all work happily.
6. Offer people choices
Now that we’ve done the grunt work and made our purchases, it’s time to setup content and what better format of content than have some user-friendly choices! Would you users like to good a vegetarian option or use meat? Would they like the 7, 30 or 90 day health plan? Simply structuring your content with options can lead to a lot more traction from the start and definitely over time than just taking people down one path and telling them what to do. In my case I let people choose to make a Indian website for free with the Elementor theme, which works great anywhere around the globe, and offered people a super premium plus option to go with Divi by Elegant Themes.
7. Pick the right time to launch
With your content tied down and edited to perfection, you lastly should be sensitive to when you launch. Gathering peoples attention is essential to a successful lifelong piece of content, and if you miss it you might think you create the wrong stuff when really it was just a timing issue. Right seasons, days of the week, and times of the day all factor in here. In our case, my deadline was Nov 1 as this is about 1 week before Diwali begins. My launch timing wasn’t great, it was midday Thursday U.S. time so people go the content Friday morning in India. If anything, I’d have rather launched it for their Monday morning! Oops! But hope it works anyways.
8. Share, Share, Share!
Last but not least, connect with your original contacts and create a gameplan for sharing! Go to the blogs, local sites even newspapers to get the word out. Just because you wrote it or filmed it, does not mean they will come! You have to get your content in front of eyeballs and even setup giveaways and other opt-in-centives if need be! Be aggressive and don’t let your hard work go unnoticed.
So What Was Our Final Product?
In the end, using the above 8-step plan I was able to create two videos and start a movement we are calling WP4India designed to help the India WordPress audience dominate in all shapes, sizes and forms!
Here is what we made:
And here is the free India website tutorial.
Final Thoughts
Of course what you create may not be a video about WordPress, you can think of things far more original to bring over seas! I hope this guide helps inspire you when you’re out of blog ideas in your national niche – sometimes none of it has been covered for people abroad, so get to it!
Do you create content that does well internationally? Please let us know a few of your strategies below!