I’ve read a bit here and there about niche. I’ve read both the opinion that niches aren’t that important and I’m assuming my regular readers don’t look at the fact that my writing is all over the place and I talk about random things to avoid this being just personal thoughts and stuff.

If pushed, I’d probably have to say I’m a blogger mommy. I write and I’m a mommy but I’m definitely not a mommy blogger in the traditional sense. I won’t post anything (hopefully) that will ever embarrass my kids when they grow up. (one loves the limelight anyways, I’m trying to get her to start a Youtube with me and hey, maybe we could get the not so social girl involved as well…)

I have silently promised to take 20 pictures to make sure I get the perfect shot, if it ever comes up when my girls are teens or adults I don’t want them to be embarrassed.

I also lost my identity when I first had my oldest. She was born 3 months early, had an 8 month NICU stay and when she came home, we took her out once and she ended up back in the PICU because of a cold. Due to that, we were afraid of putting her in care and my parents worked, so I had to stay home. We tried home health care but the nurses kept leaving (better opportunities out of state or in other areas) or weren’t stable enough for us to leave them alone with her.

I stayed home for 4 years until she had been in pre-k for a while (it wasn’t 4 years by choice- when she started pre- k I started looking around but the job market is hard to get back into when you’ve been gone for as long as I had)

In the years I was unemployed, I started slipping out of my identity. I got very actively involved in the “Mom Facebook community” to the point I adminned in several groups but ended up getting tired of the drama and being expected to post multiple times daily. I very slowly quit those communities.

Now, I have two healthy kids. The youngest is 3 and I’ve been working on losing the identity of just “mommy.” I’m working on trying to get in touch with my real interests, hopes, dreams and who I am as a person. Thanks to that, my mind is typically all over the place. One minute, I’ll be listening to “Baby shark” with Bubble Guppies on in the background and the next I’ll be listening to Within Temptation with Lord of the Rings on. It hasn’t been as huge a process as it seems or even feels like it would be. I love reading “mommy blogs” and connecting with “mommy bloggers” but I don’t feel like I would fit into that.

I know I’m not a travel blogger, beauty, fashion or lifestyle so I’m guessing I don’t fit in any of the neat little categories.

The cons I have read about not fitting one is that it’s harder to find a target market. Since I write and have my business, I spend a lot of time trying to determine my target market and in that realm I’d need a niche, right?

I can name one huge pro with not fitting a niche- you aren’t confined to only writing about one topic. I was writing for a pregnancy/baby website for about 6 months. In that six months, I wrote 72 articles. Those 72 articles were all about either pregnancy or having babies under 2. By the time I left that site, I was burned out and wracking my brain to figure out what to pitch for them next. I was starting to think of random topics and pitching 2 or 3 bad ideas based around the one topic. It got to be a huge pain. Pregnancy is something I know very well but there comes a time you can write too much about a topic and run out of ideas. Since this isn’t a pregnancy site, I don’t have to stick with writing about pregnancy.

Do you have a certain niche?

How did you decide- just an interest, business or hobby or did it fall into your lap once you started writing?