7 Steps To Picking And GROWING Your YouTube Niche In 2026

If you're watching this, there's a good chance that you're either still trying to figure out your YouTube niche, or you've already picked one, but you're not growing the way that you should be. Maybe feel like you're posting content consistently, but the algorithm isn't responding, or you're confused about whether your niche is even profitable, or you're not sure whether you should niche down or expand. In this video, I'm going to walk you through the exact seven steps that I teach my students for picking and growing a niche that actually attracts the right viewers and eventually makes you money. And this clip is taken directly from one of my private live sessions where I break down how to understand your value proposition, how to structure your format, why you are the niche yourself, you are the niche, and how to finally stop second-guessing what your channel should be about. So, if you want clarity, direction, and a niche that can be profitable, keep watching until the end. And if you like this kind of content, please let me know by gently tapping that like button. And let's jump into the video right now. Okay, so we got a lot of questions on how to find a profitable niche. Um, that is that is a big one. We are getting that one quite quite often. We are getting a lot of questions on like a solid plan, which I guess that kind of goes back to the niche plan and and niche, you know, there quite quite similar. Um, then we've got money. Okay, so money and stuff like that. Like try to be more specific than that. How narrow to make my niche. Margarit offering my niche the right amount of value so they want to come back. Yeah. Okay. The right amount of value so they want to come back. Yeah. It's it's not necessarily the amount of value, it's it's the type of value, right? So, just as an example, what do you guys think the value proposition of my channel is? I'm actually curious what you guys think. What do you think is the value proposition of my main channel, Shane? Shane hummus. Go ahead and comment that because it's not necessarily the amount of value that you offer. It's the type of value that you offer that matters. Okay? So, I want to I want to get some answers to that. What is the value proposition of my channel? helping others get out of the rat race. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That Okay, that's the main one. But let's go deeper. Let's go deeper. This this is actually a very interesting Let's talk about this topic because this this is uh very very interesting topic. Let's go let's go a little bit deeper. We'll get back to the other questions. By the way, I'm going to get back to the other questions, but let's talk about this topic. Can everyone see the whiteboard? Give me a thumbs up if if you can see the whiteboard. Okay, great. Great. All right. All right. Quick break. This Tuesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern time, I'm hosting a free live workshop called Make Money with YouTube Secrets. If you've been struggling to find your YouTube niche, or you don't want to spend months or even years building a channel around something that isn't profitable or just doesn't work for you in general, then this workshop is for you because for everyone who shows up live, I'll be giving away the 60-cond niche validator GPT 2.1. This is the most advanced version of my GPT powered niche validation tool yet, and it's designed to help you instantly test and uncover profitable YouTube niches before you invest your time, money, and effort into the wrong one. And it's the most refined data-driven version so far, and I'll be giving it away completely free, but only during this live workshop. So, attend the free live workshop by clicking that link down the description and the pin comment below to grab it. You'll also be able to ask me questions live, so I look forward to meeting you. Oh, and just a heads up. This will be probably one of the last times I'll be giving away a version of the niche validator for free. So, make sure you click that link and show up to the workshop. Make sure you put in your calendar and I look forward to seeing you there. Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming. So, yeah, helping others get out of the rat race. Uh, time to profitability speed up path to financial independence. Help helping is help our niche solve their problem. Okay. So, uh, you get we got a few people saying that, you know, like helping people get to 10,000 a month, helping others get out of the rat race. The thing is is there's tons of other channels. Uh, Tomas and Anthony, there's uh, and then Tony says, "Time to profitability speed up." So, helping people get profitable faster. Uh, Sharon says, "Path to financial independence." Those are all decent answers, but there's tons of other people that offer that exact same thing. So, why is it that people watch my channel and not other people's channels? Okay. Finley says, "Help helping and educating people for whatever life throws at them." Yeah. Okay. Yeah. For me, real world experience can't be replaced by read and regurgitate like they made us do in college. Yeah. So, you like you like the real world experience that I that I give. Okay. Gina says, "Helping everyday people become great." Uh, Eric says, "Detailed instructions to succeed on YouTube." Margarit says, "My channel offers deep knowledge versus shallow." Tony says, "You made it so much easier to get started." Um, DJ says, "It's specific to YouTube." Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That that that's that's good, too. Exploring unusual opportunities. Boom. That's it. Van, I think Vaughan got the closest out of everybody. Yeah. Uh, Marie says, "How to makes you how to how it makes you feel." Yes. Yes. that that is important but but that's a little bit it's not really tangible right it it is important like the the how the content makes you feel the emotions that the content evokes is absolutely important but it's not really tangible the person who gave the the closest answer it was van okay uh you solve a problem you're real and relatable these are all important things but the value proposition that my channel gives the re and this is this is something I've done from the beginning by the Okay. And and I of course I always use the um the examples of food, right? So my channel is basically like a buffet. Okay. People come to my channel when they are figuring out what what college degree they should get, right? um C whats they should get for different jobs what jobs they should pursue what jobs are best for them or what you know side hustle slash uh uh side hustle I'll just put h sidehustle slash sort of like you know entrepreneur make money online type opportunities are best for them. One thing I always say on my channel is there is no such thing as a best college degree, a best certification, a best job, or a best side hustle. There is a best of these things for you specifically, right? But there's no such thing as a best of all these. Now, of course, doing YouTube, in my opinion, is really good because it actually works really well with just about any other make money online or or side hustle that you do because you can literally just do YouTube and that's how you get traffic for for whatever other thing you're doing. or you can just do YouTube on it on its own. So, it's it's super flexible, right? You can also literally do YouTube to get a job, which which is something a lot of people don't realize, but if you have a YouTube channel and you're an authority in your niche, like you're going to have people begging you to work at their company, but uh th this is this is what I do is like the formats of my videos. What what are the formats of my videos, guys? And by the way, I'm going to go back and answer all the questions, so don't worry about the the questions before. But what what is the format of my videos? Can anyone say off the top of their head? And this is most of my videos. I'd say at least 80% of my videos have this format. That that's that's the niche hypothesis statement. I do have X and help people solve Y. That's a niche hypothesis statement. Um, but so the format of my videos is listical. Okay, this is the format of my videos. Now, there's a lot of different formats you could have, right? You could have uh you know, let's just list all the formats, some of the formats out here. Um how how to case study, challenge, Mr. Beast does challenge videos, right? Interview, explainer. explainer would be like why the ice is melting and blah blah blah blah blah whatever right um why why snakes why there are no snakes in Ireland or whatever you know that's an explainer video um there there's tons of different types of videos I mean there's there's endless you like music video you know like it's etc etc right tons of different formats I specifically have the listical format over and over again why because Again, my channel is like a buffet, okay? My channel is not a fancy Italian restaurant. It's not a pizza place. It's not a um you know, like uh like Thai food, right? It it is a buffet. I give a bunch of different examples of successful businesses, successful niches, successful like people that have found success. And then I tie into those examples how you can also find success using, you know, YouTube or or or whatever, right? Um, so I give you ideas and examples, but at the end of the day, my channel is kind of like a buffet. I give a bunch of different options, lists for what things that you could do, and I go into and I tie it in actual like actionable things that you can do in order to achieve those those outcomes. But we find like a bunch of different uh examples. So so a listical is like a list. So it's like top top five college degrees. Top five college degrees, right? List like a list. Um so you'll notice that like if you look at my channel almost all my videos are like that. Now am I saying that all like you should all do listical? No, not necessarily. Right? That like all most of these formats are great. How to case study challenge interview etc. But the the thing is is you need to understand what is the value proposition of my channel. The the niche that I am currently serving is yes, I'm helping people grow and make money on YouTube. That is the niche that I'm currently serving. However, I've changed niches many many times. But you know what I haven't changed? The format. The format and the value proposition of my channel has remained the same. When I was serving the college degree niche, I had I was making listicles and the value prop. I was basically like a buffet. I was giving people examples, telling them the pros and the cons and telling them, you know, helping them decide what is best for them, right? That is the value of my channel. Someone said that I do deep dives on my channel. I I rarely do extreme deep dives, you know, I'm not doing like hour-long tutorials on my channel, but I am giving really good information. I I give the best information and I completely ignore all the mediocre information, right? But I don't I don't really dive like super deep into it on my channel. What I do is I give people examples of like successful YouTubers or people who are having success in the world doing random side hustles and then I basically show them that, you know, like this is what they're doing. Maybe this could work for you. May, you know, but if it doesn't, here's another one that might work for you. And oh, by the way, this is what they're doing and that's what they're doing and this is the strategy they're doing and blah blah blah. Right? That is the value proposition of my channel. I give them ideas. People come to me when they're not sure what to do and they're looking for the next thing to do in their life, right? Whether it's getting a new job, getting a college degree, um getting s certification so they can upskill and get paid more in their job, uh starting a side hustle, or starting a YouTube channel. That's what people come to my channel for. that is the value proposition the core value proposition of my channel. Okay, so this is this is really important for you to know that like what what is it that makes your channel different besides just your niche because yes the niche is important but understanding on a deeper level what is the value proposition of your channel. Now another thing to understand about listicles is they're easy to consume. Okay, you don't even technically you don't even need to be looking at my videos in order to consume my videos because I do. Yes, I do have a visual component to my video. However, um you don't need to see the visual component. Whereas, if I was doing tutorial videos, you absolutely do have to watch, right? That's like an I. Okay. and and hear. That's like an ear. Okay. A very very bad ear. Um yeah. So So you have to watch and you have to hear. Whereas with my videos, you really only have to hear. So a lot of people watch my videos like a podcast almost, right? Yeah. So um that's another thing to understand. They're easy to consume. They're easy to listen to. uh you don't you know you might be tired on your break uh from from work and or or tired after work and you could watch my content and you could easily consume it and listen to it and it gives a lot of value. It gives the same type of value over and over again in the same format. Okay, that is the important part about my content that a lot of people don't realize. So you also need to understand like what is the value proposition of your channel? What makes your channel different than all the other channels? Because there's lots of other channels making YouTube videos. What makes my channel different? Well, first of all, I you know, I I I do have like different philosophies on on how to grow on YouTube than almost any other, you know, YouTube guru out there. Um I I've actually done it myself, right? So, I've done it with multiple different channels. I'm not just kind of telling people how to do it while I'm doing it, which which a lot of the YouTube gurus are, but there are some legit people out there as well. And then another thing is I mostly focus on educational content. So education content for the most part, that's that's what I focus on just because I know it's way easier to monetize education content. It's significantly easier to make money. Like you can make a full-time income with education content just getting like with a few thousand subscribers. Whereas with an entertainment channel, like you got to have like 500,000 subs at least before you're going to make a full-time income typically. So yeah, and I also focus on the money side of things. I treat YouTube like a business. So th those are the things that kind of make my channel unique, right? Those are those are the conglomeration of things that make it unique. Um, so yeah, um, that's something that you really want to think about like what what is your channel going to do? What what unique experience are you going to provide? So, let let me let me just give another example here. My two favorite shows of all time are The Office and Breaking Bad. These are my two favorite shows of all time. The Office is a dry comedy and Breaking Bad is a gritty drama. However, if I were to go and click on The Office and then Breaking Bad popped up, even though it's probably my favorite show of all time, I would be disappointed. Why? because I was in the mood for a dry comedy and a gritty drama popped up. I'm not in the mood for a gritty drama right now. Okay. So, this is why you need to deliver like work towards delivering a consistent experience that has the same format and the same value proposition. The Office, every single episode has the same format and every single episode has the same value proposition. Not only logically, but also emotionally. You feel the same emotions when you watch Breaking Bad as well, right? And you feel the same emotions when you watch The Office. Okay? So, I know that that's a little bit it's a little abstract, but that's something you you want to put some thought into, right? What what consistent experience are you going to deliver your audience? When you go to your favorite restaurant, you probably have one dish that you really like, right? And you consistently order that dish. Maybe you have a few different ones, but you consistently order the same dishes and it probably has an ambiance to it. And you probably know the staff and that's what makes you go back again and again and again. You you know the the staff there, you like them, you have a good rapport with them. You like the ambiance of the restaurant, the maybe the the interior design, just the way it makes you feel, right? The restaurant has a certain feel to it, a certain energy to it. You enjoy that. You want you want to experience that again. And you probably like the food as well, right? So, and there's certain dishes that maybe you just order over and over again. So, so you want to experience that food. Okay? That is why you go back to the same restaurants again and again and again. it has a consistent experience and you want to provide that cons uh consistent experience with your content. Now, if you're not doing that right now, don't worry, okay? It's fine. That's totally fine. This is the process that you want to go through to find what that consistent experience you you're going to uh be delivering is. Now, uh if you look at any channel out there, Mr. Beast, of course, as an example, he makes challenge videos. every single one of his videos are challenge videos, right? He always has the same format. Okay. Also, they usually involve money, right? So, winning or losing of money. Um, that's, you know, drama, drama, drama. That's, you know, it's like, uh, it the stakes the stakes are higher because there's money involved. Um, it also produces, generally speaking, a lot of the time it produces the same emotions. It's like there's competition. There's people that have, you know, some kind of uh hardship in their life and then they're trying to win the money and then they they win the money and and it's uh you know, everyone like they're very happy about it and and blah blah blah, right? Like it's the same same emotions in every single one. Uh there's also usually like story lines so that he weaves like story lines into the uh the content and uh he has con consistent uh characters, right? Consistent people that uh are in his videos. Um of course I think uh some of them have been swapped out recently, but consistent characters, those are kind of like the staff at a restaurant, right? And the style of video is usually quite similar too in terms of the editing. So it kind of has like similar styles, right? So this is this is Mr. Beast. This is why people watch Mr. Beast videos is that's the value proposition of this channel. And you want to put some thought into this like what what besides just the niche, what is going to make your channel different, right? Why are people going to watch your channel versus other channels? And it's not necessarily like a competition thing. It's just like you need to find your your spot in the ecosystem, right? Find your spot in the ecosystem. Um, some people probably don't uh, you know, vibe with with my particular type of videos, and that's totally fine. They they don't vibe with the way I make content. That's all that's okay. That's fine. And um, you know, that that's not a problem, right? Like you don't have to vibe with with the way I I I make content. You know, they might watch somebody else and they vibe with them. I was like, "Okay, cool. That's totally fine." But, uh, yeah, understanding your spot in in the ecosystem, like un like deeply understanding why people come to your channel, what the unique value proposition that you provide to people is. What is your format? Of course, what's your niche, right? But go beyond go beyond just niche. Yes. What's your niche? You know, I help I help X do Y, right? the you need to know those two for sure. I help X do Y, but go beyond that, right? Not just your niche, but like what what is what is your format? What is your value proposition? What makes your channel different than other channels? All right. Finding that niche that attracts paying clients. So, okay, DJ, 95% of my successful clients have used this method to find their niche. The truth is is that the niche is you already you like like first of all you need to understand that one. Okay, never forget this. You are the niche. Okay, so this is one thing you you need to understand. You are the niche. Okay. Um this this is a bit of a a concept. Now you might be thinking, well Shane, you just told me that I need to pick a niche like I help X do Y. Yes, you do. But always understand this is just a temporary niche. This is like a snapshot, right? This is like a snapshot. This is the whole movie. Okay? You are the niche. This is the whole movie. And because of the fact that you are the niche, chances are your niche is already something that you've done in your life or you spent a lot of time doing. So, just as an example, if you've had a lot of problems in your life, chances are that's a lot more opportunity for you to make a a really good niche because guess what? I know it doesn't seem like it, but if you've had problems, millions of other people have probably had those same exact problems. Problems are are very rarely unique, right? Most of the time, if you've had problems, like millions of other people are suffering from the same exact problem. And so if you've been able to overcome that problem, then you can help other people do the same, right? So you are the niche. So, what I always like to tell people, and this this is a a strategy that that you should you should use, is pretend that you had a time machine, and you could go back and you could talk to the younger version of yourself and give them advice to overcome the biggest problems they had, the most painful problems they had, and do it faster, better, or just without as much headache. How valuable would that be? So just as an example, let's just say you became uh you have a a good IT job, right? You got a good IT job. A and in order to get this job, it took you like, you know, 3 years of working through like kind of crappy jobs to get to this good IT job, right? If you could go back and tell the younger version of yourself the exact skills that you need to get hired, how to make a portfolio, how to make your resume look good. Do you think you could cut this three years into maybe one year, maybe six months, maybe three months, right? Chances are a lot of you are like, "Yeah, I think I could like if I if I knew all the things that I know now, I could easily get the same job in one year, 6 months, or or 3 months because now I know what skills they need. Now I know what they value. Now I know what a good resume looks like." Maybe you've done some hiring or helped with the hiring process and you're like, "Oh my gosh, these people have no idea what a good resume looks like. These people have no idea what a good portfolio looks like. they have no idea how to look good um in an interview, right? And you could easily help people do that. I've probably had like 50 I think at this point I've had like 50 clients uh that that are in situations like this. Not necessarily it, but like different jobs, right? Like I've got a lot of career clients who who've done something similar to this cuz just it just makes so much sense, right? It's like like we we I I have clients in so many different niches. I I don't want to like call them out specifically cuz I don't want them to have necessarily any competition, but but like I it is is one of the niches. I have several clients in the IT niche and um yeah, it's cyber security is another one. It's just it's easy for them to help people get jobs and it's like a lot of these people that don't work with them, they they'll go and they'll get a degree or something. It's like they just spent four to five years. They probably spent $100,000 on the degree and it's like they could have just worked with this person for 3 to 6 months and gotten the same exact job and it would have cost far less money like maybe five $5,000 $10,000 something like that, right? You know, for the certifications and everything and the coaching and they would have gotten the same exact job, right? So, it just makes so much sense cuz you're saving them a massive amount of time, effort, and money. Yeah. It's all because you are the niche. So, what a lot of people think is the niche is outside of them, right? Right. So, so they think like this is you and here's the niche and you need to find your niche. I mean that's what that's what people even say is like oh I have to find my niche. The truth is the niche is already chances are in 95% of cases the niche is actually already inside of you. It's already in your past experience. And so you just need to look inside and look at your past and see what you could help other people do. So, there's so many different examples of this, you know. Um, like I there's there's one lady I worked with who was really good at writing grants and and you know, I remember she was like, "Oh, I I I want to try this niche and that niche." And I'm like, "Are you even good at those things?" She she was telling me, "Oh, I want to try penny stocks. I I want to teach people how to do penny stocks." I'm like, "How long have you been doing penny stocks?" Like, "Oh, I just started." Like, "No, don't do that." Like, that's that's a terrible idea. and and and then after we like sat down and you know mapped out her experience, it's like oh you have like 20 to 30 years of like grant writing experience and you've secured billions of dollars of grants. Maybe that should be your niche, right? That that makes a lot more sense for you to teach other people how to do grant writing. So, you know, it's it's a lot of the time it's very obvious to other people that are asking you questions what your niche should be, but it's not as obvious to you because, you know, you might she might be thinking, "Well, I'm pretty good at grant writing, but I know people out there that are way better than me. You know, they've secured tens of billions of dollars in grants, hundreds of billions of dollars in grants, whatever, right?" And what she didn't realize is like she's still top 99th percentile. It's just she's comparing herself to other people. It's kind of like, you know, you're in the NBA and you're like, "Well, I'm not as good as Michael Jordan." It's like, "Yeah, but you're still better than 99.999% of people, right?" Because you're comparing yourself to the best of the best. So, uh, you know, and it's like a lot of the time that that's the way it is. I mean, you know, you are, if you have an IT job, you are better than 99.9% of people at getting an IT job. like you know more than 99.9% of people about getting an IT job just as an example just to make it very simple. So um what you want to do to to make this uh as easy as possible is you really want to list out a few things. Okay, you want to list out, so list out five things that you've been told you're good at. Five things you spent a lot of time doing. Five biggest problems you've had in your life. Five things you've struggled with the most. And by the way, you could do 10. That's totally fine, right? Five jobs or ways of making money you've done. Five things you think you're good at. Five biggest things you've accomplished. Okay? And there's probably a list of other things as well, but list all of these things out, right? List all of these things out right here. This is just a good thing good place to start. And then this is where you start and you just start talking about it. And this is what we do with our clients is we we have them list stuff like this out and we have them kind of tell us their life story and then we just we we listen and we're like ooh yeah okay that thing you could do a niche that that could make a good niche this could make a good niche etc etc right so just as an example I'll give you guys kind of like a little case study example I think this is a great case study we had one client who's about 18 years old he was attending a elite Ivy League university Okay, this is one of my favorite examples ever. So, he was a uh foreign student, right? So, he got into an elite Ivy League university in the US as a foreign student. And what he was doing is he was kind of making like productivity slashstudy content. And this is what he was doing. And he was to be completely honest with you, he was kind of like a little mini Ali Abdal clone, right? That's because he was just copying what the big YouTubers were doing, right? And that's what a lot of people do. And he was not having a lot of success with this. He was making basically zero money. It was a huge headache. He was spending way too much time on it. And he just he was running out of time. So we looked at his his background, which of course he's 18 years old, so he he doesn't have that much life experience, but we basically did went through this process of looking at his background and what we found is that he did really well on these tests called like IB tests, international balora tests. And he also was a foreign he he also was a foreign student who got into an elite Ivy League university in the US, right? Ivy. So we'll talk Ivy foreign. And so what his niche ended up being is helping other foreign students get into elite Ivy League universities in the US. It makes way more sense than doing freaking study content, which is oversaturated, right? So, that's that's how we found his niche. And he's he's been phenomenally successful with that. I mean, he he literally had to shut like he had to stop making videos cuz he had too much too many people applying to work with him, right? So, this is this is a great example. We went through this exact process and we found and and when we first found this, he was kind of like reluctant. He was like, "Oh, well, I don't think I could do that." but it it just worked, right? So, yeah, that's uh hopefully that helps. If you found this valuable and you want to help applying these seven steps to your channel, you can join my free one-time only live workshop happening this Tuesday at 9:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time. I'm going to be walking you through this entire process live and help you get clear on your niche, your value proposition, and the exact content strategy that you should use. If you want to watch more content here on YouTube, the video that I recommend is how we were able to get one of our students to seven figures. And you can check that video out by clicking right here.