How to Choose Your YouTube Niche (Starting a YouTube Channel Over 50)

Recently I did a video about starting YouTube for people that are over fifty years old. I think it's a really great idea to consider if you are over 50. I just talked a little bit about my story, about my YouTube channel. I started it when I was little over sixty one years old. I've had it for about nineteen months. It's grown to a little over forty five hundred subscribers, And I make a really nice little side hustle income.

My YouTube Journey

I'm retired now, so, you know, I sort of had this choice if I wanted to continue with, you know, some of my more expensive hobbies, which one of them happens to be photography. I needed to find something to do to supplement my income.

And so I just started my Mike Shuey YouTube channel as a as an experiment just to see, you know, could I make some money with this and avoid having to maybe work part time somewhere in town. I live in a relatively small town. I had some places that I could go and work, but then I'm on somebody's schedule. And the whole point of retiring is to not be on somebody's specific schedule. So that's why I did this.

The Importance of Niche Selection

And so if you look at my video about starting YouTube at over fifty, I just go through the whole gamut of everything to think about if you want to go down this road.

But specifically today what I wanted to do is talk to you about picking your YouTube niche. So the interesting thing is I think for people that are over fifty years old and they're going to start a YouTube channel, I think the great thing is your life experience is really going to come into play when you choose a niche.

Hobby vs. Side Hustle

Now I do wanna say a couple of things about niche selection. You're just doing YouTube for a hobby, then you can talk about anything that you wanna talk about. You can not even have a niche. You know, every day you could talk about something that's different if you want to. It's completely up to you.

But if this is going to be a side hustle, you need to understand that with YouTube there's this sort of loose ecosystem where the choices that you make will influence the amount of money that you could make.

Monetization and Niche Selection

So as I talk about niche selection, you may hear me talk about monetization. Now both of these topics can be talked about individually, but if you're choosing your niche and, you know, you do want to think about this carefully, you want to be able to choose a niche that has at least the possibility of being monetized.

Because let me just say this, you know, you may see some videos where people are talking about getting to a thousand subscribers and four thousand watch hours. That's sort of this hurdle that you want to overcome to be able to run YouTube ads.

YouTube Ads and Income

So for instance, when you started this video, there was an ad that ran in front of it. There's going to be an ad that's going to run mid roll in this video and that's because when I reached a thousand subscribers and four thousand watch hours I was able to run YouTube ads.

The thing to realize is YouTube ads is really the smallest component probably of the money that you'll make. And so when choosing a niche, if you're going to rely solely on YouTube for your income, you may not be too excited about the amount of money that you get from it.

Now it just depends on how many subscribers you end up getting and and really the the number of viewers for each video that you have. I know I'm in a technology area. My videos average between five hundred and a thousand viewers each video. So it's not a lot. Right? To really make big YouTube ad money, you have to go viral. So niche selection does become important.

Choosing Your Niche

Now I've got a bunch of notes here. You may see me look down at my notes. I'm trying to keep this as conversational as possible, but I don't wanna miss anything as we go along here. So I think the very first thing to do when you're choosing a niche is to just make this laundry list of all the things that you're interested in, that you're passionate about. I think your niche could end up coming from maybe what you did as a job.

Leveraging Your Professional Experience

Like, for instance, I worked in IT for thirty four years for for a company. I have a lot of experience, you know, writing technical documentation. I have a lot of experience. I was a user experience specialist, so a lot of my life was spent looking at user interfaces and trying to figure out ways to make them better for people when they're using our software products, that kind of thing.

So I gravitated toward a niche in technology, and I explain to people how to use software, and I teach them how to use software. And that's primarily what I do. And so that worked out well for me because it's closely aligned with my profession.

Helping People Through Your Niche

Now, you know, what you do could be something completely different. But if you've maybe been a teacher, you know, think about teaching people something. Because the thing that you wanna do with your YouTube channel and the niche that you pick is you wanna help people. You know, that's my goal with every video. Can I help at least one person?

And so, your niche, could be a hobby. Like, if you see behind me, lots of plants behind me now. I didn't do that. My wife did that, and she's a really good gardener. And so, you know, maybe that's your niche. You're going to teach people how to start plants from us, from seeds in the spring and and, you know, what to look for. You know, all those whatever your hobby is, that could be a good niche.

Avoiding Niche Limitations

So like I said, make a laundry list of all the possible niches that you might want to do videos on, but just remember, don't go too narrow. If you go really narrow, what's going to happen is you're going to run out of things to do videos about. So that's the one thing that I would caution you is don't go super narrow.

Make sure when you pick a niche that it gives you room to grow and even room to pivot. Because, like, I'm in the technology area now. I chose to just call my channel by my own personal name, Mike Shuey, because I wanted to be able to pivot if technology changes. Because, you know, with all the changes in AI and everything that I talk about, you know, I may need to take my channel a different direction, and you could too.

Considering Content Volume

So I would be cautious, like I just mentioned, a gardening niche. So I would be cautious about just creating a gardening niche that was solely about growing dahlias, for example. You know, keep it more general so you're able to do more things. And remember, niche monetization is important. So let's get to that.

So you've got this laundry list of niches. Maybe you've narrowed it down to two. There's two niches that you think that you'd like to do videos on, and you think that you could do a lot of videos. Right? So when I say, you know, when I say doing videos, I mean, could you do two or three or four hundred videos on this topic, not just ten or twenty.

So that's important to think about. You're going to have to keep making content, you know, at least a video every week, and you wanna make sure you don't run out of topic ideas.

Monetization Strategies

So you've got your list. You know that those two niches or that niche that you picked, you can, actually do quite a few videos about. And the best way to do that is to look at your competition.

So go out, look at YouTube, do some searches to see who else is doing videos on this topic, then look in their description and see what kind of links they have. Many times, they'll have links out to affiliate programs.

Affiliate Marketing

I'm going to just keep harping on the garden niche because I'm sitting with a bunch of plants around me. You know, when I look around here right now, I see a potting table that I built for my wife from a kit. You know, that's something where you could have an affiliate link to that and talk about this potting table. Right? So product related items that have something to do with your niche.

And here's the thing. When you do a YouTube channel, and you wanna turn it into a side hustle, you need to make sure that, when you think about monetization, you know, can you, spend a little money to make a little money?

Investing in Your Niche

And here's what I mean. So for example, in my niche where I talk about software products, I have some different software subscriptions that I have. And I have those because I'm an affiliate for those software products, yet I still have to show people how they work. Well, I can't show you if I don't have a subscription.

That's what I mean. If you're a gardener, if you're a fly fisherman, if you're a photographer, you know, are you going to be able to show enough products and you know do enough reviews of different items that you know, you can afford to do that.

Niche-Specific Considerations

So let's talk about the what niche like photography. And this is why you need to be careful with your niche selection is I would never do a photography niche because you have to have a ton of camera equipment in this niche because you're going to be doing product reviews. Right?

You're going to be showing people cameras and lenses and filters and all these things. And until you get bigger, nobody's going to be sending you these products to review.

So you have to make sure that whatever it is you're getting into, you know, you're going to be able to afford to to do that because you will have to spend a little money to make a little money. And that's just the way it works. Right? Nobody can do a product review or you can't do a good product review that people believe in if you're not physically showing them the product at the same time.

Now if you're into cooking and you do, like a cooking channel, that's going to be a little bit easier. Right? You may talk about some of the different utensils and and mixers and things that you use, but that may might be a little cheaper way way to get in.

So you've got when you think about your niche and you're picking that niche, just make sure that you're not putting yourself in this position where you're going to run out of monetization capability.

Sponsorships

Now other ways that channels monetize are through sponsorships. So I didn't I so I still haven't had anybody ask me to be a sponsor for the channel. So occasionally, you'll watch, somebody on YouTube and they'll say, hey, hey. Have you heard about Squarespace? It's a great place to make a website, etcetera, etcetera. Well, of course, they're a they're a sponsor for Squarespace, the the website builder.

Well, to get that kind of sponsorship, you really have to have a lot of viewers, and you have to be a really big channel. And that takes a while for that to happen. Now I only have forty five hundred subscribers, so I do have people offer me different software products for free to review. But I typically only will, review things for a niche if it's something that I that I use myself. And so oh, thanks a fly. Anyway, that's what happens when you're outside.

Embracing Competition

So let me make sure I'm not missing anything here. I talked about looking at your competition. You want to make sure that there's other competition out there. Don't look at competition as something that's bad. Look at it as something that's good because if there's other people making content about the niche that you're interested in pursuing, that means there's money there.

People normally don't do YouTube channels and not think about monetization. Right? So look at those channels, see how they're monetizing. I talked about you're going to have to spend a little money to make a little money with your niche.

Video Production Considerations

Oh, here's the thing I don't want to forget. I'm glad I looked down at my notes. You have to think about your niche from the standpoint of doing your videos right. How hard is it going to be for you to shoot your videos? So this is an easy video to do and, you know, just the talking head video where you're seated and you're talking, that's easy to do.

But let me go back to something like fly fishing or gardening. Right? You'd have to plan out your shots before you do a video. Cause if you're in the garden, you're going to have to position a camera around. Or if you're out fly fishing or mountain biking or whatever your niche is, if it involves a lot of different camera angles and a lot of different shooting angles and shooting on location.

That's going to be time consuming. Right? So you want to take that into consideration where when you're picking your niche. How hard is it going to be to create a video on all the various topics that you wanna talk about? Some will be easy, some won't.

Now I like the software arena that I'm in because I'm sitting in my little home office with my laptop and, you know, I'm do I have a screen recorder going. I'm recording my screen so people can see, see the software that I'm giving a tutorial about. That's pretty simple. But if I was out here and I had to shoot something out in the yard, then you run into lighting issues. Like, why am I talking to you at 06:30 in the morning when I could be sleeping?

It's because if I wait until 09:00, my background is so bright that the lighting is difficult. So then I'd have to bring out external lights and do a bunch of stuff. And this is the deal. Right? You wanna try to keep it simple in the beginning. So, don't get into a niche where the it's just going to take a ton of work to shoot one video or you're going to run out of gas really fast.

Leveraging Your Life Experience

So again, make a laundry list. Think about your your, strengths. Think about your profession that you've been in for most of your life. Because for people that are fifty and older, your strength, your superpower is going to be the fact that you have a lot of experience in a lot of different areas.

Twenty something year old people don't have that. You have that. So really use that to your advantage. Make that laundry list of niches. Look at your competition, see how they're monetizing, and then from there, you can decide what it is you wanna do your videos about.

Conclusion and Next Steps

And what I'm going to do, in the next video is I'm going to talk a little bit about channel naming. I'm going to have a whole series of videos on on various topics that will be important for you to think about as you build out your channel. But for today, you know, my assignment for you is to sit down, make that list of niches, look at your competition, look at how you would monetize, Think about how you would shoot your videos.

Make sure that you could do two or three hundred videos on this topic or even more. Don't go too narrow, but don't don't go too broad either. Right? So, you know, if you're going to talk about healthy living, you've got to narrow it down a little bit more. So maybe healthy living for seniors, healthy living for over, you know, over fifty. Pick a demographic, something like that.

Right? So, that's it. I know I've rambled a little bit. I've been all over the place, but there's a lot to talk about. Like I said, YouTube is this loose ecosystem, and there's a lot of different things that come into play. And so, you know, the niche is the most important place to start because you've got to have something to do videos about, a topic for your channel.

And once you've got that, we're off to the races. So I hope you found this helpful. And again, look forward to some more videos here in the near future about how to approach YouTube at over fifty. And thanks for watching. Take care.