Defining your Content Niche

So you’ve decided to write a travel guide, but how do you compete in the marketplace alongside established brands like Lonely Planet, Rough Guides, and Moon Travel Guides without a clearly defined content niche?

When it comes to setting your travel guide apart from trade publications you need to define a content niche to reach your target audience, and the key to achieving this is to get to grips with the difference between your theme and your angle. Your theme is broad, and your angle is narrow.

Your Theme and Angle

A theme and an angle work together to make your book stand out from generalist guidebooks and are a way of narrowing down a broad topic idea to a targeted niche. Themes and angles also let your readers know about the book’s benefits and act as the hook to encourage them to buy it.

If you don’t have a clear idea of your theme and angle, you’ll have trouble defining your descriptive statement and targeting your readers.

Things to consider:

• What aspects of your travel topic are most interesting to you?
• What unique elements can you bring to your book’s topic?
• Do you have a specific area of expertise or knowledge?
• How can you approach your topic differently than other books in the marketplace?
• How can you make your book unique?
• What value can you bring your readers?
• What benefits does your book offer your readers?

You need to ensure your travel guide has something that other books don’t or you have to bring a different angle to the topic so that it can stand against the competition.

How to Define your Theme

A theme is a way of approaching your content and adding guardrails around it so that you can make decisions about what’s in and out of the scope of your travel guide. It will help to solidify your thoughts around your content niche and to decide what type of book you want to write.

Here’s a simple example of how you transform a generic guidebook about a destination into a guidebook with a strong central theme.

Rather than writing a general guidebook about Thailand (it’s been done to death), how about:

30 days of Island Hopping in Thailand

This has narrowed down a destination to a specific period (30 days) and particular locations (islands).
Although this theme helps to define the content scope of your travel guide, it’s still unclear what type of reader it will appeal to, and there’s a danger this book would just get lost within the slew of other generalist guidebooks about Thailand, and that’s where your angle comes into play.

How to Define your Angle

When you define an angle, it narrows down your target audience and lets them know about your book’s benefits.

In A Writer’s Guide to Nonfiction, Elizabeth Lyon describes authors as anglers (aka fishermen/fisherwomen).

Readers are the fish you want to hook, and your book’s angle is your bait. 

Like any good angler, you need to make sure your bait is visible so that your fish can find it.

Here examples of a couple of possible travel guide angles:

30 days of Island Hopping in Thailand: On a Budget

30 days of Island Hopping in Thailand: A Cultural Journey

On a Budget: lets your audience know the types of accommodation, restaurants, travel alternatives you’ll be including. If they are looking for a luxury island hop, your book isn’t for them. This angle helps you define what to include and what to leave out of your travel guide by applying a cost filter to the content you include.

A Cultural Journey: lets your audience know that the focus of your book will be on the culture of the islands, but as this is a pretty broad topic, you should get more specific. You could cover the evolution of culture for a particular point in history to modern day, or temple culture, or family life, or opportunities for travelers to interact with locals.

Both of these proposed angles provide an opportunity to create the parameters for your travel guide. It’s evident to the reader what your content is about, and it will be easier for you to determine what to include and what to leave out.

Narrowing the focus of your guide will help you to stand out in the marketplace and differentiate your travel guide from the generalist trade publications.

Read more articles in my How to Write a Travel Guide Series

I’m putting the finishing touches on my How to Write and Self-Publish a Travel Guide Series, which details a step by step approach for writing and producing your own travel guide. It’s part of a four-part series aimed at helping travel bloggers achieve passive income based on their passions and existing content.

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