“There are riches in the niches” is something I no longer believe in. Here’s how building a personal brand with multiple interests is actually helping me grow my business.

This week on Threads, my mind went on a roll with all kinds of  thoughts and opinions.

My thumbs also acted  accordingly.

On the platform I opined on how to take risks in your business.

I called on Anthropic’s Chief Research Officer to explain exactly how he sees humanity being extinguished by AI…

 I wrote about aligning your to-do list with your quarterly plan, outlined plans for an upcoming Content Residency…

 And showed I off a new outfit of the day.

That was all by  Wednesday.

The old me would have thought: “Judette, stop. You’ll never build an audience writing about everything from AI to offers, small business, content systems and whatever else has your attention that day.”

That rationale had become ingrained.

I started my online business when the phrase “riches in the niches” was everywhere.

The advice was simple.

Pick a lane. Stay in it.

Write incessantly about that one topic.

Build authority.

Tap into a highly targeted customer base.

Charge premium prices for your specialised products and services.

Make money.

There was nothing inherently wrong with that.

Niche = riches.

Except there was a problem. I wasn’t a human being with one interest.

I had multiple passions, and in several of them I had built a body of expertise, years of practice and experiences I couldn’t wait to share.

Choosing one over the others felt like tossing several perfectly good babies out with the bathwater.

And I couldn’t do it.

But for a long time I wondered whether refusing to choose would cost me.

Would I struggle to find my people because they couldn’t immediately put me into a box?

Would an algorithm know what to do with someone who wrote about AI on Monday, business planning on Tuesday and clothes on Wednesday?

And, maybe the biggest question of all for someone running a business:

Could I actually make money without turning one interest into my entire identity?

The Single Story The Algorithm Rewards

Long before I worked in the digital world, I founded and ran a seven-figure communications agency.

I was the woman who could write the speech and handle the crisis.

I was known for creating award-winning campaigns and helping execute large-scale events.

I sat in the C-suite talking strategy, then worked with administrative teams to make sure that strategy actually got executed.

I’m grateful there was no algorithm hovering over my career back then.

I was allowed to pursue several different interests, get very good at a few of them, and then move on to learn some more.

I positioned myself so I could put all of those skills to work.

No one ever told me I needed to pick a lane.

So I didn’t. I probably wouldn’t have listened anyway.

And all of those experiences made me who I am today.

To insist that I choose only one would have flattened my curiosity.

It would have meant overlooking so much of the experience, learning and expertise that eventually became useful somewhere else.

I would have made one story my only story, so to speak.

The algorithm, however, wanted something different from me.

It wanted a story it could understand quickly, package and surface to people it thought wanted more of the same.

It was built to recognise patterns — what I talked about, who engaged, what they lingered on and what they ignored.

And so I learned to produce recognisable patterns too. To make my content, my work and eventually the business easier for those systems to classify.

And I get it.

In fact, I was so persuaded by the phrase “riches in the niches” when I moved online that, for the first time, I followed its lead.

Do You Really Have To Niche Down?

To be fair, the advice wasn’t bad.

Okay, it was solid.

I mean, there were obvious benefits to discarding my lifestyle category, my crisis PR background, my AI building skills and deep expertise in building ecosystems  and focusing on one thing.

Niching down gave a small business clarity.

So in the early days, I made it all about marketing.

And yes, if you knew exactly who you were speaking to, it became way easier to understand what they needed, create products for them and write marketing that made them think, yes, this is for me.

Niching had another advantage.

Since my world was limited it was easier to understand.

I’m sure you may have seen this too.

You could become known as the person who solves one particular problem, you build authority around it and differentiate yourself from the hundreds of other businesses competing for the same customer.

And commercially, it’s  a powerful formula.

A clearly defined audience makes it easier to sharpen your offers, price your expertise and spend your marketing dollars reaching people who are much more likely to buy.

So yes, there are riches in the niches.

I experienced some of those benefits myself.

Growth.

An audience of more than 30,000 on my main platform, Facebook.

Products that sold.

But I didn’t want to talk about marketing 24/7.

And after a while, I hated showing up online sharing knowledge around one single story/ topic.

As a business owner, it felt good to be cash rich, Creatively, I felt poorer for the choices I had made.

That was the tension.

I wanted to show up as a copywriter, a systems thinker, a storyteller, an automation + AI builder, an IRL host, a planner, a fashionista, an amateur interior designer, someone who can host a mean supper club.

I also didn’t want to throw away the clarity, authority and commercial benefits that came from being known for something.

Over time, I knew where my heart stood.

I didn’t want my business to require me to amputate every other part of myself just to stay understandable.

So my work became figuring out how to hold both.

And after years of getting a little lost, watching my metrics decline and trying to understand what a non-singular voice would mean, I began to find a way to balance my own rhythm with the algorithm’s version of what success online should look like.

How To Be Many Things At Once And Still Find Cohesion

One of the first things I did when I began thinking about how to build a personal brand with multiple interests was to find the thread running through all of mine.

My thinking focused  on how I could be known not simply as the woman without a niche, but as a successful entrepreneur with several passions,

I want to pause here because I’m about to tell you about my personal journey, but I think the same work-through, with a few tweaks, can apply to you too…

…especially if you have diverse interests and absolutely refuse to pick a lane.

My first step was figuring out what my actual business pillars were.

Notice I did not begin by asking who I served, what my brand voice was or what my content pillars should be.

I knew those things already.

I’m decades into this rodeo.

What I needed was to see whether there was enough common ground for all the different parts of my business to stand on.

I came up with four areas.

1. My planning ecosystem

This included my digital planning product and three live planning experiences each year.

2. My AI and agentic work

This included Amy, my digital offer AI coach, as well as my work with founders with 2–5 employees, helping them build integrated AI systems that gave them back the capacity to spend more time on revenue-generating work.

3. My Residencies and Supper Clubs

These were the in-person experiences I was beginning to host for founders at my home, which I had turned into a tiny community space called The Commons.