- Branding OS
- Posts
- The Creator's "Hero" Journey
Creators on social media often start with niche content but inevitably begin philosophizing.
They go broad.
Take Grant Cardone, for example. His initial content mix was exclusively focused on real estate:
How to form deals
How to find investors
How to fund real estate property loans
As he grew his audience, he began weaving in more general topics:
Self-responsibility
Politics
Motivation
If you’re like me, you’ve seen this happen with MANY other creators:
Gary Vee
Alex Hormozi
Luke Belmar
So… why does this happen?
As it turns out, this principle comes from effective news writing.
Classic news writing and modern social media share one thing in common: hooks (or “headlines”).
The newspaper and the social media timeline are strikingly similar when you think about it:
Crowded
Busy
Vying for your attention
In social media, we call the opening line the hook; in news writing, it’s called the headline.
But here’s the difference: once you’ve earned the follow, your content will be pushed to that audience every time you post.
So, what does this have to do with niche experts becoming gurus online?
It all comes back to the concept of owned audience.
Quality news headlines have to win attention repeatedly. In social media, the game is slightly different. Once you’ve earned the follow or subscription, your audience is yours to engage with directly.
The fastest way to win those initial followers is by sharing your best, most practical insights — which are typically specific to your niche.
Niche mastery is how you build an engaged, strong foundational audience.
Think of Jeff Bezos and Amazon. They started by selling books (and doing it really, really well). Once they proved the model, they expanded into other product categories.
The same principle applies to social media content. Niche mastery is one of the fastest ways to establish your voice and own your audience.
By starting with niche content, you gain high-quality attention within a smaller subset of the larger online world. Once you’ve gained traction, the next step in the hero’s journey is to reach more people.
Reaching more people usually means going broad.
So, what’s the takeaway for creators or founders publishing content?
👉 Master your niche (tactical and strategic) before expanding into broader content (ideas and mental models).
By mastering your niche or industry and becoming “locally” established, you create the foundation needed to reach a larger audience.
Just make sure you don’t go too broad or cringey with your “broad” content. Always loop it back to relevance for your original foundational audience.
A good rule of thumb is to start with 100% niche content. Gradually introduce 10–20% broad, top-of-funnel content, scaling from there. But never go all the way to 100% broad unless you’re comfortable risking your original audience’s attention.
Best,
Brett Erik
P.S. Every week I send an email to premium subscribers with templates, tips, and tricks on how to grow, scale, and monetize their social media accounts.
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P.P.S. For further reading on the topic of “niche” in content creation, here’s a great article I came across last week:
