When I spotted a man walking his cat on a leash during my Friday afternoon bike ride, I did a double take.
The cat had a harness on, was trotting along reasonably cooperatively, and the whole scene looked both completely absurd and oddly sensible at the same time. I actually admire it. The bloke clearly cares about local wildlife, and he has found a way to give his cat some outdoor experience without letting it roam and hunt unsupervised.
But my mind being what it is, within about thirty seconds I had turned a man walking his cat into a lesson about online business. Bear with me.
Cat leash training is a real thing. There are people actively searching for how to teach a cat to walk on a leash, how to get a cat comfortable in a harness, and whether certain breeds take to it more easily than others. So from a pure niche research perspective, this is a genuine audience with a genuine question.
But is it big enough to build a business around?
That is the question worth asking before you invest months of effort into any niche.
Cat leash training sits inside a much larger niche, which is cats generally. And the cat niche is enormous and fiercely competitive. Big brands, big budgets, and established sites with years of authority have already carved it up. If you tried to compete on broad cat topics, you would struggle to be noticed.
So the instinct is to go narrower. Find the sub-niche. Cat leash training. Or even narrower: leash training for indoor cats, or harness training for anxious cats.
The problem is that going narrower does not automatically mean going better. If the audience at that level of specificity is small, you end up with a technically well-defined niche that simply cannot generate meaningful income. You have optimised yourself into a corner.
This is exactly why I think the old “niche down as far as possible” advice has an expiry date on it.
There is a story worth knowing here. One of the early internet marketers who later became well known built his first product around a very specific idea. He wrote an ebook called “Teach your parrot to talk”. At the time, almost nobody had said that exact thing in that exact way. It worked because he was first. The search landscape was empty and he filled it.
If you tried to do the equivalent today, you would find yourself one of thousands of people who have already said the same thing. The window for that kind of first-mover advantage on narrow topics has mostly closed.
So what should you do instead?
Define yourself rather than defining your niche.
This is the shift I think matters most for anyone building an online income, and it is particularly relevant for people over 50 who have a lifetime of varied experience to draw on. When you define yourself as a person with a specific perspective, a specific audience, and a specific set of values, you are not locked into a single topic. You can speak to that audience across multiple topics.
Here is the contrast that makes this concrete. Instead of becoming the email marketing expert, you become the marketing mentor for small business owners in your town who are trying to get more customers without spending a fortune on advertising. Instead of becoming the cat care blogger, you become the resource for older cat owners who want practical, low-fuss advice that fits their lifestyle.
That framing opens doors rather than closing them. You can cover cat leash training, indoor enrichment, vet visits, nutrition, and a dozen other topics, all through the same lens, to the same audience, building the same trust over time.
And here is why this matters practically: when you define yourself rather than just your niche, you do not need to stack 65 bonus items onto every product you create to justify its value. The trust you have built does that work for you.
Cat leash training is a genuinely interesting topic. If you have real experience with it and a specific audience in mind, it could be a useful piece of content within a broader body of work. But as a business in itself? You would want to be very sure the numbers support the effort before you go all in.
The broader lesson is this: before you pick a niche, ask whether you are picking a topic or picking an identity. One of those scales. The other one usually does not.
If you want to think more carefully about how to find and evaluate niches that actually work for building sustainable online income, there is more to explore over at my site.
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