On Choosing Digital Painting As The Topic For CGPainting.com

It has been quite a while - more than couple of months - since I started the digital art community - CGPainting.com. Establishing an online community is something I have been dabbling with for quite a while. I have had failures earlier on starting a roleplaying community. I learned quite a bit from those mutliple attempts and as of now, CGPainting.com is doing far better than the earlier attempts.

And talking about creating and maintaining online communities, I have been following Martin's blog, Community Spark, where he just wrote about choosing a niche for starting an online community. He gives a two step process to choose a niche before starting a online community.

1. Identify a niche
2. Investigate the competition

Identifying the niche was easy. I am quite fascinated with "Art". When I did a step two - I knew it would turn out to be a futile effort like my earlier debacle - "Freeform roleplaying". There was too much competition and heavy weights on the subject of "Art". I drilled down more, and moved to digital art, and then to digital painting.

So, I indentified "digital painting" as my niche. Okay for Step One. What about Step Two?

• Search result for "digital painting" on Google.com
• Search result for "digital painting" on Yahoo.com

Oh yes. When I did the search both provided over 1 million results - but I need to worry only about the top results. And I noticed that most were for definitions in Wikipedia - and still there was some competition.

I had a choice. Either I drill down more or I stick with this and launch the community. It would be possible to drill down even further from "digital painting". There are various styles - flat coloring, cell styled shading, realistic shading, and those tied together with outline styles - to name a few. But that would turn the niche into a micro niche. And I am not sure it would attract enough to actually keep the community active. So, I stuck with "digital painting" in spite of some heavy competition.

It now all depends on members - if they choose to focus on a micro niche, they can do so. If they choose to expand to related niches of digital art, they can do so, becuase I have a "CG" in the domain name.