Finding Your Niche

When you are just starting out, you have limited capacity to build your expertise, while also focusing on getting experience. For this reason, it is often suggested that you decide on a particular niche area on which to focus your attention.

It is better to give 100% of your focus to just one niche than to give 20% of your focus to one of five areas of expertise. In the latter scenario, you’ll find that you’re spreading yourself too thin.

When thinking about honing your expertise and choosing either a specialism or a niche, you might consider all or some of these things:

• Choosing a particular specialty within your chosen field – for example, Chinese acupuncture, sports massage, trauma counselling, kundalini yoga, weight loss nutrition etc.
• Choosing a particular type of person that you will work with based on demographics (age, gender, occupation, income, location) or values – for example, you might work with pregnant women, young women, low income families, lawyers, etc.
• Choosing a particular problem that your client is consistently experiencing – for example, people with migraines, people with childhood trauma, people going through divorce, people who are recovering from a particular illness, etc.
• Choose a particular aspiration that your client desires – for example, people who want to increase their energy and focus, people who want to lose weight, people who are looking for love, etc.

With the above in mind, your niche might focus on one specialism within a broader area of expertise, on one type of person, with one problem, and/or one aspiration. It means that you can really hone your messaging (which we’ll get to when we explore the science of building an expert business) and resonate with this particular niche. If we try to speak to everybody, we tend to run the risk of blending in, rather than standing out.

Here are some examples that consider specialism, person, problem and aspiration:

• Example 1: Providing a performance psychology service to young athletes who are struggling to win, to understand cognitive discipline and focus so that they can succeed at the top level.
• Example 2: Providing a nutrition service to women who are trying to conceive and are struggling with infertility, to understand hormonal health and take natural steps to get pregnant.

In both examples you can see how the area of expertise is specific, the target client is specific, the problem this client is struggling with is specific, and their goal or aspiration is specific.

Thinking about who you’d like to work with and what kind of challenges they face is the key to making this career-journey real in your mind.

It is helpful, when deciding on a niche, to begin asking yourself some critical questions that might inspire you further. Here’s a list to get you started:

1. If you could spend all day, every day helping people, what would that look like and what would you be doing?
2. If you were guaranteed to make money and be successful in your business, no matter which ideal client you chose, who would you work with?
3. In what ways have you been your ideal client, and when (for example, when have you struggled with something and thought having an expert would have helped you)?
4. If you were to be known for helping people to learn, overcome or experience one thing, what would it be and why?
5. What do you want people to be able to say or experience because of the work you do?
6. Spend some time thinking about the specifics of your ideal client:

• What does your ideal client value in their life?
• Does your ideal client work, are they self-employed, or a business owner?
• What is their favourite thing to do in their free time?
• Describe their personality and core values.
• What keeps them up at night worrying?
• What is their biggest dream/goal for their life?
• What are their biggest challenges?
• Where are they lacking in clarity or confidence?
• What fear or frustration does your ideal client want to eliminate?
• What would your ideal client expect from you?
• What makes your ideal client get out his/her credit card and buy?