Why Find a Niche

The logic of niching down your business or content does make sense. When you are starting out, you need to get traction. You need an audience. In an ocean of information, you will never be found by your audience or customers, if you are too generic. Finding a niche, means that you target a specific set of people with a specific problem or an specific audience who are looking for specific information. The key word is ‘specific’.

For instance, if your industry is weight loss, your competition will be too great. You will not be noticed. However, if you target 50-year-old males, who want to lose ten pounds, without going to the gym, this will narrow down your target audience. The key part of this is that those people who fit these criteria, will more easily find you.

Niching down is therefore sound advice and here are some of the ways I’ve discovered, to think about my potential niche.

Your niche should be a blend of:

• What you are passionate about?
• What will be financially viable?
• Where do your skills lie?

Your Passion as a Niche

What is your passion and what are you interested in? The premise here is that, as with any new business, it takes a lot of time and energy to get it off the ground. There will be times when nothing seems to happen and you want to give up. It is at these moments that your passion will carry you through because you will feel like you are just doing it because you love it, not for the results.

Money

Counter to the passion argument is, what will be the most commercially viable niche? Follow the money.

I would say that focussing on just the money will result in you becoming disillusioned. You are more likely to follow through if you are enthusiastic about what you are doing. Yes, sure, the venture needs to be financially viable, or it is just a hobby. The focus on just money shouldn’t however be to the detriment of what you are passionate about. That said, there is wisdom in saying don’t just follow your passion. Your venture should be something that has a balance of something you are at least interested in and is commercially viable.

Skills

What if you can’t find something you are passionate about, or what if what you are passionate about, isn’t commercially viable? In that case you should consider what your skills are. What are you good at? Any business relies on providing value to the customer or they will not pay for your services. In the realm of content creation, the consumer needs to receive value, either as entertainment or useful information. You don’t need to be the best, or the most expert in your field, but you should be confident in your abilities and knowledge to provide value to your customers or audience.
Usually, your passion in the subject will grow as you become more skilled and knowledgeable.

Can’t find a niche?

What if you just can’t find a niche? Then invent your own niche. Be unique and it will resonate with someone.

Be authentic

Most of all be authentic. This means being real and true to who you are as a person. Fakery comes across. We can all tell when someone is trying to be someone they are not. In the same way, you will not resonate with your audience if you are not being you.

A word about AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been around for longer than you think. Think about predictive text on your mobile phones. Content creation by AI is in its infancy and I believe you can tell. This will change in the future, but people want to deal with people they know, like and trust. I don’t believe this will ever change. Humans can intuitively tell when something is authentic or not. It does come with experience but we all have this faculty.
I would resist using AI to create content, firstly because I like writing. Why would I outsource something I love to do, to someone or something else.? Secondly, though, I also believe my audience would be able to tell.

People are crying out for authenticity

In an age were content is, sadly, mass produced by AI, people are craving authenticity. Our politicians bend with the wind, to get your vote. I just wish some of them would stay true to their principles, even if I disagree with them. At least they would get my respect.

Just start now – see where you get to

If you are struggling with finding a niche, I would say the best advice I can give you is start anyway. Start finding your own voice. The worst thing you can do is wait to find the perfect niche. Your niche will develop as you develop. People will be attracted to your authentic message.
Then if you are consistent and persistent, you will look back and discover you have created your own unique niche.

If you are an aspiring blogger, then you might be interested in my post on how to write a weekly blog post. In this post I show you my weekly routine to get regular posts out, on time.

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If you have followed the steps in this book, you have learned how to trade in your passion. In the previous chapter, we discussed about having your own online presence, telling the world about your passion. Could you actually provide a service to other people, to help them in whatever your passion is? I’ve read tons of biographies of successful business people and they all have one thing in common, they learned how to provide a service. This means they learned how to become valuable to people in some way.

How to Provide a Service

Think about what your passion is. What do you enjoy doing the most? If you won the lottery tomorrow what would you spend your time doing? What are you good at? What do other people tell you that you are good at? Still stuck? What do people come to you to help them with? Fixing computer glitches? Putting flat-pack furniture together?
Could you Coach someone in your passion. E.g. Do you love gardening? You could have a little side-line buying and selling in garden utensils, then, have a website up and running giving tips for gardeners. Then you could provide a service to people, mowing their lawn or weeding their garden???
Or, are you passionate about personal development? Then you could buy and sell self-help books. Your website could show people how to get what they want in life. Then, you could become a life coach?

2 minute marketing tips

How do you go about telling the world about your business. Here are three ways that can get you up and running.

Your Website: You should already have your site up and running and remember I said to put a method of visitors to contact you, well why not tell them you offer a service doing xyz?
Word of mouth marketing: It should go without saying that because this is your passion, you will give exceptional service. Because of this, your customers will become your fanatics. They will sell your services for you.
Social media: Tell the world what you are up to and people will come.
Once you have paying customers, you could use some of your profits to buy pay-per-click ads on Google or Social Media. Check out Bluehost for more on setting up your website.

Advertising

The list of methods for advertising your services is massive but here are a few cheap ones. (Remember though, you pay for what you get.

Ads in local shop. I had a quick look in my local Newsagent yesterday and you can put up a small notice in the shop window for £3.50 a month. Just think how many people might notice it?
Leaflet drop – print off your own or maybe pay on online printer. One tip I learned is to do three leaflet drops, one per month. Statistically people only take notice of leaflets the third time they see it.
Ads in local newspaper – for a few quid, this old style marketing method still works wonders.

There are only so many hours in the day and there is only so much service you can give, so why not turn your service into a proper business? That’s the next step: Scaling Up Your Business.

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Scale Up Your Business

There are only so many hours in the day, so if you really want to become financially independent, there will come a time when you need to scale up your business. You, as one person, can only give so much service, so scaling up really means providing more service.
So how can you scale up your business? Well that depends on what your service or product is. Could you provide more valuable service? For instance if you have a gardening service, could you incorporate landscaping as well? If you are selling a product, could you sell related products or higher end products, to your existing customers? This is called cross-selling and up-selling.
Next, could you scale up your business by hiring someone to do what you do? Lets go back to the gardening example. You alone can only mow one lawn at a time, however, you could hire someone do the same as you. You would charge the customer a percentage more than you pay your assistant, so that the difference is business profits. Then why stop at one, you could hire a team of gardeners.

Other People’s Time

You are now leveraging other people’s time. As you scale up your business, it becomes more complex, with more admin tasks. Would it not then make sense to divide up the different tasks? You could have someone finding new customers (Sales and Marketing), people actually doing the gardening (Service Providers), someone looking after collecting fees and paying bills (Accounts)? There is an excellent book by Michael Gerber called the The E-Myth Revisited, in which he talks about dividing your business tasks up like this, before you actually hire people. In this way you have a system, in place, which will allow you to scale up your business, seamlessly.
No discussion on how to scale up your business would be complete without talking about software and the internet. Think about any task that can be performed and the internet can help. Need help finding business leads? Then there is Google Adwords or Third Party Sales Teams. What about someone to look after payroll? There’s even cloud based payroll companies. You could in theory outsource everything, but then remember this is your passion, so you might want to keep something for you to do.
If all this sounds like you need an MBA from the London School of Economics, there is another way to scale up your business. It’s not for everyone, but hear me out:

Multi-Level Marketing (MLM)

Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) or Network Marketing is a terrific way to gain financial independence.

What MLM isn’t

MLM is not Pyramid selling or a Ponzi scheme, these are illegal and rightly so. It is also not passive income or residual income, although one day it might turn into it. There is nothing passive about this business, when you start. Like any business it takes hard work, focus and stick-ability to succeed.

What MLM is

Yes, like any business, there is hard work involved but the beauty is that if you find a reputable company, they should provide support and training for you. The start-up costs can be very low or even zero.
MLM is direct selling, this means you are marketing or retailing products directly to people cutting out the many links in the supply chain. The way in which the system works is that you retail products and then recruit other people into your team. These people then do the same so that you build up a large network of people. The way you make money is firstly from the profits from your sales. You don’t need to hold stock as, when your customer buys from you at retail cost, you buy the product from the company at wholesale cost; You keep the difference as profit. The really exciting part is the Bonus system. You not only gain from the profits from your sales but also from the sales of everyone in your team through bonuses. Because the amount of people you can have in your team is open-ended, the amount of bonus you can earn is also open-ended.

Some Considerations about MLM

If you are interested in starting a Network Marketing business, the first step is to find a product that you love, from a reputable company.
Do your homework as there any many scammers out there, who give the industry a bad name.
Use the products yourself and believe in them. The company should sell products you already use, this way you are not adding another monthly expense. Remember control your expenses?
As you start to become a Fanatic about the products, you will be naturally telling people. This is how you retail the products, you simply tell people about them. Don’t think of this as selling but sharing. It’s exactly the same as if you tell someone about a great new restaurant you have been to, but you get paid for doing so.

Recruiting

Recruiting is where you start to scale up your business. As you start to build a small base of customers, these become Satisfied Retail Customers. These are the best people to recruit into your team. Simple ask them if they would like to buy the products at wholesale price and even earn money selling them to people they know.
Then as you start to become successful and earning more money, you friends and family will take note – ask them if they want to take a look. What about colleagues at work? Social Media is a great modern tool for connecting networks of people together – tell the world about your business. Then as you get really confident you will not be able to help yourself from telling people when you are out and about.

Coaching

The thing I love about Network Marketing is that anyone can do it. You don’t need any skills to join and there are no interviews or exams. However you will need to develop the skills you need. But you are never alone, the company will coach and train you. There are one to ones and also group trainings. You in turn will then coach your down-lines (people who you recruit) in the very skills you have learned. This is why it is such a democratic business model; it is totally meritocratic and open to anyone. Use your company – they will offer training courses at very low costs or free. (e.g. £20 for a day seminar). One final warning, though, they are not get rich quick schemes, they take hard work and dedication, but the rewards are there.

If you would like further information on the MLM company I am involved in then please contact me.

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