This is what my coach used to say to me in the early days of building my coaching practice…

“Your niche will find you.”

When you don’t know what your niche is, that can be quite frustrating but in truth, my niche did find me.

When I started in business, my intention was to build my coaching practice around personal development and leadership but I wasn’t going to go around “begging” people to let me coach them as I’d seen so many of my coaching cohorts do … I wanted to follow the principles of attracting clients that both David Frey and Robert Middleton had taught me but then I kept hearing coaches and professional speakers saying “you don’t make money from your website anyway.”  So in a way, I set out to prove them wrong which, I did.

In the meantime however, I had to embrace technology and marketing principles I’d never heard of before … “autoresponders,” “blogs,” ”education marketing” to name a few and the more I got into this Internet Marketing thing, the more I loved it and being the natural coach that I am, it wasn’t long before I started coaching others who wanted an Internet business.

That journey was a tough one though because some of these people had an idea of what they wanted to market online but didn’t have a clue about basic business or marketing principles and some had read the grandiose stories of online marketer’s making millions whilst working in their “boxers” and after a month of coaching, they wanted to know why they’d not become millionaires yet.  Sad but true.

I still work with people who want to get started on the Internet, but they are entrepreneurs or small business owners who are either new to online marketing or, they want to increase their online presence.

Now, had I listened to the so called wisdom at the time of some online marketer’s, I would never have competed in this niche because many of the gurus discouraged competition within the Internet Marketing space and many would even tell you that it isn’t a niche … it’s too big to be a niche.  It’s not that they were protecting their own businesses (at least this wasn’t how I read it), but it was more a protection thing and of course, the smaller the niche, usually there is less competition and therefore in theory, easier to make money.

Anyway, I took the view one day that if people are asking for my advice and acting on it, there are others who will pay me money to share what I know with them and so, I threw logic to one side and followed my heart!

Why am I telling you this and what’s it got to do with you?

I don’t believe in shying away from an oversaturated market.  If you’re being constantly called upon to help others in a particular area  (which is what happened to me), there is a market out there ready to be served… by you!

There may be better, richer, more respected players within your niche, but I believe we all have a purpose and if it’s your purpose to serve a paricular group of people, then even the best out there won’t do it as well as you, despite all their experience!

I will argue with anyone that if you have passion for something and the willingness to learn, you can compete with anyone on practically any subject and win … the importance is to live on purpose which means, not going after a niche just because there is lots of money in it, but going after a niche or target market because you want to serve the people in it and you have something to offer.  This is how my niche found me … as my passion and desire to help people make the most of building their business online, it showed up in my conversations, my writings and in how other people presented me and this passion and desire to help is still serving me well today.

So, if you’re still unclear about which niche you should be serving, your first question has to be in my humble opinion, “what am I passionate about?”  It is more involved than this, but if you’re passionate about solving a problem that other people are experiencing and, they are willing and able to pay to help them solve their problem, you have a market and therefore, you have a business.

I recently heard a Church leader say that you can easily tell whether someone is a leader or not by how many others are following them.  If you call yourself a leader but have no followers, something is seriously wrong and the same is true for targeting a specific market … if enough people are asking you to help them solve their problems and, they are happy to act on the advice you give them, you may well already have a niche and perhaps not realise it.

Your next step in the process would be to test that theory by using some online tools which, I’ll discuss in more depth in an upcoming blog post.

Until next time,

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