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My niche is the thin slice of a market, where I promote and sell my products; or as affiliate, the link to a product somebody else wants to sell and I charge a commission for it.
How many times have I heard that word in the past couple of years? Gosh, yeah – a lot.
Generally I see two extremes to approach a niche:
> On one side a focus on a passion and on the other, a focus on money < But first lets answer: What is a niche?
How Niche is Defined
Wiki says a niche market is “the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing. So the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs…” Seems a pretty solid definition.
Spending a considerable time with research and doing some tests, I knew: Finding my niche is mandatory if I want do start and grow my business successfully.
I will not waste your time with all my senseless efforts to approach this crucial topic and tell you straight away what worked out at the end.
How I Found My niche
As said before, there are different ways to approach this topic: Focussed on passion or focussed on money. I personally think that a mix is the solution.
What I did, was sitting in my cosy corner making a list with things I love to do, I love to talk about and I’m generally interested in. I was astonished about the outcome. Yet with this little effort, it was a lot clearer what can be my niche.
Being honest with myself is very important, to get a useful result. There are things I love, but they are definitely not my strength. Knowing that, I was organizing above mentioned list into “I’m really good in” to “I’ve no glue”. And yepp…, …the next step was done!
The last step is a lot more technical, as I had to figure out, for which topics on my list, people are disposed to pay for.
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I figured that since there are a lot of businesses and people out there who are looking for writers to help them with website copy, marketing collateral and so on, it would be really easy to find clients if I could get my own website up and running.
Disclaimer: there was a lot wrong with the way I started my business, but the biggest failure I had was not identifying my niche market, which is what I’m going to focus on right now.
I put up a website that told “people” (aka anyone and everyone) I could write their website copy, create marketing collateral, craft articles and blog posts, be on social media for them… I even o ered up a service that would edit already- written copy if they wanted to simply “make it better”.
I loved doing all of these things, and so I wasn’t sure how to decide which one I should focus on. Plus, I didn’t want to ofer one and have someone come to my website looking for the other, so I thought if I put them all up, then I’d be covering all the bases.
Do you see the problem here?
I was offering a portfolio of services that was way too big, and in trying to sell to anyone and everyone out there, I was selling to NO ONE.
My o erings were way too generic, and I lacked a certain focus that was sure to turn anyone away from my site in a heartbeat.
So, one day I cleared out my website copy, and instead of o ering everything I listed above, I told people that I specialized in one thing: I would edit and format their eBook so that it would be ready for the Kindle Direct Publishing Platform.
Why eBook editing?
About this time I had really started focusing on a passion of mine: helping small businesses and Entrepreneurs find out how to provide value to their audience and establish themselves as an authority in their industry.
I knew that if I could sell small businesses and Entrepreneurs on the idea that an eBook could do these two things for them (provide value to their audience and establish themselves as an authority in their industry), then the rest would follow.
All my services included was editing an already-written piece for grammar, sentence structure and consistency, and then formatting it for Kindle – that’s it.
I went from making $0/hour to over $75/hour within one week of finding my niche market, and then niching down again.
Some people know exactly what their niche is. For others, it’s a little bit more work to discover exactly what space you’re trying to fill (what value you’re providing) with your product or service and who your target audience is.
Why did I fail when I first tried starting that freelance writing business? Because I didn’t want to miss out on clients.
I thought that if I was o ering one thing, then I would be missing out on the millions of people who didn’t need it. What I should have been focusing on were the millions of people who DID need it.
Once I started talking to them about how an eBook could help them in their business, and how I could help them get that eBook published on the Kindle Direct Platform, I started getting clients.
Finding your niche is an important step in building and growing a successful business. When you try to sell to everyone, you run the risk of selling to no one.
The more you niche, the easier it is to provide value to a specific audience.”
