The first piece of business advice I heard:
“Create a niche for your business”
Everyone talks about finding a niche.
The smaller, more specific part of the customer base.
But hardly anyone talks about how you can choose, test, and change to find the right niche.
The right niche is wildly profitable. It has people willing to buy and spend more while spreading the word with the community because of how satisfied they are.
In the end, the niche determines your business success or failure.
Ok. Let’s get into a few techniques I learned on how to find the right niche.
1/ Your niche should be the customers whose problems you solve the best
People pay you because you solve their problems.
And if you solve a certain customer’s problem extremely well, you can charge a high price for it.
So, choose an expensive problem to solve, and solve it well.
Now, your job is to figure out from your existing audience, who that customer is.
There are plenty of ways to do market research:
Look at your reviews (positive and negative to see what customers like/dislike)
Look at past successful customers and what they had in common
Ask your customers questions about their pains, obstacles, and goals
This research helps narrow down who you help the best.
It allows you to position your business as the solution to their painful problem (this is called the painkiller framework which I cover here).
Take the time to understand who your best customers are and choose your niche from that.
2/ Test, measure, and change niches
Your niche should evolve over time.
Your niche changes based on the content you make, the people you collaborate with, what problem your customer wants solved, and thousands of other factors.
You need to test different content, products, services, and measure what’s working.
This data should help you realize what content your audience likes and what products people love.
Then, you shift your content, offers, and business to the new niche.
This may not be a big change, and you don’t have to announce it but notice the data and remember to focus on the customers whose problems you solve best.
Deconstructed: How I changed this newsletter’s niche
When I started, I took the “niche down” advice and targeted only young entrepreneurs who currently have a business.
My posts for young entrepreneur posts got only 500-20,000 views while my posts about business ideas averaged 50,000+ views.
Also, I saw that my audience wasn’t entirely young entrepreneurs, and most of them were interested in just online businesses.
So, I adapted to that.
I started targeting all people interested in entrepreneurship with business strategy for online businesses.
These were the people who I could help solve their problem of inactionable online business advice the best.
- Warren
PS: A small niche isn’t always the best niche.
Choose the niche of people whose problems you solve the best.
PPS: For more on how to create authentic content that resonates with your niche, check out this article: What separates a $1 brand from a $1M one?