How To Pick Your Niche

Your niche matters! 

Everyone is affected by their niche. 

So how do you pick the right niche? 

Well, you need to know what a niche is before picking one, right? 

A niche is the specific problem you're solving for a specific person.

Why solve a specific problem for a specific person? Because when you try to serve everyone, you end up serving no one for very cheap. 

Having highly motivated, highly responsive customers for your products, services, or business is what allows you to succeed even if you are not good at business.  

Every product, every service, every business appeals to a certain definable group of people than it appeals to all people.

Your profits from marketing will be determined more by the choice of prospects than by anything else.

The specific person is more than just “busy professionals in their thirties”. But even that is better than trying to serve anyone. 

You are targeting a problem and not a person.

Remember, the pain is the pitch.

Let me explain the importance of getting specific with whom you serve with an example. 

​​Let’s say you sold a generic program on fitness. Unless you were some massive fitness influencer, it would be difficult to sell your course. Why?

Because what do you think “yet another” fitness course is valued at? $20, $50? Regardless, not much because when your services are comparable to someone else’s it causes the customer to think they are the same thing, so by default the cheaper one is more valuable to them. 

So you differentiate your product by getting more specific about the problem that you solve. 

So let’s imagine you make the product more specific, keeping the same principles, and call it “Weight Training Optimization.” All of a sudden, this course is for a more specific type of person. 

We could tie their increase to more gains they would achieve with your products. 

So let’s say this is a $100 product.

But there are a lot of people whose focus is lifting weights. So let’s go down another level. 

What if we got more specific and called it “Weight Training Optimization for Olympic Lifts”. 

Once again, this course is for a more specific type of person who probably has more experience lifting and has more specific goals and in turn would be more motivated and responsive for this product. 

This product might now be valued at  $250 — $500.

Let's imagine you specify your product down one more level and call it “Olympic Lift Optimization for the Paris 2024 Games”. 

Now this more specific type of person would be so motivated and responsive that when they see this advertisement they would think, This is made exactly for me. They would gladly pay $1000 or more if it meant you would help them achieve their goals of competing at the Olympics. 

You still need to know how to pick the right niche, here is how in 5 steps:

1. Make a List of 10 skills that you have, no matter how insignificant.

After, make a list of 10 different problems that you can solve with each one of your different skills. 

This depends on if you have the skills necessary to bring a person from point A of lots of pain to point B of life with no pain.

Ideally, you want problems that you have solved because you have the most specific knowledge and skills about problems that have caused you pain in the past. 

Problems with the most pain come from the eternal markets of health, wealth and relationships, and what jobs have you had in the past. 

What problems have you solved for yourself, What pains were you dealing with 5 years ago. 

This is especially helpful because you are aware of what works and doesn't work, so it’s easier to talk to this specific person about their pains. 

Remember, the pain is the pitch.

My initial niche was non-luxury car detailing, and here's why: I had significant expertise in this area from years of working at a detailing company, and I was lucky enough to have the owner teach me directly about the business.

So, I possessed the skills necessary to actually detail cars, the customers experienced the pain of having dirty cars, possibly due to pets, kids or themselves. 

They lacked the time, energy, or tools to clean their vehicles themselves. To attract the best customers, I set my prices relatively high, and my target audience was easily identifiable, as these people are literally everywhere. 

If you have no experience solving any problems, then we need to work backwards a bit. 

And just think of problems that you yourself have, what are pains in your own life, specifically in regard to health, wealth, and relationships.

Then go solve those problems, document your journey, and solve it for someone else. 

Once you have your 100 problems, it's time to narrow down. 

2.  Is the niche growing?

You don't want to serve a dying market.

It's very hard to have a business that grows consistently in a market that shrinks consistently (It’s like trying to swim against the current). 

Ask is the market for these people large, is the market growing at the rate of the stock market.

The stock market grows at 10% per year, so you are the market for your problems to also be growing around 10% per year. 

Cut all the ones that have been declining or stagnating for years.

3.  Do they have money to buy services from you?

Even if they are in pain and there are many of them, they will not buy if they cannot afford it. 

When I started my car detailing service, I used to try to market to college kids in all kinds of ridiculous ways.

I used to put up flyers inside the residence halls, I used to go to the student parking lots and put my business cards on all the students cars. I also used to ask my peers to post my services on their social media. 

I used to advertise in a non-scalable way, but more importantly, I missed the even bigger overarching issue that the people who I was marketing to did not have the money to buy my services.

Unsurprisingly, I sat and wondered why my phone rarely rang. 

So I switched my marketing from college kids to homeowners with kids and pets.

Cut all the problems where the people cannot afford your services, don’t want to target unemployed people, and you typically want to look for older people because they have more money. 

Now you’ve decided the problems that are in growing markets and have people who can afford it.  

4.  Can you easily target them?

Find the mailing lists, social media groups, YouTube channels where your specific people reside. For local services, find the physical places they go.

When I decided I wanted to target homeowners with kids and pets instead of college kids, I changed where I placed my advertisements. 

Since I wanted to target homeowners instead of college kids, I placed my flyers and advertisements in the entrances and exits of expensive grocery stores, and pet stores.

This is not where college kids would be, but where the higher income residents of the town would be.

If I wanted to detail luxury cars, it would be in my best interests to find out when the local car shows are to find my potential customers.

If you don’t know where to start, find 5 people who you think you can serve and have a conversation with them to go over what pains they are dealing with. 

Remember, the pain is the pitch. 

The bigger the pain that they are dealing with is, the more money that you can charge to solve their problems. 

You want to make sure you get their immediate frustrations, their desires, and their fears.

After you’ve gotten the answer to these questions, it's your job to assess what skills do I have to be able to bridge the gap between their current state and ideal state. 

If you don’t have the skills now, you know exactly what you need to learn. 

If I want to detail luxury cars, I would find out from asking 5 luxury car owners what they hate about maintaining their cars. 

But even if I didn’t know how to solve their problems, I would have the firepower to learn how to better serve luxury car owners. 

By the end of this activity, you should have a sentence similar to I help (specific person) to go from (state A of pain) to (state B of no pain). 

Finding the right niche is going to require work to figure out where to direct your most valuable asset of your time, but it is well worth it.

Once you have these questions answered, you have your niche figured out, and can go make some money.

If you avoid this work because it is difficult, I have neither great advice nor sympathy for you. 

The desire to educate oneself and act on that education is what separates the entrepreneurs with long-standing frustration and small income from the ones with freedom and abundance.