Finding Your Niche: Not Everyone is Your Tribe

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I Am Butterfly Bound- Social Media Tips To Live By

10 min readJan 14, 2019

The debate about finding your niche market is a big one in network marketing and direct sales. Some leaders will tell you that everyone is a prospective client or teammate. Others will tell you that you need to niche down.

I’m an advocate for the latter. I believe that finding your niche is extremely important to creating success in your business. Last week we talked about branding you instead of a company or a product and finding your niche is a big part of branding.

I believe that you can’t build a successful business if you have no idea who you are trying to reach. One of my favorite things to tell my team is You can be nothing to nobody or something to somebody.

“You can be nothing to nobody or something to somebody.”

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What that means to me is that if you cast your net too wide nobody will resonate with what you are saying and you won’t reach the people you are destined to impact.

Finding Your Niche: Why It’s Important

When a person lands on your website, blog, social media platform you only have a few seconds to capture them. Did you know that most people decide if they like you or not in 5 seconds? Once they’ve made that decision it’s very hard to recapture someone if they don’t feel like you are talking to them.

But when you create a niche market then the people landing on your site will immediately feel at home and think “Wow this is exactly what I need.”

People want to know that your product or service is exactly what they need or want. If it isn’t then they are gone and on to the next thing.

Finding Your Niche: Exactly How I Narrowed it Down

I spent a long time thinking about who exactly I wanted to help with my business and services and I came up with two very clear markets.

I was chatting with my best friend one night and we got into a discussion about being moms. Both of us are over 35 and have teenage/adult children. We began talking about how we both felt like we had forgotten who we were as women. I have known my best friend for 3 years now and I had no idea she felt this way. It was so funny because I had been feeling exactly the same way and hadn’t told anyone that I was struggling with my identity. After, our chat I hung up and thought to myself, “That is who I am supposed to help. I’m supposed to help mom’s who have lost themselves.”
My second niche was helping frustrated network marketers, direct sellers and small business owners. I started out in network marketing with a company I quickly decided I did not fit with. It became clear I didn’t align with their marketing strategies and I couldn’t support the dishonest sales tactics they taught. I began looking for a better way and when I found it I felt compelled to help other struggling entrepreneurs get better results and grow their teams and business fast.

Finding Your Niche: But Won’t I Lose People?

Yep you sure will. And that is okay. While you are attracting people to you it’s okay to repel people away.

The people you lose were never really there to begin with. They aren’t interested in what you are offering and spending time on them wastes everyone’s time.

Think of it as going to the doctor. If you had a problem that needed surgery would you want a GP to do it or would you want the surgeon who has preformed this surgery thousands of times working on you? You’re going to pick the surgeon because he knows exactly what to do and what you need. Being the specialist in a field is better. People like to know that the person who is helping them knows what they are talking about and are qualified to help.

“But what if there isn’t enough people to buy from me?”

If every person who needed woman over 40, struggling with PCOS and a family who didn’t like healthy food, was always on the go came to me to get help with losing weight I couldn’t possibly serve them all. There would literally be thousands of women to help.

Keep that in mind when you are thinking about repelling people from you. If you attract the right people more often than the wrong people your sales will skyrocket.

Finding Your Niche: What to Focus On

When it comes to finding your niche, many people go right to ‘what’ they do and don’t consider the ‘how’.

For example, you might know that your passion is in making potholders made of hemp but find you hate running an Etsy shop. If you disregard that last part and open the Etsy shop anyway because it’s what you think HAS to be done how will you feel about your business?

Pretty Lousy! And it will reflect in your efforts and ultimately your sales.

So, what you need to consider when finding your niche, is the following:

What you love doing,
What are you good at doing,
How you want to do it
Who you want to help

Let’s look at each of these individually. Now before we start I can say YOU are the only person who can really answer these questions. I can’t tell you what makes you unique and special you’re going to have to figure that out for yourself.

Finding Your Niche: Do What You Love to Do

What do you love to do? I mean really, really love. I’m talking your calling here.

If you were told you can’t make money doing that would you still do it? If someone tomorrow said you could no longer do it would you be devastated?

Running a business will test your passion. It will test your true love of something. It will make you doubt why you thought this was a good idea in the first place.

Especially if you are starting a side hustle, it means getting up early, working late when you come home and fitting tasks into your lunch break.

It means finding a thousand different ways to talk about your topic. It means knowing things or coming up with ideas that are a little bit different from what has come before you.

And, trust me, a casual interest or even a strong interest sometimes isn’t enough.

It has to be true love.

Finding Your Niche: You’ve Got Mad Skills Now Let’s Find Them

What are you really good at. What’s the one thing your friends say you do better than anyone else? Do they come to you for advice? Are you a fashionista, a beauty expert, an omg amazing cookie baker?

And even more importantly do you really love doing any of those things? I’m talking for the rest of your life kind of doing them.

You may make the best chocolate chip cookies since Mrs. Fields but if you abhor baking them and you only do it for the church potluck because Edna really loves them, then baking cookies probably shouldn’t be part of your business model.

So think about the things you really are passionate about and that you are good at and use those as a foundation for your niche.

Finding Your Niche: How You Want to Do Things

It’s time to think outside the box. Doing exactly what everyone else is doing isn’t going to set you apart. Figure out what you can do different and capitalize on it.

Remember that the most obvious avenues of making money, aren’t always necessarily the best for you. Just because 900 other people do it just like that doesn’t mean it will work for you.

One of the main mistakes I see people make is that they choose a way of making money because they think that’s going to be the easiest way to make money.

But if you become a coach, because you think that’s going to be the quickest way to cover your monthly expenses — but working one on one with people turns you into a nervous mess, it’s going to be difficult to sustain. If you are terrified of going live and your business model revolves around live videos you are setting yourself up to fail.

It might be difficult, to begin with, but the easiest way of making money, in the long term, will be to do something you enjoy and excel in — because that way you can blow the competition away and not end up being burnt out and miserable.

You can work on other skills, other methods but finding what you really want to do and doing things the way you feel works best for you will be the greatest step to success.

Finding Your Niche: Who Do You Want to Help

At the core of all business is this: People buy things that help them. Things that help them feel pretty, look better, be healthier, be more successful etc… It’s all about helping them.

And that is exactly what you should be focusing on. Once you identify a niche what is it you specifically can offer them that helps them.

A good product or service, should, very fundamentally, be able to solve a (preferably) urgent problem which your audience is experiencing. Make sure this is a specific problem.

There are literally millions of websites out there helping solve the problem of ‘losing weight’. You want to get as specific as you can. For example, helping women who are over the age of 40, that suffer from a hormonal imbalance like PCOS, have issues with depression and are interested in clean. toxin free products is my niche in the weight loss market. It’s very specific. And by focusing on that I know exactly what my ideal clients needs and wants to hear.

By being laser-focused on that exact niche I know week after week how to talk to her. I don’t have to think about what blog post she’d want to read. Because I’m writing posts I would want to read.

Finding Your Niche: In Conclusion

Once you’ve narrowed down your niche and decided how you want to help them it’s a good idea to go out and check out how your competitors are doing things. Check how you can be similar but also how you can set yourself apart from them.

If you are still struggling to figure out what your niche market is I have help for you. This weeks Free Resource is a Customer Avatar Worksheet. Click the purple button below to download it. And if you haven’t registered for my 5-day challenge that starts tonight on branding you should totally do that now, here.

Free Resource: Customer Avatar Worksheet

https://forms.aweber.com/form/31/1988154031.htm

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