Struggling to narrow your niche? get unstuck now!

Have you lost your creative spark because you’ve been told you need to find your niche?

This post is for the multi-passionate entrepreneur, the creative, the spiritual business owner who is sick of hearing about niches and avatars! You’ve been working on your ideal client profile for so long that you’ve forgotten why you started your business in the first place. Here’s the thing…

It’s all well and good being told to get in to a profitable niche and then narrow it to within an inch of it’s life, but in reality, you’re spending more time faffing with that than building your business.

It doesn’t matter what program you buy or which coach you work with these days, it seems everyone is telling you that the place to start is niche.

Well, I’m a rebel.

I’m also a business owner, as well as a coach, and I can tell you that my biggest successes have come from ditching niche and starting with what I know and what I love.

I’ve connected with my ideal clients because I’ve talked passionately about my work. I’ve given my audience access to me and my life and they’ve grown to know, like and trust me because of it.

My business success has never depended on whether or not my ‘avatar’ is called Jenny, is a size 12, lives with Barry and has 3 kids… It’s never been about what car they drive, or how many kids they’ve got or what books they’re reading.

For multi-passionate entrepreneurs, creatives and spiritual business owners the niche stuff is even more of a distraction. It can easily become something they can hide behind. They tell themselves they’re building a business but in reality they’re going round in circles.

Let’s be clear, niche has it’s place, but it’s not always helpful to focus on it at the start of your entrepreneurial journey. It’s relevant to the advertising, the marketing, the copywriting piece. It’s there to help you communicate with your ideal clients. 

All well and good if you’re Apple, but if you’re “Jane, a mindset coach who wants to help women entrepreneurs overcome limiting beliefs” then it’s not quite so straight forward.

Niche work requires you to have knowledge of things you likely won’t know until you’ve worked with a fair number of clients. There are too many variables. Too much of the unknown. It trips business owners up and worse still, it often paralyses them. 

I call this the Niche Nightmare because to the business owners stuck in it, that is exactly what it feels like, a nightmare!

At the start of your new business, the niche piece is all about things you don’t yet know; because you’ve likely not worked with enough clients to have a real handle on it, so you just make it up. You invent a name for your ideal client, arbitrarily choose a car, the number of children, married or single, an age range, a handful of magazines (Psychologies being at the top of your list, obviously), and find a few Facebook groups to hang out in and start pitching like crazy to everyone.

Result? Crickets. No new clients, few or no enquiries.

So you go back to your niche because the gurus are telling you that’s where you’re going wrong. You tinker. You rewrite it. You start again. You find another expert and try their formula for narrowing your niche. Then you try pitching again and still it’s crickets.

Over the years I’ve seen hundreds (probably in to the thousands) of great coaches, healers, consultants, designers, website creators etc start their businesses but fail to achieve the success they desire.

It’s not because they aren’t gifted at what they do.

It’s because they got stuck at niche and they never broke free.

Some of these business owners spent years working on their niche, rewriting their website copy, rebranding, all of that effort to try and find the right niche.

What they didn’t do was get out there in front of potential clients.

Your niche will develop over time. Don’t get hung up on it at the start of your business. 

If you’re reading this because you’re stuck in a niche nightmare, then here are the five things you should do right now to break free:

1. Package up all the niche stuff and pop it in a drawer where you can’t see it. Let it go for now.
2. Get creative! Write a list or draw a mindmap. Write out everything that you love about what you do.
3. Next, write out everything that you actually do. The results your clients (or potential clients) can expect from working with you. The magic and the transformation that you help your clients achieve.
4. Look over the two lists/mindmaps and then pull it all together in to three or four themes. This will be the basis of your content! (See my post about creating content HERE)
5. Start being visible! Write content, post blogs, make videos, do Facebook live broadcasts, have real conversations with real people.

Over time you’ll see similarities in your clients and the results they achieve. You’ll begin to love one part of your work more than other parts. Gradually the niche will emerge. 

In the meantime, all you have to do is work on your visibility and keep showing up.