Over the years I’ve had many folks come to me with their niche struggles.
And the ask for help usually comes out of them in exactly that way: “I’m struggling with my niche.”
It was only in the past few years or so that I realized I should have been asking people a very important follow-up question:
“Are you struggling to find your niche or are you struggling to articulate your niche?”
Those are actually two very different problems.
Struggling to find your niche is normal. And, it’s not something that anybody else can really do for you.
It’s a process, usually a very messy and non-linear one, of trying and experimenting with different things and gradually figuring out what you love to do, how you love to do it, and who you love to do it for/with.
I had a great conversation with a Chicago friend this past weekend and was telling her all about this incredible business that I’ve created and how much I love it and how perfectly it fits my gifts and the way I love to work.
She wanted to know how I knew that this was my calling, how I knew to position myself in the way that I have and do something so specific and perfect for me.
My answer?
“I didn’t!”
I didn’t know – not until very recently.
It took 14 years of throwing spaghetti at the wall after I was done with school to see what I was really interested in and what would stick in my life and career.
And 7 of those years were specifically spent trying to find my business niche after I discovered the option to be an online entrepreneur.
Never in a million years could I have predicted or even imagined 14 years ago that this specific business would be what I’d be doing with my life.
Because I didn’t even know that this way of working or the type of consulting I now provide even existed or was an option.
And once I got into my current online consulting business specifically, I didn’t know that I had the option to break the tired mold that everyone else was using and do things my way. 😉 That was yet another messy journey of discovery.
The biggest thing I’ve learned about finding your true niche is that it’s always going to be the thing that you feel most called to, from deep in your heart.
And you might have to have a lot of experiences before you realize what you’re called to. Because you might not be aware yet that that option is even available to you.
This is why I had no business ever providing “niche help” to people who were trying to find theirs.
Because what they wanted to know from me was what niche “should” work. Or would be attractive/profitable.
And they were usually people who’d spent little to no time gathering experiences – data from which to determine what they actually were good at and wanted to do.
What I now know is that your passion for your niche is what makes it profitable and attractive.
You need something that you could talk about for days, can’t wait to write content about, and are so darn excited to help people with, that your ideal clients can just feel your excitement radiating from everything you say and do.
You’ll never get that kind of energy behind something that a business coach just tells you “should” be profitable.
Now, let’s look at the other kind of niche problem: the one where you’re struggling to articulate your niche.
That’s the “niche problem” that I can actually solve. 😉
It’s the problem that comes from absolutely knowing at a gut level what type of work you’re great at and who your ideal client is, having served them before (multiple times) and having seen them get results with you, yet being unable to pin down in words the distinctions that actually define who this person is, so that you can attract them consistently from your marketing, and stop getting all the less-than-ideals sneaking through to your sales conversations and even sometimes to signing on with you.
Yep. That’s MY niche. 😀
I’ve developed the most incredible process for pulling the right words out of people to explicitly define their ideal client whom they currently only know implicitly.
But it only works if you have the experiences to pull from. I can’t pull the words out of thin air.
Nor can any other person who’s gifted at messaging. We’re not magicians (although our clients sometimes tell us that it feels like magic, because we’re finally providing that last missing piece to the puzzle of how to attract the right clients consistently).
My point in saying all this is to empower you.
To help you see that so much of the answer to “clarity problems” lies with action. Your action.
And to make you very wary of investing with anybody who promises they’ll help you come up with the “magic words” to market you/ get you leads and clients when you haven’t first taken lots of messy action to create the gut-level clarity around what you want to do and who you work best with.
Early in my journey I spent so much money on marketing/ sales/ messaging coaches who didn’t help me at all, and a big reason for that was because I simply didn’t have enough experience to pull from to create the messages and offers that would be right for me.
None of it was a waste, though, because I got a huge sampling of the mediocre client attraction tactics being taught out there, and years down the line, they inspired me to come up with a system of my very own that works far better than anything I was taught. 😉
Turning lemons into lemonade… that’ll be a topic for another post sometime.
In the meantime, if you’re one of those folks who knows who you work best with but has trouble attracting that person consistently because you don’t have (all of) the right words – you might love working with me 1-on-1 in my 30-day intensive.
In that program, we not only go through an awesome process to help you articulate your niche… but we also work on creating (or tweaking) and articulating your offer, and writing content to attract the people in your desired niche.
I have a fantastic method for actually USING the clarity we get on your niche wording to weave more precise wording into your offers and content so that your newfound clarity actually brings you more of the right clients (in many cases, A LOT more).
Past clients of this program have scaled their income to six, multiple-six, and seven figures (and not just from any clients, but the right clients!) and have said that they partially or largely attribute that success to the work they did with me on their messaging and content in this program.
For the right person, it’s magic – and a total steal, too.
Send me a Facebook DM if you’re interested in the 1-on-1 program. We’ll chat over Messenger to see if it’s a fit.