Creating Your Own Niche is Brave and Courageous, What’s Stopping You? KDS: 065

Creating your own niche IS possible…If you’ve been in the online space for any length of time, at some point or another you’ve heard/read/been told that you need to niche down. As someone who hasn’t ever really done this, I’ve been a little giddy to see a couple of articles popping up lately that go against that age-old advice. I’m going to start by saying you don’t necessarily need to be a generalist either… I’m saying create your OWN niche. Back in the day when I was creating websites for clients, I never niched down. I also never advertised or marketed my services (which I’m not saying is a smart strategy, I simply didn’t want to be doing that work so let it just unfold and see what showed up, but that’s for another day). Before we get too deep into this episode I think it’s also worth noting that if you are in a niche and it’s working for you, then fantastic. I’m not saying that niching down doesn’t work, because I can give you plenty of great examples where it does. I have a friend whose niche is the building industry (construction). She has created a solid and growing business in a very specific niche. However, she didn’t start her business because she went looking for a niche and then picked the construction industry. When I started my online business I more or less stumbled upon WordPress, enjoyed what I was learning and grabbed a great domain name (The WordPress Chick). Those were the good ol’ days…. ignorance was bliss. My imposter syndrome showed up as I started to learn more and it wasn’t until I found my own little space within the WordPress community (marketing & WordPress) that I started to slough off the feelings of being an imposter. Which is why I shifted to my personal brand. I love EVERYTHING about marketing. Content creation, email marketing, copywriting, product creation, offers, chatbots, traffic, etc. I go deep on things that interest me and let them evolve. Let’s look at content creation as an example. I started creating content and continued doing things I loved. I knew very little about SEO, had never done the ‘content silo’ and many of the posts or episodes I’ve created that have resonated most with people have very little to do with SEO. Again, not saying SEO doesn’t matter (it does, and it’s worth doing and getting good at). What I am saying is it’s brilliant to create and publish from a different place. If I don’t feel inspired by what I’m doing it’s simply not going to work. Let’s talk about the whole “niche” thing, shall we? First, let’s differentiate who we serve from the niche. When you’re creating your customer avatar, with demographics and psychographics, you want to get specific. Whether or not that ends up being exactly who you serve isn’t the point. Meaning, let’s say I were to say that my target audience is a female, between 35-60, who has an online business and is looking to stop trading time for money. In other words, even if they love the service work they’re doing they want some leverage. My psychographics are clear: they’re self-responsible, willing to do the work, and are non-judgmental. Does that mean I don’t work with men? Or I don’t work with someone outside of that age range Of course not. What this does is help me get crystal clear on my messaging and who I’m talking to when I create content or copy (including email). When I was in the WordPress space my audience was pretty split (50/50 between men & women). I don’t have current data on this right now but I can tell you that more women purchase from me than men (especially coaching services). In a recent article by Nicholas Cole, he said:Creators who stand out don’t “find”...