Before I became a consultant, one of my first ever jobs was as an English Teacher at a local language school.

I was paid around 6$ /hour to teach school children to read and write.

It was… well… awful.

After about 6 months, I hit a lucky break and landed a $30 /hour contract at a nearby bank to train the senior staff presentation skills.

Funnily enough, there wasn’t much difference.

That was when I realised something very interesting.

I was doing essentially the same work for a different group of people and making 5x more money (plus it was way more interesting).

This was my first exposure to the impact of a good niche.

What if I told you you already have all the skills you need?

What if you could make 5x more money just by picking the right niche?

In this article, I’ll show you how.

Quick Disclaimer

If you’re reading this, I probably don’t need to explain to you the importance of having a niche.

But if you want to master your market, and make the best products, this isn’t something we simply gloss over.

Pretend you’re a beginner (or if you are, even better) and let’s approach this from the top.

All about niches

I’ve helped dozens of businesses from six to eight figures understand their niche and very few of them get it right.

In fact, almost no one does.

They think a niche is something like:

• Industry

• Headcount/revenue

• Job title

That’s certainly part of it…

But the problem with this is that it doesn’t help us get to the route of the issue:

Their problems

The only reason we care about making a niche in the first place is to better position our offer and speak to the market’s problems.

Let’s think about it for a second:

“Agency Founders” is a very general niche.

Not all agency founders want:

• To grow their business (it’s true)

• To increase CAC on their PPC ads

• A new website design

In fact, if you send 100 messages to the agency founder market, only 2 or 3 people would even know what you meant.

That’s why, instead, we pick a niche based on their goals instead.

We don’t want 2-3%, we want 80-90%+.

Here’s how you do that.

How to pick your niche (and do market research)

To pick a market and learn about it’s goals, follow these steps:

1. Write down 5 niches (groups of people) that you know well.

It doesn’t matter if you think you can help them or not.

It doesn’t matter what you will offer them.

Just write them down.

2. Pick the one that resonates with you the most.

This decision is not final but you need to make a decision.

Don’t pick a niche just because you think it’s a good niche.

Pick a group of people you genuinely understand and like.

3. Find the top 10 blogs, top 10 books, and top 10 YouTube videos in that niche.

Read/watch them and see what topics they are talking about. Find problems. Read the comments. Write notes.

The goal here is to understand the market better.

Where are they coming from? Where do they want to go? What goals do they have?

4. Message 20-30 people in that niche and ask them what their problems are.

Do not skip this.

If you’re serious about starting a business, you must engage with your market.

Talk to them. See what they say. Tally how often you hear the problems you identify.

Now you should have:

• Your niche

• Your market’s most powerful desires 

Marketing your product/service is now no longer a guessing game. 

You have the focus needed to craft an excellent offer and start reaching out to prospects.

Niche-swapitis

Good businesses have a niche.

Great niches stick to them.

Somewhere along your journey (probably early on) you’ll start to second guess yourself.

“Maybe this wasn’t the best niche.”

“Perhaps this niche would be better.”

The thing is, there is no such thing as the perfect niche. Every niche can work.

What doesn’t work is swapping niche every 2 months and starting again from zero.

I call this having a bad case of Niche-swapitis; the never ending need to swap niches and make no progress with your business.

Pick a niche.

Commit to it.

Do your research.

Stand out from the noise by understanding their goals and positioning yourself appropriately and you will prosper greatly..