Your best marketing and promotion efforts are likely to come to naught unless you focus them in a specific niche. Without this focus, your message is diluted, spread so thin that no one really knows what you stand for or who you can help.
A niche that fits is is the sweet spot in which you deliver the greatest value with the least effort to the people who will benefit the most. That is a far cry from the cramped, dank, dark hole-in-the-wall that is evoked by classic definitions of a niche.
Framed this way, choosing a niche gives you a platform from which you are visible, accessible, and useful to the kinds of people who most need and appreciate your services. When you market your work to a niche like this, you are having a conversation with an interested audience, not trying to persuade a stranger.
Finding Your Niche
Over the years I've developed some tried and true methods for helping my clients define a niche that fits. Here's one to try for yourself.
Indulge in a rant about your competitors. What do you dislike about their work? Where do you disagree with their approach or promises? How do you do it differently? The purpose of this is not to trash others, but to reveal the ways in which your work wants to be different. After you have had your rant you can stop focusing on what they other guy is doing wrong and start letting people know what you do differently.
It's what you do differently that makes you stand out in a niche. Framing your niche is not about being better than someone else, it's about being different in ways that will serve your "just right" clients.
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