[Thriving Creator Podcast] Episode 2: Everybody dance now...here's how you narrow down your niche

Hello, and welcome to this episode. Today, we will talk about what a niche is and how do you find your niche so you can focus on the right things in your business. I will walk you through the best exercise to help you uncover who your niche is. No fill in the blanks!

Episode 2: Everybody dance now…here’s how you narrow down your niche – Podcast Transcript

Hey, Thrivers. I’m Sara Nguyen, creator of Thrive Video Academy, and I’m here to help you go from stuck and overwhelmed to becoming a confident, profitable and thriving creator. Join me here each week for honest conversations about what it really takes to become a successful YouTube creator without compromising your creativity, sacrificing cheeky drinks with people you love or downtime for yourself.

You’ll hear about the hard lessons I’ve gone through, so you can avoid making the same slow and costly mistakes on your journey, as well as my secret weapons to help you dig deep and do the work it takes. I’m so honoured and grateful to have the opportunity to share this together with you right here on the Thriving Creator Podcast.

I’m glad you’re here. Let’s get started. Today’s topic is a really, really good one. Today I’m looking at, how can you find your niche, niche or niche? I had this discussion with Dave, my husband last night, and we did the research and apparently it’s both niche like peach, like peach. It’s both niche and niche.

Whichever ones tickles your fancy. I have always said niche so I’m going to say niche. We’re going with niche. Now, we’re going to cover what’s a niche? And then more importantly, I’m going to show you a really good exercise that will help you uncover yours.

And I promise, I promise you that you will not have to fill in the blanks because that’s probably one of the things that I really despise where people make you do exercises, where you’re like I blank and blank and blank. And you really feel like you’re just peaking an idea out of the air, but I’ve got a much better exercise that I’ve found that I’ve worked with, that I know you’re going to love.

What is a niche? A niche really is a group of people in a market who you can solve problems for. What does that actually mean?

If you are in business, more than likely, if you’re a coach or a consultant, you serve a particular market, whether that’s the health and fitness market, if you’re a personal trainer or a health coach, whether you’re in like, you’re interior designer and you serve like the housing or the home market, or whether you’re like me, you’re a video and business coach and I serve businesses, particularly small businesses.

A niche is a subset of the actual market that you serve. I want you to think of your niche kind of like a slice of pie, right? If your market is the whole pie, let’s say sewing is, is a market and I want to go after a niche, a slice of that pie may be quilters within that market.

Or another slice may be sewers or another slice may be knitters and another slice may be crocheters and it’s really important that you, I think, come to just the awareness that having a niche, so a segment of the market that you’re going after as opposed to going after the whole pie, is something that’s important to your growth because the biggest mistakes that I see particularly new coaches make is that they try to go after the whole market.

Right? They’re in the sewing niche, sewing market and they want to go after everyone. And what happens? You end up being too broad, your message isn’t dialed down, your products, your services, your content, your advertising, your marketing it doesn’t hit any particular people because the message is all over the place.

But if you can dial down on a segment, then you can really sound like you’re speaking particularly to a person, and that’s how you connect. And that’s how you can move people from being a viewer or a fan into being an actual buyer.

So niche is slice of the pie. We love pie. We don’t need to eat the whole thing. Focusing on a slice, gives us more traction. And then later after we’ve kind of conquered that slice, we can go after more, but when you’re just getting started, really just focusing on one part of the pie is what we want to tackle.

Now, we really want to focus who this niche or who this slice of the pie is? Let’s talk about some of the questions. I’m going to walk you through an exercise that I absolutely love that will walk, that will help you uncover your segment of the market.

And as I promised you, it won’t involve you doing any fill in the blank exercises ’cause I personally can’t stand it when I see fill in the blank exercises, I’m a bit like, I feel like I’m in primary school again. Let’s start with a set of questions and then I’m going to show you how to bring it all together to uncover who your niche is, who you should be going after.

The first question that you need to ask yourself when trying to find your niche is. Who can I help? Right? So you need to think about who can you solve problems for within your market? And I know this is really a broad question.

This is the first question, right? Who can I help? Think of your market all the people that you serve or currently serve, write it down. Who can you actually help? Because this is the starting point.

Don’t over think it at this point yet. The second question is, do I like them? This is incredibly important. The first question we said, who do I actually serve and who do I work with? And the second question is.

Do I enjoy working with them? And you know exactly what I’m talking about. Those people who ring your phone, ring you on the phone, and you let it go to voicemail.

There’s people who you see an email from and you kind of, what do they want now? Do you actually enjoy working with these people because life’s too short to be working with people who you don’t love.

So you may be a photographer and you may be like, I am never ever working with brides again, because I cannot stand them. They’re Cray Cray. Find that group of people who you can serve and who you enjoy working with.

Life is way too short to be working with people who you don’t like. And if you seriously are saying, there’s no one in my market who I like working with, I think you may need to reconsider the market that you’re in because there should be plenty of people in your market who you actually enjoy working with.

This is really important. Now the next question is, can I help them get results or can I deliver for them? Right? This is really important. You’re choosing people who you can work with, who you enjoy and thirdly, who you can help them get results.

Now, if you’re in new, or deliver for, right? If you’re a new coach, you may be saying I don’t have a lot of clients yet. How do you prove that you can get results? Well, can you do it for yourself?

Have you done it for yourself or are you ahead of them or have you done more of the process than them? So this is the question of, can I help them get results?

And if you don’t or you aren’t able to answer this question, I think you may need to reconsider getting a bit more experienced so that, you know, you can at least have the success of yourself before you go off and start helping clients.

So can you help these group of people get results? And think of it in terms of, okay, I always use the health niche because it’s, I used to be in the health niche, so, I’m very familiar with it, but it could be like, if I’m a personal trainer, I may not want to work with a certain group of people who I know I just can’t help.

So for example, as a personal trainer, I may not be able to help people who are morbidly obese. That’s just not within my remit of people that I know I can actually help them get results. I prefer to work with teenagers or I prefer to work with working women who I can, I know I can absolutely deliver the results that they can, if they follow my process, get what I say they will get.

So can you help them get results? This is the criteria for helping you narrow down your niche. This is really important as well. And the most important, and definitely not the least of the questions you need to ask yourself is can they afford to pay?

When I was in the health and fitness space, I remember I was really young in my early twenties and I wanted to help change the world. And I was like, I’m going to help unemployed, depressed, overweight people be their best selves, get back into fitness and help them change the world.

What was wrong with that? Unemployed. Can’t afford to pay me. That’s really not an ideal scenario. Can the group of people who you want to serve, pay you because you’re in business, my friend, and if you’re in business, you need to be making money.

That’s very important. They need to afford. They need to be able to afford to pay you. And I think this becomes a little bit tricky where you could be targeting a group within the niche who may not directly be able to afford to pay you but their parents might, or someone else might, but that’s really hard because then you’re convincing not just them, but then someone else.

Then they’ve got to go convince someone else to hand over the money. So you’ve got this extra layer. It’s much easier if you can get to this group of people who can take out their wallet and afford to pay you.

That’s super important, super, super important that they can afford to pay you. Now, this framework and these questions that you’re seeing here, I have to give credit where credit’s due. I saw this framework from the coach Taki Moore, and I absolutely loved it.

It was the best in my opinion niche framework that I’ve seen in all of my years, like working online in business. And when I saw it, I was so excited and I was like, I just have to teach it. This is the one that I want to teach, because it made the most sense to me.

Let’s see how it all comes together now, right? I asked you all of the questions, right? What you want to do is to put them on a piece of paper across the top of a page, and you want to write it out? Who can I help? Do I like them?

Can I get them results? And can they afford to pay? And then on the other side of the page, you want to write down all of the different groups of people who you are interested in working with, and then you narrow it down.

You need to go across and make sure that there’s a green tick in each of the columns. Right? And this is how you bring it down. This is how you bring it down. If there’s a red cross in any of them, then it’s no bueno.

You don’t go with them. If you’re down to two, so let’s just say you’re down to, whether you work with knitters or you work with people who are in the cross stitch and both of them have green ticks, then what can you do to choose between those two niches?

I say flip a coin. Heads is knitters. Tails is, cross-stitch. Throw it in the air, when it’s in the air the one that you want to land on wanted to land on, that’s the one that you go with. That’s the one that you got excited about that you wanted. Go for that one.

This is my little exercise to walk you through how to narrow down on your niche. Super, super easy exercise, but incredibly powerful. I hope that you enjoyed the exercise on how to find your niche. The questions that I asked you to ask yourself in order to narrow down on your niche and to uncover who your niches are, who can I help?

And you’re asking yourself, what questions can I solve? Do I like them? Are you actually going to enjoy working with them? Can I get them results? Right? So you’ve either been able to get results for yourself, or you’ve been able to get results for clients like them.

Can they afford to pay? Super important. There’s no point in going after a segment of the market who can’t afford to pay you, that’s a disaster. And then go through the exercise of writing down all of the groups that you want to go after and make sure that you see green ticks across all of the questions and that’s the one that you want to go after.

One last thing before I go, I created this podcast as a reminder that you are not alone in this. Growing with video is hard and I want to be here to help and guide you and others through it.

If you found this podcast episode helpful, please leave a review. This helps apple and the algorithms put my podcast in front of more people just like you. I’d be incredibly grateful. Thanks for listening.