What is a Niche?

I talk a lot about what a niche is and I think that there is a lot of misunderstanding around that as well that I would like to help clear up here.

There are a lot of folks who think that a niche has to be an industry.

So for example, as a web designer he only work with lawyers. Or as a web developer, she only works with doctors.

And because you don’t want to work within those niches that you can not have a niche.

Which is simply not the case.

So let’s define it.

What is a niche?

I define a niche as a targeted audience that you can clearly define who it is that immediately the person reading your site or hearing you talk will immediately say whether that’s them or not.

Of course if you talking about a specific industry or location or technology, it makes your job easier. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t have a niche in professional female business owners who are based just located outside the Boston metropolitan area. (and yes, that’s a niche someone has defined for their business).

The key is to define it so clearly that there is no question of what it is.

The biggest problem when defining a niche

In my experience with freelancers looking to niche down, they often say things like “my niche is small business owners who use WordPress and want to growth their businesses and not spend their days running a website” or something to that effect.

And while that’s great, but I would challenge that is not a niche since WordPress is about 30% of the web and every small business wants to grow.

It’s just not specific enough.

It’s fine to have the industry or technology as a part of the criteria in defining a niche, but it’s not enough to narrow the focus.

How to define your niche

It has to be about them, not you.

What I mean by that is when you are working through what your niche is, you have to think about the individual and what they are looking to achieve.

What is it that they do each and every day and ultimately what are they trying to accomplish with their business and life to be quite honest.

The reason for this is simple. This is how they are going to define themselves.

So if you say something like “We help technically savvy businesses increase sales.”

Well who isn’t going to identify themselves as savvy? As we both know, not everyone is technically savvy and your definition of savvy is different than theirs.

You want to get at the heart of defining your niche by how your niche defines themselves.

If you think you are specific, then I challenge you to spend even more time getting specific, because you are not done.

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