Why picking your Niche is the wrong first step.

byJKWardell

119 followers

Updated 8 years ago

It isn't anyone's fault for teaching the first step after setting your goals is to find your niche. That is just how it first got taught and continues to be taught.

Facts are if you want to find complete success, you must get out of obscurity. Picking a niche and working within that niche will not get you out of obscurity. It also will not allow you to expand and grow, you will pretty much flat-line in your potential.

You need to brand.

Now branding isn't a company logo, the niche you are in, or even the service or products you can provide.

To brand is to say what you want to be known for.

So what do you want to be known for? What do you want people to pull up if they do a search on you (what should they learn about what you do)?

Once you are able to answer that question you can get started with branding for true success.

Steps of branding:

1. What do you want to be known for?
2. Create your social accounts: Twitter, Facebook, G+, Pinterest, Instagram, Youtube, and even Linkedin (there is some leverage with it)
3. Keep your profile images and any headline images consistent through out
4. Get personal with your about details, not too personal, but enough that it tells your story and allows people to see why you want to be known for xyz
5. Twitter has some nice tactics you can do for your about which is a bit different for the other sites. You can see mine as an example: @jk_wardell
6. When branding and working to get out of obscurity you want to do a 90/10 or even a 95/5 posting rule. Meaning you post 90-95% value and then 10-5% self promotion. Once you start picking up speed and people are coming to you to connect you can switch it to 80/20.

How to approach niches:

Approaching an niche shouldn't be about what field you want to get into and talk about. Instead approach it as you looking at a niche as a target audience, not as a field to go into.

So say you want to get into work from home online, and be known for helping people find the program that works best for them and succeeding with it. Most would teach you to jump into that niche, this is only partially accurate. You want to target that niche as an audience, but you could also target: make money online, stay at home parents, mlm, network marketing, IM, and even affiliate marketing.

See now why treating it as target audiences is better for your potential success, doesn't box you in, and it allows you to grow and expand on your impact of your brand.

So here is a better setup of the steps you should take when first getting started or trying to restart on the right foot:

1. figure out your brand
2. set your why core (this is the fire that drives you to reaching any goals and it will never change)
3. set your goals and 10x them (meaning if you want to make 1k a month set it for 5k a month it causes you to work harder)
4. decide your target audiences (niches) that you want to work with
5. stay constantly present on social media (it will help get you out of obscurity)
6. blog, but when you do don't write for the searches write for your audience. The reason for this is that SEO is good, but no matter Google's changes what has never changed is content, bounce rate, and time spent on the site as what Google has always looked at.
7. Don't give up, even when it feels like you will never make money keep going. It isn't a quick pay off. Getting out of obscurity takes time, but it builds a trust relationship and builds you as an authority thus making people feel comfortable purchasing something you recommend.

To help get you working on a plan out of obscurity, here is a step action plan:

1. Write an article or blog on a chosen topic related to your industry (brand + target audiences (niches) write like you are talking to them).
2. Create a video discussing that topic for YouTube.
3. Host a Podcast or Live Stream with Periscope (utilize katch.me, to save your periscopes) discussing the topic.
4. Create a custom content e-mail and blast it to your network (even if you don't have a list act like you do and write yourself a followup message, this helps to get a followup sequence in automation for you).
5. Rinse & Repeat

It took me almost eight years to get out of the bad habits that an area in IM niche teaches and approach online as a brand rather than a niche. It has really started to pay off and that is why I want to be known for empowering the average joe to find online success. Now do I always do the action plan above myself, no. Do I need to start being stricter with myself on it, yes.

I hope that you were able to pick up some good information from this article and are able to take on the take action mindset and just do attitude by implementing it. As the key to success is what you want to be known for (brand), getting out of obscurity, utilizing your target audiences (niches), and opening up the ability for you to expand and grow on all that.