I have to admit that I’m guilty of being too afraid to choose a niche market.  From the very start, my business coach had stressed over and over again, the importance and necessity of narrowing down my target market.

I would listen and think:  yah, yah, I will do that later - right now I want and need to make some money so I’ll just offer up everything to everybody.

My thinking was that I could start “specializing” once I got well known and gained credibility.  Well, I have to tell you, that didn’t work so well.  Guess what?  By trying to reach everyone, I reached no-one.  “I told you so”, kept ringing in my head!

It’s pretty hard to gain exposure, credibility and thus customers and sales, when the number of people I was trying to reach was so huge (remember, I tried to go for EVERYONE) that:

1)  I didn’t have enough money to market to them all

2)  I couldn’t choose the “best” ways to market to them and reach them because how do I pick which forum, magazine, association, newspaper, trade paper, conference, tradeshow, etc. to use - when there’s hundreds of thousands of different ways to get at the whole world?

3)  I wasn’t able to be really clear in my marketing messages and materials about who I was “talking” to because they’re all so different - so therefore no-one knew if I’m talking to them or not!

4)  I burnt myself out because I was running around like a chicken with my head cut-off trying to be everything to everyone

5)  people had a hard time referring possible customers to me, because they realized they didn’t have a clue about what kinds of customers I work with

6)  I couldn’t figure out what kind of products to create because I could choose from about 50,000 different topics…because, ya’ know I’m going help e-v-e-r-y-o-n-e

Despite all the problems I ran into, it still just seems to go against common sense and whatever business sense I’ve got rattling around in my head - that I will be more successful, the “smaller” area I play in.

So, I’ve decided to quit listening to my common sense (at least on this one issue) and listen to my coach (otherwise, why pay her the big bucks?!) and start thinking about niches that I can really serve well, efficiently, affordably and have fun doing it.  

Okay, so now I’ve learned my lesson - I’m appealing to small business owners, such as me and you. Of course as soon as I was bragging to my coach that I chose a niche, she’s got me trying to pick even smaller groups - yikes!  I’ll keep you posted.

Let me know of your adventures with niches - send me a comment back!