The Step by Step Guide to Finding Your Niche

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

You’ve probably heard that to be successful you need to find your niche. Well, that’s all well and good. The question is how? Finding your niche or your target market or your avatar seems quite overwhelming when you are first starting out. To be truthful, it took me years to figure it out even though I had good advice.

Definitions

Let’s look at a few definitions to start and keep in mind my interest is in blogging. The first 3 definitions are from Wikipedia.org and the last one from an article called Who Is Your Avatar?

• Niche blog – a blog focused on a niche market
• Niche market –  a focused, targetable portion (subset) of a market sector
• Target market – a group of customers towards which a business has decided to aim its marketing efforts and ultimately its merchandise
• Avatar – a person (singular) who embodies your ideal audience member and/or customer. They are the person who you are creating your business, your content, your services and your products for.

Okay, so you want to write a blog. Are you writing just for fun or do you intend to create an income through blogging? Either way, what it comes down to is this. When you are writing a blog, you need to know who is your audience? Who will be reading what you write? What do they like? What are their problems? What solutions can you offer?

Let’s Pretend

You are someone’s avatar. They have to figure out how to reach you. The exercise below will help you figure out what they see, amongst other things. Give it a try.

In fact, stop reading this. Go get some paper and a pen. When you come back and are ready to write, then continue.

Write down the first question and then start writing. Don’t stop until you know the answer is complete.

Then and only then do you go to question number 2, then 3, and finally 4. That’s the only way this will truly work for you.

Finding Your Avatar Questionnaire

1. What are you passionate about? What would you rather do instead of sleeping or eating? What do you enjoy doing so much that the time literally seems to fly by?

2. What things have you accomplished in your life? It may be as simple as completely a hike you never though you could. It can be as complex as being a world renown brain surgeon.

3. What can you teach others? The can be telling the story of how you completed that hike or the training necessary to be a brain surgeon. It could even be how to make your grandmother’s favorite recipe.

4. Lastly, what is different about what you have to offer? What do you see that others seemed to have missed? Do you have a solution for something that is quicker or more proficient?

What did you learn about yourself?

I learned that I am passionate about my family, about creatively helping others, and playing games which I used as a coping mechanism when my husband died. I have accomplished many things in my 62 years of experiencing this life thus far and I love to help others in meaningful ways. I am now the Grandma on the Go. So what do I have to offer? Well, quite frankly, a hell of a lot.

My niche and your niche are essentially the same. Our niche is our avatar is ourselves. We are our target market.

We know ourselves better than anyone else (with the exception of our blind spots).

So we write to ourselves, or rather the avatar of ourselves. We write for the people who are like us. We attract people who like what we authentically do and say. People can tell when you are just faking it.

So while my niche is grandmas, yours might be golfing, or aeronautics, or thermonuclear reactions, or single parenting or game playing. Your niche is the people like you who generally like what you like or who have had similar experiences. They want to hear how you have already solved a problem they are going through now. They want to hear your perspective.

How Can You Apply This?

Once you find your niche, it’s time to start writing to your audience. Tell your stories and ask for feedback.

Join syndication groups like we have with the Superwomen Connection and others in our blogging community. (Ask me for an invite.) What’s syndication? That’s another blog idea for sure. Basically it’s a means of getting your blog seen by more readers.

The most important aspect here is using your avatar to write to your niche. Then LISTEN to what they are saying. Answer their questions. Be open and honest and transparent and do it all with joy. This is getting fun!

If you haven’t yet found your blogging home (you know, your home on the internet), one which can provide you with incredible support and training, I invite you to check out ours. Check out the Truth vs. the Hype where Dave Wood will show it to you.

What value do you have to offer?

Let me know in the comment section below.