How Having a Niche Helped The First 10 Months of My Online Business
If your online business journey has been anything like mine, you have encountered the common question: “what is your niche?” along the way.
We have all heard that having a niche for your business is extremely important. It makes you narrow down to whom you are marketing to and it increases your chances of attracting your ideal client.
Honestly, I was only of the lucky ones that did not struggle in finding a niche for my business. It was more like my niche found me, rather than the other way around. You see, I studied design in college, and once I graduated I followed my passion for health and pursued my certification as a health coach at the Institute for Integrative Nutrition (IIN). While studying at IIN, I designed my own logo, website, business cards, and my IIN friends asked me to design their websites and branding as well. It was then and there that I realized my business path: I wasn’t going to be a health coach, but instead a designer FOR health coaches.
When I started to pursue this idea and started to develop my online business plan, I did think of potentially broadening my niche to include any small business owner that needed branding and website design services. I did get worried for a bit that if I narrowed down to only working with health coaches that I would be neglecting a big portion of the human population. But I had heard SO MANY TIMES from other entrepreneurs and mentors that having a niche is the best thing you could do for your business that I decided to go ahead and give it a shot.
I decided to call my niche “wellpreneurs” (wellness entrepreneurs). It felt comfortable since this way I wasn’t only targeting health coaches specifically, but any entrepreneur that worked in the wellness field (heath & life coaches, massage therapists, yoga teachers, healers, …).
So with my wellpreneur niche figured out and locked in, I started my business 10 months ago, launched my website, Instagram, Facebook, and Youtube accounts, and this is what happened:
1. My clients are finding me without me having to do paid marketing
This has been the best takeaway for me with having my business narrowed down to a specific niche.
This is what happens: let’s say there is a health coach looking for a website designer. She goes to google and types in “website designers” and she is shown pages and pages with options for great website designers (which probably feels quite overwhelming). So she decides to narrow down her search and googles “website designers for health coaches”. Her search results now go from thousands to probably only a handful of designers.
So instead of competing with the large world of talented designers out there, my competition is now maybe only 3-7 other designers that work exclusively with wellness entrepreneurs. Much better odds right?!
Since my competition isn’t so big, I don’t have to do any paid marketing to make myself pop out. I am coming up on Google and Instagram hashtag searches organically. Of course, I do think paid marketing can be extremely helpful and successful and I do plan on giving it a go in the near future for a few new projects I have coming up, but it has been nice to not have needed it during these first 10 months of my online business.
2. I am only working with my dream client
Since I have my niche so clearly defined in my mind, all of my material/branding/marketing/copy on my website, Instagram posts, Youtube videos are all targeted towards that niche, therefore I am primarily only attracting my ideal client.
My website visitors and Instagram followers are so clear that my content and services are targeted for wellpreneurs that mostly only wellpreneurs reach out to me for design services (and most of those are health coaches).
Conclusion: all I have to do is to be myself, share my work and my passion for wellness, create material and content for the wellpreneur community, and my ideal clients are coming to me.
3. I started to become an expert in my niche
Life has taught me that the more you do one thing, the better you get at it.
And by working on design projects with many wellness entrepreneurs, I began to learn and understand what my clients need. For example:
They want a calendar on their website for potential clients to schedule free consultations with them.
They want an opt-in pop-up to grow their newsletter and share some free goodies with their audience.
They want a blog section to share recipes and wellness tips
They want password-protected pages with forms to send to their clients
They want to come across as inviting, professional, and warm
With every client I learned something new and was able to refine my business strategy more and more, which gives me the confidence to offer a better service to every new client I have the opportunity to work with.
4. My niche did not limit me from getting clients in other niches
I know what you are thinking… isn’t a niche going to keep me from working with other people?! From my experience, NO.
So even though everything I do is for and marketed towards wellpreneurs, I do still end up getting clients in other niches. For example, I have just recently worked with a clothing brand in redesigning their logo, and a videographer in creating his branding and website.
These clients that are not part of my targeted niche are finding me through either recommendations, references, in person networking, or they are old friends/family friends. And even though they are not wellpreneurs, I almost never say no do these “non-niche” projects because they help respark my creativity and learn things I wouldn’t have learned if I was only working in my niche.
Do you have a niche?
So there you have it. These are the 4 ways my business has benefited from having a niche. Now I am curious if you have experienced the same thing. Share in the comments:
Do you have a clearly defined niche for your business?
What benefits have you experienced in having a niche?
If you have not yet found your niche, are there any niches you have been thinking of committing with?
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