Nail Your Niche: 6 Steps to the Perfect Target Audience

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Struggling to find the right business niche for the stuff you sell online? These 6 niche marketing ideas will help you nail it!

I heard an amazing statement the other day from a 7-Figure internet marketer.

She said that in her online marketing efforts: “I’m looking for people who are looking for me.”

The reality is that, as a freelancer, solopreneur, coach, or consultant, you are looking for target customers who are looking for you.

And, at any given time, there are thousands of people out there who are looking for just what you’re offering. And, they’re willing to pay for your product or service, in order to get it.

The key to putting yourself in front of these people is to create your own highly targeted niche.

See also:

• 7 Secrets to Being Irresistible to Your Target Market
• 3 Insanely Simple Steps to Build a Loyal Audience
• 5 Simple Ways to Build Rapport in One Sentence

1. Understand The 3 Core Markets

Russell Brunson describes that the first step in creating your own niche is to understand the 3 core markets. The truth is that everything you may ever think about selling fits into 1 of just 3 markets.

These core markets are:

1. Health
2. Wealth
3. Relationships

It doesn’t matter what your product or service is, it fits into one of these three.

Each of these 3 core markets has many, many submarkets.

For example, the Health core market may have submarkets such as:

1. Diet
2. Weight Loss
3. Wellbeing
4. Lifestyle
5. Strength Training

The Wealth core market may have submarkets like:

1. Investing
2. Business
3. Entrepreneurship
4. Marketing

And, the Relationships core market may have submarkets similar to:

1. Dating Advice
2. Parenting Advice
3. Marriage Advice
4. Religious Advice (Relationship with God)

As you can see, these are just a few examples of submarkets. In reality, you may be able to identify hundreds, or even thousands of submarkets for each of the 3 core markets.

The first thing you want to do is to identify which submarket your area of expertise fits into.

2. Create (NOT Find) Your Niche

Now, even though it’s important to identify your submarket, that’s not where you’ll find your target customers. Submarkets are still too broad. Marketers often say, “the riches are in the niches.” So, you need to think in terms of your own niche.

Niches fit a pattern like this:

Core Market -> Submarket -> Niche

So, you might identify some niches that look like these:

1. Health -> nutrition -> high-fat diets
2. Wealth -> real estate -> flipping houses on Ebay
3. Relationships -> parenting -> dealing with teenagers

Your Blue Ocean Niche

Some niches are very broad and some are narrow and laser targeted. And, some niches have many marketers selling products in them already. These are often called “red ocean” niches, since they already have a whole lot of sharks in them feeding on a small pool of fish.

Your key is to create a new niche. One where there are very few sharks. Those are called “blue ocean” niches.

You create your niche by adding additional qualifiers to it.

For example, in the case of the niche, Relationships -> parenting -> dealing with teenagers, you may create your own niche, such as, “dealing with teenagers suffering from smartphone addiction”.

You can also find where two completely different niches (even in different core markets) intersect. Consider these two niches:

1. Health -> lifestyle -> digital nomad lifestyle
2. Wealth -> online marketing -> affiliate marketing

In this case, you can create a new niche such as this, “affiliate marketing for GenX’ers who want to be digital nomads”.

Questions To Test Your Niche

Once you have identified a niche that you potentially want to serve, you want to make sure that it can be a profitable niche.

Start by taking a step back and looking at your submarket. Think of creating a new niche as kinda like creating a new pond. You will be inviting fish from the bigger pond (submarket) to come live in your new pond (your niche). So, you need to understand the fish in the bigger pond.

You do this by asking yourself these three, key questions.

1. Would People In The Submarket Be Excited About The New Opportunity I’m Presenting In My Niche?

First, are YOU passionate about your new opportunity? Do you talk about it with your friends and family and sometimes even strangers? That’s a good start.

Now, are people in your submarket potentially just as passionate? If they were to catch the same vision that you have of your new opportunity, would they get just as excited and talk about it with their friends and family and sometimes even strangers?

If not, then your niche won’t be a profitable niche.

2. Are The People In This Market Irrationally Passionate?

Do they have communities, such as online forums or Facebook groups? Do they have their own vocabulary or jargon? Do they hold their own events? Are there other experts in this niche? You don’t want to jump into a red ocean, but you also don’t want to be the very first expert in a blue ocean.

3. Are These People WILLING and ABLE To Spend Money On A Solution?

This is a two-part question.

First, people are only willing to spend money if they have a strong, irrational desire to change. AND they need to be convinced that spending money is the only way to get that change.

Second, they need to be able to spend money. This typically means that they have a credit card and enough disposable income that purchasing your new opportunity is even feasible.

If you can answer “yes” to all three of these questions, you’re ready to move on to the next step.

3. Find Where Your Niche Hangs Out

In Question 2 of Step 2, you confirmed that the people in your potential niche have communities, vocabulary, events, and even other experts.

Now, you want to go and make a detailed examination of all the places where your potential niche hangs out online. This is important, because these hangouts are where you’ll put yourself and your message in front of your potential customers. So, the more hangouts you can identify, the easier it will be to attract people into your niche.

Here are some examples of the types of places to look for:

1. Online forums
2. Social media groups (Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter Lists)
3. Hashtags (Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest)
4. Experts’ fan pages
5. Blogs
6. Email lists
7. Search keywords on Google or Bing

Be as comprehensive as you can in identifying all the places where people in your potential niche hang out.

Start hanging out in all these places. While you’re there, watch, listen, and engage. Find the answers to these questions.

1. What are the topics in their conversation threads?
2. What questions do they ask over and over?
3. What seems to be the big block, or THE WALL, that they are all struggling to overcome?

4. Describe Your Niche’s Customer Avatars

When you watch, listen, and engage with your the people who make up your potential niche, you’ll begin to learn quite a bit about them. After a while, you’ll be able to create a pretty accurate description of your potential customer. We call this description a customer avatar.

Write a description of your ideal male customer and a separate description of your ideal female customer. Answer these questions in your written description.

1. How old are they?
2. Where do they work? What do they do?
3. What is their income level?
4. What kinds of interests do they have? Personal and business?
5. What are some of their struggles or pain points?
6. What kinds of obstacles or objections might they have?
7. What are their habits, likes, and dislikes?
8. What motivates them?

When identifying your target audience, focus on what they WANT, not what they NEED. People are overwhelmingly more likely to invest in what they WANT than in what they NEED.

5. Build Your Niche’s NEW Opportunity

Once you know the WALL that your target market faces, you can design a product that will help them break through that wall.

Give them what they want first, before teaching them what they need.

There’s one key thing that your target market does NOT want.

Your target market doesn’t want improvement.

They don’t want to fix what’s not working. Instead, they want to replace what’s not working with something altogether new and better.

A NEW Opportunity For Your Niche

You want to give your target market a new opportunity to radically change their status for the better.

On the flip side, your target market’s biggest fear will be that if they try your new opportunity and it doesn’t work, they will suffer a radical decrease in status.

You must address both in your product offering to your target market.

Then, when you create and promote your product, you simply address two things:

1. What is the RESULT you want for your people?

2. And, what is the VEHICLE (product or process) you are going to take them through to get that result?

6. Define The BIG DOMINO

Have you ever set up a line of dominos, just so you can tap one of them and watch all the rest of them fall down, one after the other?

In fact, you can set up some pretty intricate patterns of dominos. And, by knocking just one of the dominos down, all the rest of them fall over as well.

Well, the same is true of your target customers.

They all have ONE THING which, once they believe it, it will knock down all the rest of their fears or objections and will either solve them or make them completely irrelevant.

This ONE THING is often called the BIG DOMINO.

Write Your Niche’s Big Domino

It is critical to understand your niche’s BIG DOMINO. Once you do, you can tailor all your tweets, blog posts, email messages, and every other form of communication toward addressing it.

In addition, with your communications focused on it, every message will resonate highly with your target audience.

You can think of a BIG DOMINO as taking the form of a statement like this.

If I can make people believe that (my new opportunity) is / are key to (what they desire most) and is / are only attainable through (my specific vehicle), then all other objections and concerns become irrelevant and they have to give me money.

Here’s an example:

“If I can make people believe that building an engaged, highly targeted email list is key to their being able to make money online, and in today’s world of drastically changing email dynamics is only attainable through the secret process I outline in the Ignite My Tweets course, then all other objections and concerns become irrelevant and they have to give me money.”

So, grab a sheet of paper and start thinking about your target audience’s BIG DOMINO. Then write it out as I described.

The Payoff

As you can see, even though this blog post is pretty meaty, it really just scratches the surface of creating your perfect niche. If you want to take a deeper dive into this process, you’ll probably want to check out pages 5–90 of the book, Expert Secrets, by Russell Brunson. It will take you much deeper into the psychology of creating a mass movement, a tribe, and a cause.

But, even so, this blog post gives you enough information to get started. And when you create your perfect niche, you can build an audience of people who fall in love with YOU and want to BUY everything you sell!

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