Do You Need a Niche?

I have asked this question so many times to so many “gurus” and “coaches.” Do you NEED a niche?

At one time, I would have said, “No way!”

Sure, it makes life a little harder, but who cares about a dumb niche.

Niches are for suckers.

…

Now, though…I have changed my tune.

I had it explained to me this way, “Your niche helps attract the main bulk of your clients you WANT to work with…but that doesn’t mean you can ONLY work with those clients.”

Cue the angels, open up the clouds, and let those sunbeams shine down upon me! I was having a revelation!

Do You Need a Niche? Yes!

Ultimately, whether you are an author, freelancer, or business owner, you need to have a target audience, which is all a niche really is.

This will be the bulk of the people you are trying to reach out to and work with. So, yeah, it makes sense to be able to definitively say, “I am a freelance writer helping small-to-medium sized businesses share their story with their written content.”

(Hey, that’s what I do!)

If a small-to-medium sized business who needs help sharing their story with their written content comes along and sees what I do they are gonna think, “Hot dang! This person is doing exactly what we are looking for!”

Wham-bam our worlds collide and we mutually help each other out.

Amazing.

Now, imagine that I refused to have a niche and instead just ran around saying, “I forge stories, whether for a person, a brand, or a business through blog posts.”

Are all those things true? Yes.

Do they give you any idea what I really do? No.

Could they still want to talk to me? Maybe!

Do You Need a Niche? No!

Now, it is only fair if I take a minute to talk about the opposite approach.

Do you need a niche? No way! Just reach out to potential clients and tell them what you do and if you are a match, then who cares?

That is true.

You can still have plenty of clients and help plenty of people by reaching out to people you want to help and go from there. That is going to take a lot of work, though. Plus, you will only ever get clients if you are going after them.

It is possible. Don’t get me wrong.

I have made the mistake of not being specific enough and it has made the process of finding people to help incredibly difficult. I don’t recommend it.

How Do You Find a Niche?

Now, a crash course on finding a niche!

Pretty simple process.

Write down a list of these three things: what are you good at?, what do you love to do?, and what are you experienced in?

Once you have exhausted all the ideas for those three things (and maybe keep it to things that fit within what you are already doing to make money or things that can make money), then it is the process of finding the common things that exist across all three categories.

From there, keep narrowing it down until you have a niche you are interested in making your primary target audience.

Best of luck, friends! You got this!