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The Ultimate Guide To Finding Your Coaching Niche

In the coaching world, everyone talks about finding your coaching niche.

But very rarely do I see anyone talking about it at length. Or even creating any content that helps everyone understand what it is.

So I have decided to create an in-depth guide which any new coach can read and use to find define their coaching niche.

Defining a coaching niche is one of the most important things that a coach must do.

Get this right and you will have a flourishing coaching business.

But if you don’t get it right, you’ll be struggling and begging for new coaching clients for your practice. Which would dishearten you to pursue your coaching dream?

So before we get further in it let’s understand what is it and how we can start defining your coaching niche.

What is a niche?

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As per Wikipedia,  “the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing. So the market niche defines the specific product features aimed at satisfying specific market needs…”

And that’s what we did with our business as well.

When we started our coaching business, we could have easily targeted to sell to people who are looking to start their own online business. Or we could even think about selling it to coaches, trainers, consultants and authors (which everyone in our market space was doing)

But when we started our coaching business at sai. Coach. We kept our targeting very sharp from day 1. We choose to stick to coaches only. The real reason why we decided to do that was that we understood the desires, dreams and hopes of coaches better than that of authors, consultants and trainers.

Keeping that in mind we stuck to only one target market, and that’s what we’ve been doing for quite some time.

And the results that we’ve been getting for our own business has been nothing short of impressive.

But that’s all about our business. My REAL goal here is to help with this guide and assist you in finding your coaching niche, and give you tons of examples along the way, and make you understand why it is important for you as a coach to do something like this.

Why Choosing a Niche is Important?

Choosing a niche is important for any coach who wants to capture a large portion of their target market. If you can do this well enough then making 10,000 dollars a month as a new coach becomes a doable task.

To do this, there are 2 usual ways which people follow:

1. Go broad and target everyone

Target everyone in the market & sell your coaching packages that appeal to everyone.

My tip: Don’t do it, you might make some money here and there but you won’t be able to build it into a thriving coaching business. If your goal is to build a 6 figure coaching business, then you won’t be able to do it by targeting everyone.

2. Competing in a new niche space (with little to no competitors):

Competing in a new niche space means creating a new market space, which doesn’t exist in the market, but you create it with testing and refining it yourself by working with your potential target clients.

Either you can figure this out yourself or with the help of a proven mentor who knows how to define and refine your coaching niche.

My tip: I would always recommend creating a new market space, and building your coaching practice in this space. Because this way you’ll have little to no competition, and building a coaching business this way will become an easy task as compared to the targeting everyone.

I feel that as a coach, this is the ideal space you should be in: Competing in a new niche space.

But that’s not all. That’s just one piece of the puzzle.

This will work well only if you have enough potential demand.

So if you can figure out a new niche space plus also ensure that there is enough demand for it, then you’ve hit the sweet spot.

So this is the formula that you should be looking out for….

SWEET SPOT = New niche + high potential demand

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So when you have

Good niching -> you’ll have Strong messaging

When you have Strong messaging -> you’ll have Strong Emotions

When you have Strong Emotions -> you’ll have Strong Action

When you have Strong Action -> you’ll have signups, trials, demos, Purchases, referrals

Why Should You Refine Your Coaching Niche?

I have seen so many new coaches who are just starting make the mistake of targeting everyone in their target market. The number of coaches doing this is unbelievable.

So let’s say if someone works with people who need help getting over breakups, they’ll end up targeting everyone as their potential client.

From a marketing standpoint, this is NOT the right place to be in.

If you do this your marketing message will be diluted and basically, you’re NOT appealing to anyone in the market.

After working with a lot of people, I have seen that in most cases people find it hard to figure out their coach niche, and I have personally faced that as well.

When you are really in the early phases, you just have a basic understanding of who your target market is. But over a period of time, you refine your target market and eventually build a persona from it.

I experienced it when I worked in the dating niche with my coaching company ‘Saifai dating’. What we did was, we ended up targeting everyone in the dating niche: men, women and gay people.

While immediately, it didn’t cause us any difficulties, but in the long run, it turned out to be a BIG problem for us only because we were trying to appeal to everyone in the market. This mistake cost us a lot of money in terms of advertising, joint venture partners, conversions. Even our sales calls weren’t converting at a very high percentage.

And you want to know how much did this mistake cost me?

More than $100,000.

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GOD, I was such an idiot back then.

We had very little money left to work with.

When I think about that time, I really think about what we could have done differently. The only thing that was required was to fix the positioning of our coaching business.

Finally, we rescued our dating coaching company after an intervention from one of our mentors who helped us drill down our niche. The moment we did that our business got stabilized and we were on track to making a 6 figure coaching business.

But I hope you get the idea from my mistake about the difference between going generic vs becoming specific.

But what’s the point of finding a coaching niche?

Let me explain this to you with the help of an example.

So let’s say we have a potential client right now by the name of James.

Now, James is someone who is looking to quit smoking and is looking for options to quit smoking through hypnotherapy.

So what James does is, he looks out for a quit smoking hypnotherapist, and he comes across 2 coaches: John and Jane.

But before I take you any further, let’s look at the coaching bios of both John and Jane.

Jane:
Is a quit smoking hypnotherapist.
Not famous
Works solely with smokers
Has a great track record
Specialization: Yes, in addressing the specific problem.

John:
Is a normal Hypnotherapist.
Best selling author
Works with all problems
Considered a leader in the hypnotherapy space.
Specialization: No, is a general hypnotherapist

Out of both these coaches, who do you think will James pick, and whose coaching packages is he more likely to buy?

Of course, he is going to pick Jane. Because Jane is a specialist and addresses his problems in a more specific manner. That’s why he can relate very strongly with her.

Even for advertising, It is almost certain that Jane’s conversions will be higher, and her customer acquisition cost will be cheaper.

Everything, in the long run, will convert more and cost her less.

That’s the whole benefit of niching. Niching allows you to directly speak to your clients in a language they can understand.

My personal story about niching…

When we started running Saifai dating, which was my first coaching business, we targeted everyone and were very generic in our approach. We ended up including men, women and gay people in our marketing campaigns.

Not that we intentionally did this. But that’s the best we knew back then.

We did all this because we believed that targeting more people will be better for our business and they will bring us more business.

Unfortunately, we were wrong.

We ended up blowing our money at a very rapid pace and as a result, our seminars couldn’t lead to anything and we weren’t closing well on ads.

We couldn’t figure out what exactly was going wrong in our business.

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But, after an intervention from one of my mentors, Adam Davis, we started to shift our marketing and positioning. We started to focus on the people in the age group of 23-26 who wanted to have a girlfriend.

So we repositioned everything around our brand, coaching packages, boot camps, mastermind and intensives. To fit the persona of our target audience.

We positioned our flagship program around this and made our proposition unique by helping our coaching clients find a girlfriend.

Once we did that, everything started to fall into place.

I am not telling you all this to impress you, but to stress on the fact that if you have figured out your coaching niche properly, you won’t have to struggle as much to build your business.

Because not niching has a lot of implications.

Your JV partners will find you too generic.

Your ads won’t have good Click through rates.

In fact, the whole process of automating your coaching business will be a very hard uphill climb on a slippery slope.

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But selecting the right niche is going to help you a lot.

Don’t make the mistake that other coaches are making. Rectify the issue and grow your coaching into a business that makes $10,000 a month right from the first month itself.

If I had to give one advice to all new coaches who are starting out, I’d suggest all of you spend as much time as you can or get some professional help to figure out and test your niche.

You can also book in a call with one of our specialists who can really help you out. You will be given an opportunity to book that call after watching my webinar here.

Top Mistakes Coaches Make while Choosing Their Niche

Many coaches make mistakes when it comes to finding and refining their coaching niche. Some of the top mistakes that they make are….

1) Going too broad:

Going broad is a very common mistake that I see in a lot of new coaches.
Trying to appealing to everyone in your target market is the fastest way to burn your coaching business to death.

Let me explain this to you with an example based on my personal experience.

You already know my dating company story, of how we burned a lot of money and finally rescued it and made it into a flourishing business.

Our biggest mistake from burning close to $100k was that we were targeting everyone. But then we learnt our lessons and made everything work nicely after niching our brand.

At times I have found it hard to explain it to others as to what exactly niching is, and how can anyone learn on their own.

But, then I read this book Blue Ocean Strategy, and then it all started making sense to me about what positioning is and how anyone should go about it dealing with it.

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Blue Ocean Strategy – the best book on how to plan and position your products and services

What the author, W. Chan Kim goes onto say, is that whenever you are building a product or service, there are 2 concepts, one is blue ocean strategy and the other one is red ocean strategy.

He refers to the uncontested market space with no competition as Blue ocean. As a business that’s the best place to start and deliver your services where there is little to no competition.

To markets where there is a lot of competition and products, he refers to as the red ocean. It signifies the blood of the rivalling companies or products which have been killed by the competition.

So, whenever you want to start your coaching business you should be in a space where you aspire to deliver your products and services in an uncontested market. To avoid competing with dozens and dozens of other coaches who are already winning in the market.

2) Focusing on passion:

Now, a lot of gurus and top coaches out there advocate the idea of following your passion and just sticking to it, which will supposedly lead you to conquer the world.

In my opinion that is a failed strategy.

For instance, if you are trying to be just another weight loss coach, chances are that the market won’t accept you because there are a ton of other coaches in the market which are already doing that. So maybe you might have to position yourself a bit better to drive more sales and clients to your business.

For example, Nagina Abdullah from Masala Body, positioned her business towards busy women who wanted to lose weight by not going to the gym, but by eating herbs and spices based food.

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So technically it’s the same thing but her positioning became unique and slowly she has won the market with her offering.

So ideally, when you’re starting a coaching business, you want to be looking at a mix of things that you are uniquely good at, which is a profitable market and low competition.

where our coaching niche should be diagram

3) Fake Coaching Niches:

I have been in the coaching industry for quite some time, and I have seen a lot of coaches make this kind of mistake. The mistake of using either really fancy terms or very vague ones that they think would appeal to their audience.

In reality, it doesn’t appeal to any subset of the market. Hence, they fail to lift off the coaching business properly.

Let show you a couple of popular ones…

  1. Coaching people to be happy
  2. Relationship coach
  3. Confidence coach
  4. Business coach
  5. Health and fitness coach
  6. Life Coach
  7. Self Coach
  8. Spiritual coach
  9. Helping people get unstuck

Now if you carefully look at all these coaching niches you’ll notice that there is one thing that’s common among all of them. They are very vague and don’t have any tangible outcome for the prospective buyer.

Like “relationship” could mean anything. Does it mean with men? Women? Or LGBTQ people?

I mean if you really look at it, it isn’t well-defined. So it makes it difficult to for the audience to feel connected to you and be motivated to buy your coaching products and services.

Let me show you a couple of examples so that you understand what powerful niches look like.

  1. Coaching gay men coming into their sexuality on embracing their new world.
  2. Coaching middle-aged women through breakups & divorce and how to come out powerful, sexy and alive.
  3. Coaching ordinary people to become extraordinary artists by unleashing their creativity.

And it’s not like you’ll be able to find your coaching niche right away. It takes time because you need to gather a lot of market feedback, and run a lot of one on one feedback sessions to get your niche fixed.

An alternative way to do this is to speak with an expert who will help you nail down your niche.

The Tangible Benefits of Finding Your Coaching Niche

a) Advertising Costs

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Ever since we have started our business, we have been relying heavily on paid online advertising to grow our business. With a special focus on Facebook & Google advertising. I have noticed that a lot of people who are competing with our business in the same coach niche.

But they are usually targeting coaches, authors, experts & publishers.

While everyone in the market is going broad by targeting coaching, authors, experts and publishers, we have been sticking to targeting coaches only. We figured that the pain points, benefits and desires of a coach are very different from an expert, publisher and author.

Hence the advertising copy, headline and photos would be different for all these three categories, which means that in a quest of trying to target 3-4 niches. I would not be able to address them properly because the ad material would not appeal to them.

So what happens is when you do targeting on Facebook and Google towards a specific interest group, and not go broad, your ads perform better. And Facebook and Google’s algorithm recognizes this very well.

So every dollar that you spend on advertising, it starts performing better and gives you more ROI.

Imagine had we been targeting coaches, authors, experts and publishers. We’d be paying more money for every ad and would be converting less.

So if you want to avoid increasing ad costs, it is wiser to target ONE group and try to appeal that one group in your advertising only.

b) Competition

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I think the best way to understand your competition is by reading the book Zero To One by Peter Theil.

Peter goes on to explain this concept in his saying “ competition is for losers “.

Although it appeals to the market of usual startup market but in the coaching world, it would mean that If you are looking to create lasting value and want to capture a large market share in your coaching niche.

Either you have to be a celebrity coach like Tony Robbins, T Harv Eker or Les Brown, which means that you have to have enough star power so that whichever target market you go to people will flock to your products/services.

And if you don’t have that, then you have to have a ton of money to blow up on getting more customers than your competition. Eventually, the business that is able the spend on getting a customer wins.

And as a beginner coach neither you have the star power nor do you have the money to blow up like big coaching business.

Hence competing with other established star coaches or coaching businesses is a waste of time and money.

If you step aside and create a category where you don’t compete with people of your niche and target a new subset of the market then you will have no competition. Becoming a go-to expert in the market will be an easy task.

For example, Sarah Jones, a dating coach, positioned herself uniquely with her brand, The Introverted Alpha, where she targets introverted shy, silicon valley engineer like successful men who want to meet and attract genuinely beautiful women in the most natural possible way.

Now, she could have gone broad and competed with thousands of dating coaches in the market. But she made a unique positioning proposition and that’s how she carved a niche and became a go-to expert in her target market.

All I am trying to show you here is that It is possible to step away from the masses and create your own unique brand proposition and win the market share in the most simple way.

c) Conversion

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Now when we were starting our business I started with targeting coaches, consultant and authors. Although I had no interest in doing that, I decided to test out the market and see how it would best work for us.

I did all the ads, on-page copy and website for it and structured everything in the best possible way to appeal to these 3 people:

a) Coaches
b) Authors
c) Consultants

But later we figured that our results were very poor and our whole funnel from website to webinar presentation wasn’t converting that well. It was at that moment where my mentor told me to prepare another funnel and target coaches alone and run ads specifically for them.

And to my surprise, the conversion of the whole funnel was 70% higher than the previous funnel.

My main point here is that when you target only one portion of the market and niche it down it might appear narrow to you as a business owner, but as a buyer, it is very appealing. That’s why the more precise you are in your niching down process, the better it will be for your traffic and conversion stages.

Because the business problems of a coach are very different from an author or a consultant. So it is better to target one area, and then go all in it

d) Business Development

Even from a business development standpoint, we have seen that when our team approaches other well-established coaches like Les Brown, Chris Howard and other biggies of the coaching world for joint ventures. They tend to pay more attention to us because of our sharp targeting.

They see that we are well defined as a business and that appeals to them and their audience more than anyone else, and hence they prefer working with us.

And that’s why when we do co-promotions with them with their audience, our emails, conversions, webinars and sales are very high.

Only because they like our message more than anyone else out there.

So a refined niche also helps in business development as well.

e) Word Of Mouth / Referral

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When you are able to figure out your coaching niche properly, you’ll see that your business will spread very fast in your target market. I have seen this time and again with our students who graduate from our accelerator program.

When your niche is precise and appealing to your coaching clients, they will share their success story with their friends or people who are looking for your type of coaching packages or solutions.

And every world class coach knows this by now that word of mouth/referral is the best type of marketing to have.

f) Go-to Expert or Subject Matter Expert

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Now let’s consider the example of Sarah, The introverted alpha dating coach (that I just mentioned on top). She operates in the men’s dating market.

Now if you know a bit about dating for men, you might know that there are lots of coaches covering the market from different angles. So she chose to target well-educated men who were shy and had high-end tech jobs or were consultants.

Initially, when she started coaching, she did small numbers like 3 students every weekend. Since she was the only person in her target market, she instantly became a go-to expert for shy men looking to date a high-quality woman or finding a girlfriend.

The point I am trying to make here is if you have a first-mover advantage and your niche your idea properly, you have the potential to become an authority in your niche and eventually you can dominate that niche.

g) Premium Pricing

Now, this is something I learnt with years of testing and working with our students in a ONE on ONE coaching basis. I realised that when you solve the pain points of your market in the most efficient way, people will start relating to you on a deeper level.

Once that happens, then people will start paying you a premium for your coaching packages. Even with our business at sai coaching, and the kind of work we do at our accelerator program, we charge 5-10X of what our competitors charge in the market.

And people pay us a premium price over others.

But an interesting question to ask is why do they buy our premium packages when they can buy things in the market as well at a cheaper price?

The answer is simple.

It’s the fact that our positioning is precise and out of all the competitors in the market, they relate to us the most because of our precise niching.

h) More Sales

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From the kind of work that I have done, I have realised that in the coaching space there are 2 types of sales strategies. One is ‘push’ and the other one is ‘pull’.

What I have found is when your positioning and niching is well-engineered, you don’t need to push your products to your customers. Most of the times people can relate to you on a deeper level hence they will come and find you on their own.

This is what call pull strategy. You’ll get a lot of sales, leads, customers and conversions in an inbound format.

When you are a well-targeted niche, the pull around your brand will be so strong that it will bring sales in a friction less manner.

The real reason why you might need to grow your coaching niche

For coaching, I would highly suggest starting in a no competition zone.

So when you start in a no competition zone, usually the market is not aware of you. So you need a lot of niche development (Also known as market awareness) by creating a lot of content and free material so that the right sort of coaching clients that pay you for your premium coaching packages start interacting with your brand.

Once they start knowing you, and you keep them engaged with your content, they will start trusting you. Once they start trusting you, they will start buying your products and services.

That’s why whenever we do this exercise of refining coaching niche in our accelerator program. We tell all our coaches to start creating content around your target market so that they start knowing about you.

So if you are in a no competition zone, growing and educating the target market is only going to add more advantage to your coaching business, and no one will attempt to compete with you in that coaching niche.

The real reason I am telling you this is because when we started in the coaching niche and working with coaches, we did a lot of free training, live events, webinars, and other types of marketing materials just to get our name out there with the right set of people.

And if I really look back it today, I can say that it has paid off. Because all our free content has helped us in establishing our authority on our coaching niche.

You can grow your target market by doing a lot of….

a) Videos

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You can do a lot of free youtube videos, Tutorials and how-to’s of growing your coaching space or just answering top queries of your target market in a video format. You can even learn how to create HQ youtube videos and get them on the top of Google by reading this blog post from Brian Dean.

b) Blogs

Blogging works really well. You must write a lot of authority content and blog posts that are Google-friendly and gets you a lot of consistent traffic. At our coaching business, we have been using this as a strategy at our business and in a short period of time, we have grown from a few hundred visitors on our blog to thousands of visitors.

I would encourage you to invest some time in writing high-quality content followed by SEO (as and when you get mature in your building your coaching business).

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Look at our traffic stats, now imagine an article that we wrote years back is stilling getting us consistent traffic to this date. This how powerful SEO based content writing is.

And we’ve been growing this every month, so much so, that currently we are driving close to $2000 worth of traffic for free every month by just writing HQ articles on our blog.

You can also do the same by learning how to blog and bring traffic to your business. Personally, I like this course by ahrefs called blogging for business.

c) Webinars

I have found the best tool to grow and sell high-end products and services is through video sales or webinars. Webinars are the best place to close high ticket sales and products that run anywhere between $2000 to $20,000 USD.

d) Public Relations

Public relations means the press interviews, magazine interviews, podcast and other types of press-related appearances that you do to build your brand out there.

The more you appear in the press, the more people start seeing you as a subject matter expert in that particular area of a field. And slowly they see you as a go-to guy for the subject area.

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If you want to understand more about this in-depth, I’d recommend you to check out some work of Selena Soo, who is the #1 expert on getting PR for businesses.

Why Should You Target Fewer People or Focus on a Smaller Market?

So whenever someone asks me about why should you target a smaller market. I always explain to them by telling the story of Anthony Robbins.

So when Anthony Robbins started. He didn’t start out as a life coach or doing the kind of work that he is doing these days. Like if you see him today, he sells workshops, info courses, books, seminars in almost every niche of personal development.

And over a period of time, he has amassed a lot of buyers for his offerings.

But what if I tell you that, Tony being the guy that he is didn’t start out that way.

You’d be surprised right?

So back then, when Tony started entering the scenes of personal development. He started out as a Phobia coach. All he did was help people in getting rid of their phobias and help them in getting a breakthrough with it.

He became really popular when he helped a woman in getting rid of her snake phobia on live national radio. The moment he resolved her fear, he became instantaneously popular amongst the phobia community.

And he became a go-to expert for curing phobias.

And as he kept working on his niche and helped more people, he slowly started growing in other niches as well, so much so that he has become the go-to-guy for anything that’s related to personal development.

I hope by hearing this story you’re able to get a hang of how important it is to target a smaller market space, why it’s so important to focus and specialize on them.

So starting small and targeting fewer people is very powerful if done right.

How to Choose Your Coaching Niche [Exercise]

Choosing a niche is simple exercise if you follow the right steps.

So in this section what you are going to find your hidden profitable expertise and map it out so that we can build a profitable coaching business around it.

But that’s not all. You’ll have to also know how to tear down good ideas from the bad ones. You’ll have to get a combination of your knowledge, skills and experiences that are 100% unique.

We do these kinds of exercises in our accelerator program within the first week on onboarding. A lot of times our students wonder, and question themselves, what are they good at? And why would someone pay premium pricing for their coaching services?

A lot of times what I have noticed is that people have immediate blockers when we tell them to comes up with ideas about their coaching niche and how they can position them in a better manner.

They usually come up with doubts like…

But I am not an expert at [abc] style of coaching.

I don’t know if the market is BIG enough.

I am not sure if someone can pay me that much money for a service like this

And That’s okay.

We can get that handled at the later stage, for now, let’s stick to the refining part of the niche and we’ll deal with those problems later on.

Follow the steps below

  • Figure out what exactly are you good at & put it down on paper.
  • Write down as many niches or potential target ideas you have; skills that you’ve acquired, the knowledge that you’ve acquired or challenges that you have overcome.

Quick tips that you need to remember while work on this:

  • Analyze what other people are struggling with
  • What do your friends always compliment you on?
  • What would you do if you had an extra 3 hours free every day?

Write down as many potential ideas/niches as you can

  • Any number between 10-20 is a good start.
  • Silence your inner critic: At this stage when you’re just trying to map a niche, no idea is bad at this stage. And it really doesn’t matter if you think other people wouldn’t pay for it- just follow the process and write it down.
  • What comes easily to you might be a crunchy valuable solution to someone else, and they are badly looking for someone to help them with it. And people like these don’t even mind paying a premium to resolve their issues.

Some potential coaching ideas from my own life:

1. Dating coaching for men: Since I have been a dating coach for a good part of my life, and I have the skills, challenges and strengths to make it work.

2. Relationship Coaching For Busy Entrepreneurs: Because I am in that phase of life.

3. Helping coaches in building businesses: What I am currently doing

4. Helping coaches in making more money using publicity: Since this is where we are really excelling these days when it comes to our coaching business.

Some Common Limiting Beliefs

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A lot of the times when we do the niching exercise with people at our accelerator program, we see a lot of coaches go through what we call limiting beliefs around their abilities.

A few common limiting beliefs are:

Credibility

But I don’t have the credentials to make it work. (We are in the brainstorming phase, credibility is something we can deal with for later on)

You don’t have to be an expert at your skill, you just have to be good enough to help and deliver results to others.

Being Attached with Your Niche

Warning: Please don’t fall in love with your coaching niche

A lot of times we see that coaches get too attached to their niches and they forget whether it is market perfect or not. And that’s where the problem begins. So a big caution here would be to trust the process and not fall in love with your idea and let the best coaching niche win here.

Why you shouldn’t be creating any coaching packages/products yet

  1. It’s risky: What if you spend weeks on creating content and nobody buys it?
  2. Its short term: Anyone can do this part. But evergreen world-class products always have a lot of upfront work, so that they don’t fail.

Don’t let this happen to you. Be prepared and work your way through it.

Read the article: How to sell high-end coaching packages

Questions to ask yourself to refine your coaching niche

1. What was your story to start getting into coaching?

Figure out the real reason why you wanted to get into coaching. What was your true inspiration to dive deep into it?

2. Do I have 3 inspiring success stories that I have gotten from my clients?

Dig out your 3 most inspiring success stories of your clients that can help you with backing your claims. They don’t need to be big, just the ones that can be inspiring.

3. What are the 5 values that you have found in your coaching which are the pillars of your coaching?

Ask yourself about the top 5 things you’ve discovered in your coaching. The values that you genuinely believe and you think defines you as a coach.

4. What is your natural gift/USP according to you as a coach?

Everyone has a natural gift that makes them unique It is just how we are. Think about the unique USP you have and how you can tap that into the market. (Unique selling point)

5. Which coaches are doing what you want to be doing with their businesses? (Don’t choose Authors who became coaches)

So now it’s time to look for competition. Do some research on your competition.

Ahhh now we are looking at your competitors. Tell us all about them. Tell us about the coaches who are doing the exact same things that you want to be doing with your business. We are focusing only on coaches, not authors who became coaches.

6. Which coaches are serving the audience that you want to serve? Who are their audiences?

Try to pin down an audience, and come up with a version of who might work best for you.

7. What issues in your life have you overcome, which the audience(s) in Question want to overcome?

This will help your audience in relating to you. Think about the issues you’ve had in your life and how you’ve overcome them and how you can explain them in a story format. This will help your audience in relating to you and they will like your journey and that is going to motivate them to buy from you.

This is a critical question because this will show how much that audience can relate to you. Be specific, and create your story.

8. Why do you as a Coach Matter?

Do not shy away, do not be modest. Be honest and be frank. Ask yourself why do you matter as a coach to your potential clients.

Now it’s time to choose your niche.

Time to choose your niche, look at question 6. Choose your audience, and be as specific as possible.

Where to Research for Your Coaching Niche

Google Search

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You can go to Google and use a keyword search tool and see what kind of data that shows up. It will point you to the top businesses, resources and people that are doing business within the radius of your target market.

Search for a lot of variations, and especially look for related searches to see what is working and what is not working, and base your research on it.

Amazon

If you see the reviews section on the products of Amazon, those are a good place to find valuable information related to your potential niche. The customers commenting down below will tell you exactly what is good and bad about the book of your target market author.

And using those nuggets you can use different concepts and ideas in your course content or positioning.

Go look at the top 5-10 best selling books and carefully study their material in the comments section and use those inputs in your coaching niche research.

Reddit and Quora

Go to Reddit and Quora and find the relevant areas and discussion threads and see if you can borrow any concepts or nuggets from there. Reddit and Quora are good places to find honest opinions and reviews from your potential target market.

Manual Interviews

Talking to people and manually interviewing them and finding out about their pain points is also a great way. People like your friends, family, online acquaintances and even strangers are good sources of feedback for your potential researches.

Remember: You’re not trying to sell anything here, you are just gathering data from all sources so that when you start defining your coaching niche you can have all the inputs from different angles and make sense of it.

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You can ask questions like:

What do you think about this? Did this ever cross your mind? How do you think about that?

What is the hardest part about [insert your term here]? Which part? And why does it feel so hard? Any specific reason/example you can give?

When do you think about this problem the most? How often do you think about it?

What else have you tried to resolve this problem of yours? Did it work? How long did you try on this?

How to Validate Your Niche [Exercise]

Validating your idea is critical. There is a simple thumb hand rule to find out whether your idea will work or not. In our accelerator program, we do the testing on our own using our own internal frameworks which we have been using on our products.

I will give you a simple way to find out whether your stuff will work or not.

Let’s say you’re dating coach for Ambitious women. (women who have a high paying career, define the age)

Notice how specific I am about their salary & career and I can even define their entire demographics.

For example, a woman who is looking for love at the age of 25 vs 35 are really different, they have an entirely different set of goals.

So go to target market single ambitious women 30-35 years.

1. Look out for other products and competitors that are operating in the same domain.

2. Write a simple article that could get traction. For instance, you can write a piece like 10 places where ambitious women can find a man they like.

Go post the article on where your target market hangs out, and share it there and observe their reactions in the comments section and ask them whether they like it or not. Yes or no.

3. Look for potential partners: Go to a related domain website and see if you can email the owner and ask them about the feedback on your potential niche.

4. Create a title for your coaching package and for feedback from your potential target market. In this case, go and ask ambitious women and ask them feedback on the coaching packages that you’ve created. Ask them what do you think about the packages.

Signs to Look For

See if they are emotionally invested in the conversation. That’s a sign of finding out whether your solution has takers or not.

Pay attention to emotional responses in all these methods.

Things like, people saying, yes I want this, OMG this is exactly what I need.

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If you get signals like these then that means you’re on the right track. The whole point here is to get everything tested and validated for your niche easily.

True Validation of your Coaching Niche

When people are really engaged and interested in your coaching offering they’ll do one of these 3 things:

  1. They will give you their email address for more content.
  2. They’ll follow you u on the work or the niche that you are proposing and researching about.
  3. They exchange some money to see if what you are offering has any value and whether they can buy it or not.

When you have one of these things happening to you. Only then you should consider that your proceeding in the right direction of building your coaching niche and coaching packages.

Now while you are doing your validation, you should also be careful about non-emotional responses. If you’re getting non-emotional responses, that means that you still need to do some refinement in the niche processes.

And you need to keep doing it until you get some stronger confirmations as validations.

Advanced Concept: How to Fine Tune your Positioning

Now I don’t usually teach this to everyone. It’s taught to our students in our high-end mastermind. Not that it is a tough thing to pull off but we don’t want to overwhelm them by giving in too much information.

But basically positioning means how you want your buyers to a position in their mind.

Like how they perceive your brand. That’s what positioning means.

I will explain this to you with the help of an example.

Now you know how big the fitness market is for men. So let’s say you are a fitness coach who wants to train men, now there are hundreds and hundreds of fitness coaches that are working in this domain, it’s almost impossible to get your positioning right to find customers in the market.

Let me share with you an example of 3 businesses which are operating in the same dating market for men, but they have taken up quite a unique approach to positioning.

Nerdfitness: Fitness for nerds, engineers, and highly successful smart logical guys. Same category but they have positioned it uniquely by targeting nerds. Now nerds aren’t really interested in growing huge muscles. They just want to be FIT and have an average fitness level.

Bony to beastly: Their brand deals with guys who want to grow from being skinny. Gain 20-30 pounds of muscles in a matter of 60-90 days. Their target audience is people who are skinny and are hard gainer ectomorphs. Again, same market but a unique proposition.

DieselCrew: Diesel crew is for people who are serious about getting buff and huge. They teach advanced weight lifting exercises in their courses. So, someone who is looking to buy from DieselCrew, they won’t be able to relate it to someone like other websites.

Same way neither of these target markets will be able to relate to other brands and they won’t buy their coaching services.

So with this, you can easily understand that there are hundreds of unique ways to target the same type and same market in a certain coaching category.

That’s why positioning is the key. Try to positioning and cement yourself in the customers’ mind in a unique way.

8 Examples of Hyper Successful Coaching Niches


1.
Introverted Alpha: Dating coaching for men who are shy, introvert and typically your silicon valley nerd kinda guys.

Revenue Format: Online courses and coaching.

2. BonyToBeastly: helping skinny guys in bulking up and gaining quality muscle through weight lifting and smart nutrition. This is specifically targeted for skinny men.

Revenue Format: Ebooks, courses, program and coaching.

3. Fluent in 3 months: Lessons in learning any language at a rapid pace.

Revenue Format: Ebooks, courses and coaching

4. Precision nutrition: Research-driven nutrition coaching.

Revenue Format: Ebooks, courses, coaching and certifications

5. Kinowear: Style advice for men.

Revenue Format: Ebooks and coaching.

6. Management consulted: Publishing authority content on management consulting. They cover resumes, interviews, case studies, and finding jobs.

Revenue Format: Ebooks, courses and personal coaching.

7. Adoption Financial coaching: Financial advice for couples looking to adopt a child.

Revenue Format: Coaching

8. Sixfigurepetsittingacademy: Coaching advice for people who want to do pet sitting and build it into flourishing money making the thing.

Revenue: Coaching and programs

Case Study: Kaley Zeitouni, the working professional who transitioned to becoming a grief coach

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Grief coaching: Helping people come out of grief.

Meet one of our accelerator students Kaley. Now Kaley’s story is an interesting one. Kaley was already practising as a therapist and was doing some on/off side work in her niche, and was helping clients’ in transitioning through her painful phase.

Mindset shifts

When we onboard people at our accelerator program we first make them go through a module of mindset shifts that allows them to accept that they can make their own coaching, and get rid of their 9-5 jobs.

Some of the key mindset that she experienced…

  1. Making 5-10k USD is not a difficult task as a coach.
  2. You don’t have to work 80 hours a week to become a great living as a coach.
  3. If systems, strategies & tactics are in place, fear and other things that all of us have while launching our course can be immediately taken care of.
  4. If others are doing and getting success in the accelerator, I can get it as well.
  5. Adopting and learning the psychology of becoming a world-class coach.
  6. Getting rid of your fear of moving away from your full-time job to transitioning to your coaching business.

In Kaley’s case, when she came on board she realised that her niche was already a very high converting and we needed to tweak it enough to spin it around and get things going for her to sell her coaching packages.

Over the course of few weeks, she worked around with our team and in house coaches that we have on the accelerator program and got her webinars converting to get clients on board who was ready to sell her program.

One of the biggest fears Kaley had was how she would transition from her 9-5 job to getting full-time in her coaching business.

In the program, we teach the exact systems, mindsets and process that we have used to scale our businesses. So Kaley already had a blueprint that was working with her, she knew that building her coaching business would be taken care of easily.

She also realised the power of storytelling, since she had personally been through a tough time of losing her fiance just before they were planning to announce their engagement. She realised that getting comfortable around the idea of sharing her story, and getting people to know more about her story, actually attracted her more clients to her coaching.

And surprisingly enough her word of mouth referral started increasing too.

Problems she was experiencing in building a coaching business:

1. How to deliver results:

Sometimes working in coaching means that results for coaching clients might come very late, it might take them years to experience real change that might help them in getting things better for themselves.

She faced the same problems of how to deliver tangible results to her clients in a short span of time, and make the clients feel the value of her coaching.

2. Transitioning from her full-time job:

We don’t really advocate anyone to leave their job and go all hard into building an online coaching business. We always recommend them to slowly derisk things step by step and trust the process. Once they get early results, then they can decide how they want to move on to their coaching business.

She trusted the process and within a few weeks, she had her early successes which gave her the confidence to move from her job and go full-time in her coaching practice.

And within a period of 60-90 days, she started building her business and started getting clients for it.

But that’s not important, what’s important here is that she worked her way around a super targeted niche and made a great coaching practice around it. And you can even do that as well.

Things to keep in mind while niching along the way

– Having a well-defined niche gets you more sales.

– Your ideal niche might be a really obvious one but it takes either an expert or some time to figure out if you are doing it on your own. A lot of other factors like experience, passion, target market and passion come into play when it comes to figuring out the niche.

– Testing your niche is as critical as defining your niche.

– It’s slightly better to keep your niche choice a little flexible before you start creating full-fledged material around it. Keep testing it until you find enough personal reference experience, client feedback and enough sales to justify your niche.

I understand a lot of new coaches have initial worries that narrowing down or targeting a smaller market will restrict the as a coach, and would be a hurdle in making enough sales. But if you are working with an expert and have done your homework and niche testing properly, the opposite turns out to be true.

In a simple world, defining a niche means figuring out your Unique selling proposition as a brand. Becoming a go-to expert in the market, and attracting your dream clients to you. Then the other opportunities will follow.

If you are struggling to find your niche, then I’d personally love to help you with it. You can come to my online workshop by clicking here. I’d love to help you nail down your niche, plus show you how other businesses are making 6 figures using the power of precise niching.

 
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8 Comments

8 thoughts on “The Ultimate Guide To Finding Your Coaching Niche”

  1. Hi Sai ~ I’m a student of the Health Coach Institute online school, and I’m in training now for the end of my 4 certification Modules. In the last year and a half since starting my training, I’ve struggled and struggled with establishing my niche’. But guess what ~ you and this article that you’ve written helped me to discover and claim it 2 days ago, and I’m absolutely thrilled. Thank you with all my heart for this wonderful, free advice. And the niche I’ve chosen? “Personal Development Coaching for Retirees.” 🙂 The name and logo I’ve chosen for my branding are “Get A New View.” I’ve tried to ignore the Retiree Coaching market, but I’ve felt pretty sure that’s where God wants me to go – since I’m already a re-fired retiree! Your guidance confirmed it 🙂 Thank you again. (p.s. There is no actual website yet – but I’m working on it!)

    Reply
    • Hi Connie, I’m glad to help 🙂 And I am thrilled for you as well! You’re off to a good start, and I encourage you to join the workshop. I assure you that you’ll get more value than you already have from the article

      Reply
  2. This is such a well written and clear guide to finding my coaching niche. I am currently in the fourth semester of my Master’s degree in Emotional Intelligence and Life Coaching from the University of Mumbai, India. I have had several ideas with regards to my coaching niche, but reading through this guide has helped me get a greater sense of clarity and direction to arrive at a specific area. I need to fine tune it further, of course, but I now believe I am on the right track. Thank you so much. God bless!

    Reply
  3. Hi there,

    I was wondering if anyone can help me personally in finding my niche. I have an idea, but it is too broad at the moment and I need an extra pair of eyes helping me out narrowing it down and how to best name my niche. Is that possible and if so, how much does that cost?

    Thank you

    Reply
  4. The pop-ups for who registered for your webinar is very annoying. It distracts me from reading your article to see if your information is valuable to me and whether attending your webinar would be beneficial to me.

    Should I be interested in attending the webinar, knowing who already signed up for it would be better after I click on the link to learn more about the webinar. Seeing it in the pop-ups doesn’t make me feel like I’m missing out on anything.

    Reply

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