When you start a business it can be difficult trying to work out who your target audience is. It’s a question I ask myself every day, something I have to remind myself of when posting on social media and even writing this blog. If I aim my updates and blog posts at the wrong audience it’s unlikely I will attract the clients I want to my business.
That’s where establishing a niche comes in, and it doesn’t have to be difficult to work out what your niche is. I am going to use my own niche as an example. If you are struggling to come up with a niche, you need to ask yourself some questions – what am I good at? what sort of clients am I hoping to attract? do I have a unique skill I could sell?
Example
A virtual assistant can do almost anything, you hire a virtual assistant to help you with tasks in your business you either don’t have time to do yourself, or tasks you find difficult or time consuming. The list of tasks a virtual assistant can help you with is endless, so I won’t list them all here. Common tasks could be bookkeeping, writing letters, checking your emails, answering the phone, formatting documents, organising events, doing research for you etc…
Make yourself stand out…
When you are looking for a virtual assistant you want to make sure who you hire is great at what they do, and capable of taking on the tasks you need them for. This is where searching for a virtual assistant with a niche comes in. You need to make a list of the tasks you want your virtual assistant to do, and then I would suggest going to some of the useful directories of virtual assistants such as BeMyVA, IVAA, Virtual AssistantVille, Virtual Assistant Forums or even LinkedIn (you can use this for any skills, not necessarily virtual assistants). For all of these sites you are able to search using keywords, which will bring up various people specialising in the skills you need.
Using myself as an example, my niche is eBook formatting and social media management. These are the tasks I am good at, yes I provide other services, but I think I excel at these two main tasks. If you search for eBook formatting on LinkedIn, I rank quite highly in the results. Knowing what my niche is means I can target the right audience, for example authors, writers and small businesses who require help with their social media accounts.
Do you have a niche?
It’s not only virtual assistants who need to establish a niche, if you run a business which provides many different services it’s worthwhile finding two or three which you can aim at a particular audience. You’ll soon notice that enquiries start to come in for your niche, and once you have clients you can talk to them about your other services they may not have thought about.
I have found there are a lot of blog posts about establishing your blogging niche, but not many about your business niche. I was hoping to include a few blog references here, but I couldn’t find any good ones. If you know of some, please let me know so I can include them in future blog posts.
