Uncommon Business Advice: Let Your Niche Find You!

“I can’t succeed in my business until I find my niche!”

How often I’ve heard that statement from talented but frustrated entrepreneurs.

Often, these hardworking hopefuls have paid huge money to “business coaches” to help them find this elusive niche.

So, let’s talk about the niche. First of all, it’s pronounced neesh, not nitch. There is no such thing as finding your “nitch”.

Merriam-Webster defines “niche” as a place, employment, status or activity for which a person or thing is best fitted.

In business, the “market niche” is the small, profitable segment of the public that you specifically target.

Niche marketing goes way beyond the study and understanding of demographics. Niche marketing advises us to narrow our services, and our demographics, so we are not trying to be all things to all people.

That makes sense, and in many cases, is really good advice for a lot of reasons.

However, with some careers, like mine, it doesn’t necessarily hold true.

My greatest success has come from casting my net wide, and seeing what happens. For instance, I didn’t set out to be a reader and mentor for other professional readers, but a publisher asked me to write a book of lessons from my lengthy fulltime tarot career. Suddenly, I had found a niche as a mentor, that I didn’t expect or chose, but enjoy very much.

Early in my career, I was the go-to tarot entertainer for the local LGBT community. That was because I happened to land a great gig in a gay bar. I love reading for drag queens in the club environment, and I love being a trusted, supportive consultant to those who have not always received the support they need.

Those were two niches that found me, and there have been many others.

Before you pay a business coach to help you find your niche, think about what you might need to do to let your niche find you.

It can simply be that we find our niche by avoiding certain types of work that we don’t enjoy, and pursuing the gigs we like.

I think, too, over time, our niche can change, as our needs change.

Sometimes, it feels that a niche is more like branding, like a tarot reader only doing relationship readings, or a counselor only working with children.

Finding your niche can mean finding a place where you a truly comfortable and happy. Looking for your niche can be frustrating and disheartening.

If your niche isn’t obvious, maybe it doesn’t need to be. Cast you net wide, and see what happens. Don’t let an inability to narrow your services or demographics keep you from hanging your shingle.

An Open Letter to Self-Published Creatives

Dear Artists, Authors and Inventors,

I am writing from my perspective as a member of the tarot community. However, I believe most communities function in pretty much the same way. If you are a self-published creative in any community, or want to be, please pay attention.

Twenty years ago, we called self-publishing “vanity press.” To pay to publish your own work was usually a waste of time and money. Technology changes everything. Today, self-publishing is a viable option for a wide range of creative people.

The success of your self-published project depends a great deal on your ability to market your project. To do that, you will need to reach out to members of a community. You will need to connect with other entrepreneurs who produce podcasts, webcasts, vlogs and blogs. You need interviews, and you need reviews.

We vloggers, bloggers and reviewers need you, too.

At a certain point, I realized I had gained some notoriety for my webcasts and reviews, because my inbox began filling up with introductions from creative people, essentially asking me to promote their work.

That’s not as bad as it sounds. I need interesting people to interview, and new products to review. Every professional community is symbiotic in that way. We have to work together. We can support each other, and lift each other up, or we can tear each other down.

When you approach members of a professional or hobbyist community to ask for support for your project, everyone’s experience will be better if you keep a few things in mind.

First, we are a community. Many of us have known each other for years, even though many of us have never met in person. If you send an impersonal cut-and-paste form letter to each of us, we will know. If you want to send an email blast to people you don’t know to announce your new project, just don’t.

If you want my time, take some time to build a relationship with me. You don’t have to buy me dinner or send me flowers. You do have to send me a personal email, not a copy-and-paste request. Understand the value of community, and of relationships. If I like your work, I will introduce you to my friends. That is how it has always worked IRL (in real life). That is how it works in cyberspace, too. We all want and deserve this basic human courtesy.

Here’s a true story. Recently, many of us received the same email request regarding a new project. My friends and peers smelled a spammy rat right away. My reaction was different. I was excited about the project and forgave the heavy-handed approach. Well, without any further contact, and without my request or permission, they added me to their official spam mailing list! I had no choice. I withdrew my support from a project that had really excited me. My friends had been right all along. Yum, yum, crow.

Ultimately, whether your bad internet manners are a result of naiveté or intentional spamming doesn’t matter. Your poor results will be the same. You see, we all have mailing lists, too. We are very careful to make sure we don’t spam people with our mailing lists. That you don’t show this same courtesy and restraint shows us we don’t want to work with you. Behavior matters.

Here’s another true story. I was doing weekly webcasts on a Livestream channel. Over the course of a week, I received two emails, each from people hoping to promote their self-published creation. One was very demanding about his requirements for the interview; even though he was the one requesting it! I expressed my enthusiasm for his project, and explained the constraints of my production schedule. The reply I received was abusive, beginning with the phrase, “You are an idiot.” To this day, I have heard nothing more about this project.

The other person who approached me was very polite in his initial email. When I responded by inviting him to be a guest on my show, he was appreciative. We had a wonderful interview. His project has become a successful reality, and he is now working on a follow-up project. This time I’ll reach out to him with a request for an interview.

Please don’t misread me. I am not saying that my webcast is a star-maker. I am saying that the attitude of the artist matters. To promote your work, you have to make the rounds. There are more shows looking for guests than you can imagine. Bring a good attitude, and you will be on every show and in every blog. Bring a bad attitude and very few of us will want to talk with you.

In any community, there can be a few talented people with difficult personalities. Most people are forgiving enough to appreciate talent and excuse a few social faux pas, thank goodness. However, for most of us, there is a saturation point. If you irritate enough people, you will have a hard time finding any peers who are interested in your work, no matter how good you work might be. This isn’t usually an organized community-wide blacklist, it’s just something that happens. What you learned on the elementary school playground remains true to this day. If you don’t play nicely, no one will want to play with you.

The ability to interact with creative people is one of the great perquisites of my job. Like many of my friends and peers, I will gladly review your project and promote your Kickstarter. We are all in this together.  I can support a friend. I can support a community member. I can support great art. I can’t support an egomaniac, or a spammer. I can’t support an entrepreneur who doesn’t take the time to learn basic internet courtesy. I think you will find many of us feel the same way.

Three Heinous Marketing Mistakes Made by Healers, Part Three

This is the third and final installment in my series about marketing mistakes made by healers.

To illustrate the third mistake, I will tell you a story about my friend who went to a new dentist. On his first visit, he felt very “upsold.”

Before returning for his next visit, he did some on-line research and found a YouTube video of the dentist being interviewed on a marketing webcast. In the interview, the dentist is proudly explaining how she is monetizing her practice, and the tricks she is using to make the most money from each patient.

This confirmed what my friend had felt; the dentist was more interested in his money than his mouth.

At his appointment, he told the dentist how he felt. She was offended, but couldn’t say much when mentioned that he saw her on YouTube claiming that she commonly did exactly the thing she was now denying.

My friend has a new dentist, one who care more about keeping her patients healthy than she does about taking their money.

The third heinous marketing mistake is caring more about marketing than you do your clients. That mistake is compounded if you, like the dentist on YouTube, brag publically about your unsavory practices.

The best advice here, is have ethical marketing practices. Don’t take advantage of people. Don’t be greedy. If you are inclined to take advantage of people, don’t be a healer. If you are a healer who takes advantage of people, don’t brag about it.

There is a crass edge to some marketing enthusiasts. In the first installment of this series we talked about not being shy about marketing.

Today we will add something to that.

Don’t be shy about marketing, but also don’t be crass.

Marketing people often freely talk about how much they make. They love to talk about six figures. “Six figures! I’m making six figures, and you can too!” I can guarantee you, people who make real money, and people who are worthy of the money they make, don’t talk about it quite that way.

When you give something away, give it freely.

I once interviewed a healer who is well-known for providing great free services. I commented on that, and asked her about her philosophy on business and freebies. I expected to hear something about sharing, or giving back, or even sampling. What I heard was a comment about generating hits for her website. She even told me, off the top of her head, the number of hits free offers were generating.

To me, that’s crass. It may be true, and it may be the kind of thing we talk about privately in strategy sessions. If you are a healer, service should be your top-of-mind priority always. Web hits and six figures are the happy byproduct of that, not the goal.

Three Heinous Marketing Mistakes Made by Healers, Part Two

This is the second in a three-part series about mistakes that entrepreneurs with healing practices often make.

The first mistake, which I covered last week, is about being afraid to market, being shy about marketing and not doing the research to become knowledgeable about marketing.

The second mistake, our focus for today, is sort of the opposite problem.

Don’t become a spammer, or an in-your-face-business-evangelist, no matter how excited you are about your product or service.

If you are paying more attention to the size of your mailing list, rather than the quality of your mailing list, you are making a mistake.

If you are sending newsletters to thousands of people but getting an open rate of less than twenty percent, you are not marketing, you are spamming.

If you invite folks to your webpage and then require them to sign up for some free offer before they can read about your services, you have clearly demonstrated your questionable priorities.

And, if your freebies really aren’t free, or aren’t valuable, you are guilty of some of the oldest tricks in the book.

P.T. Barnum was right, there is a sucker born every minute. But do you want your client base to be full of suckers?

If you are guilty of these sorts of high-pressure marketing techniques, you get a gold star for enthusiasm and hard work. If your tactics are working for you, and you are OK looking at yourself in the mirror, that’s your choice. However, there are considerable drawbacks to these types of techniques, and, once you are labeled as a spammer you will lose a lot of ability to promote your work at all.

Sometimes we become spammers unintentionally. I woke up the other day to find myself included in a very large group message on Facebook. The healer was marketing a webinar. In her great wisdom she felt the best way to do this was to send a group private message to eighty of her closest friends. When she realized how poorly received this was, she apologized, saying that she didn’t realize what she did was wrong. If even one of those eighty people reported her to Facebook for spamming, her marketing problems were only just beginning.

She was guilty of spamming, but she was also guilty of last week’s mistake; failure to do research and learn how to market.

Getting labeled a spammer is a very real risk. In the past year I have tried to partner with two different organizations whose URL could not be included in my weekly newsletter because the URL was already identified as a spam site. It’s hard to promote an online event if you can’t send the URL to your client base.

The other risk of these kinds of marketing mistakes is that you will simply look cheesy.  If you want to be the “Amway” of your particular modality you certainly can, but you will end up limiting yourself more than you will be helping yourself.

Find the balance that works for you. Quality is better than quantity. Classy is better than cheesy.  Do get your word out. Don't be a spammer.

Three Heinous Marketing Mistakes Made by Healers, Part One

This is the first in a three part series about marketing mistakes. Each week I will address one mistake in detail.

The specific type of marketing I am addressing is the marketing of businesspeople who could loosely be called “healers.” In that category I include medical professionals, psychologists, tarot readers, life coaches and energy healers, amongst others.

Basically, I am addressing practitioners of healing arts, either allopathic or alternative. I am doing this both to help my colleagues benefit from some of my experience as a successful practitioner, and also to warn against some marketing problems that could be devastating to a new business.

The first mistake, and the one I will cover in this post, is so simple it is surprise that it’s a problem at all.

The first marketing mistake, and one that most healers make, is to be shy about marketing, or to not put any energy in to marketing at all.

If we wanted to be marketers we would have majored in marketing in college and we would be working in that field now.

We are healers because we are called to be healers. The problem is, we may know very little about marketing. We may easily fall prey to expensive rah-rah networking schemes that don’t work. We may truly believe that if we burn enough candles and visualize hard enough our angels will direct our clients to us. We may be uncomfortable talking about ourselves. Marketing may make us feel boastful, insincere and impolite.

Here’s what healers need to do.

Be honest and direct in your marketing. Be clear about your purpose. You simply want to make people aware of who you are and what you can do for them.

Decide who your demographic is, and how to best reach them.

If there is something you don’t know how to do, or don’t understand, research it. Don’t be afraid of technology, and don’t be afraid of learning something new.

Don’t let high-pressure ad execs talk you into expensive media campaigns or unnecessary “SEO.”

Believe in yourself, your ability to help people, and your ability to be successful.

Do the research you need to do to learn the best ways to market your practice.

Learn the technology you need to know.

And, most importantly, don’t be afraid to toot your own horn. It’s not boastful to market. It is appropriate to make it easy for people who need your services to find you.

Next week, we will tackle the second heinous marketing mistake!

Shock Value

There was a time before the internet when FM broadcast radio was how the cool kids (of any age) stayed connected to each other and their world.

During that time morning radio was ruled by the Shock Jock - DJs who pushed the envelope with language and subject matter that was designed to get a response.

Now it's hard to shock anyone. We've seen it all on-line. Sadly, the most shocking things we hear seem to come from the mouths of our politicians.

But that doesn't seem to stop the spiritual-but-not-religious community from trying to shock us. Right now it seems that everyone, from get-rich-gurus to life coaches to tarot mavens, is trying to separate themselves from the pack by being edgy.

Edgy - that is - true edginess - is a wonderful thing. But here's a clue. Using foul language is not inherently edgy. True edginess has to have some intelligence behind it; some cleverness. Putting the word "ass" in your title or text doesn't make you edgy. It may make you look like an ass.

Other things that are just not edgy include intentional misspellings. "Krazee" is not edgier than "crazy." It just makes you and your product look, well, crazy.

Using the word "naked" to describe anything other than an absence of clothing is not edgy. It's also not unique; everyone is doing it. Unless your book, program or event is really going to be in the nude, don't call it "naked." Just don't.

My fellow spiritual entrepreneurs, if you want to be edgy, be edgy - but take the time and energy to be clever, not crude. Otherwise you look like Howard Stern in Downward Dog.

Don't try to shock us. In 2013 we are unshockable. Make us laugh, make us cry, make us think.

It may be that in 2013 the way to separate yourself from the pack is to be courteous and professional. What if you presented yourself as respectful and kind? What if you took the time to use good punctuation and proper spelling? What if you did your research and spoke (or wrote) with grace and dignity? What if you tried to distinguish yourself with your message, rather than with cheesy packaging? I think that would be shockingly edgy!