Professional services marketing begins with finding your niche and developing services to service your niche. While browsing the forums, I came across a life coach who was having trouble finding her niche.
With the coach’s permission, I created this video, based on a real question, my real answer and her very real thank you message.
What do you think … what are your questions about finding your own niche?
Intro note: Perry Marshall, the Google Adwords guru, writes frankly and wisely on many topics. This recent article sent a message that contradicts a lot of what we hear. It’s so important that I got permission to use it here, with my affiliate link to Perry’s site. I own several of his materials and he’s the real deal.
“Anyone Can Do It” by Perry Marshall
Any time someone says to you, “Absolutely anybody can do this” you need to hang on to your pocketbook.
I do not believe that “anybody can do…” any specific thing. At least not to a level that the world is going to richly reward.
Let’s take some of the stuff I teach. Can anyone build a Google campaign, write ads that get clicks and make their CTR’s get better and better with testing?
Sure they can.
Can anyone and everyone expertly build and manage $20,000 of clicks each month?
No. At least I don’t think so.
The extraordinarily successful people in the Adwords game are the ones who somehow ‘crawl inside’ of the campaign and feel what all those numbers and columns mean… who are able to sense what those visitors are clicking on and why. They can look at somebody’s ad campaign and in 10 seconds know whether it’s put together right, or not. Those are the ones who manage $10,000 or $100,000 of clicks every month and make it profitable.
There’s the doing of the thing, and then there’s the Art Factor. The Art Factor comes into play when your heart and soul get connected to it, when you are able to crawl inside the thing and live in it and breathe it. If you can do that, you can pick up the art factor. Then you can master it.
One of my favorite scientists is Barbara McClintock. McClintock was a biologist who made startling discoveries that scientists are still ignoring today, 50 years later.
McClintock discovered that DNA, the helix that contains the instructions for assembling your body, is intelligent. It has the ability to re-engineer itself on the fly – in fact it’s literally pre-programmed to re-program itself. This discovery was so radical that they thought she was crazy at the time and her insights are mostly dismissed even now. But McClintock was perhaps the first to understand that living things are organized by information.
The title of her biography “A Feeling for the Organism” refers to her ability to seemingly crawl down through her microscope and get inside the cell – not just observing what was visible, but what was implied.
Forty years later she claimed the Nobel Prize for science.
What world are YOU able to crawl inside of? Can you crawl inside your customers’ minds that way? Can you imagine you’re a web page, readers listening as you talk to them and you know how they’re answering back? Can you become so absorbed with your customers that you become one with them?
Whatever microscope is so fascinating to you that you can crawl down inside it and imagine yourself living down there – if it’s an audience that has money to give – that’s the way you’re gonna make a million dollars.
Will “absolutely anybody” be able to do what you do? Not on your life. You can’t buy marketing for your business on a showroom floor the way you buy a car. USP’s don’t just roll off assembly lines every 45 seconds. There will be few who can rival you. And nobody will be able to sell somebody a road map to your pot of gold for $49.95 either.
If I could encourage you in any way possible, it would be this: To be patient with yourself as you explore and unfold the unique giftings that you alone possess, and to wrap those gifts and talents into your products, the services you offer, and your marketing, so that NO ONE can knock you off.
The world will richly reward you for fulfilling that vision.
There are plenty of cubicle drones and paint-by-numbers people in the world… I hope you’ll aspire to put out some of your own original pizzazz, put your own fingerprints on what you do. Do the thing that you alone can do.