Episode 184: You Are the Niche - Embracing Individuality in Online Business
In the ever-evolving landscape of online business, the conversation around niching down seems to be a constant hum in the background. The advice is always the same: find your niche, cater to it, and success will follow. But here's a perspective shift I encountered—one that might just turn the whole concept of niching on its head. The idea isn't to find a niche; it's to create one. This concept resonated with me deeply, prompting a reflection on my journey and the unique approach I've cultivated in navigating the online business realm.
I've spent countless hours diving into demographics, psychographics, and every other -graphics you can think of, trying to game the system, to find that elusive, perfect niche. I've crafted avatars, engaged in endless social media conversations, and attempted to distill my entire business essence into a predefined box. But the truth is, this approach always felt somewhat limiting, like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole.
The revelation came when I realized that I am the niche. This wasn't about finding a unique way to deliver a transformation; it was about understanding that my uniqueness is the transformation. This isn't a new concept by any means, but embracing it fully requires a shift in perspective. It's about recognizing that your unique journey, your experiences, and your story are what set you apart in this digital ecosystem.
Our online spaces are saturated with individuals seeking to alleviate the pressures of modern life, searching for transformations that can simplify and enrich their existence. The tools and knowledge we possess are unique to our journey, and it's this distinctiveness that holds the power to effect change. No program or product can claim to be a universal solution, but by leveraging our unique experiences, we can offer something truly special.
The crux of this approach lies in understanding that the heart of our niche isn't something external to be identified and targeted. It's internal, rooted in the essence of who we are and the transformations we've navigated personally. This realization frees us from the constraints of conventional niching strategies, allowing us to focus on what truly matters—connecting with others through the authenticity of our experiences.
In navigating my path, I've learned that simplicity is key. The online business world is complex, with a relentless influx of strategies and tools promising success. Yet, at the heart of it, the most compelling offering we have is ourselves. Embracing our unique identity as the niche transforms the way we approach business, shifting the focus from chasing external validations to cultivating genuine connections.
This journey of self-discovery and business evolution has been both challenging and exhilarating. It's a path less traveled, but one that promises a deeper sense of fulfillment and impact. By centering our businesses around our innate uniqueness, we not only carve out our niche but also inspire others to embrace their individuality as their greatest asset.
So, to my fellow online entrepreneurs, I encourage you to look inward. Your journey, your struggles, and your triumphs are the foundation of your niche. Share them, not as a blueprint for others to replicate, but as a testament to the power of authentic, individual paths in the vast digital landscape. Let your unique light guide you, and in doing so, illuminate the way for others.
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Podcast transcript:
Hey, femnation. Welcome back to another episode. I'm so delighted that you are with me today while we dive into a very common topic about niching in your online business. Yep, I'm gonna go there. Here's my perspective before we dive into this episode. Don't find a niche. Create one. Here's how I'm witev, your bizb and your favorite online mentor, and I am so excited that you are here today for another episode of the Fem Nation podcast. Let's dive in. All right. Okay. Niching is such a big, big, big topic in the online space. It is probably, I would say, one of the most, widely conversed topics in the online space. And there's so many different ways to determine a niche, right? A lot of psychographics, demographics, sociographics, put m a name to it. There's ways to game the process. There's ways to, create an avatar. I've done those. I'm sure if you're listening to this podcast and you resonate with the online business space at all, you've done it, too. You have worked through determining what your niche is based on your avatar or your ideal client, or your niche based on, researching a million times and maybe a million Facebook groups or maybe a million Instagram posts, or people that you follow or people, that you've messaged on, their posts and had comments, whatever. All the strategies of trying to determine that, going into other groups where you think they are, having an idea of who you think the person is, in order to be able to determine who the niche is, right? I have been a very vocal proponent of the fact that you are the niche. You very specifically are the niche. There is not a niche. And I'm holding up air quotes for those of you that are hearing this on audio, you can't see me do it, but there is an opportunity for you to be the niche. And with that, instead of holding on to the fact that you're trying to come up with a unique way to deliver a transformation, all of a sudden you can release that, too, because the uniqueness itself is you. And I know that's not a new concept, but I'm going to put my twist and my spin on it, and then I'm going to give you something fun to take away from this episode, to be able to test out just for fun. It doesn't. It's not. It's not meant to be your, you know, writing, ah, your avatar for you. but it is a way to just kind of get an idea of what, who, who you are from a culmination of ideas, right in, in the, in the ideal client, in the niching spot, in the uniqueness of who you are as an individual. And the knowledge that you've acquired, I've often said, is based more on your unique, layered experiences to get to this point, because nobody else has those. Nobody else has ever come close to identical as you, as what you've experienced and what you've gone through and what you, what your uniqueness is, who you are as a person, how you grew up, how you learned, how you were taught, how you were, what you were dealt in life, how you ebbed and flowed, learned, experienced and traversed, let's say, in this world is extremely unique to you now. The end result of what you are ultimately seeking or the end transformation which you are ultimately desiring to bring to life for others, is not unique necessarily. There are only so many different ways that we can reduce down the fact that we want to improve our life. We want to improve family members lives, we want to, reduce anxiety. We want to reduce stress. We want to reduce, you know, hardship. We want, and it's not for the fact that we want an easy life. It's not, we're not looking for that because there is no easy life. We just pick our hard. But it's more of, releasing some of that pressure. And we have a tremendous amount of pressure in today's society. Pressure from all angles, everyone. There is no one that is without some level of pressure in today's society. And so the online space is ripe for bringing around transformation that can alleviate some of that stress or a fraction of that stress or a section of that stress or pressure. There, there's an opportunity for you to use your knowledge, use what you have gone through uniquely yours, to be able to help people reduce that right. Will it eliminate all problems? No. No one can. No human can eliminate all problems. There is no program that eliminates everything for everyone. There may be a program that is the icing on the cake after someone has gone through series of programs and finally gets to yours, and that just caps it all off for them to where they get to the next level because they had already been working to that. Yours was the final straw that helped them do that. There's that. But no one particular program created by no one particular human is going to be the be all, end all. There is not any solution like that that exists. There can't. Partly because there's an evolving world that consistently changes the. The metrics, right. The metrics of achievement to get to what does anti stress or what does more time or what does, simpler life look like. You know, whatever the ultimate goal is out there, what is, you know, there is. There is no ability to be able to move into the direction of having only one solution. Can someone provide multiple solutions in the same direction? Yes, obviously, and then that would be great, because then you have parallel points that help people along a longer transformation line instead of just one point. But we have an opportunity to bring a lot of life to, a lot of opportunities to help people in their world and in this space and time. We have an. The Internet, which gives us the opportunity to be able to put those things out there. Side note, I've mentioned this before. If you're not launching your products, then you're obviously not able to sell them. And then obviously, people don't know that you have a solution available. So key to simplicity on this one, going back to a couple of my previous episodes, is being able to understand the launch factor. Right. But I digress. Let's get back to you being the unique niche. Too many times people try to externally identify who that niche is for. Maybe it's an old version of themselves, maybe it's a current version of themselves, maybe it's a future version of themselves. But identifying what that niche is, finding out what that niche is, is not the proper way to look at it. One, because you're unique, that uniqueness is the niche. But two, because you're thinking outside of what you know to be true internally, you're thinking outside of what you know is. Is, near and dear and close to your heart. And, your mind makes logical sense of the transformation and puts it together in. In a progressive form. But your heart is also also the guide with which that transformation has life. Because it's your heart and your desire and your, purpose for better good that drives that knowledge base from your mind to put it together forward. So if there then is an opportunity for you to dive into your niche, the uniqueness of you, you being the niche, if there is an opportunity for you to look at that and analyze that and sit with that, I actually, I'm going to go back and say, not necessarily analyze because that's too. That's too logical. When a lot of this space, outside of putting the pieces together, the system pieces together, should not sit in logic per se. The transformation process and most creatives bring to the world, needs to be heart centric first and not logic first. It needs to be heart centric first, because if it's logic first, and I am digressing, I know, but if it's logic first and you're following an outcome, process that disengages you from the heart of your ideal client, who follows you because of who you are. Right? So let me get back to the topic at hand. Now, in your heart, that's the process. That's where the. The creative element starts from. That's where the true depth of who you are and what your greatest niche is lives. That is where it lives. Your niche. If you're using a, worksheet or a process or filling things out, because you're trying to identify externally a niche, you're trying to find a niche, you are abandoning the very process, the very part of the niche that you have to be in in order to set yourself apart in this world. See, your unique journey is what other people want to know. And if you are putting it down on a worksheet, who your ideal client is, so that you can try to determine what niche that is, then you are absolutely working from the knowledge space and not from the heart space. And you have got to bring that heart space into perspective in order for you to remember that you are the niche. I can write down a great avatar. All the demographics, all of the sociographics, all of the. All of the psychographics, all of the graphic, graphic, graphic, graphics, whatever we want to call them. I can write all of that down. In fact, I can create a program and turn around and say, okay, now I'm going to identify who that's for. So then I can identify what niche that is. But it doesn't ever pan out. It doesn't ever pan out because the one thing people want from you, from me, from, us collectively, is to know, how did you go through it. We all have stress, we all have anxiety, we all have pressure, points. We all have things we want to alleviate and simplify for ourselves in this walk of life that now, because we have plenty of how to out there, that is very general, we want to know, how did you go through that? How did you come on the other side of it? How did you weather? How did you learn? What was your journey like? And I'm not meaning tell your story. Putting your story into perspective, that's a great thing to do. But if we put the story out there, we're focusing on the past hardship of it, which is the wrong place to be. There's a place in time for it. But for this sake, that's the wrong place to be for the niche. People want to know what is important and what you remember and what your journey was and how that manifested itself, worked through itself, came through you. And if you are simply willing to just share what is natural and easy and. And refreshing and, healing for you, gives them that glimpse into what specifically was your journey. So they can say, ah, that, ah, point of that journey makes sense to me. I didn't think of it that way. That point of that journey, that step you took right there, makes sense to me. I didn't think of it that way. The fact that you weathered this journey, I didn't think of it that way. But guess what? All of those things rotate back to you being the niche. So instead of putting it together on a worksheet, instead of trying to come to an idea of who your ideal client is, so you can figure out what your niche is, you don't even have to do that, because now it's not external. You're not trying to fit it into some linear boxes on a piece of paper, because that's what it sounds good, and that's what makes the most sense, and that's what Suzy Q over here was doing with it. Because that pre programming, from what we've researched and seen and learned over the course of time, does affect it. You know, it does affect our thought process on it. So if we take it back to who we are and allow ourselves to be the niche, it releases all of that pre programming. You have the capacity to be that powerful and to lead people. You have that. Whether or not you choose to do something with it is certainly up to you. Nobody's saying you have to go out there and put a digital product together. Nobody's saying you have to start an online business. Nobody's requiring you to do that. You may want to do that because of the revenue possibility that exists out there, but it's going to exist no matter what, whether you do it or don't. So then, in this moment, in time, in this era, that we find ourselves in an online business, then why not let it be simple? Why not let it be you? Why not let the quirky uniqueness of who you are be the niche? Why not? Because that is the most beautiful, profound possibility out there. You can't even make up a better ideal client and niche on paper than that. Even if you make up that ideal client and niche on paper, there's still going to be people that don't want what you have. Your quirky uniqueness there are going to be people that don't want what you have. And that's okay. There's nothing wrong with that. That's beautiful and real and human rejection hurts. We think that they're rejecting us when we're just. It's just not their thing at the moment. And that's okay. That's why I love the launch process with little products over and over that I teach in the toolkit. Why? Because you get good at people not saying yes to you. You gotta feel those feels, my friend. You've got to feel them. Because it's important to remember those people unsubscribing from your email list. It ain't you personally. It's just not the time for them. And that's okay. It doesn't mean anything about you. It doesn't degrade what you're offering those that aren't saying no. And jumping off your email list when people don't say yes to your organic launch offer, it doesn't mean that there's anything wrong with it. It just means that maybe not enough people saw it and maybe the algorithm was off. Maybe you need to tweak something. Maybe you're meant to go through this cycle of the process to learn what that's like. But you rinse and repeat and start over again. Why? Because you are the niche. What you create is beautiful and amazing and profound and unique. It's you, and you are what people need. You are the niche. It's that simple. Let it be that simple. Allow it to be a space that can be simple for you. Get good at living in that simplicity. Because this online business world is just here. We've been sold a lot of strategy and necessary things and how tos, and there's always something new and. And sexy around the corner. It's gonna be new things. In two months, one month, six months, one year, it's gonna be new things. It's an always evolving world. So instead of playing catch up and trying to keep up, we can be good at the one thing that we are already naturally good at, ourselves. And that is freedom, my sweet friend. Now I'm going to give you something fun to do. I do not, do not, do not, do not want you to take this and make this part of your ideal client or your niche. I want you to have some fun with this. And it evolves. AI. So if you can go on to OpenAI somewhere, not in a program source, OpenAI somewhere. And if you are on the podcast list specifically, if you're not, sign up for it, I'll put the link below. But if you are, I will have this written out for you. So you can simply just take the prompts as I write them out and copy and paste. But I'm gonna give you an idea, and those of you that are savvy enough to not need the prompts written out, take it away and run with this. But it's fun. It's just fun. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to chat GPT or, an OpenAI source somewhere. And I want you to let chat GPT or let that open AI source know that you want to teach people something. You want to coach people, you want to help them, you want to help improve lives some way, you know, reduce, it on that somehow. I'm generalizing it a little bit so you can find your sentences in it and then write this out. Based on my interests, goals and problems, what is a good description of my ideal client, assuming she is me? That's the question. Now, underneath that, before you enter it, I'm going to have you write ten current interests. What are ten current interests that you have? What interests you right now? What lights you up? What is amazing to you right now? Ten. And then next, I want you to write a goal. Ten goals. What are ten goals that you seek right now in this current world, in this current space and time? And then ten, problems. What are ten problems that you currently face right now? I want you to put all of that together and let me go back on this and say, before you put it in as an AI prompt, I want you to type this all out on a note or a word doc or somewhere. So then you can copy all of that, the prompt itself, opening it up and saying what you want to do. And then the ten interests, the ten goals and the ten problems. And then I want you to copy that entire thing and put it in there. And for fun, let it spit out a response about you, her, because she is me. Because instead of thinking that you have to go find your niche by determining who your ideal client is, you get an opportunity to see, based on your interests and goals and problems. Currently, right now, real world today, you get to see a feedback of who she is and then find where you resonate inside of there. Then from there you can see some perspective of, maybe you were overlooking for yourself, amazingness for yourself, keywords for yourself, generalizations for yourself based on your interesting goals and problems, thought process for yourself. There's a lot of things that you can come away with this but it's a fun exercise. Yes, I did it, too. I went on chat GPT, and I put that prompt in and I absolutely, absolutely had it spit out the same for me. And then, you know what? Share it. Share it online. Let me know. Tell me who it is. tag me in a post about a story that you make up about your you ness. The she is me. Analyze it, look at it, feel through it, but be able to see it from a perspective that isn't trying to associate it with creating a program, you're associating it with you and the uniqueness of you, you being the niche and your ideal client being you today. From there, you're going to be able to write to your past self. Who were you before this moment in time? You can write to your current self. Who are you in this point in time? You can write to your future self, your goal self, who you determined to be, what you were striving for, who you think she is. Now, you'll be able to write out your beliefs and opinions and experiences based on some of that, because the act of just going through and listing out ten of each one of those three is going to remind you of what you're working towards. It's going to shine a light on you. The niche for right now, I want you to go through this fun little exercise and, spend some time with it. It should only take about five minutes. It's not really meant to be overwhelming, and there's not anything you have to do with it. It's perspective and an opportunity to be able to get outside of your head trying to produce something for people that aren't you and remember who you create for now. All right? Okay. I'm gonna wrap up this episode. I'm gonna remind you to get into the toolkit if you're not in the toolkit. Yes, I keep saying this, but toolkit is such a no brainer, and it is the simple online business way. It's 7 a month, no obligation. If you don't love it, I understand. It's okay. No hard feelings. I'm here for you to come and go, to listen or not, to try it and see or not. But at the end of the day, the one thing that you can always remember from me is that if there's a way to make sure it's simple, I'm going to source it. And that's what I put together in toolkit for you. So if you're not inside a toolkit, please do join toolkit and be a part of a growing community of over 100 people who are already in Toolkit and have been there for a long time, months. We have a vibrant community inside a toolkit. You'll see the link down below in the show notes. If you have any questions, please do reach out and ask me on any of the social media channels. Dm me. That's my world. I dm, right back. And the highest form of thank you is for you to, like, share and forward the femination podcast, and maybe this podcast in particular to someone who might need to hear it. But as always, keep moving forward.