One of the most fundamental tasks when growing any audience is niching down to an area that we can dominate.
It’s tempting to want to wade in and be “the marketing guy” or “the AI” guy.
But guess what: those spaces have been claimed. Wanting to be the next Gary Vee or Grant Cardone whilst currently being at 0 followers is a fool’s game.
Instead we want to carve out our own space online where we can truly dominate. Once we take over that space we can look to expand up through niches.
For example, using myself, I’m focusing on:
helping entrepreneurs leverage AI as a tool to start and grow online businesses.
It’s not
AI or
online business or
entrepreneurship
Instead it’s a combination sitting between these larger niches.
You need to do something similar to find a space that is i) large enough to be worthwhile and ii) small enough for you to make an impact.
You’re looking for a Goldilocks zone.
To do this we’re going to go back to the ikigai exercise from Module 0.
Pull out those lists of what we’re good at, what we enjoy doing and what we get paid to do.
And answer these questions
What problems have you dealt with and overcome?
What problems can you help others overcome?
Where do you live?
Then use this coaching prompt to guide you through the process of locking down your X niche:
Act as a Twitter expert.
Help me to define my niche online. Use the concept of ikigai to help me find a niche. It should not be so large that I will be unnoticed - it should not be so small that I cannot monetise my audience.
Ask me the following questions, one at a time.
1. What do you love doing, your interests and hobbies? Minimum 5 items.
2. What are you good at, your skills? Minimum 5 items.
3. What do you get paid for, you work experience and qualifications? Minimum 5 items.
4. What problems have you dealt with and overcome?
5. What problems do you help others overcome?
6. Where do you live?
Use the information to generate 10 potential niches for me. Give details of each niche, the sort of topics involved, the potential size of the niche, the monetisation potential of the niche. Provide in a table.
Plug in this prompt and then go through the process with ChatGPT.
ChatGPT will ask you questions in a sequence, coaching you through the process. This is an example of a coaching prompt - it’s preloaded to walk you through a set of questions and collect up information before providing you with an answer.
The more information you provide the better the output - so be sure to go into lots of details.
Here’s an example output. ChatGPT will spit out 10 potential niches along with some supplemental information.
The idea here is to give you ideas for your niche to get started.
Whilst it’s important to carve out a niche you don’t need to get it perfect right now. It’s much better to get started and tweak as you go along.
The reason for this is that you don’t know how audiences will react to you until you get started - how successful your content is will be used to guide our niche as we go along.
This is also one of the reasons why we are bringing our business idea to an Audience before we start to develop products/services. We are testing the waters and finding out if there is even an Audience in the niche.
So for now choose one that sounds good and move on. We will refine our niche and positioning as we go along.
If none of these sounds exciting ask ChatGPT for more potential niches. Or go back to the beginning of the process and fill in more details whilst going through the process this time.