On Thursday, 29 April 2021, Yello Media Group hosted the ‘How to Find Your Niche’ webinar. The informative session was hosted by Imagine Digital’s Senior General Sales Manager, Carou Ralph, with speaker Lauri-Ann Ainsworth. Lauri-Ann is the founder of Thriving CEO and the CEO of the Branson Centre for Entrepreneurship Caribbean.

The session answered the big burning question first. What is a niche? This is the starting point of the conversation surrounding finding your niche. Lauri-Ann took the participants through what is not a niche to drive home the point. Your niche is not:

• An avatar or the ideal client demographic.
• It is not the title you give yourself.
• Your methods.
• You being your most authentic self.

While these elements are essential, they are not your niche.

So, what is your niche?

According to Lauri-Ann, your niche is simply the one specific problem that you solve.

So how do you find your niche? Lauri-Ann outlined the best way to finding your niche involves some introspection. She warned against getting caught up in aligning your niche with your passion as that could prove to be difficult. One sure method to finding out what problem you could solve was to zero in on what bothers you. What is an issue that you hate or that gets under your skin? This issue could be your niche.

So how do you find your niche?

Lauri-Ann offered steps to finding your niche by starting with unlocking your natural abilities. The first step was finding out what you are naturally good at. Then look at your interests and then solve problems you care about. Think about solving a problem that is close to your heart. Look into commonalities between your interests, natural abilities and the issues you care about, in the mix you will find your niche.

The next step is to validate your niche.

Lauri-Ann advised that this next step, validating your niche, is important but is often overlooked by would-be entrepreneurs. Validation is simply putting your ideas through a series of tests to ensure that it is worth pursuing. Here’s how you can validate your idea through market research:

• Find products that are like your idea or in your niche.
• See if people are buying by looking at the number of people enrolled.
• Look for books on the topic and check out the reviews to see what your target audience is thinking.
• Look for blogs and similar sites to see if there is a large enough market.

A big red flag is if you have no competitors in your niche. Lauri-Ann warned that this might mean that you need to pivot and find something else to pursue or face the colossal challenge of educating your clients about the problem and your proposed solution.

The work comes in when you need to concisely and clearly zero in on your message and the differentiating factor that sets you apart from your competitors. Lauri-Ann encouraged participants to price their products and services somewhere in the middle of the market so that they are adding value and are not too pricey for the big companies or priced too low so that they offer no value.

Lauri-Ann closed the session with these key takeaways. To start, you need some self-awareness.  What do you care about?  Take an inventory of your skills and talents. Then think about how you can use your skills and talents to solve a problem that you care about. Then, ask who has this problem that you would really like to work with. And lastly, validate through market research to find out if it is a problem that you could solve.

It was an engaging session with participation from the webinar attendees.  Yello thanks Lauri-Ann Ainsworth for sharing her insights and Carou Ralph for hosting the session.