Day Five – Avatars

Alexander Technique teachers are usually proud of their multi-niche market. They happily tell you they have "… Medical professionals, therapists, business people, IT personnel, yoga teachers, personal trainers, parents, pregnant ladies, musicians, cyclists, dancers, air crew…" to quote one teacher's range of students. And multi-niching doesn't work. Yeah it's fun, yeah you learn a lot, yeah it's challenging – and you are always trying to find the next student, fill the next workshop, find more prospects. It's endless, tiring, worrying because you don't gain traction, you don't build momentum. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but the 119 abysmal years of our profession's development is testimony enough to the veracity of my view. So if not multi-niching: what do you do? To-days Mission – Make Your Own Avatar [BTW For those of you who missed out signing up for my 30 Day Challenge – you still can. I am no longer offering my new e-book, but each day's challenge is still available, and if you start now, you have 30 days to cover it. Go this this link and sign up. There are 33 teachers and students in there, some having life-changing experiences, epiphanies and everyone is being turbo-charged by each other to get their businesses happening. You can leverage their energies to get yours going too. Even students are realizing "Oh, I can start right now. I don't have to wait till I qualify." $48 is not much to pay if it gets your business purring again. Don't think to much about it – just act! Go here now and sign up.] What Are Some Good Niches?

Ideally a niche will be an activity like golf, music, martial arts and dance. These niches are most ideally suited to Alexander Technique as you can utilize the moments to create great online content. We will get to that later when we start creating some "Aho (dumb) Alexander" exercises. However, another kind of niche is a problem shared by a community – for example, Angela is aiming towards the sonographers who face debilitating problems in working with their machines. There's 42,000 of them in the UK (including related professionals) and they are conveniently gathered together in obtainable mail lists, conferences and magazines. This is the problem/niche match that most Alexander Technique fail to put together when they go after back and neck pain. You know not to do the same, right? Yet another kind of niche (which may appeal to many of you struggling to find your niche) are people with a profile: yearning for something. Until recently this was not a viable niche because the cost acquisition was way to high for an individual practitions. Google adds, and now FaceBook have levelled that playing field – so if this niche interests you, you will need to invest money. There's no way around that, but if you can find say $300 a month to invest, you are in the game again. How does this kind of niche work? Here's what we did at BodyChance – we profiled our members. We created what is known as "a psychographical profile" of our members. Profiling has a bad reputation, so let's think another way about it: creating avatars that represent students you already have (or want to have) in your business. Here's an example of one of several avatars we created at BodyChance:

Junko Hasihimoto (an Avatar i.e. not a real, living person) Female, Age 52; good relationship with kids; safely married to a salary man; 2 children in University, 1 boy (Masato), 1 girl (Miyuki); living in Chiba; husband give financial support; teaches choir singers; has some tiny performance experiences; university educated; lived/travelled often abroad; speaks some English; finished child raising – ready to start a new career or interest; big savings - willing to spend on the right kind of education.

We have many people like this in ProCourse, and now we can actively seek them out through different kinds of campaigns. How Do You Find Your Avatars? Explore the people already surrounding you. If you are a student, use the visualization exercise yesterday to get you to see who you want to be with while teaching. If you are a teacher who has taught students, use this psychographical exercise to help you find your avatars.

1. List all your students – past and present, at least those that left an impression.
2. Notice if you see any patterns there: Interests? Age? Profession? Gender? Belief? Activity? Location? Connections? Income? Seekers? Conservative/radical? Politics?
3. Now try to put them into categories of all kinds i.e. males/females; younger/older; all those who are office workers, performers, musicians, local/long distance, know someone else, came for pain/transformation. Many will appear in multiple lists. Some you will see start in one list, then move to another list. Be creative with this, bouncing off who you already have, creating categories suggested by your profiling of your students. You will discover that you can reduce them all to just a few "types" of people. I recommend you do this exercise with another teacher, friend or even an interested student! You can brainstorm better that way.
4. From these various honed-down types, produce one or more avatars that represent common characteristics that cover categories of people in your practise.
5. For each avatar, start visualizing their life: where they live, work and play. What they enjoy, who their friends are, what TV shows they watch: create a typical profile like the one I shared above, then go on and create "One Day In The Life Of Your Avatar"

In this exercise, you are looking for patterns – a niche may already be around you and you've yet to notice that it is there. I have learnt, since I started coaching teachers, that often the niche they were looking for was in front of them all the time. This has happened with a few teachers who volunteered for case studies in my three month course on the 12 Steps. This kind of niche is ideally suited for FaceBook advertising – something I will be getting into later in our 30 Day Challenge. But for that to work, you need at least on Avatar.