M02.17 The Road To Niches – Part III

Here are the 10 most important things you need to know about niches: 1. Alexander Technique is too vast, deep and incomprehensible to sell effectively to a generic audience without a deep pocket and a lot of time. 2. When your resources are limited, an effective way to convince people to learn with you is through creating a deep, empathetic connection via content marketing (blog, FaceBook, twitter, articles, TV, conversations, talks, books, appearances, etc.) 3. You create empathy by understanding the needs of a specific community or niche – defined as group of people bound together by some activity or idea. 4. An ideal niche for Alexander Technique teachers is a community of people bound together by a moving activity: musicians, dancers, martial artists, sports people, fitness fanatics, hikers, climbers, some kinds of hobbyists etc. 5. Your niche needs to be easily accessible, which means they are already connected to each other. Building your community from scratch requires up greater amounts of time and money – do you have that? If not, first find the community that is already existing. 6. When committing to a niche, ask first: how long is this group able to sustain your career as an Alexander Technique teacher: are there enough of them for that? will they stay over a longer term period? will they adapt to the business model you run? 7. Are you offering something to your niche that they clearly want? Is someone already offering them this? If so, are you more effective? Make this clear in your content marketing: selling to a niche means you do not need to "sell/explain" Alexander Technique – instead, you "sell/explain" how you will solve their problems. 8. Do you like the people in this community? Are you in this niche for reasons other than money and wealth? Passion, curiosity and empathy are better drivers to sustain you over the long, consistent effort that is required to attract people to your solutions. 9. Your primary job in a movement-orientated niche is to connect the idea that head movements govern vertebral co-ordination (co-ordination plan) which in turn will positively influence the movement (activity plan) they are keen on. 10. Use the language of your niche to communicate: talk to them using words they can understand from their past experiences. These are 10 essential points I have covered in my previous 18 posts on niches. Ultimately, you are building an Alexander Technique community niche – your personal niche within a larger, already established niche. Although you focus only on one niche, you will attract many other people besides. Far from restricting your work, the niche approach opens up your opportunities by putting you into contact with all sorts of influential people that ultimately gives you more choice about a path to follow. It is my assertion that anyone with reasonable skills, a little capital and lots of drive and time, can build a successful business by being attentive, empathetic and responsive to the needs and problems of an intelligently selected community of people.