Determining Your Niche Pt. 1

One of the questions we are most often asked is “How do I choose or determine a niche for my VA practice?” Unfortunately this is a question that we can’t answer for you, but we can point you to the tools you need to determine this for yourself. But first some brief background.

When Dale and I first got started our niche actually found us. While we were working with our first business coach, she helped us realize that the services that we offered were right up the alley of most coaches. She referred us to a coach for VA services, who referred us to another and the rest is history. In addition to WOM (word of mouth) referrals, we also market ourselves to the coaching industry. However within the coaching industry our Ideal Client Profile narrows our target down quite a bit. Keep in mind, as both you and your business grow, your niche will become more and more defined.

Become a Master Craftsman

Marketing is vital to growing any business in any industry. It is especially true with a virtual industry like the virtual assistant industry. The hard facts are that VAs do not set up a brick and mortar store-front; they typically set up a web site. The disillusion of having a website is that once it is built, they expect to have “walk-in” traffic like most new businesses experience when they open their doors for business. The “if you build it, they will come” attitude is somehow adopted into the thought of creating a VA business. The origin of this thought is unclear.

Marketing is paramount to any entrepreneur starting out utilizing the Internet as the primary medium for attracting clients. Marketing to everyone on the Internet, however, means that your one business is marketing to a billion potential clients. Marketing your business to everyone who has a heartbeat and a checkbook is not effective. The likelihood of someone stumbling onto your web site is possible but not probable, especially if you expect that visitor to use your services.

The question becomes, how do you make your business attractive to someone who wants what your business provides? The answer is to determine a target market. This is one of the biggest roadblocks that most VAs experience before they enter the VA Training program. The I.D.E.A.L. coaching principle was designed to help bring out what already lies beneath the surface of every entrepreneur and show them how to build a business around it. Included here is a portion of that principle. It is a fairly straight forward process which can be broken down into six workable components and then pieced back together. The six pieces of this puzzle are listing your five talents, identifying your five loves, identifying what industry or industries need what you have, knowing who you know, target the market and structuring your business to appeal to that or those industries.

Next time we’ll delve in a little further.

Becki