Find My Niche

A DWC Tool

Find My Niche

In about ten minutes, find the one thing you should be known for, the woman you are best placed to help, and the thirty days that will tell you whether you are right.

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Step one of seven

What are you carrying?

List everything you are currently selling, offering or posting about. Up to five. Write each one the way you would say it out loud.

Nothing to list yet? Start here.

One is enough. Five is the most this will take.

Write at least one thing before you carry on.

A niche is not a category. It is one thing you sell, one woman who buys it, and one result she gets. Most women arrive here with the first part half-formed and the other two missing.

Five offers do less work than one, and the reason sits outside your control. A woman needs to hear the same thing several times before it settles, so five messages divide her attention by five and each one arrives before the last one landed. The harder cost is described second-hand: your customer can only pass on what she can hold in one sentence, and five things give her nothing to carry.

This works from what you already have rather than from a list of profitable industries. Seven short steps. Most of them are tick boxes. Four of them ask you to write a line in your own words, and those four are where the answer comes from.

Step two of seven

Which one has the strongest signal?

Three questions about each one. Answer on what has happened so far rather than on what you hope will happen.

Answer all three questions on each one before you carry on.

Step three of seven

Do any of these belong together?

Tick the ones that would serve the same woman. Not the ones that look similar, the ones the same woman would want.

Of those, which would you most like to be known for?

Choose which one you want to be known for before you carry on.

Step four of seven

The woman

Describe her in one line. Not her age or her postcode, what she is in the middle of.

A woman who

That reads as a feeling rather than a situation. What has happened in her life or her business to put her there? Keep it if you are sure.

Others, as examples rather than answers: is going back to work after years away; has outgrown the way she has always worked; knows what she wants and cannot turn it into a plan; is doing well and quietly exhausted; has money coming in and no idea which part is working.

Write one line about her before you carry on.

Step five of seven

Her problem

Two lines. The distance between them is your positioning.

She says she needs
She actually needs

Think about what is stopping her getting the thing she says she wants. If both lines say the same thing, sit with the second one until they differ.

Both lines are needed before you carry on.

Step six of seven

Why you

One line. Why you rather than the next woman offering something similar.

Because I

Experience, a result, or having lived it. Qualifications come last, because she rarely asks.

Write one line before you carry on.

Step seven of seven

The shape of the test

Four last questions, about the one that came out on top.

Which is closest? This one is mechanical. It decides which thirty days you get.
What would you charge for it?
Could you deliver it inside a fortnight with what you have today?
Would you still choose this if it took six months to become known for it?

Answer all four before you carry on.

Your result

Wording it

The sentence has three parts: who she is, what she ends up with, and how you do it. Keep them in that order, because the woman reading it cares about the first two.

  • I help women returning to work after a career break to be ready for interview inside a month, through six weekly sessions.
  • I sell hand-poured candles to women who want the house to feel calm at the end of the day, delivered in two days.
  • I help women in their fifties to walk without knee pain, through a twelve-week strength plan.
  • I help independent salons to fill their quiet Tuesdays, by running their booking reminders.
  • I help writers to finish a first draft, through weekly deadlines and a read-through.

Two habits spoil it. The first is describing your method where the outcome should be, so the sentence explains what you do all day rather than what she gets. The second is the tail: "and lots more besides". That phrase undoes the whole exercise, because it puts the other four back.

How to tell it is working

Three things change inside thirty days, and sales are the last of them to arrive.

  • The questions get more specific. Instead of asking what you do, women ask whether you cover their particular situation.
  • Strangers repeat your words back to you, sometimes as their own.
  • The price comes up earlier in the conversation, because the rest of it is already clear.

When to change your niche

Change after twenty real conversations that reached the price and stalled there. That is the threshold, and it is deliberately high.

Changing after a quiet fortnight is the same habit that produced the list of five in the first place. Quiet weeks arrive in every lane, and moving during one costs you the thirty days you already spent.

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