Becoming A Niche Leader

Niche leader status doesn’t happen by accident.

When you first started marketing your coaching online, did you have dreams of waking up in your pajamas, setting up a little bit of content that you carefully crafted with just the right keyword density – and then watching the clients roll in?

Well it may have worked that way once upon a time, but thanks to automated tools and scummy spammers, search engines cracked down on that minimalist work strategy and now you have to go to a little bit more effort.

You might be nervous about being a niche leader in coaching. You might have these common feelings:

• Who would want to be coaching by me?
• I don’t have anything unique to offer.
• I’m not pretty, young, or smart enough to be successful.
• I’m nobody and there are already coaching leaders in this niche.

These feelings are normal, but they’re not accurate. Be honest. How would you like it – as a potential client – if you only had one choice for a restaurant, a salon, a clothing line, a music style, a grocery store, etc.?

You probably wouldn’t like it much, right? It’s the same way with coaching leaders in a niche. Clients connect with leaders in different ways. Some people might love bold, hard-selling individuals – and you can’t fathom why – because you prefer sweet, motivating people.

Everyone’s different. And whatever you have to offer, it’s going to have an audience for it – your style, your voice, your message – it’s unique to everyone else even if you’re talking about the same niche topic.

You don’t have to be an expert already. People love following along with someone on their journey from start to finish – so share where you’re at and work from there.

As for looks, it’s a non-issue. Unless your purpose is to attract people with your looks, then don’t worry about it. People looking for help with parenting don’t care if you have a crooked tooth or wrinkles under your eyes.

There are several ways you can position yourself as a niche leader – in a way that’s comfortable to you. It doesn’t mean you have to get out there and brag about how wonderful you are – it means you do the right thing and your audience automatically lifts you up to authority status.

Be a Niche Researcher and a Sharer

No matter what niche you’re in, there’s news that needs to be shared. There are new:

• Breakthroughs
• Trends
• Strategies
• Products
• People

You want to share all of that with your target audience. Yes, even share who other influencers are! We’ll get more into that in the next section. If you’re a niche leader in leadership, for example, you might share a proven process that helps organizations form a more defined identity.

Maybe you’ll see a news story about how women are flocking to professional decluttering coaches to get their homes and personal lives in order.

Your blog or your email subscriber list will be the place where your subscriber feels they can go to gather all of the information they want. They don’t want to have to go all over the Internet and buy a bunch of different products to see what works best – that’s what they’ll love you for!

Whenever you blog about something with a cutting edge slant to it, you increase your worth in the niche. Your readers will bookmark and share your site with others, they’ll trust your recommendations whenever you want to promote something, too.

The non-aggressive (unsuccessful) coach does nothing but look at keyword volume, outsource their content to ghostwriters without injecting any of their own personality, and basically copy another niche leader who is out there working for their audience the way they should be.

Align Yourself with Other Niche Leaders

When you’re a true niche leader, you’re never running solo the entire time you spend growing a coaching business. The top leaders understand that you work individually, but you stay connected with a team of like-minded niche leaders online.

Don’t be afraid of your competition – embrace them. They can be guest bloggers or invite you to guest blog on their site, they can co-create products and events with you, and they can cross-promote you whenever you sign up as an affiliate to promote one of their products.

Don’t just look to people who are bigger in status than you are, either. You want to keep an eye out for rising stars in your niche and help make them well-known, too.

It’s not just competitors who you should align yourself with, either. It’s anyone whose products or services are related to your own niche in some way. Let’s go through an example.

Suppose you run a diet blog that teaches people how to embrace a healthy lifestyle through nutrition and exercise. You want people to adopt life-long habits that improve their lives.

You can certainly promote other leaders in the diet and health niches – like someone specializing in juicing, for example – but you also want to connect with someone whose information is relevant, if not directly identical.

An exercise and fitness leader would be a good example of this. People learning about good nutrition often want the whole body approach, which means moving your body and getting fit.

You also might want to align with:

• A parenting leader so you can help their audience learn about good nutrition for growing kids.
• An aging leader so you can teach good nutrition for senior citizens.
• A job success leader so you can offer information about staying alert and energetic during a long workday.

There are endless possibilities for someone if you think about the target audience who needs what you teach and then consider who else they might be learning from. Here are some more examples:

• A smoking cessation leader so you can help smokers quit their bad habit without gaining a lot of weight.
• A skincare leader so you can teach good nutrition that helps your skin maintain its youth and appeal.

Make a list and then make it a point to reach out to those other leaders and form a bond with them so that you can help each other out as you both grow your online business.

Be Accessible to Your Audience

Accessibility is important to your prospects and customers. So few coaches are truly open to hearing from their clients. Many coaches put up a wall between themselves and their online audience. They don’t engage in blog comment discussions once a post is created.

It means a lot when your reader can just contact you – and get a response from you, not a virtual assistant that you’ve hired.

The best way to be accessible as a niche leader in your niche is to do the following:

• Respond to people on social networks like Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
• Respond to blog comments whenever you go in to approve them.
• Reply personally to your emails.
• Open comments up on things like YouTube videos to show you care about feedback.

All of these things take time, yes. But that’s where you can really put a personal touch on your usually sterile online presence. Going the extra mile can serve you well as a niche leader. It shows you care.

You don’t have to incorporate all of these elements in one day. It will take some time to integrate them all into your business, and you may have to outsource in some other areas.