Below you’ll find a curated list of articles the Big Circle of niching. These are supplemental reading suggestions for participants in the Niching Homestudy.
***
The 3 Elements That Make for a Profitable Niche – Corrina Gordon-Barnes
At its most basic level, a niche is a group of people who share characteristics and a problem. So, for example: women (a characteristic) who’ve tried every diet and can’t lose weight (problem). It’s useful to specify further. For example, women in their twenties living in Brighton who’ve tried every diet and can’t lose weight. (This is the niche of a hypnotherapist I worked with.) But we can go deeper with niche and check in with three elements which make for a dream business. If you feel stuck in the “I want to work with everyone” phase, ask yourself these three questions.
Attracting Perfect Customers – Are you a Searchlight or a Lighthouse? – Jan Brogniez and Stacey Hall
How many times have you thought “I need more customers!”? If you find that you often feel that you need more customers, then consider this . . . 85% of new businesses fail within the first five years of operation, and, of those that survive, another 85% will fail within the next five years? The major contributing factor for these failures is that these businesses have focused their resources on finding or “targeting” customers to serve.
There Are Some People I 
Don’t Want to Heal – Does That Make Me a Bad Healer? – Kay Gillard
This is a question I hear from people more often than you might think. And it gets asked in a slightly lowered voice, because it has the whiff of shame about it. As healers, we are supposed to love everyone, and therefore if we admit that we don’t want to be of service to a particular person or type of person we feel that we are somehow unspiritual.
Big and lit
tle fields – a quick idea for working on your “purpose” – Tim Gray
Do you get pulled between an inner urge to make a big contribution to the world and the need to do something useful in the moment, so that you go round and round and don’t get anywhere?
A Different Look at Understanding Your Niche – Suzanne Evans
You typically hear in many marketing circles that the first thing you need to do is identify your niche. This terminology of a ‘niche’ doesn’t work for me because it feels very much like, “Find a group of people to sell to.” I’ve found a better way to identify these people is to ask, “Who needs me most?” When you look at who needs you most and you can recognize what your ideal client is, it’s very important for you to be aware that you shouldn’t work with everyone.
Who is Your Customer? – Seth Godin
Rule one: You can build a business on the foundation of great customer service. Rule two: The only way to do great customer service is to treat different customers differently. The question: Who is your customer? It’s not obvious. Zappos is a classic customer service company, and their customer is the person who buys the shoes. Nike, on the other hand, doesn’t care very much at all about the people who buy the shoes, or even the retailers. They care about the athletes (often famous) that wear the shoes, sometimes for money. They name buildings after these athletes, court them, erect statues . . .
What Sack of Stones did you grab from Heaven? – Tomar Levine
It came to me one day when I was thinking about my own “issues” – those behavior patterns, limiting beliefs and self-images that seem to have conspired to keep me “stuck” for what seemed like eons. It was like I was living inside of invisible walls made of impenetrable plexiglass.