Discover Your Coaching Niche

You have decided on your target market for coaching and are committed to it.  You know you have to understand what your target market wants – but how?   How on earth do you find this out?  Read on for ten quick and easy ways to research your market.

1. Bookshop and library research

A great deal of information that you’re seeking has already been published.  So take a trip to a nearby large bookshop and go to the specialist section for your market. 

Look at how much shelf space is dedicated to your market niche.  This will indicate the demand in the marketplace.

The section manager or librarian of your specialist section knows which books they are selling the most of.  They may also be aware of new books about to be published.  Ask them to tell you which are the bestselling books in your niche area.

If it’s a narrow topic, look at the bestselling books and see how much of each book is dedicated to that topic.

Then go to a library and again see what takes up shelf space.  Talk to the librarian.  Which are the popular titles?  Pull a few off the shelf and flick through them.  What topics are covered?

2. What is on Amazon?

This is an easy search – go to www.amazon.com and see how many books relate to your target market.   

What are their titles?  What angle are they taking?  Look at the table of contents – what topics do the the books cover?  What do the reviews say?

Where you can, look inside – what problems are they solving?  Is the treatment academic or down to earth?  Make notes on your findings.

3. Do an Overture Search

Type in your topic to http://inventory.overture.com .  This will indicate how many searches were conducted on Overture for that topic last month.

This will also give you the most common keywords searched for relating to your topic, and the number of searches they got last month.  Make notes on the number of searches and the most frequently searched keywords.

Parts 4-10 of this article will continue in the next postings.

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