No one buys from a 'generalist'

Reminder: The [Laptop Lifestyle Academy 50% discount]( ends on my birthday, July 19th. ****** "No one buys from a generalist." These were the words I heard as I was sitting in a large auditorium, listening to an internet marketing expert teach the fundamentals of online business. "People buy when an offer sounds like it's purpose-built for them." The presenter on stage explained how you need offers that speak so closely to a specific problem that the prospective customer feels like you are reading their mind. I found myself nodding my head. It made so much sense. Specialists win when up against generalists. I left that event eager to put into practice my new found awareness of what was called 'niche marketing'. I wanted to find my niche, and then market to it. Too Many Options The unforeseen challenge I next faced was to figure out which niche I wanted to dedicate myself to. When you start to narrow a problem down into smaller niches, suddenly you find yourself spoilt for choice. Pick one problem or topic to focus on and you are not going after so many tempting others. This is why people fall into the generalist trap in the first place. You want to be everything for everyone because you don't want to miss opportunities. I was ready to commit to a niche, I didn't want to be a generalist, but I also didn't know which niche to go after. So of course, I became a generalist... We Can Do It All! If you know my entrepreneur story, you know my first real business was an essay editing agency focused on university students. However, it didn't actually start like that. When I built my website I listed the following services for sale - - Business editing (editing documents for companies) - Editing for students (essay and thesis editing services) - Resume editing - Language translation Needless to say, it was hard to sell four different services at once. My business didn't make a strong appeal as the best option for any of these services. As a result, the only thing I could compete on was price. Customers were comparing my company to other companies and usually the lowest price quote won. This was not a formula for massive profits. Following The Breadcrumbs As I read more books about marketing and business, and attended more events, the concept of narrowing your niche so you are a specialist appeared again and again. It seemed like universal advice, yet I still wasn't following it. Meanwhile my business was not doing great... but we did have a few customers. During the first six months we completed: - 0 Resume jobs - 1 Language translation job - 1 Business editing job - 2 Student editing jobs At first I was excited (and nervous) just to get any customers, but I realized I wouldn't succeed offering so many different services. I learned from this brief period running my business that there were aspects I liked more (and less) about selling certain services. Business editing, although potentially lucrative because the projects were larger, was harder to sell. I'd have to deal with more meetings, more formal sales documentation, bureaucracy, and even wear a suit! I have a vivid memory from this time, sitting in a board room with the CEO of a small company and her assistant, nervously making a pitch to take on a proofreading project for them. I tried to sound confident as I pointed out how many errors were in their document and thus how much we could help. The CEO was not happy with my negative critique, yet surprisingly I still got the job. Language translation was a difficult niche to stand out in (as a generalist who offers every single language!). We could've narrowed down to specific languages or, better still, picked specific situations where you need language translation (say for example, captions for television), but I didn't feel confident about going after this market. I didn't know how to reach customers. For resume editing we had no customers and the profit margins looked to be the smallest, so it was easy to cut this one. Student editing was a better fit for me at the time. I was still a university student myself, so I understood the customer well, I could see how to position my offer even more narrowly (focus on international students with English as a second language) and students were comfortable buying things online, so no face-to-face meetings to close a deal. I also gambled that I could create set pricing structures for student editing because essays usually fall into certain word-count brackets. I could charge based on word counts and that way eliminate any back-and-forth quoting process. The student could click purchase, submit their essay, and everything happens online. It was easy to finally make the decision to narrow down to the student editing niche. I could see the path forward and was excited grow into this market. You May Need To Test Multiple Niches Over the years coaching people inside the [Laptop Lifestyle Academy]( and in Blog Mastermind 2.0 (now included with the Academy), new members almost always struggle with niche refinement. Most people know they need a niche. The hard part is how narrow to go? And once you go narrow, which problem to pick when narrowing in unlocks multiple niche opportunities? Unfortunately I don't have universal knowledge about every niche, so I can't give everyone an answer. What I do say to these people is to make your life easier by choosing niche experiments where you have an advantage.... and test one niche at a time (not 4 like I did!). Ideally that advantage has something to do with reaching people. If you have a job or business (or previously did) where you can source your first customers from, that's an advantage. It you have a connection to someone with an email list or a YouTube channel and they are willing to feature you or your content, that's an advantage. You could also have skills, like knowing how to use paid advertising, or influencer marketing to reach people, so it's easy for you to test ideas in front of people. That's an advantage. I find everyone, if they look hard enough, has some kind of advantage, even if it's a small one, that they can use to at least get started. From there, you look for the breadcrumbs -- those signs of success leading to a path forward. Don't Be Afraid To Kill Experiments Narrowing in to the right level niche for your next successful business will take time. However, it can't be something you experiment with forever. As a rule, try and get your offer in front of at least 1,000 relevant people before calling an experiment done. From those 1,000 people, some will become email signups and/or ideally one or two will become customers. If you get no results, that's a sign to try something else. BUT, if you only show your experiment to 100 people, that's not enough to draw a conclusion from. Keep marketing until you've shown your offer to enough people, then either tweak it for improvement and keep going, or kill it. Bear in mind some of your decision making criteria will have nothing to do with the data. You will also learn from intrinsic and intangible feedback. Are you enjoying the process? What kind of people are you getting to work with? Can you see a future where you are excited to keep selling this product or service you are selling, in this format? Niches Are Everywhere The next time I launched a services agency, I went straight for the niche. My current company, [InboxDone]( is a virtual executive assistant service that focuses on one main service - email management. It would have been very easy for me to launch a general virtual assistant service with no focus, but there are so many companies who already do this. I'd have nothing to say when it came to what makes us different, what makes us special. Instead, by focusing on a niche from day one, I was able to clearly position what we do differently, who we are best suited to help and clearly stand out from the competition. We also built the company around this niche, hiring and training a team to be specialists at delivering the service, not generalist virtual assistants who claim to be able to do anything. This is something you can do too. There are so many ways to slice up niches and the internet is vast. You can have a seven figure business with fewer than 100 customers, if you go after a narrow niche. It may take some experiments, and you may need to drop one niche for another, but if you focus on the process of testing eventually you will get there. Remember this – You can reach the entire world just with your website! All you need to is make sure that website uses copy that clearly demonstrates your speciality (your niche solution) and why you are the best choice to solve a narrow problem. Then all you have to do is get that website in front of people! Now go get busy and build your niche business. Yaro P.S. If you need help with niche refinement, copywriting, how to run marketing experiments, when to build a team, how to deal with technology challenges – all of these topics and more are covered in the [Laptop Lifestyle Academy](. You can still lock in the [50% discount for lifetime access to the entire Academy]( if you join by July 19th. -- yaro@yaro.blog Blog Mastermind Ltd 330 Avro Ave Pointe-Claire, QC, H9R5W5, CANADA [Unsubscribe]( Sent with [Systeme.io](