Confusion doesn’t sell and equally importantly, confusion never gets started.

To start your online coaching journey, having a clear idea about what you want to teach (your niche) is very important because without that it’s tough to imagine your would-be coaching business.

Let’s look at some important questions and exercises that can help you get closer to your perfect niche.

Q.1 What am I passionate about?

Yes, this may sound a bit cheesy but it’s probably the most important point even though the other questions below may sound more pragmatic.

But what’s the reason for this?

Without passion, you can’t create content in a sustainable manner. Simple as that.

Because the Online Education industry is the type of industry where content is everything.

Without passion, you will run out of steam.

It’s perfectly ok if you don’t know exactly what your passion is. But it’s important that you pay attention to this point. Rest you will only come to know when you actually try.

But don’t ever make the mistake of going into a niche just because you feel someone else is making money in it.

And also remember, you have to be passionate about TEACHING in that field. Because a lot of times you can be passionate about some field but you may not be passionate about teaching in it. For example, I am very passionate about playing drums. But it’s only a personal passion. I would never like to teach in that field because that idea simply does not excite me. So selecting Musical Education as my niche would be a wrong thing to do.

Q.2 Is this niche narrow enough?

Once you have chosen a general niche that you are passionate about, it’s time to narrow it down.

But why should you narrow down?

Before I mention the reasons, let’s first look at an example of what it means to narrow down your niche. See the image below:

Suppose, you decide to become a Digital Marketing Trainer. So that’s the general niche you have chosen.

Now that is too broad because Digital Marketing has a lot of branches like shown above.

As a solopreneur, you simply can’t expect to become an expert in all those topics.

So the right thing would be to narrow this niche down by going for a specific branch.

Let’s say you choose Social Media Marketing.

Now even Social Media Marketing can be divided into the following branches:

So here you can then decide to select even a more specific branch. For example let’s say you select Facebook.

So suddenly you went from a vague sounding trainer (Digital Marketing Expert) to someone who is very focused (Facebook Marketing Expert)

Now your only job will be to create courses related to Facebook marketing, which will be a much easier task than trying to cover the entire Digital Marketing spectrum.

You will be free of stress and your prospective students will also recognise your authoirty easily since there is no room for confusion.

Even choosing Social Media Marketing is ok if you feel you had the knowledge and expertise to cover at least a few different platforms. But never become a complete generalist by choosing an extremely broad niche. Your niche has to be at the very least uniform and focused towards one area.

Always remember, CONFUSION DOESN”T SELL!!

If you come across as a focused expert, people will buy from you more since people are always ready to pay a premium to someone who has expertise in one specific field because such a person is most likely to take them from their pain point to their solution in the fastest way.

In Online Course Launchpad, I talk about narrowing down your niche in much more detail and even show you real life examples of how different coaches serve in narrow niches. I even show you how to narrow down further into something called as a Micro Niche.

Q.3 Is there market demand in this niche?

You don’t want to select a niche in which there is no potential to sell an online course.

That’s why you should always do a bit of marketing demand validation to judge to profitability of your future online course.

Let’s say that I am someone who is interested in making an online course which teaches people how to invest in Cryptocurrency.

Let’s look at some market demand validation techniques that can help me:

Checking via Udemy.com

Udemy is the Amazon of Online Courses. So you can head over to Udemy.com and in the search bar, type the keyword realted to your course. For example, in this case, I will type “Cryptocurrency”.

What I am looking for is whether there are other people who have created online courses in this niche. And whether those courses are doing well or not. Let’s look at the screenshot below:

You can see that searching for Cryptocurrency on Udemy gives very promising signs because the courses that come in the results look very succesful with the first one having over 10k reviews. Even 50-100 reviews is considered good so this is simply a great validation for a course related to Cryptocurrency. Remember, during the validation stage, competition is actually a great thing because competition just shows you one thing – that there is DEMAND for your course idea.

Checking via Keyword Search Volume

Another great way to know about the potential demand for a course idea is to see if people are typing in keywords related to it in Google and other search engines.

There are a lot of free tools which show the volume of keywords being typed in the different search engines but for this example we will use Google Keyword Planner. You will need to create a Google Ads account to use it (it’s free).

Once you are inside your Google Ads account, click on the Tools and Settings button on the top and then click on Keyword Planner. Then click on “Get Search Volume and Forecasts”.

Now enter a keyword related to your course idea. Going by our example, I can type “Cryptocurrency course”. I could have also typed just Cryptocurrency but sometimes its better to add the word “course” also to exactly see how many people are searching specifically for a course related to your niche. Let’s see the results:

You can see that in India, 100-1000 people search for Cryptocurrency course every month. Yes this is not a very big number but remember that we typed in a very specific keyword so it’s still a good result. Ideally the best result is in 1k-10k and 10k-100k category but for specific keywords this is fine because it means almost 1000 people/month want to get educated in Cryptocurrency. And this is just on Google search. And that too just in India.

Let’s see what happens if we remove the location filter and set it to worldwide:

You can now see that we are in that 1k-10k range even with a highly specific keyword. Remember we can sell our online course all over the world. So this is good news.

Now let’s put the filter back to India but this time let’s see what the results are if we only type in the word Crypcocurrency:

100k -1M !!!!!!!!!!

That’s just fantastic because this also shows the overall interest in the topic of Cryptocurrency.

In my course Online Course Launchpad I show you 8 more market validation techniques like these ones. And on top of that I actually show you the biggest market validation technique itself, which is putting your actual course idea in front of real people and seeing their reaction.

Some important points to keep in mind:

• When you are starting out, choose only one niche. Which basically means, have only one coaching business. Once you master this one business/niche, you can think of diversifying/expanding. Like they say in the Digital Marketing world, Nail it and Scale it.
  
• Don’t narrow down too much also. While it’s good to be specific and narrow down enough to avoid being a generalist, it can also be counterproductive to narrow down to such an extreme extent that you are left with a very small potential audience to serve. For instance, narrowing down from a general niche like Health and Fitness to a more specific niche like Yoga is a good thing. But there is not need to narrow it down even more to something like Yoga for kids or Yoga for senior citizens. That will restrict you too much. In Online Course Launchpad, I talk about the negatives of narrowing down too much in detail and in fact show you a better approach to serve an extremely narrow audience.

I hope this niche discovery exercise helps you in discovering your perfect niche.