“Find a Niche”
When you get into business, you can’t swing a cat without being told you have to find a niche.
What the hey?
Well, niches are groups of people. Typically a niche defines a group of people by slots and numbers: middle-aged housewives, young men with disposable income and technical skills between the age of 18 and 35, white Republicans with an income of $70,000 to $100,000, new mothers, cat fanciers, Rails developers, web designers.
But take any group of new mothers, cat fanciers, young men, Rails developers, web designers, or white Republicans with a firmly middle-class income, and you’ll find they vary hugely when it comes to opinions.
And, let’s face it — external attributes don’t matter nearly as much as opinions do. There’s a reason the saying doesn’t go, “External attributes are like assholes: everybody has ’em, and they all stink.”
Everybody’s obsessed with finding a niche when what they should be doing is expressing a worldview.
Overcome Inertia & Inspire Movement
The best way to use the Laws of Customer Physics [see below!] to your favor is to take a stand. This is more powerful — and easier to implement — than a massive advertising budget.
If you respect the awesome power of worldviews to direct attention and interest, you can use them to lure the Right People to be your customers:
If your plan is to be bland, to make your product middle-of- the-road so you don’t offend anyone (because you think your market is everyone), then everyone will ignore it equally. Your product will exert no gravitational force; extremely few customers will be moved.
If, on the other hand, you have a worldview (or taste) that drives your product, and you let it out, you’ll exert gravity. You’ll pull the Right People in, when they land on your site or pass by your store, and feel OH YEAH! THAT’S FOR ME!
You’ll also repel the Wrong People. Result: everybody’s happy!
This is positioning. It’s messaging. It’s branding. It’s purple cows, and differentiation, and customer segmentation. Those things are all important — but it’s the worldview, the tastes and beliefs, that drive them. If you try to do big, business-y sounding things before determining your worldview (and the worldview of your customers), you’re going to find yourself in deep doo-doo.
Your worldview, and the worldview of your product, have to get in at the ground floor, and make nice with the worldviews of your Audience.
This happy confluence of worldviews should influence everything, from feature choice to the way you write.
This is the way to make a name for yourself… and make sales. Everything else is just struggling against the tide.
Learn More… Free 39-page Guide to Worldviews!
Yup, I’m releasing two whole lessons from my always-sells-out 30×500 Product Launch Class for absolutely free. Yes, zilch, zippo, nada, nil.
(But wait! There’s more! — just kidding! Who do I look like, Ron Popeil?)
If you’re targeting developers, or even Ruby developers, or designers or even web designers who use WordPress, or freelance writers or even freelance writers in the business space… you’re making a mistake, because you’re working off the very ineffective concept of niches.
And you should definitely download my free guide to Worldviews below, with a bonus introduction to the 3 Laws of Customer Physics. (Which cannot be denied & must be understood — unless you want your business to fall as fast as a feather OR a bowling ball in a vacuum)
For serious: check out this lesson. If it doesn’t rock your socks, you lose nothing!
But if it does rock your socks — and boy am I hearing a lot of great feedback! — then imagine what it would be like to have 3 full months of this kind of education delivered to your doorstep. Concise. Funny. Effective. Breathtakingly simple, once you read it. Actionable. Yup, that’s 30×500 in a nutshell.
But don’t take my word for it. Try it yourself.
Learn how to make your audience say "that's for me!"
Avoid the pitfall of Niche-Seeking with my free 39 page lesson
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