From personal development to personal finance, coaching has become one of the most popular ways for creator educators to monetize their knowledge and expertise.
So, do you want to become a life coach? Before you can launch your dream coaching business, you’ll need to find your coaching niche.
And that’s exactly where this article comes in. Here, we’re teaching you how to find your coaching niche. Oh, and we’re also providing you with a template that helps you identify your niche in just a few minutes. Get our Coaching Niche Finder template now — for free!
What is a coaching niche?
Before you start finding your niche, it might be useful to define just what, exactly, a coaching niche is.
In the broadest terms, a coaching niche is the specific topic or area of expertise that you’ll focus on in your coaching practice. In other words, it’s your specialization as a life coach.
When thinking about your coaching practice as a business, it’s helpful to reframe your coaching niche as your target market. Your coaching niche is the group of people (with specific demographics and psychographics) who you can coach best — and who are best coached by you.
If we combine both of these ideas, your coaching niche is the type of coaching that coincides with your specific expertise and that has an existing market of potential clients. In a nutshell, it’s the intersection between your unique genius and what people want.
Why you should find your coaching niche
So, why is finding your coaching niche important? In a nutshell, niching down helps you reach your target market and, ultimately, earn more money.
Think about it: as a client, wouldn’t you rather invest in services that are tailored to your specific needs (say, procrastinating less or improving your self-esteem) than a generic, one-size-fits-all solution (say, just “life coaching”)?
That’s right: life coaching actually serves as an umbrella term for a variety of different types of coaching. In reality, there are many, many different coaching niches out there.
Identifying your niche has a number of benefits to both your business and your clients:
- Create effective programs: Identifying your niche allows you to get deeper into a specific topic, so you can deliver solutions that truly solve your client’s problems and pain points.
- Reach your target audience: Niching down also makes your marketing efforts a lot easier — and effective. On one hand, it’s a lot easier to promote your services to a specific market than a general audience. And on the other hand, audiences are generally more receptive to hyper-specific, targeted marketing than broader campaigns.
- Clarify your purpose: Getting clear on your niche can also bring you clarity on your coaching business. This includes everything from your broader career goals to the details of your coaching programs.
- Earn more $$$: Providing more effective services to your clients allows you to charge more for your programs and reap a larger income from your coaching business.
- Beat the competition: Determining your unique value proposition gives you a leg up on the competition. In other words, niching down helps you determine what you can offer that others can’t.
Ready to start earning as a life coach? You can with our free Coaching Niche Finder.
Our easy-to-use template provides you with everything you need to know about all the most profitable niches and helps you find yours in just a few minutes.
How to find your coaching niche
- Identify your expertise and passion
- Conduct market research
- Choose your niche
- Define your target audience
Now that you know all the income-boosting benefits of finding your coaching niche, it’s time to hunker down and actually, well, find it! The best part? It only takes four steps.
Read on to find out how to identify your coaching niche so you can earn more money as a life coach.
Step 1: Identify your expertise and passion
The first step in finding your niche is identifying your expertise and passion. Before you can begin helping others, you need to get in touch with yourself and find out what drives you.
Growing your coaching business from your own strengths and passions not only helps you deliver better services, it makes your coaching business a lot more sustainable and enjoyable to run. If you don’t have the skills to address your clients’ needs or the drive to keep doing what you’re doing, your business can easily run out of steam and even lose you money.
Begin by listing out all your skills and passions. Are you a fan of the mindfulness method? Add that to the list. Do your friends often approach you for relationship advice? That’s also something to jot down.
Ask yourself questions like, “What do I like to do?”, “What topics do I like talking with others about?”, “What professional experience do I have?”, and “What are my hobbies?” These are all great places to start as you make your list of potential niches.
For this step, you might even want to enlist the help of family and friends. Ask them what they consider to be your best characteristics and skills. Their answers might surprise you — and provide you with valuable information for determining your niche.
Keep building up your list until you have about 20 or 30 skills and passions. Of course, you’re not going to be cornering 20 to 30 niches! But this number gives you a broad enough pool to begin diving into step two: market research.
Step 2: Conduct market research
At this point, you’ll want to figure out how your skill set fits into the coaching market. Yup, that means it’s time for some good old market research.
Conduct keyword research
The best way to determine the most profitable niche for your expertise is to conduct keyword research. This type of research shows you just how large a market is for a specific topic. There are lots of free tools online that can help you do this work, including Google Keyword Planner.
To do this research, you’ll first need to come up with a list of keywords to test. Take a look at your list from step one and transform each list article into one or two keywords.
For example, if you wrote “financial advice”, you’ll want to check out the search volume for the keywords “financial coach” or “financial coaching.” A large search volume means there’s a healthy market of potential customers seeking this kind of coaching. In other words, you’ve landed upon a potentially profitable niche!
Determine your niche’s competitiveness
To find the truly profitable niches, however, you’ll need to also check its competitiveness.
Your initial keyword research should have helped you narrow down your original list to just a few potential niches. From there, you can determine those keywords’ competitiveness by getting a bid estimate or searching the top-ranked posts on Google.
A bid estimate tells you just how expensive it is to run a Google Ad campaign for a specific keyword. Now, we know what you’re thinking: I haven’t even launched my business yet, let alone started thinking about ad campaigns. That being said, getting a bid estimate using Google Keyword Planner is a great way to see how competitive the market is for a specific keyword.
The higher the bid estimate, the more brands or creators are trying to corner this niche and the harder it will be to break in. In other words, keywords with high bid estimates might not be the most profitable, while keywords with low bid estimates but high search volumes will be the most profitable.
You can also determine a keyword’s competitiveness by checking out its top-ranked posts on Google. Scan through the top search results to determine the type of information being shared, the length, and the quality of each webpage. If you think you can create better quality content or if you find there’s an information gap that you can fill, then you’ve found yourself a profitable niche.
Of course, competitiveness counts when it comes to finding a profitable niche. However, you don’t need to let it dissuade you from a niche you feel passionately about. With enough passion, expertise, and hard work, you can turn even the most competitive niche into a profitable one.
Step 3: Choose your niche
Now that you’ve done all that great market research and narrowed down your list of potential niches, it’s time to finally choose your coaching niche!
Remember that your ideal coaching niche will always exist at the intersection of your skill set and what people want. You’ll want to choose a coaching niche that you’re excited about, but that also has a healthy market.
Pro tip: Review your list of the top three or four coaching niches with the highest demand and lowest competitiveness. Whichever niche gets you the most excited is probably the one that you should choose.
Step 4: Define your target audience
After choosing your coaching niche, the final (additional) step is to define your target audience. Your target market is the group of people that you’ll be helping with your coaching services. In other words, these are the people you’ll be tailoring both your coaching programs and your marketing efforts towards.
When defining your target audience, you’ll want to get as specific as possible (just like you did with your niche). For example, let’s say your niche is relationship coaching. It’s a fact that people from all age groups and walks of life are seeking relationship advice. However, to really hone in on a specific market, you might want to consider tailoring your services to singles or divorced individuals. The more targeted your audience, the more effective your services and your marketing efforts will be — and the more you can earn.
When defining your target audience, it’s helpful to create a few different user personas. These marketing tools are vivid “character” profiles designed to represent specific clients who might use your coaching services. A user persona includes a client’s demographics and psychographics along with their unique preferences, habits, needs, and pain points.
Coming up with detailed user personas helps you pinpoint exactly who you’re looking to reach with your promotion tactics and who you’ll want to tailor your services towards.
Want to create comprehensive user personas in minutes? Grab our free User Persona Template now.
Mistakes to avoid when choosing your coaching niche
Looking to niche down but want just a few more pointers? Here are the top three mistakes not to make when you’re choosing your coaching niche:
Don’t be too vague
It’s called a niche for a reason! When choosing your coaching niche, it’s important to be as specific as possible rather than going with a vague, broad niche
Sure, life coaching might have a broad audience, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. Choosing a niche (or even a sub-niche) that’s highly specific to your expertise and that has a very specific target audience (like, say public speaking coaching) helps you help your clients better and earns you more money in the long run.
Want to learn about the most profitable sub-niches? Use our free Coaching Niche Finder.
Don’t choose low-demand niches
If you want to earn money coaching, you’ll need to choose a niche with a healthy market. You can be the most skilled expert on a specific topic, but if there’s no demand for your expertise and no potential customers willing to pay for it, then you won’t turn a profit.
Take the market research step outlined above to heart and dig into that keyword research in order to find out which niches are in high-demand and which aren’t. This will ensure you have a built-in client base when you launch your business, so you can earn the most as a coach.
Don’t choose a niche you can’t commit to
Sure, finding a niche with high-demand and low-competitiveness is the ideal. These are the niches that will earn the typical coach the most money, overall.
With that said, however, it’s important that you choose a coaching niche that you’re passionate about. Without the passion to fuel your purpose, your business can easily fizzle out — or you might even burn out!
Remember, being an infopreneur is a serious hustle. Without a spark to keep you going, hard work becomes even harder and less rewarding. That’s why it’s important to identify the niches that you’re passionate about first, before looking into their profitability.
The most profitable coaching niches
Want to find out what the most profitable coaching niches are without the market research? Consider this section your cheat sheet.
Below, we’re unpacking a few of the most profitable coaching niches today.
- Personal development coaching: Personal development coaching focuses on helping clients improve their self-awareness, confidence, communication skills, and overall personal growth.
- Career coaching: Career coaching focuses on helping clients navigate their professional lives, including job searches, career transitions, and professional development.
- Relationship coaching: Relationship coaching focuses on helping clients improve their romantic, social, or professional relationships through effective communication, conflict resolution, and emotional intelligence.
- Financial coaching: Financial coaching focuses on helping clients improve their financial well-being by providing guidance on budgeting, saving, investing, and managing debt.
Want to unlock even more profitable coaching niches (and sub-niches)? Our easy-to-use Coaching Niche Finder provides you with in-depth information on 12 of today’s most profitable coaching niches, including lists of pro’s and con’s, and sub-niches for each, so you can really niche down.
Launch your coaching career today
Now that you know how to find your coaching niche, you’re well on your way to launching your coaching business.
Want to start selling your first services today? You can with The Leap.
The Leap is a free all-in-one creator store with features including a mobile-first digital product builder and a link-in-bio storefront. Powered by AI, The Leap can help you transform your expertise into a digital product in just minutes.
In addition to mini-courses, tutorials, guides, and challenges, The Leap enables you to sell mini-consultations through its “Ask Me Anything” feature. Rather than hopping on a live coaching session, these bite-sized consults allow you to share advice, offer feedback, and answer clients’ questions via pre-recorded video. In other words, it’s an easier way to monetize your unique genius.
The best part? The Leap is totally free to use.
Interested in selling mini-consultations or in building out your digital product offering? Try The Leap for free today.
Offer micro-consulting and sell coaching sessions with The Leap.
Follow The Leap on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube for more audience growth tips. We also make a newsletter.
Further reading
- How To Become a Life Coach (Tips + Free Templates)
- How To Become a Mindset Coach (Tips + Free Templates)
- Your Guide to Creating an 8-Week Coaching Program (+ Free Template)
- Your Guide to Creating a 12-Week Coaching Program (+ Free Template)
- How To Create a Coaching Contract (+ Free Template)
- How To Create a Life Coaching Business Plan (+ Free Templates)
- How To Find Your Target Audience (+ Free Template)
- How To Create a User Persona (Tips + Free Template)
- How To Sell Digital Products Online: A 6-Step Launch Checklist
