Your VBO Niche

Have heard the saying “There are Riches in Niches”.

Is that still true? What is a niche? More importantly... What is a VBO Niche and how do I find mine?

For starters, that saying has never been truer than today.

In fact, it is not just a good idea to find a niche - your survival depends on it. The market for generalist is overpopulated. If you want to succeed with your work from home business you will need to deliver a very specific skill and deliver more value than anyone else. It's becoming more and more difficult to stand out and find work within this busy freelance lifestyle that so many are gravitating towards.

Three things happen when you create and own your VBO Niche:

1. It will be way easier to target and communicate with clients
2. Your conversion rates will go through the roof
3. Your income will rise along with your conversion rates 

Let’s define what a VBO Niche is and share with you a real-life example:

1. Primary Niche
   This refers to the general skill you bring to the table, in my real-life example it would be copywriting.
2. Sub-Niche
   Your sub-niche might be that you write high converting copy for outbound emails.
3. VBO Niche
   Your VBO Niche would be that you write high converting outbound emails for wealth managers that deal with HNW (high net worth) individuals. 

About a year ago, I had very talented VBO (virtual business owner) reach out to me. She was struggling to find new business. What’s worse, the business she had were low budget gigs.

She loved her work from home business - just one problem…It wasn’t paying the bills.

She was a copywriter - and a good one at that. Also, she had taken gigs writing website copy for a nutritional company, writing copy for a brochure for a manufacturing firm, and writing outbound emails for a company in the financial services sector. Her niche wasn't a bad one, she actually really enjoyed it. Focusing on copywriting as a niche can be very lucrative, but the term itself was too broad. So we spoke at length about what she enjoyed the most to see if we couldn't refine it to be something more specific - her VBO niche.

It turns out what really made her happy was helping people get their financial house in order.

Not only that, but writing copy for those in the financial services sector required compliance with a regulatory entity named FINRA.

Writing FINRA compliant copy was a real challenge. They wouldn’t tell you what words you couldn’t use, they would just correct you when you wrote something they didn’t like.

After a couple of conversations, Debbie decided she was going to focus on writing high converting outbound emails for wealth managers.

Here were the compelling reasons for that decision:

• There is a lot of money in money - As such, wealth managers “have a budget”. In VBO terms this means they can afford to pay the bills.
• Wealth Managers tend to be fairly local - Wealthy people want to be able to meet in person with whoever is taking care of their investments. This meant there were opportunities for new clients for Debbie in every town and city across the country.
• FINRA - this whole FINRA compliance thing was a big issue. For the most part, many wealth managers had given up on bringing in outside help to write their copy - they just couldn’t get it through compliance 

So, here we are a little over a year later. Debbie’s business is booming. She used to spend over half her time trying to find new clients and how she gets referrals all the time within her VBO niche. All by finding and refining her niche.

Debbie was able to really get into the minds of these ultra high net worth individuals and understand the unique issues they deal with every day.

This helped her communications convert at a way higher rate than most people in her industry had seen before.

Last (but not least), Debbie’s clients were so happy with their success that they started to offer her a bonus for new clients they sourced from her work. It turns out that she is now making more on the bonus income than her hourly billings.

Oh, there is an even bigger benefit.

Debbie is now in the process of creating a step-by-step course for marketing to high net worth (HNW) individuals. This will take her from a VBO Pro to VBO Passive. So basically, she will continue her copywriting to keep her skills sharp but by refining her niche down to her VBO niche, she can now scale her business and focus on it from a different angle.

However, the whole trade time for money will be secondary. What a great outcome! This ties directly into your success as a VBO. 

It's not difficult to find your niche, but it does take a lot of introspective thought and let's be honest, sometimes it's hard being truthful with ourselves.

Here’s what Debbie did - and you are able to do too:

• She got small to grow big - it’s much better to be an inch wide and a mile deep.
• She avoided the commodity trap - if Debbie would have just taken any writing job she could get her hands on she wouldn’t have made near as much money, by refining her niche, she was able to hyperfocus her efforts.
• She was able to create a product out of her expertise - successfully marketing to wealthy people is a skill businesses will pay a lot of money to learn.

Thanks - Go Launch Your Dream!

Tom Poole
Founder, VBO Nation
Fellow VBO