Find Your Niche

A lot has been made of niche marketing over the past several years, for good reason. While I am not a believer in putting all of your eggs in one basket, I do believe that finding a specialty or a niche can lead to growing other areas of your business while maintaining a solid base of business.

Here's the danger of relying on your niche for the entirety of your business. Over the past few years there have been myriad stories of agents that have made a fortune selling REO properties, short sales and working with investors. Flash forward a few years, the market has recovered, and those agents, for the most part, are hurting. The put all of their eggs in one basket and are paying the price now. There have been some who used that money to grow their "conventional" business, but for every one of those, there are a dozen others who didn't.

How, then, do you find or create a niche without opening yourself up to the trap of betting the house on one hand (pun totally intended!)?

Finding a niche is about finding something that you have experience with, can use to leverage into business, and enjoy doing. Whether working with seniors, the military, a charitable organization, or whatever you choose, make the niche a base of business while you work on other parts of your business at the same time.

Think of niche building like geographic farming. You work a neighborhood hard to build a base but you don't only focus your attention in that one neighborhood. No, you use that business to extend to other areas. With niche marketing, you do the same thing but your niche takes the place of your original geo farm.

For example, let's say that your niche is working with relocating military families. How do you take that niche and expand it to pick up additional business? First of all, you could use referrals of family members or friends in the area. You could throw welcome parties for the new arrivals to help them, and you, meet the neighbors. From that you could pick up listings, start to build a farm area, and use that to expand to other communities. You market your past clients like any others for further referrals. Before you know it, you have a huge referral engine in place. You could do this over and over for each area that a military family relocates to. And, so on and so on and so on.

Niche building is a great tactic for building a base of business that can then turn your base into a referral machine that will allow you to grow your business in other areas. That's the key to successful niche marketing. Don't leave all your eggs in one basket unless you are prepared to deal with the consequences of those eggs being smashed one day.