Step 1: Define your niche and target audience

With how advanced technology has become, anyone can create and launch a course on just about anything. If you're doing it just for fun, then fine. But if you're planning to build or support your business with an online course, you need to choose your niche strategically.

Ideally, your niche should be a culmination of three things:

Your passions, interests, or skills
Real problems people have that you can solve
A high probability of profitability

To choose a niche, the first step is to make a list of things you are passionate about, interested in, or know enough about to teach others.

Next, you want to find out if other people are actually interested in your ideas. Before you create a course, you have to be sure that there are people that will be willing to buy it once you launch. These people will start as your target market and eventually become your community.

This is where market research comes in.

Market research helps you discover the target market for your niche and gauge the interest people (will) have in your product or service.

Start your research by visiting existing websites, social media platforms, forums, and other channels to gather as much information as possible about the different audience personas in your niche. This information includes:

Demographics: Age, gender, education level, profession, income level, relationship status, etc.
Goals: What do they want to achieve? What are they aspiring to?
Competitor research involves identifying your competitors, assessing their strengths and weaknesses and the strengths and weaknesses of their products or services.

In her Think In Color presentation, Own Your Niche, Annie Atherton, breaks down how to do competitor research:

Pain points and challenges: What problems are they facing? What's preventing them from achieving their goals?
Interests: What are they interested in or passionate about? What do they like doing?
Online behavior: What websites do they visit regularly? What social platform do they use the most? At what time of the day do they use these platforms?

Answering these questions will give you a deep understanding of your target audience, so you'll create a course that is helpful and relevant to them.

After defining your niche and target market, you still need to know what you'll be going up against should you release a course in that niche.

And that brings us to competitor research.

Competitor research involves identifying your competitors, assessing their strengths and weaknesses and the strengths and weaknesses of their products or services.

Find out who else is offering what you're offering:

Use Google to find the most popular courses with the same topic as yours and the people who created them. Note what they're doing really well: Check out these creators' websites, social media profiles, and their courses' curricula to find out what they're doing right to attract customers. It could be a well-made landing page, a sizable social media following, clear offerings, or something else entirely. These are things you should emulate.
Figure out the customers they are missing: Here, you'll try to figure out what your competitors are not doing well. It could be that their course doesn't cater to the needs of a specific group of people, the course is too expensive, or they're not promoting through a specific platform. Whatever they are, your competitors' weaknesses are things you can turn into your own strengths.
How does their audience compare to your target audience: You'll have to do some guesswork here since you don't have access to your competitors' analytics. But study your competitors' marketing to figure out who they're primarily speaking to. Then weigh their audience against yours and take note of disparities in their demographics, goals, pain points, and online behavior.

If your course can cater to both audiences, all the better for you. If not, at least you've realized that your niche does have multiple audiences that are interested in it.

As you do competitor research, try not to get caught up in comparisons or feel defeated at the success of other creators. This is merely an avenue to find out where your course fits into the options facing your target market.

M2:S4 - Define your niche and target audience

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