One of the biggest mistakes I find small business owners making is fishing for clients in a pool of people who will just never pay for the services they’re offering.

We all want to help people, and it’s an unfortunate fact of life that many (MANY) of the people you could really help – you WANT to really help – will just never pay for that help.

And, actually, many of the people who need you MOST may fall into that group.

Sometimes they just don’t have any money and they have absolutely no means of accessing any money.

Sometimes they DO have money, they just don’t want to pay you.

It’s important that, as someone looking to build a successful business, you get to grips with this fact and face it head on.

Because there will always be more than enough people who DO have the money and DO want to pay you for your help.

The trick is focusing on getting in front of them.

Now, that’s not to say you shouldn’t help people who have no money, and we’ll come back to that later on.

But for now, let’s talk about finding those clients who can, and will, pay you handsomely for what you do. Enabling you to go ahead and create amazing packages that will bring them amazing results, and that will empower to charge what you’re really worth.

What we’re talking about here is finding your niche. Finding the people who love you, love what you do and how you do it and will happily pay you handsomely to help solve their problem.

In my Ignite Mastermind & Coaching Programme, we use a 6-Step formula called ‘Niche Breakthrough Secrets’ for this, and in this article I’m going to walk you through Step 4 in that process – working out whether your current niche is ‘Hot Or Not’.

In other words, are you going to have the success you really want fishing in the pool you’re currently fishing in or do you need to make some tweaks?

Let’s take a look:

• Is your niche big enough to be viable?

Now let’s just take a step back for a minute and look at this realistically. Think about how many clients you actually NEED. (I would recommend you do that calculation if you haven’t already). If you’re offering packages that range in investment from, say, £99 to £ 5,000, I’d recommend you need to be looking at a pool of at least 10,000 people.

So do some basic research – are there likely to be 10,000 or more of your ideal client in the area you’re looking to serve?

Remember, we’re not saying you need to convert 10,000 into clients – just that there needs to be at least that many people out there for you to pull from.

If there are less than 10,000 you need to look at either broadening the scope of your main package, or widening the geographical area you’re going to cover.A

• Are your ideas/services flowing upstream or downstream within your niche?

Flowing upstream within the culture that is already present within your niche means you are attempting to get them to change their mindset and beliefs about your topic.

Flowing downstream means your ideas are ones your niche is likely to accept. Any time you are flowing upstream within your niche’s culture you’ll find marketing and making sales difficult, time consuming and costly.

There are plenty of people who will already be ‘sold’ on the methods/approach you use. Focus on showing these people how you specifically can solve their problems and help them achieve the results they want, rather than trying to convince non-believers that your way is best.

• Out of 10, how important will the people within your niche rank solving the problem you’re offering to solve?

Let’s be honest, there are a myriad of problems that we all live with on a day-to-day basis that we could just carry on living with forever, without ever getting to a point where we believe we need to fix it NOW.

So, out of 10, how important is it that your ideal clients get a solution to the problem they’re facing?

A 10 is a “must solve now” and 1 is “I can live with it for a long time, as is.” This ranking must be a EIGHT or higher to make your niche viable for you.

If it’s lower than 8 you need to either change your niche or change what you’re offering.

I’ve made the mistake numerous times over the years of nurturing (essentially giving free advice to) potential clients – sometimes over many weeks – who are ‘interested’ in what I’ve had to offer, but not at all ‘committed’ to taking action to solving their problem.

This can lead to a tremendous amount of wasted time and effort and huge disappointment when they eventually decide they’ve got better things to spend their money on.

Addressing this at the outset by purposely hunting out those people you know need to solve their problem urgently can eradicate this altogether.

• Do the people within your niche have a history of investing in things of a similar nature to what you offer?

Remember that people will put up with a lot before they decide to invest in solving a problem – in fact, in these days of YouTube, Google and social media, they’ll likely try every avenue they can to solve the problem by themselves first.

So it’s best to focus your business on solving a problem your clients already prioritise as important.

The best measure for this is finding people who’ve already paid for something similar in the past.

Luckily, using those same online tools as well as other methods, it’s easy to do that nowadays.

• Do you love them?

You will be spending a lot of time with the people in your niche – working out different ways to help them, designing amazing packages for them that create great results…

This means you need to love these people and what you are doing with them.

If you don’t, the motivation to do everything in your power to help them just will not be there and that leads to a poor attitude, poor client results, payment problems and complaints further down the line.

So let’s go back briefly to helping those people you really want to help who have no money.

The best advice I can give is to separate your business from your charity.

Yes, if you want to give your time and energy away for free, that’s your decision. But that’s not running a business.

If you want to have a separate charitable project, of course that’s fine.

Personally, I would suggest that you wait a few months until you actually have some cash in the bank, are able to pay your bills and have your cash warrior lines and savings well and truly under way, if you haven’t already (see my Money Breakthrough Method® training!).

Because if you haven’t got that sussed, giving away your time for free will just be counter-productive – you need to spend all the time you can finding paying clients while you’re getting your own money sorted, THEN you’ll have the luxury of being able to help others.

If you’re looking for a proven method to turn your business results around, offering step-by-step guidance and support, so you can finally Charge What You’re Worth And Get It and build a life you are 100% in love with, check out my Ignite Mastermind & Coaching Programme at https://emmahague.leadpages.co/mastermind