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117 coaching niches, and what the buyers in each one actually want

By David Poole · 29 September 2026 · 4 minute read

4 things to know from this article

The problem coaches have is they try to talk to too many people. In this article I'm showing you why that slows down your business when it comes to finding new clients.

Let's take anxiety as an example.

A life coach is helping people overcome anxiety. But a woman at work under pressure from her colleagues has a different experience to the man struggling to go on a date, the learner driver taking their lessons, and the parent worried sick about their child. It's all anxiety, but they're all looking for different solutions.

They don't want vague help, they want something specific to them. They don't want to work it out for themselves, they want to dial straight into their own experience.

When we examined the coaching industry we found 117 main niches, and almost 1,000 sub niches underneath them. We did it by looking at what people are buying on Amazon.

Could there be 118 main niches? Maybe. What we learned matters more than the number.

Because we read what each of those people is buying, we know why they'll buy from you, once you know their buying triggers.

The full list is below. Find yours, then keep reading.

The 117 coaching niches

Mental health and emotional recovery

How you run yourself

Relationships, dating and family

Health, body and ageing

Money

Career and work

Business, leadership and selling

Skills, identity and meaning

A niche isn't an audience

Take "women over 40". It tells me who you want. It doesn't tell me what you'd do for me.

I could be a woman over 40 who wants out of a job she's done for twenty years. I could be one who hasn't slept properly since the menopause started. You've said nothing to either of us, and we both have to guess.

"Menopause coaching" I understand straight away. Two words and I know whether to carry on reading.

Scan the list above and you'll see hardly any of them are a type of person. They're problems, or they're things somebody wants. That wasn't a decision we made, it's what came back when we read what people buy.

You can do both, and it's stronger. "Menopause coaching for women in senior roles." Put the problem first though, because somebody skimming wants to know what you fix before they care who you fix it for.

There's more on the niche and audience difference if that's the bit you're stuck on.

Picking one off the list isn't enough

Out of those 918 sub niches, 733 of them want something the bigger market above them doesn't cover. Four out of five.

So if you pick a line off that list and write your homepage to it, you're writing to an average of people who all want different things.

I'm not knocking the list. Picking one beats telling everybody you help everybody, and it beats a homepage that opens with your certification. It's a real step forward. It's just not where you stop.

Back to anxiety, and what's underneath it

Anxiety has eight sub niches under it. Seven of them want something other than help with anxiety.

Four people, four completely different reasons to get their card out, and your homepage has said one word to all of them.

A coach writing "I help people with anxiety" has written something perfectly true. It's also what every other anxiety coach has written, so the reader goes straight past it.

Money does the same thing. Somebody trying to get out of debt is frightened. Somebody building passive income is trying to get ahead of people they know. Both come under Money and Wealth, and neither one would read the other's page twice.

So which one do you pick?

Pick the one where you can already hear the person talking. Not the one with the best search volume, and not the one somebody on Instagram says is lucrative.

Here's the test. Write down the sentence that was going through their head on the morning they started looking for help. If you can write it out without making it up, you know that market. If you find yourself reaching for adjectives, you don't know it yet.

Feeling sure and being right aren't the same thing, and this is easy enough to check. Go and read fifteen reviews of the books those people buy. If what comes back is what you'd have guessed, pick it.

Then go one level down. Don't write to anxiety, write to postnatal anxiety, and let the people who have it recognise themselves in your first line.

If you're good at several things, choosing between them without giving the rest up is its own question.

What this list won't tell you

It only covers markets where people are buying books, because that's what we could count. If nobody's publishing in your market, it won't be on here, and that doesn't mean nobody wants it. It means we had nothing to read.

The sub niche counts came out of that same reading. Seven or eight per market is what the evidence gave us, not a number we were aiming for.

One more thing worth saying. We've scored 10,954 live coaching homepages out of 10 and the average came back at 3.7. Almost none of those marks were lost on the niche the coach picked. They were lost on never saying it out loud on the page. If you want to know which yours does, you can have it read the way a stranger reads it.

Questions coaches ask about this

How many coaching niches are there?

117 with enough buyer evidence behind them to be worth naming, and 918 subniches inside those. That count comes from markets where buyers are already spending money, so it's a floor rather than a ceiling.

What is the most profitable coaching niche?

Wrong question, and the list is what invites it. Profit follows whether the buyer recognises their own problem in your words, not which market you picked. The ten markets with the most money already spent in them are also the ten where buyers have heard every claim before, which is the trade set out with the numbers here.

Do I have to pick a niche at all?

No, but the page has to. A coach can work across several markets and still have a homepage that speaks to one of them. What doesn't work is a page that averages them, because the average is a sentence nobody recognises as theirs.

What if my niche isn't on this list?

Then we haven't read it yet. I'd rather tell you that than hand you somebody else's market with your name on it. The list grows as the reading does. Faith is the one that catches people out. It's not on here as a niche because it turns up across six of them instead, and Christian coaching markets get their own article.

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