4 things to know from this article
- Mindset has 255 books behind it. That's 255 authors who got to your buyer first.
- Nine of the ten richest coaching markets are ones where every claim has already been made.
- A market with 12 books in it is quiet for a reason, and that reason will cost you.
- You can work out how hard a market is yourself in fifteen minutes, without our numbers.
Somebody will have told you mindset coaching is where the money is.
They're right. And in this article I'm showing you why that's exactly the problem.
We looked at what people are buying on Amazon across 117 coaching markets. Mindset came top with 255 books behind it. So 255 authors got to your buyer before you did, and the woman reading your homepage has probably finished three of them.
That's the awkward bit about asking which coaching niche is the most profitable. The markets with the most money in them are the markets where everything has already been said.
Here's the top ten.
| Niche | Books behind it | How many times the buyer has heard it |
|---|---|---|
| Mindset | 255 | 4 |
| Confidence and self-worth | 236 | 5 |
| Spirituality and meaning | 207 | 2 |
| Money and wealth | 199 | 3 |
| Self-compassion | 183 | 4 |
| Women's empowerment | 178 | 3 |
| Parenting | 172 | 4 |
| Career and purpose | 159 | 4 |
| Health, weight and fitness | 151 | 5 |
| Anxiety | 147 | 4 |
The second column is market size. The third is where it gets expensive.
What the third column means
It's how many rounds of promises somebody has already sat through before they get to you. We score it 1 to 5.
At 1 you can say what you do and people take it at face value, because nobody has said it to them yet.
At 5 the man reading your page has tried two apps, a programme his employer paid for, a book his sister gave him at Christmas, and a bloke on YouTube. He isn't doubting you. He's just tired, and he's read your headline somewhere before.
Nine of the top ten markets are at 3 or higher, and two of them are at 5. Across all 117, that's 51 markets at 4 or 5. Nearly half. The crowded end is where the money already is.
So where is the money?
In the market where you can still say something nobody has said to them yet. Which has almost nothing to do with how big it is.
Look at the other end of our list. Empty nest has 12 books behind it, sitting at 2. Caregiving for ageing parents has 19 books, also at 2. Blended and step-families has 14, at 3.
The woman whose last child moved out in June has not read four books about it. Nobody has sold her anything about it. She's probably never typed it into Google.
I'm not going to pretend that makes it a better bet. Twelve books means twelve books were worth publishing, and that's a hard limit on how many people are out there looking. If you need fifty clients this year, a market that size will not carry you.
How do you actually compare two niches?
Take the book count as the size of the room and the sophistication as the price of the ticket. Then ask which room you've still got something to say in.
That last bit is yours and the numbers can't help you with it. They'll tell you how loud a room is. They can't tell you whether you've anything worth shouting.
Try it with mindset. 255 books, sophistication 4. Walk in with "change your mindset, change your life" and you're the 256th person to say it. Walk in with a mechanism nobody has put a name to, for one specific person, and you're having a completely different conversation in the same room.
None of this keeps you out of a crowded market. It tells you what somebody will need from you before they believe a word of it.
Is a book count the same as revenue?
No. Plenty of people buy coaching who'd never buy a book, and a market can be busy with almost nothing published in it. What the count tells you is where money is already moving, which was the closest to evidence we could get.
Are the sophistication scores exact? No. They came out of reading what people in each market say and buy, so it's judgement on top of evidence rather than a figure off a chart. Treat a 4 and a 5 as the same warning.
One more thing. We've also scored 10,954 live coaching homepages out of 10 and the average came back at 3.7. Not one of those marks was lost over which niche the coach picked.
Questions coaches ask about this
Which coaching niche makes the most money?
Nobody can tell you that honestly, because coaching income isn't reported anywhere you could count. What can be counted is where buyers already spend, and that's mindset, confidence, spirituality, money and self-compassion, in that order.
Is a crowded niche a bad idea?
No. Crowded means proven. It costs more to enter, because the buyer has heard the standard claims already, so you need a mechanism rather than a promise.
Should I pick a small niche instead?
Only if you can live on the number of buyers in it. Empty nest sits at 12 books for a reason, and a market that quiet won't carry a full practice on search traffic alone.
How do I know a market's sophistication without your data?
Read fifteen reviews of the three best-selling books in it. If reviewers are comparing the book to four others they have already read, you're at 4 or 5.