4 things to know from this article
- "Women over 40" keeps everybody eligible and gives nobody a reason to stay.
- We scored 10,954 coaching homepages and technical health averaged 9 out of 10. The build isn't the problem.
- Naming a type of person feels careful, right up until you count what it costs you.
- There's a version that does both, and getting the order wrong wastes it.
Two coaches, same qualification, same fee.
One of them says she helps women over 40. The other says she helps women whose sleep fell apart when the menopause started.
The same person could have written either line. Only one of them tells me whether to book a call.
In this article I'm showing you which of the two your homepage needs, and why the other one quietly costs you work.
An audience is who someone is. A niche is what they want sorting out. Coaches swap those two words constantly, and you can spot it on a homepage: a headline naming a type of person, and nothing anywhere saying what actually gets fixed.
Scan the 117 coaching niches we found and hardly any of them describe a person. They're nearly all problems or things somebody wants. We didn't choose that, it's what came back when we read what people spend money on.
What is the difference, in practice?
An audience answers who. A niche answers what for. At eleven at night, with the laptop on her knees, she's typing the second one.
"Women over 40" is an audience. "Menopause and women's hormones" is a niche. One says you might be for her. The other says you fix the thing she came about.
Same again with "corporate professionals" against "recovery from redundancy". Or "men" against "modern masculinity and men's work".
Say those pairs out loud and you can hear it. One's a category on a form. The other's somebody's Tuesday.
Why does the audience version feel safer?
Because it keeps more people in, and keeping people in feels like the careful thing to do.
I get it. Naming the problem feels like turning work away, and when you've got three clients and a mortgage that's a horrible feeling. The reasoning's sound. It just comes out backwards.
Name a type of person and everybody stays technically eligible, and nobody has a reason to stop scrolling. Name a problem and you lose the people who haven't got it, who were never going to book anyway, and you keep the woman who has.
So is an audience useless?
Not at all. It's the second half of a good sentence.
"Menopause coaching for women in senior roles." That's a niche with an audience hung off it, and it beats either one on its own. The problem gets her to stop. The audience makes her feel you meant her specifically.
Put the problem first though. Written the other way round she has to hang on through the whole sentence before she finds out whether any of it concerns her, and she won't.
The version that costs the most
Naming the person, and then naming your method instead of her problem.
"I help women over 40 through my signature five-step framework." There's an audience and there's a process, and nowhere on that line does anybody find out what it's actually for. A page like that can sit on the internet for two years while not one stranger works out what it does.
We scored 10,954 coaching homepages out of 10 and the average came back at 3.7. Technical health averaged 9, so hardly any of those marks went on the build. They went on somebody landing and not being able to say what the page was for.
Am I telling you who to work with?
No. This is only about what the page says. Who you take on is between you and your professional body.
Is the list of 117 complete? Probably not. We built it from what people buy on Amazon, so it leans towards problems somebody has published a book about. A market can be perfectly real and completely quiet at the same time.
If you want to know which of the two your page is doing at the moment, have it read the way a stranger reads it.
Questions coaches ask about this
Is my niche my target audience?
No. Your audience is who they are. Your niche is what they want sorting out. A homepage needs the second one, and reads better carrying both.
Can my niche be a type of person?
It can, and it works when the person implies the problem. "New fathers" carries a situation with it. "Professionals" doesn't.
Which should go first in my headline?
The problem. A reader deciding in five seconds whether to stay is looking for their own situation, not for their own demographic.
What if my clients have nothing in common except their age?
Then look again at what they turn up with, rather than who they are. Age is usually a proxy for a life event, and the event is the niche.