In this instructional video, Joshua Nelson explains a step‑by‑step framework for choosing a profitable niche for a local internet marketing or consulting agency. He stresses the need for a niche that self‑identifies (e.g., dentists rather than the vague "healthcare"), has a proven propensity to spend $1,000‑$5,000 per month on marketing, and is large enough to sustain a business. He demonstrates how to validate these criteria using a quick survey of 5‑6 potential clients and by researching market size with tools like InfoUSA, focusing on firms that generate over $1 million in annual revenue. Nelson also highlights the strategic advantage of targeting niches that have active industry associations and regular events, which provide networking, speaking, and exhibition opportunities. A case study contrasts a successful plumber‑focused book with a failed broader "contractor" effort, illustrating why specificity matters. The video concludes with a call‑to‑action directing viewers to 7figureagency.com/free for a free training video and checklist that detail how his agency grew to $178k in monthly recurring revenue by following this niche‑centric model.
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So now let's talk about how to choose a niche. And you know, the stuff I just shared, and I know you've all heard this before, you've heard the, the benefits of having a niche and you know that it's useful and you kind of probably buy into it, but you've never actually chosen your niche. So how do you do it? Well, some things you want to consider and some things you want to think about. First of all, do they clump together or self-identify? And so by that I mean obviously dentists clumped together as dentists and they self-identify. So if you say, "Hey, I specialize in working with dentists," they all say, "Okay, that's me. You're talking to me." Now, something that's more abstract as an example would be healthcare. I work with healthcare organizations. People don't self-identify within healthcare. They wouldn't say, "Yeah, I'm a healthcare provider." They would say, "I'm a chiropractor. I'm a dentist." I'm an urgent care. So you want to make sure that you're really drilling down within a niche, that way you can speak to a very specific audience. And I can tell you a story about this and why I realized that it's so important. So we work with plumbing and HVAC companies and we wrote our book, The Complete Guide to Internet Marketing for Plumbers, and that's done extremely well for us because it really speaks directly to our target audience. Somewhere along the line, we decided, "Hey, you know what? Our clients are getting great results. These same strategies would work for any home service business, whether it's a roofing company or a pest control company or a landscape company." So we tried to make a broad division of our company, which was Contractor SEO, and it was going to serve contractors or home service contractors. We wrote a book, Internet Marketing and SEO for Contractors, in my opinion, a better book than the plumbing book. We put up the website with great content, training on how to market a home service business, and this fell completely flat. Um, the amount of sales we have on Amazon, the amount of leads that we get through the website, they're not even close. And the reason is nobody self-identifies as a contractor. Nobody's looking for how do I market my contracting business. They look for their specific type of business. So the dentist isn't gonna be looking for healthcare information. They're gonna be looking for how do I get more patients for my dental practice. How do I get ranked on page 1 for my dental clinic, etc. And so really focus on, on do they self-identify and really laser target in that way. Do they have the propensity to invest? You want to make sure that you choose a niche that is used to spending between $1,000 and $5,000 per month in marketing in general, whether it's Yellow Pages, whether it's direct mail, whether it's radio, they have the propensity to invest. There are certain niches that for whatever reason they just don't market. They feel like they can grow their business via word of mouth. They feel like they can grow their business through cold calling and they don't really believe in spending money to get leads. And so make sure you think about that and you might wanna, if you have a niche that you're thinking about targeting, reach out to 5 or 6 people and just do an impartial survey. Hey, I wanted to ask you a couple questions. We're thinking about providing a service to your area. Can I ask you 5 questions? And then just get a couple people that you can ask, you know, how do you market yourselves, what's your average marketing budget, and make sure that you're building your house on a strong foundation, so to speak. Now, are there enough of them? You don't, you don't want to choose such a small niche that if you got 10% market share, you wouldn't have a big enough business to be to be profitable or to be effective. And so a tool you can use to do this is called InfoUSA, and you can just go to infousa.com. You can choose literally thousands of potential industries, verticals, and niches, so, and click on that particular line of business and run a search. So let's, again, let's say it's dentist. You can go in there, put in, okay, how many dentists are there, run the search, and it will tell you exactly how many dentists there are in the United States. Now I'm gonna suggest you take it one step beyond that, and that, okay, yeah, we know that there's 90,000 dentists, that's great, but then you also wanna see how many of them do over $1 million per year in revenue. And this is important, and I'm gonna train you throughout this process that you wanna be selling to the top end of any vertical as opposed to the middle or low end. You don't wanna be dealing with people that don't have their act together. You don't want to be dealing with people that are just getting started because they don't necessarily tend to spend or stick in the long term. So you want to see how many of the people in your niche are doing over a million dollars per year in revenue and make sure there's enough of them to be significant. Is there an industry association or associations within your particular niche? And so you'd be surprised, there's a lot of industry associations for just about anything you can imagine. There's a dental association, of course. There's the Bar Association for attorneys. There's Plumbing Association. There's the HVAC Association. There's associations for almost every vertical and niche that you can imagine. So just make sure you choose a niche that has an association and make sure that they have periodic events where they all come together. So in other words, if you find the association, you look at the website, there should be an events calendar. And usually there's gonna be at least an annual event, if not quarterly events and local events. It's important to make sure that they're organized in this way so that you have the opportunity to get in front of your top prospects at any given period of time. And it's a great opportunity to exhibit at their events, it's a great opportunity to potentially speak at those types of events, and it's strategically significant that you choose a niche that has an association that gets together on a pretty consistent basis. So I really feel like if you've got those elements nice and tight, you've got— you can say, "Okay, my niche fits all of these different variables," you're probably in a good place to launch a service to a very specific niche market. Well, I hope you found that video useful. I hope it gives you some ideas and strategies on how you can more effectively build your local internet marketing or marketing consulting agency. If you'd like more ideas, strategies, and techniques on really how you can build a successful 7-figure agency, I'd encourage you to go to 7figureagency.com/free. There we've got a couple resources for you. We've got a, a complete training that outlines exactly how we were able to build our agency from a startup about 4 years ago to the point where we're now building $178,000 per month in recurring monthly revenue, about $2 million per year all by focusing on a relatively narrowly defined niche. And so if you go there, you're going to get that training video where we really explain our entire process and entire model. We also share a checklist with you of the top things you need to be doing in order to position your company to get that type of success and kind of follow that same model. So again, it's just 7figureagency.com/free. You'll get the training video and the checklist, and I look forward to talking with you soon.
