Leveraging the Power of Knowing Your Niche

When I first started speaking, I ran into a big problem. I was inconsistent.

Sometimes I knew I did well. Not only had I poured my heart and soul into message preparation and prayer, but I also felt the connection with my audience. I knew from their expressions and the conversations I had with women after my message that the seeds of transformation had been planted. Man, did those events feel great!

After some events, however, I didn’t feel so terrific. Deep in my heart I knew I had flopped, and I honestly couldn’t figure out why. For those events I had poured myself into message preparation and prayer too. Why didn’t my message connect?

Now I know the problem. I hadn’t yet leveraged the power of knowing my niche.

My messages were all over the place. I treated my speaking ministry as if it were a high-school speech assignment. Remember those days? The teacher would pass around a hat with speech topics or debate topics in it, and we students would create a speech on whatever was randomly assigned.

Just like those high school days, when an event planner called, I’d ask, “What is your theme or topic for the event?” She would share the topic with me, and I’d trot off to write a message. Sounds reasonable, right?

That approach seemed sensible to me, but it was a big mistake to approach ministry that way.

The problem with putting my message topic into the hands of an event planner was that it assumed a couple things. It assumed that I was the expert on everything, and it assumed I was passionate about every topic. Neither of those assumptions are true.

When I delved into finding my ministry niche, knowing the boundaries for my calling, I found not only power but consistency.

I found the power to say “yes” to events that matched my passion and expertise and “no” to those that didn’t. Those that fell into the “no” category were someone else’s assignment! I also found consistency in the connections I was able to make with my audience when I was speaking about things I had experienced and were fueled by strong convictions.

Have you been able to leverage the power of knowing your niche? Click here to read a post by Lynn Cowell that will help you define your own ministry niche.

One powerful way to express your niche is in a tagline. Click here and here for more about developing a tagline for your ministry.

In the next few weeks, I’m doing a marketing series, and this is the first in the series. I’ve found that it’s impossible to market your message effectively if you don’t have clarity about your ministry niche, so take time this week to work through finding your niche and expressing it in a tagline.

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Do you ever wonder what other speakers and writers know that you need to know?

Join Melanie and I on Facebook Live this week for the beginning of our series “What I Wish I Had Known”. Click here to follow us at Next Step Coaching Services and join us on Thursday, March 29th at 2:45 pm Eastern Time. Amy will interview Melanie about what she wishes she had known– a truth that will help every person in ministry!