The Real Reason Your “Niche” Isn’t Working
And the copywriting fix that gets you more clients
There’s a pattern I see across every corner of the health and wellness world. It happens to functional medicine doctors, dietitians, physical therapists, acupuncturists, nurse practitioners, certified health coaches… everyone.
The moment they try to turn their expertise into a profitable online coaching business, they almost all hit the same wall.
It happens when they realize how hard it is to market themselves. And sadly, most of the marketing advice out there doesn’t help.
Chances are, somewhere along the way you were told to “pick a niche.” But that advice usually creates more confusion than clarity. Because the real issue isn’t picking a niche.
The real issue is choosing a profitable audience.
And those two don’t always line up.
A profitable audience isn’t determined by demographics, credentials, interests, or “who you feel called to serve.”
A profitable audience is determined by something far more blunt:
How disruptive a problem is to a person’s quality of life.
That’s it, in a nutshell.
People don’t invest in help for problems they can tolerate. They invest when something keeps interfering with their life, over and over, to the point where they don’t want to keep pretending “everything’s fine.”
And when it comes to successful marketing, there’s another part to the equation that’s just as important…
Because while many health and wellness professionals may choose a profitable audience, they lose them with their marketing for one simple reason.
They think like experts… not like the people they want to attract.
Let me give you a real example.
I recently did some deep market research for a coach. She helps people whose quality of life is suffering because of joint and muscle pain. And what I found was eye-opening.
Inside the clinical world, there’s a strong preference to avoid the phrase “chronic pain.” One Australian exercise physiology clinic even wrote this:
“The preferred term is now becoming Persistent Pain. ESPECIALLY when talking with clients about their condition. Words matter. Words form beliefs.” 1
They’re right. Words absolutely form beliefs. As a copywriter, I couldn’t agree more.
But I’m also a marketer. And so I also know this:
For marketing to have the highest chance of success, the words we use must enter the conversation people are having in their head.
And here’s where the research got even more interesting.
Using “persistent pain” or “ongoing pain” instead of “chronic pain” isn’t just clinically different...
It’s commercially catastrophic.
The market overwhelmingly uses the term “chronic pain.” It’s not even close. People use “chronic pain” nearly 100% of the time.
Google, YouTube, Reddit, Amazon… everywhere people talk about it, they use the word chronic. And while some search engines redirect “persistent” queries toward “chronic” content, relying on that is a gamble.
My analysis showed that using “persistent pain” exclusively could tank your discoverability by 95% or more.
That’s not just a small gap. That’s invisibility.
And this is why the “pick a niche” conversation often misleads people. If you choose what you want to do, your marketing could be a big disconnect with the people you can help.
That’s why building a successful coaching business isn’t about picking a niche. It’s about creating a marketable offer.
Once you understand that, choosing a profitable audience becomes a different conversation entirely. You have to look at the actual lived experience of the people you want to help.
If you choose an audience with a pressing, disruptive problem, you’ll have an audience that is hoping someone with the answer will come along… and the sooner the better.
I go deeper into all of this… including how to identify a profitable audience and the mistakes most professionals make… in this week’s video.
If you want to see more videos like this, you can explore the rest of my YouTube channel here. I’m adding new ones regularly.