The most commonly asked question about building a micro-niche business is, “When is the right time to start?” The answer is, “Now.”

Let’s face it, procrastination is much easier than actually starting on a project. Under typical circumstances, if you think about it long enough, you can always think of a reason to defer action.

One of the most important factors determining how your clients and prospective clients view you, your knowledge, competence, experience and expertise is your mindset. Just as a negative attitude can deep-six your hope of succeeding at a task, your mindset can help you build a business on your expertise or it can undermine your efforts.

When you build and promote a micro-niche based on your expertise, your success depends upon your ability to present yourself as a credible expert. There are two parts of this communication: your mindset and the client’s/prospect’s perception of you. The two are intrinsically related.

Would you send a proposal to an important prospective client printed on wrinkled paper with your children’s drawings on the back of the pages? Of course you wouldn’t. You would go to great lengths to ensure a beautiful presentation of the proposal.

If you were called into the prospective client’s offices to make an oral presentation about your company, would you wear jeans or khakis and a golf shirt? Don’t laugh. People have done this.

A primary reason for a business to publish content (blogs, whitepapers, LinkedIn, Website, etc.) is to clearly define your position in the marketplace. When you do this, it is important to be clear, focused and consistent in your messaging.

If you have a team, and if you think you have clearly defined your position in the marketplace, please try an experiment. Ask everyone in your firm to define your position in the marketplace. Then have everyone share the statements.

Are the statements consistent?   Are the statements all over the place?

What does the experiment tell you?

Please post a comment below telling us what happened when you tried this experiment. We would really like to hear from you about this.

I was approached by a firm in need of LinkedIn training a few weeks ago. They wanted The Practice Building Team to provide training in the use of LinkedIn for branding and marketing, as well as professional networking. Part of my preparation for the first meeting was to review their website, their LinkedIn profile and other things available online. I also reviewed their basic marketing documents – key marketing messages, positioning and differentiation, company overviews, services brochures, etc.

Most people with an interest in effective marketing in today’s environment will tell you very quickly that content is important and that you need to produce content for your website and other outlets about your business. As a result, many people are now writing blogs.

Blogging is an excellent content delivery platform and writing blogs is a good content delivery strategy. The first rule of blogging is to have a focused subject. The second rule is to know your audience and write for them. Ordinarily, when someone decides to write a blog, s/he decides to write about a particular subject area in which s/he is knowledgeable.