"Oh" they say
(trying to look interested)…

"What is the Alexander Technique?"

Ever dreaded that question?

I know I have. These days, when people casually ask, I just say: "I run a health studio in Tokyo." People rarely go beyond that, which tells me they already got the information they wanted. If they keep asking, it does come out, and there's that question again…

When Isuzu first proposed that her niche was teaching English, I was befuddled. Really? I thought to myself… How do you make that work?

On our Pro Members' Skype call this morning, I finally got it. For Pro Members who missed the call today, you can listen to it in the Skype directory. Members had great questions, then Isuzu contributed. Her idea is truly ingenious, but let me tell you a little about Isuzu first…

Isuzu is an alien. She once told me:  "I come from another galaxy." Seriously.

Niche is such a detailed subject, I have been devoting more time to blogging about that, rather than sharing some of the inspirational stories I have been receiving from teachers who are getting on with building their businesses. Today I have two reports to share.

On Sunday night we had our monthly meeting of CareerThinking participants in Tokyo. Many have found their niche, while some are still searching to find where they want to impact the world with Alexander's Discoveries.

Kyoko-san, who posted a guest blog recently, is one of our members still searching for her niche. From doing the worksheets, she came up with three areas of that qualified for her further consideration:

1. Past skills: Kyoko has been a mountain climber for 20+ years;

Another 12 Point Plan, this time from Pro Member Rossella Buono. Rossella has recently moved to Canterbury, Great Britain where she is seeking out ways to establish her identity in this small town. My format below is to publish her 12 Point Plan in full. My comments follow each of the numbered points under the three asterisks that look like this: ***

Bellydancers are a tight knit community in Japan, and one day BodyChance consciously decided to offer our services to them. Being tight knit, word could spread quickly, so we did not have to spend money to create buzz. Brant has asked me to write about how we did this, so here it is…

It was a project that ended with a flourish: 200+ belly dancers packed into a theatre venue - that BodyChance had hired for the night - to watch performers gyrating to a rhythm, while I tried to figure out what the heck was my job here…

Honestly? I made a complete mess of it.

In Japan yesterday I was talking with a teacher inspired by a new idea – a specialist class. I listened enthusiastically to the idea, asked questions, but as we progressed I sensed a disease arising within me, and I wondered what that was about?

Sleazy. That's the word my biz consultant Paul Lemberg offered up this morning when I explained the membership system of this website. He commented: "I know it works, but it doesn't build loyalty."

Then I explained to him why I designed it that way.

"That makes perfect sense to me" Paul concluded. "So tell them. Explain it – it will be much better if they know why you are doing it this way."

Why I Am Doing It This Way

First understand that you are a niche, just like any other niche.

Every month, Kentaro delivers a report on the status of BodyChance's marketing to all the staff at our Operations Meeting on Monday.

I am looking at last month's report, and there is a salient niche lesson that will interest you all. The report tracks the number of new people who visited the studio in May (39) and of those, how many decided to take membership (15) which gives us this month's conversion average (38%). Three years ago, looking at a similar report, our conversion average was 5%.

About 18 months ago, I started getting Friend requests from Japanese people on my FaceBook page. For years I'd been urging people here to get involved, now finally – in their own time – it was happening. Hurray, at last! Up to then they had all been crazy about a thing called Mixi, an anonymously driven FaceBook-type service that was totally inaccessible to my challenged Japanese-language Self.