Rachel Roberts works with freelance language teaching professionals to fully monetise their skills and experience so they can transform their lives and those of their clients, through her deep dive programme, Designed to Flourish https://earnlearnthriveinelt.com/designed-to-flourish-group-programme/                       

 

Editorial

The text was originally published on LinkedIn

 

In a crowded market, it is absolutely vital to focus on the elements of your niche, your messaging and your offer which differentiate you and make you stand out. But, despite what some may tell you, you aren’t going to find your perfect niche by looking on LinkedIn, or even asking Chat GPT. 

Based on my experience working with 100s of clients in the language teaching field, the perfect fit is nearly always something that’s just waiting to be discovered when you look within. 

While there may be lots of other teachers offering IELTS preparation, or Business English, the bottom line is that no one else has your exact combination of experiences, teaching philosophy, and personality, and it’s this which shapes the experience of working with you, and the kind of results you get. 

It's tempting to try and ‘keep your options open’, but the truth is that trying to appeal to everyone often leads to appealing to no one. When you lean into what makes you and your teaching different, you naturally attract students who align with you.

This might be about your past learning and teaching experiences, and how those have fed into the way you teach now. If you’ve been teaching a while, you probably hold quite strong beliefs about what you feel is most effective, whether that’s around focusing on emergent language, or the importance of lots of practice and repetition, or how to develop more learner autonomy. 

While we have to be careful not to put too much ‘teacher talk’ into our marketing (I guarantee you they won’t know what flipped learning is), if we can show our prospective clients something about why we do what we do, and how our approach is different from what they may have tried (unsuccessfully) before, that gives a clear and concrete reason to choose us, rather than anyone else. 

Or it might be about who we are as a person, our values, and our life experiences. For example, I recently did a live interview with a client, Gábor Kovács. When we started working together, I helped him to pull out two important things which have both very much shaped how he works with clients. The first one is that he LOVES languages, and is something of a polyglot (he’s currently working on Japanese, and already speaks Hungarian, English, German and Greek). All this language learning experience means that he REALLY gets what it’s like to be a language learner, and at different levels of expertise. He’s developed any number of strategies to help learn languages more efficiently and effectively, that he can now pass onto his clients. 

The second is that he is a self-identified introvert, and, we discovered, so are most of his clients, especially his favourite ones. Without entirely being aware of it, Gabor already HAD a niche, supporting more introverted clients to learn English, and using his own experience as an introverted learner to help them. He just needed help to pull these elements of his niche out, and to use them in his messaging and positioning.

So, rather than stressing about picking the “right” niche, recognize that it’s very likely that the answers you seek are within. Your personality, teaching style, and values are what make your business special, and the more you lean into who you are as an educator, the easier it will be to attract students who truly appreciate what you offer. 

 

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