20 Hot Client Industries That Hire Freelancers
Jaime MintunWith the coming recession, I get a lot of questions about whether it will be increasingly difficult for freelancers to get new clients and, more importantly, projects that pay appropriately.
Over the past eight months, the following industries have proved extremely lucrative for freelancers. I categorize them into Spheres.
The Extreme Sphere
The industries in the extreme sphere are those that are currently crashing or booming. Why would a crashing industry be a good industry to find clients in?
If you’re a freelancer, you’re less expensive and easier to handle for a struggling entrepreneur or business than an employee would be. Additionally, if you provide marketing services or can help them secure a presence online, they need you.
A recent global study by McKinsey & Company demonstrated that online marketing drastically out-pulled traditional offline marketing in results. 62% of participants rated online marketing as very or extremely important to their company.
Struggling industries must invest in direct profit-producing services like marketing and online tools to survive.
Industry #1. Real Estate
Currently Crashing. Real Estate companies need to change their approach and develop additional streams of income outside of strictly selling houses. Innovative freelancers can ghost-write information products for them, gain tons of traffic by participating in social media conversations regarding the crashing housing market and how home sellers and buyers can survive, etc.
Industry #2. Pharmaceuticals
Consistently Booming. Very large budgets. But you must be highly experienced to compete. A particular niche of this industry that is also booming is drugs and medical tools targeting Baby Boomers.
Industry #3. Spirituality & Natural Medicine
Currently Booming. Eben Pagan, a leading authority on business trends, named two industries to look out for in 2008-2010. He named Spirituality and the next industry below.
Industry #4. Women-Specific Campaigns
Currently Booming. Women have been identified as the primary decision makers when it comes to major and minor purchases. Niches are developing around women, including female entrepreneurs and business owners, female readers and books targeting women, mothers (primarily “mommy bloggers” in the blogosphere), and more.
One of my clients recently cashed in on the women’s niche by creating a series of “confession” websites where wives, mothers, and career women could post anonymous confessions about their day, how they’re feeling, and what they think of their child, boss, or significant other at the moment.
Industry #5: Green & Eco-Conscious Campaigns
Currently Booming. You’ve seen the commercials and billboards. Global warming and “going green” is everywhere you turn. Major companies like UPS have launched massive “green” campaigns and tons of alternative eco-conscious companies are springing up in virtually every niche, including: clothing, building materials, housing, automotive, health foods, waste management, etc.
Industry #6: Baby-Boomer Campaigns
Currently Booming. Now that we have the largest Baby Boomer population in history, companies want to target this exceedingly large audience. This includes:
+ Retirement Communities
+ Retirement Plans & Financial Consulting
+ Insurance
+ Medical Tools & Drugs Specifically for Baby Boomers
The Luxury Sphere
This sphere includes those typically boutique firms that differentiate themselves by appealing to an elite or wealthy audience. Because they can charge a premium for their services, they often spend a large pretty penny on marketing, nice websites, effective copy, and sassy or classy advertising.
Industry #7: Luxury Services
+ Limousine Companies
+ Luxury Car Rental
+ Yacht Rental
+ Concierge Services
Industry #8: Lifestyle Companies
+ Elite Dating Services
+ Wealth or Beauty-Based Matchmaking Services (I know, perhaps morally questionable, but they fulfill a definite need that their target audience desires)
+ Lifestyle Adventure Companies (Expensive adventure travel like safaris and singles adventures)
+ Image Consultants & High-End Stylists
Industry #9: Elective Procedures
+ Plastic Surgeons
+ Hair Removal
+ Body Sculpting
+ Dermatology
The Venture Sphere
If you really want to target companies with enormous budgets and no current resources, go after companies that have just secured financing.
Industry #10: Companies Recently Financed
You can typically find a Venture Capital firm’s partial portfolio online. Also search online news (set up a Google Alert for “financing”) for press releases announcing that a company has been newly funded.
Industry #11: Venture Capitalist Firms
Partner with a Venture Capitalist or a VC Firm to service all companies in their portfolio. They will have the peace of mind that someone they know and trust is dialed into each of their companies, increasing the likelihood that their overall investment across their entire portfolio will outperform the typical odds.
To create such a partnership, you’ll have to prove your worth. I suggest having solid client results and examples of your work and perhaps working for a significantly reduced fee on a pre-determined number of companies. Identify ahead of time what elements the VC will judge you on to determine if they will partner with you so you know exactly what you have to do to secure the partnership.
The Local Sphere
You don’t have to stick to your local area, but companies in the Local Sphere are those that service their own local area. These are the people who service YOU, such as your dentist.
Industries #12-20
+ Lawyers (consider large firms that need to target multiple niches, i.e. different case-types)
+ Therapists & Psychologists
+ Carpet Cleaners (One brilliant marketer, Joe Polish, has built a multi-million dollar marketing empire helping carpet cleaners market themselves)
+ Massage Therapists (a great industry to start in. Not a lot of money in it, but tons of professionals in need of a way to differentiate themselves)
+ Landscaping Firms & Landscape Design
+ Restaurants, Clubs and Bars
+ Retail Boutiques
+ Doctors & Dentists
+ Weight Loss Clinics
Whatever service you offer, unless extremely specialized, should be applicable to several, if not all, of these industries. And, save for a few exceptions in the Local Sphere, these industries are proven to have meaty budgets. Best of all, they are very open to, and in many cases prefer, freelancers.
In June 2004, Jaime Mintun was homeless and broke and out of options. She flipped her luck around by moving her focus from starting her own business to helping other people’s businesses grow. In less than 30 days, she had a $10k/mo income. Now she coaches over 100 freelancers to provide their marketing and web development skills to offline businesses. You can read her blog at www.WarWagonBlog.com.
Mike Smith - Bootstrapping Blog
June 22nd, 2008
Great article with a lot of good places for freelancers to hit. For a marketer/SEO freelancer, hitting all of those companies for work would work perfectly. Especially since they’re booming and each company wants to be #1
Plus, your little about blurb at the end is inspiring. I’m off to your blog now to read more about you.
Evan Meagher
June 22nd, 2008
Good tips! I hadn’t thought or heard of VC-partnerships. Great for freelancers, regardless of trade or specialty.
Michael Martine
June 22nd, 2008
Holy crap, this is just about the most useful thing ever posted here.
TPN
June 22nd, 2008
Useful.
Skellie
June 22nd, 2008
@ Michael: I thought so too!
Rita
June 22nd, 2008
A helpful listing.
See my blog The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide at http://boomersurvive-thriveguide.typepad.com for information on how the pharmaceutical industry is targeting boomers. Look on the left side of the blog and select Prescription Drugs from the listing.
I’m also writing a new blog called the Boomer Consumer for the Seattle Post Intelligencer at http://blog.seattlepi.nwsource.com/boomerconsumer/.
Rita R. Robison, Consumer Specialist
The Fen
June 22nd, 2008
Your forgot to add 2 more categories:
1. Category that consists of people who are cloning everything they consider to be profitable.
2. The one that consits of people who will always have some money to pay for cracking software, writing spambots, OCR-recognizers e.t.c
These 2 categories are going to take their niche in the list of top client idustries that require freelancer attention nowadays. And being illegal or unethincal doesn’t stop job listrings from these industries from appearing on various freelance websites.
Mo
June 22nd, 2008
I echo what Michael says. Keep up the good work.
Ilise Benun
June 22nd, 2008
Jaime,
Great list for any freelancer who has trouble coming up with possible markets to target. I’m not sure I would agree, however, about how ripe some of them are at the moment. I spoke to a freelance medical writer last week who has been working in the pharmaceutical industry for years and who tells me that the industry is currently contracting. She has to look elsewhere right now because all her clients have brought their medcomm writing in house.
And I’d stay away from real estate. Only a few of them have money to spend at a time like this.
Still, great article and I’ll do a post to link to it at the http://www.CreativeFreelancerBlog.com
James Tryon
June 22nd, 2008
what was left out…
Allena
June 22nd, 2008
“With the coming recession, I get a lot of questions about whether it will be increasingly difficult for freelancers to get new clients . . .”
Do you (anyone) think that freelancers are feeling the pinch of the economy? I don’t. I’ve had several clients tell me “we used to do this in-house, but. . .” and I haven’t felt a dent at all. Crossing fingers.
The Fen
June 22nd, 2008
And every second client always ready to say you something like “I’m also [designer|programmer|writer|analyst|e.t.c] so i will pay you no more than …. , just because i personally don’t have time for it”.
Yeah, we have 20 industries available for freelancers, but even working within these niches every freelancer will meet harassing low offers from clients at least once during freelance career. What the sense of listing these 20 niches, when not all of clients are competent about considerable pay rates?
Misti Sandefur
June 22nd, 2008
Great post all the way around! Your headline caught my attention, and once I began reading, I didn’t stop until I reached the end. This is one post I know I’ll refer back to, and one that I chose to share on StumbleUpon and Twitter. Thanks for the information!
Chris
June 22nd, 2008
A truly great post, thank you!
Scott Duffy
June 23rd, 2008
@Michael: I agree. It’s obvious a lot of work went into this post - it’s very useful and I will be coming back to this.
And the byline was much better than the first article you did. Made me want to click to your website.
Social Networking North
June 23rd, 2008
Client targeting is often overlooked by freelancers - a very useful list,well done!!
Rongen
June 23rd, 2008
Very HOT indeed. Thanks for pointing those out.
Rachel
June 23rd, 2008
Great post, Jaime!
dagobert renouf
June 23rd, 2008
So useful stuff
Corby Simpson
June 23rd, 2008
One small comment about #1.
Realtors make up some of the worst clients. The companies may be better, but the individual sales agents are often the worst clients you could imagine.
Brian
June 23rd, 2008
The coming recession? I take it you’re votin’ for Hussein.
The Freelance Writer's Blog
June 23rd, 2008
I can personally attest to number one. Some of my most lucrative and long-term gigs have come from realtors and a subsidiary industry, mortgage writing. And with foreclosures, interest rates and adjusting ARMs in the news almost every day, in the current economy, even more copy is needed by real estate sites to stay current and relevant.
Great list — and inspirational “resource box” copy by the way. I’m off to check out your site.
Yuwanda
Megan
June 24th, 2008
@Jamie - May I ask, where did this information come from?
The Nadir
June 25th, 2008
I will not disagree that this list is useful for scrounging up some work …
… but, egad, what a disgusting bunch of industries!
With the exception of “women” and “green building” I don’t see much enjoyable work up there.
Schilling for pharmaceuticals, real estate and luxury stuff (and by “spirituality” we mean pulling the wool over the eyes of “baby boomers”) — these are all groups that are easy enough to figure out. Open up any classified section in the country and you’ll find these folks begging you to help them shovel coal into Hades. BTW, that’s not a bad idea! Maybe Satan has some leads… I’ve been hurtin ever since Blackwater refused my resume.
Chris
June 25th, 2008
“Eben Pagan, a leading authority on business trends”
rubbish
Jimmy
June 25th, 2008
Do you happen to have a link to that study mentioned?
Marcel
June 25th, 2008
Woo hoo.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The real estate industry is an excellent example. The are not always very computer savy. Just make things easy for them.
Jaden @ Screenwriting for Hollywood
June 25th, 2008
Nice breakdown.
Nigel Hall
June 25th, 2008
I have to disagree with the idea of pitching VCs. They get everything for free, or very low cost. Every VC has a long list of wannabe VP/CTO/CEOs of the next hot startup and they can get them to do just about any kind of consulting you would normally use a freelancer for, for free.
jenngood
June 26th, 2008
Here’s a tip for this blog. How about using a different font or color. My eyes were straining because the contrast is not great enough.
Dean
June 26th, 2008
Could one of the people who said this list was useful explain how they’ve actually used it? Frankly, I can’t see how being told I should be marketing to 20 industries from Big Pharma to massage therapists helps me. The industries have nothing in common and the article hasn’t offered any practical suggestions. Now that I know drug companies are rich, am I supposed to call Johnson & Johnson and ask the receptionist if they need any freelance writing?
And the bio is terrible. Why would I take business advice from someone whose attempts to set up a business made her homeless and broke?
I hate to be so negative and cynical but really, this is terrible.
Liam
June 26th, 2008
Duh?
Listing out the industries that a freelancer could go hunt in is the easy part. The posting reads like the “Secret to making money in the stock market: Buy Low, Sell High” strategy, and it’s amazing to me the number of stroking, useless comments that follow it. Like “so useful stuff” or “keep up the good work”.
What the article is missing is the HOW.
1. HOW you close a deal with a company struggling for cash?
2. HOW do you get in front of the decision maker in a company that has just gotten $9m in funding? Because EVERYONE is hounding them now that news of the funding is public knowledge, and they are SICK of strangers soliciting to relieve them of it.
Give us the hard stuff. Not the easy stuff.
Frederico Leonardo
June 27th, 2008
The recession is real, at least here in Europe. But someone said that times like these are the best to make investments. I think this is a really cool article, refreshing and optimistic =)
Jaime Mintun
July 10th, 2008
Sorry to only come to all these comments now. I was out of the country for two weeks.
@ comments on targeting real estate: I haven’t approached real estate in the past couple months, but as some people have pointed out in these comments, the larger firms that are facing serious losses or closure have to give a last ditch effort and have been looking to copywriters, social media promotion, etc. to bank on all the news around their industry. Also, don’t just go after traditional agents. Go after the people who are popular right now - mortgage lending, foreclosures, etc.
@ The Nadir: I’m not saying you have to choose these industries. I personally refuse to work with pharma companies. I prefer natural medicine and nutrition. But the title of this article was not “inspiring industries to work for,” it was “profitable industries.” Whether you choose to work with them is up to you and outside the scope of this article.
@ Nigel Hall: interesting mention about VCs. I will say you may be right about that. I haven’t approached VCs cold, but networked into them through colleagues. Thank you for pointing that out.
@ Dean: this is an article, not an ebook or a complete process. I can’t give you the industries, how to approach them, what to say, etc. all in two pages. If you look at the other articles I’ve written here so far, they give many of those other pieces you’re asking for.
As far as my having failed at a business, I’d like you to find a millionaire who hasn’t failed at a business venture at some point. There are a couple out there, but three years ago when they surveyed millionaires, the average statistic was that it took them SEVEN FAILED BUSINESSES before they succeeded.
I also personally believe and have found that our greatest successes come from our greatest failures. One of my favorite quotes is, “Success is simply getting up one more time than we fall down.” Show me someone who has succeeded without having ever failed and I’ll show you someone who is kidding themselves.
@ Liam: I say the same - this is an article. I can’t cover EVERYTHING. Check out my other articles on this site. To answer your questions, read the one about landing clients nearly 100% of the time. I’ve found it to work even in extreme cases. I haven’t yet used it to close a company with funding whom I didn’t have a referral into, however I will test that out now and report back.
@ everyone else: thank you so much for all the great feedback. It’s much appreciated.
All my best,
Jaime
Brent
July 22nd, 2008
So…basically target every industry? I have to agree with nigel, jenngood, dean and liam. I have been an independent, interactive marketing consultant for the past 7 years, and my client roster includes everyone from Fortune 5 companies to non-profit organizations.
While you may be trying to be helpful with your list, the title of your article entry is a bit misleading. For example, I was a lead consultant for a real estate marketing firm, and I saw their business dwindle over the course of a year when the real estate marketing began to decline several years ago.
I understand you are trying to help and have good intentions, so keep up the good work!