Skyrocket Your Freelance Business by Going Niche
As freelancers, we often feel like we have super powers and are able to take on any project, any customer, and any challenge that comes our way.
This “do-it-all” attitude is a great way to build our skill set and personal growth, but is it the best way to grow your freelance business?
At a certain point in your freelance career, it may be time to go niche. Contrary to popular belief, focusing on a targeted niche (and turning away anything that doesn’t fit) is an effective way of marketing your services and growing your business.
So what does it mean to go niche? Well, take my recent experience as an example. I’m a professional web designer. When I first went freelance, I did all sorts of web design projects for freelance clients. I created blogs, shopping websites, HTML emails, web-apps, you name it. Then, a few years in I decided to focus only on WordPress web design. Now, with my latest company, Restaurant Engine, my niche is WordPress web design for restaurants. Get the idea?
Benefits of Going Niche
First, lets look at it from the perspective of search. Did you know that the most popular, broad, one or two-word search terms (like “writer” or “web designer”) only make up 30% of all search engine queries?
According to SEOMoz, 70% of queries lie in the “long tail” of search — longer, targeted phrases. For example “blog writer in Omaha” or “magento e-commerce web developer”. The point is, people tend to search for narrowly targeted solutions to their specific problems.
Finally, you can build on your success in a particular niche to become the “go to” expert in that space, feeding more and more clients into your business.
It’s true on a practical level as well. Think about it: If you’re remodeling your kitchen, wouldn’t you prefer a company who specializes in kitchen remodels over a general contractor? There’s a certain comfort the customer gets knowing that you’ve performed this specific service successfully, again and again, for clients just like themselves.
Finally, you can build on your success in a particular niche to become the “go to” expert in that space, feeding more and more clients into your business. Plus, by repeating the same types of projects again and again, you can refine your systems and make your operation more efficient, making it easier to hire help and scale up.
How to Pick The Right Niche For Your Business
So how do you know which niche you should focus on? It’s a big decision, considering that you’ll be dedicating a significant amount of effort and resources to this niche for months, if not years to come.
Here are four steps to figuring out which niche is right for you:
- Assess your current business. Take a close look at everything you’ve been working on up until now. What’s been working? What was stressful or resulted in problems? Which areas make you the most money? Which areas are the most enjoyable for you?
- Which service do you love doing most? Take all of your areas of expertise and choose one — only one — that you love doing more than the others. It shouldn’t be difficult to choose.
- Which clients/industry do you prefer working with the most? Now think about all of the clients you’ve worked with. Do you prefer working with small clients? Big companies? Non-profits? Which industry have you had the most success in serving?
- How big is this niche market? Think about the industry you chose in the last step. Is it a large and growing sector? Can your projects in this space be easily replicated?
If your chosen niche aligns nicely with these four questions, then you’re on the right track.
Understand Your Customer
Now that you’ve picked a niche to focus on, you must do everything you can to understand your target customer. Ideally, you’ve already done a project or two for clients in this niche, so start there. If not, try and learn as much as you can when you pitch new clients or simply go out and talk to some.
What are the most common requests you’ve received from these customers. Make a list of services and sub-services that apply to all clients in this niche. But keep it short! You don’t want to overwhelm clients with options. Instead, you want to offer the exact things they’re looking for (which won’t be many).
Next, take note of the common questions you receive from customers in this niche. Are there issues you find yourself having to explain again and again? These questions give you a clear idea about how to tailor your communication to suit this targeted niche.
Marketing Your Niche Service
Now that you know WHO you’re serving, WHAT you’re offering, and HOW to communicate with these customers, it’s time to use all of this to inform how you market your niche service.
Design your website and web copy around these targeted services. Create a FAQ to answer those common questions you’ve received. Present case studies that speak to those common problems and how your services have solved them.
The key is to put yourself in the shoes of your targeted niche customer. Every page on your website, every case study, every email campaign, and every other marketing piece you put out, should speak to this customer. They should relate in some way to everything you’re saying. That’s the beauty of marketing to a niche: It’s infinitely easier to tailor your communication to a focused set of customers rather than the whole world!
Niche Marketing Tactics
By pinpointing a particular niche, you also have the opportunity to focus your efforts on niche marketing tactics. Here are a few ideas:
- Industry associations – Most industries have a local and/or national association. Join the one for your niche to start networking with your target customers.
- Industry conferences/meetups – Seek out conferences and meetups that relate to your niche. It’s another way to make more connections and build your reputation within your niche community.
- Industry message boards and forums – Participate in targeted online forums where your customers discuss topics related to your niche. This is a great option if your niche isn’t location-specific.
- LinkedIn Groups – LinkedIn has a feature called “Groups” where specific industry people get together and network. Join a few groups related to your niche, or better yet, start your own group in this niche!
I hope this article helps you think about new directions to take your freelance business. I’d love to hear how you’ve found success by focusing on a niche. Share your ideas in the comments.
Photo credit: Some rights reserved by Malchev.
Leave a Comment
I did work for a niche for 12 years and I felt limited in my creativity, I was working more towards the technical engineering sector. Some may enjoy it, but they would have to have a higher interest and love for that niche. So in your case may be the love of food. I am sure you just did not wake up one day and decided to pick a niche out of the blue. Right now for me catering (no pun intended
to a variety of businesses brings me peace of mind knowing that if one particular market fails or has downtime, I am still able to work and keep a steady stream of income. Also I am not missing out on design work introduced to me by referrals and social media/face to face interactions. Variety is good and for me the challenge of working and building business relationships outside of a niche is total satisfaction and gives me that pleasure of knowing that I have been a key instrument in their business image.
Great article. I fell into my niche of powerpoint presentation design, and it’s the main reason my freelance business took off so fast. Although I do enjoying picking up new skills, and being able to tell current clients “yep, I can do that too”, the main driver for new business is all through my niche.
Great niche! I’ve never heard of anyone specializing in Powerpoint design. I can see how there would be a great market for that.
This article comes at a good time. When I graduated from college in 2010, we were expected to know and be good at every aspect of design. I learned very quickly that I would never be a web designer, nor would I be happy doing it for a living. So I focused on print. Within six months of graduating, the creative director and art director at my internship told me I’d found my niche in illustration and hand drawn typography. It was perfect because that is exactly what I enjoy creating and have managed to get a few freelance projects while employed full time as a designer in the fashion world that focused primarily on my type of illustration work that I do.
Niches rock!
Even if you find your niche, beware of changes in the economy. Happened to me. The niche I was working in for years was hard-hit by the Great Recession, and it has yet to recover.
So, don’t get too pigeonholed.
Excellent point. It’s always a good idea to look for ways to migrate horizontally. For example, I’m now getting ready to duplicate my Restaurant Engine service and tailor it to work for the Hotels space.
“Niche” is not a silver bullet. You still have to work hard to get exposure for your services. And just saying “I serve XXX who needs YYYY” needs to be delivered to the right prospects.
My point is that claiming a niche is not a magnetic attractor for new clients.
The marketing for a niche is quite a bit easier than for generalized services, though.
My own really strong opinion is that niche focus on an industry segment is a stronger proposition than a purely technical niche focus. IE, the author here who has “a web design solution focused on serving restaurants” is an instance of industry focus.
Yep – marketing a niche service has stronger potential than marketing yourself broadly because you can get more granular and focus on the specific needs of your clients.
Many of my clients wants to gather all their projects and appreciate that I don’t do just one thing. So I don’t want to go all-niche. But I try to create and maintain smaller websites for my niche services.
I think going ‘niche’ can be a good thing. When people know what your good at and a project comes up that requires your services they will know where to find you. For smaller clients or local ones, going niche might not work as well. Budget becomes an issue and they probably just want to make it easy and have one person or a small team create everything.
It was actually my goal to be able to work with smaller clients (in my case, Restaurants) and I found that going niche allowed me to do that.
Before, when I offered general web design services, most of the smaller clients couldn’t afford my services.
But by launching a niche-service focusing solely on Restaurant web design, it allowed me to build tighter systems and automation, in turn bringing down the costs of producing sites and making it an affordable package for smaller Restaurant clients.
sun sines after dark ,,,,, good time comes back for freelancers
http://www.alacraft.com.au/wall-stickers-cat32
Hi Brian
Great article, I really mean that. I’ve seen a few articles by people saying ‘you gotta find a niche’ and then they just leave it at that.
You’ve gone beyond and told us how to tackle this properly. I’m also impressed with your Restaurant Site. Looks like you make it really easy for restaurants to get on board with having a site done.
Well done mate. Looking forward to seeing how your hotel version pans out.
Thanks for reading and checking out my work! I always strive to give as much detail on a subject as I can
My niche is tax returns for one man bands. I got into it as the needs of a one person business are very different from a larger business and I tailor my services to what they need specifically.
Great post! Very timely too, for me that is because I feel like I’m all over the place. I am not a web designer but I am a freelancer. And I perfectly understand why it is important to go niche. I’m a one-year old freelancer, and I’m still trying to figure out which one is going to work best.
Great post. In my Niche coaching I find that most people’s biggest fear is that they niche themselves out of opportunities.
In reality when you niche you position yourself to maximise your resources and be seen as the expert in your industry.
Love it and you get that message across loud and clear Brian.
Brian…. I really enjoyed reading this article. Very well written and touches on a lot of great points that we as freelancers run into. I’ve been in my business for just over 5 years now, and I’ve come to the crossroad of needing to further focus and niche my services.
Your article has definitely helped me think about new directions and has provided me insight on next steps to take. Thank you!
Nice article, brian, I am currently exploring the niche for auto dealerships in my country, for the first time, I find it very easy to pitch to clients in that industry, since I’ve had prior experience.
When are we seeing the hotel version??
I’ve been experimenting as well trying to target niches within SEO and have found that the health and fitness indsutry to be an easier target for me as I too have worked for multiple companies within this niche market, therfore making it easier to relate to their customers and business model.
Brian, An excellent article and I agree with you. From being a general graphic designer I now specialize as a historical architectural illustrator.
I personally find it easy to market to historical house owners as I understand many of the challenges they face and based on other clients experiences can often help them solve their problems and challenges which after is what business is about.
Thanks again and am looking forward to other articles.
Focusing on one niche is definitely the way to go. That and developing a tool that allows you to enter into other vertical niche markets.
Very helpful! Brian your thoughts cleared my mind very much about choosing the right industry for me. After leaving my 5 year day time job as Lead Web Designer, I thought to start a small web design agency, so I built http://www.sterical.com where I am offering most of the services to grab clients from where. But during searching about choosing the right niche I decided to pick up the unique one and beneficial one.
One Question, should I work on one best Niche or more than one Niche like buying 5 domains for different industries?
Regards,
Waqas Gulraiz