Raise your hand if you’ve heard sayings like “If you’re marketing to everyone, you’re marketing to no one” or “A jack of all trades, master of none.” (Yep, time to put our hands down, too.)
This is exactly why one needs to discover your freelance niche if you wish to be successful as a freelancer. If you’re asking yourself, ‘Why niche down?’ Won’t that mean I’m leaving tons of clients on the table that I could do work for?
Well, sure. But you’ll also compete with millions of people who think the same way, and that’s never a good path to take.
Why choose a freelance niche? The truth is, focusing on one specific type of work, or one specific industry, allows you to become an “expert” in the niche and it also makes it easier to market yourself. You can gear your marketing efforts to a specific niche, rather than every business that may need your services! In fact, why not try one of the best highest-paying freelance writing niches of 2024?
Tips to Discover Your Freelance Niche
When you’re choosing your freelance niche, follow these tips to find one that suits your interests while also being a high-paying freelancer niche.
Tip 1: Reflect on Your Passions and Interests
What do you love to do? What are you good at? What lights your soul up? What creates a fire in your belly? The answers to these questions are the best place to start your freelance niche journey.
If something interests you, and you have a true passion for what interests you, you’re more likely to motivate yourself to push through the roadblocks when they arise. And roadblocks will come, it’s part of the journey.
Take time to brainstorm ideas. Do a brain dump of everything you love, like, and enjoy.
As you do discovery for your freelance niche, you might want to focus on topics—like fitness, nutrition, technology, consumer products—or, you might think about content marketing writing for brands or copywriting specifically. Both are ways you can categorize a niche.
Tip 2: Assess Your Skills and Expertise
As you sort through the thing you love, make sure to ask yourself and others what skills you have that others would consider you an expert in and remember to evaluate freelance writing skills as well. Include things you know you’re good at, but also those that you’d want to do day after day to make money!
Ask your friends and family, as well as co-workers or former co-workers what they know your skillsets are and what you excel at. Ask them, “When discussing specific freelance skills, which ones make you think of me?”
It’s a lot easier to generate income doing things you already love to do, as well as know how to do. No one wants to have to spend extensive time learning new skills, and then master them, so you feel confident selling yourself to others.
When you feel confident providing value to others, it takes far less time and effort to start attracting clients who want to pay you for your service offerings.
Tip 3: Research Market Demand
Once you’ve done all the preliminary work, it’s time to dig in a bit deeper to discover your freelance niche. It might take a bit of time, because you’ll need to research each niche you’re interested to find out if there’s a demand for your niche service or services.
You could have all the skills in the world, master of all things in that niche, but if no one needs the service or wants it—you won’t find much success, or it might take a lot longer to make money in your chosen niche.
Some of the best places to see if the freelance niche you’ve chosen is in demand? Ask people in your network if they would pay for what you’d like to sell them. Look at places like Fiverr, Upwork, or even LinkedIn and see what services business owners are hiring freelancers for.
And there’s always Google! Set up a “Google Alert” to help notify you about information and jobs in your chosen niches.
Tip 4: Test and Iterate While You Discover Your Freelance Niche
Be open-minded and flexible. If you launch yourself, do all the leg work to get your name out there, but months go by without much interest—prepare to re-evaluate your niche and make changes.
Or, you might need to brush up on your skills and add certifications that potential clients would find appealing—like UX certifications, copywriting certifications, or showcasing courses completed on your LinkedIn page.
Consider working with a reputable business coach, or a marketing coach. Focus on working with professional coaches who can help you with the results you want to achieve. Ask them for previous and current clients, and make sure you get the full story of how the coaching process works to help you achieve your freelancer goal-setting strategy.
Tip 5: Trust Your Instincts
Your gut is often the best barometer for what you should and shouldn’t do to become profitable in your chosen freelance niche. You know what lights you up inside and gives you the motivation to get up each morning and earn money. Trust yourself. Trust your skills. Embrace the challenge knowing you’ve got the skills to be successful.
Your Path to Freelance Success Begins with Discovering Your Niche
Entering the world of freelance work and finding success requires discovering your niche. You’ll need to do a deep dive into what your skills and expertise are, what you enjoy doing, and knowing that you can sell this “work” or “service” to others for a profit.
Now’s the time to get real with yourself and your skill set. Talk to friends, family, and professional acquaintances to learn what they believe your strengths are and what types of work they would hire you to do. Then, collect all this information to finally nail down the perfect freelance niche for you to find financial success with.
Your ideal freelance niche could be a topic “healthcare” or “freelance medical writing” or a skill “copywriting for Google ads” or “technical writing.”
You might have a few starts and stops until you find just the right freelance niche, or combination of niches, that will be successful. If you find yourself struggling, first figure out of your niche is too broad. Remember, if you’re trying to market to everyone, you’re marketing to no one!
If you know your niche is narrow enough, but still run into roadblocks to success, reach out to your network and find a reputable business coach who can help you come up with a plan of action to find success within your desired freelance niche.
Your Freelance Niche Doesn’t Have to Be Forever
Don’t worry. You don’t have to choose one specific topic area or skill and only do that one thing for the rest of your freelance career. (That’s what some think are the cons of freelance niche writing.) But, you do want to niche down so you can focus on your main thing until you make your desired income.
You also want to be the freelancer potential clients think of for specific topic writing like “B2B healthcare writer” or “technical writer.” You’ll get more work that way!
