If you are a freelancer but you can’t seem to get clients, it’s maybe because the services you offer are either broad or vague. There’s nothing wrong with having a wide range of services. The more things you know and the more skills you have, the better. However, if you really want to dominate a certain market, you have to focus on a specific niche.
Choosing a niche as a:
Virtual Assistant
Let’s dig in deeper. For example, if you are a virtual assistant, we know that VAs are in demand to all kinds of businesses, and the competition is high too. Now, if you want to narrow down the competition, select your target market. For example, you want to be a Real Estate VA, or VA for health professionals, VA for fitness coach, VA for travel agencies, VA for Amazon store, VA for Shopify store, and so on. That way, people looking for VA that are directly related to their businesses can see your profile on top of other VAs who don’t specify their niche.
SEO Specialist
If you are an SEO specialist, you know that SEO isn’t just one thing and there are a lot of things that has to do with it. So how can you get a niche on SEO? Select one area of SEO that you know best and where you can excel. For example, email outreach, guest posting, link building, keyword research, social bookmarking, blog commenting, meta tags optimization, forum posting, local citation, directory submission, Google penalty recovery, and the list goes on. From my experience, I just focused on doing email outreach. As a result, I was getting invited to each and every job post about email outreach on Upwork.
Writer
It’s easy to find a niche if you are a writer. Think about your interests and the topics that you are comfortable writing. If you love music, then write about music. If you love cooking, write recipes. If you love travel, write about places. On the other hand, you can also choose your niche based on the kinds of writing and not topic. For example, you can be an email copywriter, novel or story writer. You can also focus on writing product description, press release, ebook, product reviews, how-to guides, and a whole lot more.
Graphic Designer
The competition is also tight in graphic design field that’s why it’s important to choose one area where you can excel the most. You can choose among designing logo, ebook cover, infographics, business card, flyers, posters, banner ads, product packaging, invitations, custom icons, and so on. If you focus on one thing, for example infographics, you’ll be surprised that you can get a lot of job invitations from clients looking for someone to make infographics for them. Since that’s your area of expertise, you’ll have a lot of infographics to show from your portfolio. From a client’s perspective, the more things a freelancer has done on the same thing they are looking for, the higher chance that person will be hired.
WordPress Expert
It’s true that WordPress is one of the most-used tools in creating websites because of the readily available themes and templates. On top of that, there are a lot of drag-and-drop page builders out there that clients and business owners want to use for their site. That said, to find your niche as a WordPress expert, focus on a specific theme or page builder. For example, you can master one of the following page builders: Divi, Elementor, Cornerstone, Beaver, Fusion, Visual Composer, Themify, Site Origin, and more. Clients usually ask “show me sample websites you built with this builder.” If you make yourself a pro in using one of those, you can have a lot to show to the client and he will be convinced that you are the best person to hire.
As you can see on the sample above, there are a lot of opportunities out there and the key is to specialize and not generalize. Start finding your niche now and you will later realize that it’s a great way to get a lot of clients. Believe me, if you focus on a specific niche, clients will be the ones to find you and you no longer have to send proposals or job applications. Remember, find a niche that you’re comfortable and confident doing. And once you became an expert in your chosen niche, you can convince the clients to hire you despite the high rate.
If you don't know how much to charge to your clients, you can use this hourly to salary calculator to compute your desired earnings.
If you did not find your skills listed above and you are having a hard time finding your niche, leave a comment below and I’ll help you find your niche.
Happy freelancing!