How To Find Your Freelancing Niche

Podcast Intro

About this podcast episode…

HOW AND WHY TO NICHE AS A FREELANCER

In this short compilation episode, Steve revisits conversations from across 11 years of the Being Freelance podcast archive to explore what actually happens when freelancers specialise in a niche. Full of stories of how these freelance creatives found their niche and the impact it had.

You’ll hear:

THE IMPACT OF NICHING

  • How specialising can make marketing simpler and sales conversations easier

  • Why expertise can lead to higher-value opportunities

HOW TO FIND YOUR NICHE

  • How to choose a niche based on experience, enjoyment or values

  • Why your niche doesn’t have to be permanent

Featuring insights and stories from James Barnard, Liz Painter, Katie Chappell, Ayo Abbas, Louise Shanahan, Eman Ismail, Estelle Hakner, Ebonie Allard, Hannah Dossary and Stephen Adams.

Whether you’re just starting out or rethinking your positioning years into freelancing, this episode might help you scratch that niche itch.

Read a full transcript & get Links in the tabs.

 
Links
 
Video

Check out this video of James Barnard discussing his niche.
https://youtube.com/shorts/17nhPMnbD8k

 
Transcript

Transcript of the Being Freelance podcast with Steve Folland exploring how freelancers have found their niche and the impact it’s had on their business.

Steve Folland: Hey, I'm Steve Folland. Welcome to another short compilation episode of Being Freelance. And this time we're gonna look at niching or 'nitching'?

Paul Jarvis: I'm glad I'm talking to a Brit. So I can say niche, not niche. Just sound... niche just sounds weird. It's like...

Steve Folland: Oh no, we go for the niche.

Paul Jarvis: You go for the niche?!

Steve Folland: Yeah.

Paul Jarvis: Oh, no!

Steve Folland: Canadian author of Company Of One, excellent book, Paul Jarvis, when he did a live Q and A in the Being Freelance Community,

Paul Jarvis: At least you use Celsius, not Fahrenheit. If you tell me you use Fahrenheit, this call is over!

Steve Folland: However you pronounce it. This episode is about why it matters and how to find it, but first... Quick recap of what it is.

Nicheing mainly works in a couple of ways. You could niche in a skill, so instead of being a graphic designer, I'm a brand designer, or I design PowerPoint presentations.

Or you niche by industry. I'm a graphic designer for real estate agents. Or a mix of the two. I'm a presentation designer for the real estate industry.

Although a reminder, I'm actually neither. I edit podcasts.

When James Barnard went freelance first, well, he would design you anything.

James Barnard: Absolutely everything, being the sort of generic saturated market of generic graphic design, print advertising, flyers, email newsletters. You name it, I could do it.

It wasn't until I decided to sort of niche down into logos that finally the clients actually became easier.

Steve Folland: James had niched, he'd become an expert.

James Barnard: Setting yourself as an expert in one thing allows you to attract more clients. As backwards as that sounds. Being targeted in one area totally allowed me to sort of target more logo design clients and therefore actually get more from that by being the kind of expert in that, in that niche.

Steve Folland: Yeah, the important line in there is...

James Barnard: Finding the clients actually became easier.

Steve Folland: Who wouldn't want finding clients to be easier?

Liz Painter: It's so much easier, you know, when you get on a call with a prospect. It's so easy to give examples.

Steve Folland: Here's email strategist and conversion copywriter, there's a niche, Liz Painter.

Liz Painter: It just makes everything a lot easier in your business. And yes, even, you know, when you're posting on social media, all of the marketing activities you do for your business, they can all be focused in on that. It definitely simplifies things.

Steve Folland: Positioning becomes easier. Marketing yourself becomes easier, including your social media, your website.

James Barnard: I basically took my website and rewrote everything to target better SEO terms so I could be more discoverable and to put my logo design packages on there. Once I decided to niche into that area, really sort of specialize on it, removed all the portfolio work off my portfolio, that wasn't to do with logo design, so it was absolutely specialized and that just started to bring in the clients in. It wasn't like crazy amounts of leads, but it was decent and it was enough to live on.

Steve Folland: And when you end up on a call with one of those prospective clients, that's easier too. Because after all, you've spoken to people just like them before.

Liz Painter: So I can easily say, oh, you know, I wrote this seven email sequence for someone and it was this price, and it just gives them that reference point.

Steve Folland: Here's live event illustrator. See, there's a niche, Katie Chapell from earlier this year.

Katie Chappell: I was just a generic illustrator drawing anything for anyone. It was so much harder. I made my life so much more difficult because I didn't have a clear... I can help you do this or like, I will do this for you. Ta da!

Steve Folland: Ta da!

Yeah. It's like magic, but it isn't magic. It's pretty simple marketing ultimately, isn't it?

Katie Chappell: You don't have to think of it as a niche. I think that's an important thing. It's like a Venn diagram, isn't it? Like finding people who need the thing. And can afford to pay for the thing, that one's important. So people need a thing done, they can afford to pay for the thing to be done, and they know you exist.

So it's like you've got to tell them you exist and how much it costs and what you'll do for them. And then it's like, okay, cool.

Steve Folland: Yeah. So let's bring money into the equation. Finding your niche doesn't just make it easier to find clients. It can make it easier to find higher paying clients.

Fraser Davidson: One of my American friends say, niches is for riches, but it doesn't really work if you pronounce it properly. Yeah, niches is for riches.

Steve Folland: Oh man. We're back to how to say it again? That's Fraser Davidson. He's a character driven ator, by the way. It's funny, but it can make a serious difference to your business.

So how do you find your niche? First up, think about the things that you already have worked in, stuff you are genuinely an expert in.

For Built Environment Marketer Ayo Abass, it seemed obvious.

Ayo Abbas: I think it was quite easy for me. 'cause I mean, really, I've been working in that sector for 20 years. So, because I've always done that, that's kind of the world I know best. When I'm talking to clients, the thing they like is I understand their world. I can talk their language.

So actually it made sense for me to specialize in that area because I love it, I understand it. I can talk the language. I know how it works as a market. So I can definitely hone down on that. And to be honest, I mean there's like thousands of architects, thousands of engineers. There's lots of work out there.

Steve Folland: Ah, yes. So having experience and being an expert in the area is clearly a benefit, but you've also gotta have people who are willing to pay you for the thing. Remember the Venn diagram that Katie told us about

Katie Chappell: People who need the thing and can afford to pay for the thing. That one's important.

Steve Folland: So for Louise Shanahan, who'd spent 10 years working in the medical sphere in government, and because of her own health scare, health and fitness seemed an obvious niche when she went freelance as a copywriter.

Louise Shanahan: I think when I first started out, because I'd kind of come from this idea that I might wanna do something health and fitness related, it was quite focused on that.

And then I quickly realized that actually. That particular client group are maybe not the ones with the kind of budget to hire a copywriter. That very quickly became apparent that it wasn't gonna be a good route to go down in terms of finding clients.

Steve Folland: So not all niches have riches. Louise rethought it and turned out the ones who budgets in need of her skills were in healthcare, biotech, medical device companies, that kind of thing.

Louise Shanahan: I'm quite lucky because not that many other people seen that interested in doing these jobs, so that works out pretty well for me.

Steve Folland: So the companies have money, but not many people have the expertise to service those companies. All she needed to do was start putting the word out.

Louise Shanahan: I used a lot of LinkedIn for that. I posted a lot about what I was interested in, sharing what was happening in the industry that I found interesting. Talking about my process and previous projects that I'd done. It was quite easy to sort of stand out from everyone else. This was a way for me to use my unique experience and expertise and background to help clients on some very specific problems.

So yeah, this is why I'm a big fan of niching.

Steve Folland: So that's medical copywriter louise, what about Liz Painter?

Liz Painter: I was very generalist. Really anything that any business asked me to write, I would do it. I didn't discriminate and I think that was actually a mistake.

Steve Folland: I introduced her earlier on as an email strategist and conversion copywriter. Where did that come from?

Liz Painter: Probably by about 2016, 2017. I'd already narrowed down into really only doing online stuff. I wasn't writing brochures anymore. I was doing websites, emails, funnels. And then I think it was round about 2017, I was chatting to a client, actually, who was saying, look, you know, you're clearly really passionate about email.

You're really very good at it. I'd just got some really good results for her with a campaign we'd run. You know, she said, have you not thought about just doing email? And I had thought about it, but I had wondered whether it was a good positioning strategy or not.

But from that point, that really made me think, do you know what? I think she's actually, she's right. And I did start to focus in, I didn't immediately cut out the other work, but I started to focus in on email a bit more. And then probably over the last two or three years, I've really, really niched down into email. So it was quite gradual. I didn't... It didn't seem like a sensible strategy to go right from now on I'm only ever doing email, like I kind of gradually moved into that space.

Steve Folland: Okay, so we've had expertise that you've had for a very long time, and then listening to yourself and listening to your clients when they're really happy with the work you're doing. What about if you are enjoying it? Here's Eman Ismail.

Eman Ismail: I now work on email conversion strategy and copy, and that came about because... When I first started freelancing, one of the first things I wanted to do was build my own mailing list, and I really loved writing my emails to my own list. And I had a lot of clients that would ask me to write emails for them, and it was just, it was part of the job that just I really enjoyed and it made me really happy to do.

And it got to the point where, you know, I send emails to my email list and I get people responding and laughing with me and telling me how much they enjoyed the email and sharing the email with people. And I would meet up with a couple of my friends who happened to be on my email list as well, and they'd tell me how much they enjoyed it.

And I just thought, well, I really enjoy this, other people seem to really be enjoying this, so this is what I wanna do. And initially I was a little bit scared to niche down because I guess you worry that you are gonna lose out on work. But I found it's gone really well.

Steve Folland: So that's paying attention to what you enjoy.

What about paying attention to what you really, really care about?

Estelle Hakner: I generalized for about two and a half years.

Steve Folland: Estelle Hakner knew she wanted her work to have a deeper purpose.

Estelle Hakner: As I got more comfortable and I built up my experience and confidence, I felt confident enough to niche and to bring in this more eco focus and I, I kind of rebuilt the business around eco brands and copywriting for eco brands.

The first thing I did was I got my branding done to reflect the new niche. So I think that was a real confidence boost, just to kind of feel more legit putting my stuff out there. Yeah, so I, I told people as well. I just, I, I said to people, this is the kind of work that I'm interested in. On social media I started to talk more about environmental things and just tried to curate my content a little bit more in that way.

To be really honest, I didn't see it... it was a bit of a like light bulb moment when I realized that I could bring this in as my niche. It, it, you know, it seems quite obvious now. It was like right in front of me the whole time, but I hadn't considered that that could be my niche.

I hadn't considered that it was a viable niche that people could, you know, choose to niche in that way. I'd heard of like choosing an industry or a skill to niche in, but not so much like values. It kind of all clicked into place and it seemed so, so perfect when it happened.

Steve Folland: And you might be listening to this thinking, I genuinely have no idea what my niche is, but maybe it's like Estelle, maybe it's staring you right in the face and you just need the light bulb to go off to shine a light on it.

Way back in 2015 on the podcast, coach Ebonie Allard told me if we dig a little...

Ebonie Allard: I think people do know underneath it really. I think, you know, one of the things that I know to be true is that every freelancer that I have ever worked with has experienced that gut feeling in their belly where they meet a new client, they have a conversation and something in their stomach says, 'don't do this', and their head says, 'need the money'.

And so they go through it, that process, and they sign on with that client and they start working with them and then it's a nightmare for whatever reason. And their intuition or that that thing, that feeling knew that it was a bad idea.

Everyone I've ever met has experienced that in some way, shape, or form.

Steve Folland: Hmm. Okay. So that's our gut warning us, but...

Ebonie Allard: The flip side of that is like, who do you love working with? Who would it be a joy to work for every single day? Who, if you knew that that's what you were gonna be working with on a Monday morning, you'd jump out of bed and be like, oh yeah, I, I get to work with them today. That's fab!.

Steve Folland: So maybe it's there all along. It's just that we have to keep doing the work and pay attention to how it feels, and that can take time.

Now, if you said to me today, you want a fun, colorful Squarespace website for your business, my mind would immediately jump to Hannah Dossary AKA Shiny Happy Digital. But it took her ages to get there. When she started. She was very much a generalist.

Hannah Dossary: My website was terrible. It was just basically like my logo and then like my portfolios. It was just things I've worked on, which if you looked at it was just a mix and match of everything. So someone probably went on to it and thought, yeah, but what do you do? Like I didn't really specialize in anything, so it must have been quite confusing for someone to look at that.

Steve Folland: Hannah could see in others that having a niche was a benefit.

Hannah Dossary: You know, when I'd go to design talks and stuff, I'd always see people who were doing specific things, whether it was a style or you know, illustration or something.

And they were doing it so well and they knew exactly what they were doing and it just made sense. And I was like, I just, I'm not in that place and I dunno how to get there.

Steve Folland: Hannah figured maybe she needed a guide to put her in the right direction. And while she was in Australia, she found somebody offering a course, a mentorship to help them find their niche.

Hannah Dossary: So that course really made me kind of look inward and ask all those questions about what's your why and what's your purpose and all that stuff. They're questions I've never really asked myself, you know, I just was just trying to make some money to live. So it was quite hard. Especially when you're like, I, I don't know what style I have. You know?

Steve Folland: And if you're thinking that meant she instantly knew what her niche was.

Hannah Dossary: It wasn't a quick fix or anything. It wasn't like I figured it all out straight away. It took about two years to, to finally get where I was really.

Steve Folland: Part of the problem was because Hannah would figure out a niche and then try it, but...

Hannah Dossary: And I started it and I thought, this is just not me. Like, why, why am I trying to put myself into a niche that just doesn't seem to fit? And then, you know, it is just so many ups and downs of like, oh, how, how do I figure it out? You know, it's horrible. Um, so yeah, I think, I think I kind of just left it for a bit and just, was like, right, let me just kind of do what I'm doing.

Steve Folland: Yep. Hannah just went back to doing the work day by day. Doing the work.

Hannah Dossary: I think eventually you realize that once that seed's planted, you kind of ask yourself those questions anyways and you figure those things out and maybe you might have a project with someone. Think, you know what, this is the kind of client I want to work with, or this is the kind of project I want to work on, and you're like, maybe this could be my why.

This would try and figure out as you go. So yeah, I guess like a year later I kind of did that kind of course again to try and re-answer stuff. Now I've kind of had a whole year to think about it. I answered them and it made sense. Why my answers the way, the way they are.

I realized I loved working with, creative businesses and loved, like, even though I didn't have a specific style, I loved kind of doing anything playful and joyful.

So it still wasn't until, another year maybe that I had the guts to kind of go ahead and start my business. Shiny Happy. I think people kind of got what I was trying to say straight away. They're like, okay, well you're not gonna be doing boring corporate websites. You know, you're, you're a happy brand. So I think it made sense straight away.

Steve Folland: Yeah. You see she got there eventually. And remember that if you are struggling too.

Now, I just wanna point out that from over 350 guests of the podcast, not all of them are specialists. Many are happy being generalists. Often it's because it stops them getting bored of doing one thing, but undoubtedly, niching makes clear sense because it makes your marketing easier, getting referred easier could even get you higher paid opportunities because you are the specialist.

Me? I have always done a bit of everything, made videos, explainer videos, script work, voice over work, edit podcast, host event. Yeah, I'll do that.

This past year I focused much more on saying I'm a podcast and video podcast editor. The more I say those words, genuinely, the more I get referred that kind of work. And I'm also deliberately saying editor rather than podcast producer, because whilst I can do that, I love the editing. And sometimes podcast producers hire podcast editors and clients often search for a 'podcast editor' in quotation marks when they need help.

Estelle Hakner: Niching. It can be really powerful in that way because if you just, you start to get known for it and you, you kind of become like a magnet for the, the type of work you want to do.

Steve Folland: Another thing I wanna flag is that your niche can change over time. Stephen Adams is a web developer. That whole world is changing over time, and so does he.

Stephen Adams: Every time I sort of change specialism, it's just because, so like for now, I've done Angular for the last few years. This current project, I'm using something called View js, which is another framework for building websites and web applications.

But I quite like it. So I'm thinking, I might start specializing in this for a little bit. And it's because I've just got exposure to it from the current project I'm on.

And so what I have found is it's never been like I really set out to change to do something. I get exposed to something. I'm starting to use it, and I think, oh, I like this. I like this way. This works. I would specialize in this for a little bit. And then something else might come up and I specialize in that.

Steve Folland: But whatever you decide, remember to tell people,

Stephen Adams: It's making sure that you are saying that this is what you do and this is what you specialize in, and everything you're writing about is about that. So you get known as somebody who specializes in something.

Steve Folland: Just putting together this episode, by the way, I checked the freelancers, I've included out on LinkedIn. Eco copywriter Estelle has niched further now calling herself an Ocean Impact Copywriter. Whilst health copywriter Louise is even more specialist. Her LinkedIn bio now reads and I quote, specialist white paper writing for healthcare and med tech.

So it turns out niching isn't limiting. It's really focusing, focusing attention and energy.

It makes it easier for others to understand you. Remember you, refer you and yes, choose you. It also makes it easier for you to decide how to run your business.

Louise Shanahan: It made the marketing much easier, makes decision making a lot easier. And yeah, I think because you're able to come across as an expert because you, you basically are an expert in that one very niche thing. You can charge more I think so, yeah. It's definitely, definitely something that I would recommend people think about.

Steve Folland: Don't feel pressure, but pay attention to your experience, your enjoyment, and what people ask for, because however you say it, there is definitely riches in niches. So maybe scratch the niche itch.

If you're new to freelancing or in your first year, do head to beingfreelance.com and check out my course, How To Get Started Being Freelance. And whatever stage of freelancing you are at, get my emails. Sign up is at the website and you know I'm gonna say it, join us in the Being Freelance community. 'Cause you know what?

Whatever your niche, you're not alone being freelance.

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