Finding your Niche

If you’ve managed to identify that your skills are needed, you can sell them, you can make enough money from them and there’s nothing lurking around the corner to put you out of business, then you’re halfway there. After taking the plunge, you will need to have the patience to wait out the time it is going to take to spread the word, to get your name known, and to generally build yourself a client base. You may need to take other work while you build your business. You can, and should, spend the time you are not working, marketing, and networking with others, to build up your name, contacts, and a profile of your services within the industry. Specialisms are a long, slow game, but eventually, with enough nurturing, you may make a good living for yourself.

If, however, you are looking for a different way to ‘sell’ the same stuff everyone else is already peddling (namely non-specialism freelance tech support), there’s no harm in trying to make it look like you’re a specialist. In fact, it’s almost compulsory if you want to be memorable. Can you be fastest off the mark, no job too small, can you be a ‘female only’ or ‘over 50s only’ establishment, or maybe you can be the next gimmick like ‘geek squad. It’s all about image and advertising – do enough of it in the right way and you’re sorted!) or ‘geek in a box’ or ‘she-mail’ (sorts out your email girls…I’m thinking about trying this one myself!). The thing to do is find out what you do that can be seen to be better or more original than your competitors, focus on that, and point it out to your customers as much as you can…in your marketing, on your calls, to your colleagues, to your clients and wherever else you can do it.

Marketing works in two ways – using a ‘drip’ campaign, where you make sure that people see stuff about you as much as possible, so they remember it, or a ‘burst’ campaign – where you suddenly burst on the scene making as much noise as possible (which costs oodles of cash normally) – use as many of the opportunities as you can, as often as possible, do something to get people talking about you, and you’re at the start of something good…then you just need to deliver on your promises, keep up all the good work, continue to shout about yourself and stay ahead of the competition. As easy as that!