Hello My Friends, and welcome to this week’s #SolutionsSaturday”.  In this week’s solution I wanted to talk about some of the best ways to find your niche.

Firstly a ‘niche’ is defined as “a comfortable or suitable position in life or employment” As freelancers, our niche can be the area or type of work or job that we focus on and specialize in. Taking off from previous Thursday Thoughts in which we focused on the ‘5 Reasons To Specialize’ I wanted to go into a bit of detail on how we find our niche, or the area of our work in which we want to specialize in.

Before we go into the best ways of finding our niche, you may be asking yourself why? As mentioned in the Thursday Thoughts there are some great reasons as to why we would want to narrow down the scope of our work and focus on a single niche, such as:

1. Ability to focus your strengths and be great at one specific area
2. Charge far more than others since you have specific experience in a niche
3. Able to do a deep dive learning on a vertical market or industry
4. Brand yourself as the leading expert as solving problems for a specific niche.

Now that we have gone over why you want to have your own niche, let’s focus on the how.

Past Experience – The first area you may want to look in to find a suitable niche is past experience. When I first started doing freelance work, I targeted contractors since I ran a contracting company for 10 years. I was very familiar with the industry and the problems and challenges associated with this.  Although going from a Contractor to a freelance developer was a big leap, I was able to leverage my experience to offer a lot of solutions to common industry problems. This helped me gain a quick foothold within the freelance community

Relationships – Although you may not have specific industry experience, if those close to you such as family or friends do have specific industry knowledge you can use that to quickly familiarize yourself to that industries challenges. For example if your family runs a local restaurant, you can sit down with then and discuss the pains and problems they face and how you can possibly provide solutions to them. It’s more than likely that the issues they are facing are common among the industry, and therefore the solutions you provide to one restaurant may help thousands of others as well.

Become An Expert – Even without past experience or relationships with those in a specific industry you can literally become an expert on almost any subject or niche simply with a good amount of research. With the help of the internet and sites like YouTube, or online courses, you can become an expert in anything with the right amount of time and energy dedicated to a particular field. Regardless of what you currently know about a field, becoming an expert is far easier today than it has ever been.

The reality is, finding your niche has never been easier and more important. As they say it’s better to do one thing great, than many things just ok. I would love to hear  your thoughts. Have you found your niche? What is it? Let me know in the comments below.

I hope you have enjoyed this Solutions Saturday and you get tons of value from this post and our Excel For Freelancers Group. (If you have to join, please feel free to join here: http://bit.ly/groupexcel )  If you have a question that you would like me to answer, just put it in the comments below and I will try and get to in in a Solutions Saturday.

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Thanks so much,

Randy