Do You Need to Pick a Niche?
April 21st, 2007 by WellwrittenwordsAt the beginning of each new year, it’s important for you to make plans for your writing business. I hope you took the time to do that this year. It’s so important to have a clear mental image of exactly where you’re going.
One major difficulty with freelance writing is that we find ourselves pulled in so many different directions.
Should you concentrate on B2B writing? Is ghost writing going to be more profitable? Or then again, should we just stick to writing articles for magazines? And in addition there are literally hundreds of other different forms of freelance writing. You don’t have to ponder on this for very long to see that there are problems.
To be able to form a clear idea of where you’re going, you need to focus your energies on one area of writing. More and more you will notice that the really successful–super successful–writers do one thing and one thing only. Clayton Makepeace, for example, only does direct mail pieces. Stephen King only does horror (oops, how did that get in there?), Peter Bowerman only does commercial writing. I could go on all day like this, but you get the idea.
If you pick a niche that you enjoy writing about, and that you know at least a little about, you’ll soon find that you’re getting better at it. Quite quickly word will get out that this is what you do, especially if you write about it on your website and optimize that for the search engines. You’ll then find it easy to establish yourself as an expert in your niche so that you can go on to claim a large chunk of that market for yourself.
Clients like writers who specialize. It gives them a cozy feeling that they’ve picked someone who can be relied upon to come up with the goods, and they’ll be confident that they’ll end up with a project well done.
If you are resisting the need to specialize because you feel that you’ll be turning away work, be assured that this is not the case. For every project that you turn away, you’ll find that several materialize simply because of your status as a specialist. It’s really easy–all you need to do is decide which niche you’re going into.
Posted in Freelance Writers Manifesto |