The Long Tail – Why You Should Niche Down

When I first started freelancing, I relied on the old “build a website and wait for customers to come pouring in” approach. I also tried social media, blog posts, everything I was hearing you were supposed to do back then. It led to a common situation that many freelancers face, where most of my customers were total amateurs with pathetic budgets and were totally annoying to work with. And once you get to a certain point along this path, it becomes a treadmill – the work you’re doing is too random and too low-budget to piece together a coherent portfolio to attract better clients, and you can’t afford to stop taking those small random jobs because you’re barely getting by.

Do not think of yourself as a freelance gun for hire, hanging out the jack-of-all-trades shingle and hoping that some company in need of services will somehow stumble upon your portfolio/website/resume/whatever.

A common freelancer mistake is casting too wide a net, which really waters down the potency of your offering. You offer too little expertise in a given client’s unique business challenges/needs, and your portfolio of work is too unfocused.

Clients who will actually value your expertise will look for an expert when sourcing out their needs. When a pipe bursts in your house in the dead of night, most reasonable people aren’t going to call a tile setter or even a general handyman to diagnose and repair it, most people are going straight to the source and calling an experienced residential plumber. It’s no different when a business hires a freelancer.

You should view yourself and your offering as a traditional business. This means you aren’t John Smith the software dev available for whatever coding needs you might have. You are Bakeo – business solutions for industrial bakeries (or whatever). The difference is not in the name, it’s in the approach – meet customers where they are, provide solutions to their specific and unique problems (including problems they didn’t even know they had yet!), and build a reputation within that industry as the go-to provider. Or as you put it, ‘niche down.’

It can seem unintuitive to eliminate potential customers and restrict yourself like this. But the people making decisions within companies are still just consumers – they are risk-averse, they prefer to hire folks with lots of demonstrated experience doing exactly what they need, and they want the process to be as stress-free and effortless as possible. It’s all about reducing friction. If you had a major burst pipe in the night, would you call ‘Joe the Junk Hauler, Pest Remover and General Handyman‘ or would you call ‘Quik-Fixit – 24/7 Residential Emergency Plumbing Services?’ Again this isn’t about the name, it’s the offering and the mentality behind it. People know what they’re getting with each of those providers, and they are choosing Quik-Fixit99/100 times because they know their need will be addressed with minimal bullshit.

Once you’ve identified your niche market/s, ALL of your sales and marketing efforts should be focused on prospects within those groups. If you’re just sitting back and waiting for clients to come to you, this tactic won’t work because you’re putting yourself at the mercy of the market, which almost always leads to random clients from all over the spectrum.

From here, you can identify specific client prospects within your chosen niche who are a good fit – they have the financial resources to afford your ideal rate (not your “bro” rate), they are not so big as to be hiring those roles in-house but also not too small as to have too few resources or need, and they must clearly benefit financially from your service. This last one is key. If you can show a clear and obvious financial benefit to your prospect, it’s almost a no brainer. Then finally you need to approach the correct individual within those companies with your pitch. Finding the right person is pretty easy on LinkedIn, and there are other resources for finding the right people within a given company. Apollo.io is an example.

Do some research until you identify a target niche market that has limited direct competition while also having plenty of well-financed, active businesses that could really benefit from services like yours. Obviously, the “perfect” niche is a bit of a unicorn, but with some effort you can find 1-3 niche “long tail” markets that are a bit overlooked.

Ultimately, you should probably have at least TWO niche markets, ideally from different corners of the economy so that typical economic boom/bust cycles don’t wipe out both of your fishing ponds at once.

The final step in my view is to find ways to ‘productize’ your offering, so that rather than merely being capable of producing whatever ideas customers may have in mind (and this applies to ANY line of work freelancers do), you are proactively offering targeted, refined, value-based packages that address the specific and unique needs of the businesses within the niche market/s you’ve identified, even if they haven’t yet realized they needed those services. This will vary depending on the freelancer, what you’re offering and to whom, but the idea is to make it easy for potential customers to understand where your services meet their needs, without a ton of vision or planning on their part. This also creates future opportunity – I do 3D product renderings, and have about a dozen productized offerings developed (catalog imagery, social media posts, retail, amazon product kit, etc) with fixed pricing and a clear pitch for each to make the offer drop-dead simple. Because these offerings are pre-built around the needs of clients within my niche, with tons of samples of that work for companies just like theirs, it is very easy for them to see the benefit, and to get clients to ‘yes.’ Whenever a company hires me, over the course of the project I listen closely to what they’re up to and throw these offerings into the discussion when appropriate, and get TONS of upsells and ongoing work as a result. This is meeting people/companies where they are. It makes life super simple for them. It makes them look good within their company. And it keeps them coming back.

You don’t need to target the 10 biggest companies in a given industry to thrive, in fact that’s a recipe for failure. The “long tail” is where the real money is at for freelancers, and this means targeting companies further down the food chain that still have an appropriate budget and need your services just as much as the big guys.

All of this to say, niche down, productize, and build a business that is laser focused on building relationships with a stable of repeat clients.