You would be forgiven for thinking that it’s just good freelancing business to take any jobs that come your way. After all, gigs can be hard to come by. So why would you turn money away?

The truth is that freelancers are much better off pursuing a “long tail” strategy. So what is the long tail?

A common freelancing mistake is to consider the entire world to be your target market, which creates a variety of problems. First of all, it is nearly impossible to focus your marketing and sales efforts in any meaningful way if you don’t have a clear sense of who your freelancing customers are and why. Secondly, your portfolio of work takes on a scattered, unfocused feel as you take on more and more random freelancing gigs, which turns clients off. And finally, you will be unable to offer true expertise in solving your client’s challenges if you don’t have deep experience within their specific industrial niche.

The solution to these problems is to focus your entire freelancing operation on a narrow industrial niche that would benefit greatly from your offering, that has a reasonable number of qualified leads, and that has been targeted by the fewest number of direct competitors possible.

It can seem counter-intuitive to eliminate potential customers and restrict yourself like this. But the people making decisions within companies are ordinary consumers like you and I – they are risk-averse, they prefer to hire people 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 and increasing the likelihood of success.

Just imagine – if you had a pipe in your home burst during the night, would you call ‘Joe the Junk Hauler, Pest Remover and General Plumbing Contractor‘ or would you call ‘Quik-Fixit – 24/7 Residential Emergency Plumbing Services?’ This isn’t about the company 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-Fixit 99 out of 100 times, because they know their need will be addressed with minimal hassle and high likelihood of success.

Building Your Freelancing Niche Market

This process starts with some basic internet research focused on identifying a “macro” market. This is a broad category that you have existing expertise or interest in. From this broad category, you identify sub-categories with the goal of getting closer to a match – a good quantity of small-to-medium-sized businesses with an obvious need for your service offering, and a niche that is not so obvious and popularly known that it has been inundated with other freelancing businesses trying to win those customers. 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.

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.

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.

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.

Paid Freelance Mentors members have unlimited access to our Niche Builder Toolkit, which helps you to define your niche with ease.