Choose a Micro Niche for Maximum Profitability

Published in

Virtuali

9 min readDec 30, 2022

The fastest way to build a profitable freelance business is to choose a micro niche — a small subsection of a market where there is high demand and good income potential.

These are the lessons I’ve learned from 15 years of being a freelance writer and content marketing consultant — and running my niche content marketing agency, Seven Oaks Consulting.

Find and Promote Your Freelancing Services to a Specific Niche

Welcome back. If you haven’t read the other articles in the series, I’ve linked to them at the end for your convenience. You can read them in any order you choose — the information will still make sense — but I hope you will read them.

Find and Brand Yourself in a Micro Niche to Build Your Business

One of the secrets to becoming a truly successful long-term freelancer is to find and develop your niche. The more clearly defined your niche, and the better it aligns with marketplace demand and your unique skillset, the more potential you have to build your business and income.

Let me break this down for you step by step.

Identify Your Potential Niches

A niche is your special area of focus. It may be a writing niche, such as blogging or sales email creation. Or, it may be an industry-specific niche, such as focusing only on technology, manufacturing, video games, or gardening. Each of these industries can be defined as a niche: a smaller group within a larger group that can be identified by specific interests and needs.

Why identify and focus on a niche? After all, doesn’t that limit your ability to secure new business?

I used to think that way, but promoting my writing and marketing services without focusing on a particular industry or specialty actually made it harder for me to land gigs. For many years, I pursued any opportunity that looked like it might be well-paying and long-term. That was my sole objective. I did not focus on any one area of marketing or any one industry. If someone wanted to work with me and was willing to pay me for the time, I took the work.

The problem with this is that over time, I lacked any recognizable marketplace “brand.” You probably think you know what a brand is, but I guarantee you probably don’t. Most people think of a brand as its appearance: a logo, colors, and fonts. In truth, a brand is the overall promise made to the customer of their experience with a product or service. Because my brand was unfocused and my messaging unclear, few clients sought my services, and I was forever chasing the next gig.

By identifying my niche (technology) and focusing tightly on it (content marketing management and written content production), I was able to secure lucrative, lasting contracts and a steady stream of satisfied customers. Best of all, I became recognized as a solid tech writer and editor, someone who can transform complex topics into friendly, properly optimized articles. This began a positive cycle of successful work, happy clients, and attracting new opportunities from among companies also seeking strong tech writers with a marketing background.

Three Steps to Find a Profitable Niche or Micro Niche

Some writers begin searching for their niche based on what they enjoy. They become beauty writers, fitness writers, or game-tips writers. When I first began freelancing, I focused on the equestrian market. I leveraged my passion for horses and riding to get my foot in the door as a freelance writer.

However, writing one or two articles per year doesn’t build a full-time income. I needed to analyze the market fully to better understand whether or not I could support myself writing for this industry.

To find a niche that can support a healthy freelance income, the niche must meet three criteria:

Market Size: The target niche must be large enough so that there is demand for your services as a freelancer. It’s not enough to choose a niche randomly or based on your past success if that niche is drying up or not large enough to support a freelancer career. As I mentioned, early in my freelance writing career, I focused on writing for the equine magazine market. I’d been exercising friends’ horses, serving as their show groom, and working at a boarding stable for many years, and I used that first-hand knowledge to write articles about grooming, showing, barn building, and more. But the market for equestrian articles, although a great niche, is tiny; even with the advent of the internet, the market for this work remained small. I needed a niche large enough to provide both plentiful and well-paying work.
Effective Demand: This is the willingness of the market to buy — and to pay — for your services. There may be plenty of publications clamoring for freelance writing work, but if it pays peanuts, you’d better be an elephant to survive on it. Plenty of markets are hungry for freelance writing, photography, or graphic design work, but if they don’t pay well or pay enough for you to support yourself, they may not be worth pursuing. My second niche choice was another topic which I felt my knowledge equal to: gardening. I had worked as a marketing manager for a garden center for three years, earned my master gardener certificate, and gardened my whole life. But this, too, proved a futile niche to pursue as most articles paid below the industry standard for comparable work. And the expectation was that the writer would not only produce expert articles for less than the industry standard wage but also take gorgeous photos. It didn’t make sense economically for me to continue in this niche.
Fit with Interests: Note that this requirement isn’t that you be passionately, madly in love with the topic of the niche. I love horses and have had a lifelong passion for equestrian sports; that’s not enough to make a living freelancing for this industry. You don’t have to be passionate about a topic to make it a great niche for your freelancing career; just be curious enough about it and fluent enough in the major concepts to make it worthwhile. I finally found my niche — technology — after realizing that I had been writing about technology on and off for over a decade and liked it. I enjoyed the challenge of explaining the nuances of various technology topics, and I especially liked explaining to business owners how technology could help them solve problems. My tech articles were the most challenging for me to write but engaged my creativity the most. And they paid the best.

If you don’t yet have a niche as a freelancer, here are my steps to help you discover your special niche that meets all three criteria.

Questions to Help You Find Your Micro Niche

Take an hour or two and sit with pen and paper, pondering these questions. Write your answers out by hand. I’m a big proponent of writing longhand to engage the creative left-brain in an exercise. This is the time to sit and sketch, to journal and write, and to follow creative hunches.

You can focus on an industry or service to discover your niche. In other words, you can choose to niche to one market (technology, manufacturing, HVAC contractors, dentists, restaurants) or with one type of service (blogging, website writing, etc.) Or, you can do both and become the blogger of choice for the HVAC contractors of this world. It’s up to you how you want to specialize; just keep in mind my three criteria above: market size, market demand, and skillset/interest level. All three must meet, like three overlapping circles, to find the sweet spot in the middle that is your niche.

Find Your Niche: Questions

What work have you done in the past that could be a niche for you? Brainstorm and list as many potential industries or types of writing as you can think of. This is the time to think big and write down all industries and work you’ve done that could be a potential niche.
What are your hobbies and areas of interest? Again, think big. And don’t be afraid to be weird. If you love cooking, astronomy, and clog dancing, list them.
Now think about your past clients if you have any. Which work did you enjoy the most? Why?
What was it about the work that made you happy? Write down the characteristics of the client, project, or work that made you happy.
Which of your past work paid the best? The worst? In what industries? How did you find that work?

Now, take a pen, and circle the top 3 answers in each category: the industries you’ve done work in, the ones you liked the most, the hobbies you enjoy the most, the type of writing or other freelance work you love to do.

Study your top three responses in each category: industries, hobbies, and types of work. Once you have your top three, it’s time to look at the following:

Go to several places where you typically find freelance work (Upwork, Indeed.com, FlexJobs, other) and type in: [industry or hobby] [type of work]. Example: technology writer, marketing writer, fitness writer. Think of alternate words for the industries as well that are even more specific. For example, instead of technology writer, consider additional search terms such as ERP writer, data and analytics marketer, SaaS writer.
Now search on the terms you’ve selected.
How many jobs are listed?
What are the pay rates?
Repeat this exercise with several combinations and keep track of your research in whatever way you manage the best (spreadsheet, page in a notebook, etc.).

Conduct this research for two to four weeks. Then, look at the results. If there are few ads for the niche, then it may not be a good one to pursue. Conversely, you may see trends around a particular niche that is in high demand. You can also analyze pay rates in this fashion if they are posted with the job.

Find Your Micro Niche: Ultimately, It’s Up to You

There are many ways to find a niche and develop it into a micro niche.

Some of you reading this may be turned off by my approach and prefer a less scientific or structured way to explore niches. You may wish to try one for a few months and see what happens. My only concern with this approach is time. How much time do you have to invest in testing niches by trial and error? If you are freelancing on the side, or you have a partner who supports your freelance career (and provides a steady paycheck and health insurance coverage), then there is less risk to pursuing a trial-and-error approach. Many freelancers, however, need a faster way to identify a profitable niche.

I can confidently say that the best thing I ever did was find and pursue my niche, using the three criteria, to build my freelance career and content marketing agency. Not only are my current clients happy with my work and that of my agency, but they have referred others to us. And, because we are working in one niche, word has spread that “these are the people to talk to when you need someone to manage your content calendar and deliverables if you are a tech company.” It is a strategy that has worked extremely well for us and ensured we remain a healthy, viable company at the 15-year mark, a landmark that less than 25% of all startups reach.

In the past, I used trial and error to explore niches. And, each time, I’ve chosen a niche that was fun for me to work in but paid poorly or lacked enough opportunities to generate a livable income. It was only after I analyzed my previous work, my talents, my interests, and the market for my work that I was able to select and promote to a specific niche with satisfying results.

Tip #4: Find and market to your niche. Don’t be a jack of all trades. Be highly specific to build a lucrative business.