You Don’t Pick Niches — You Discover Them
As I continue along this meandering odyssey of posts about freelancing, I’ve arrived at the point where I should talk about marketing. After all, I just talked about sales, and then about how not to market.
But the trouble is that, until you pick some kind of niche, your marketing is essentially just platitudinous bullshit.
Marketing is really about making consumers aware of how your offering could (or couldn’t) help them. What, then, does marketing generalist labor look like?
- I’m passionate and I believe in quality!
- I have good communication skills and I believe in under-promising and over-delivering.
- My credit score is 800!
It quickly descends into the farcical, particularly since there is only one true, accurate piece of generalist marketing: “I’m cheaper than the other people you’re talking to.”
Don’t believe me? Consider the only two generalist arguments about hourly rates:
- I’m the cheapest!
- Sure, the other dude is cheaper, but I’m higher quality, which means you’ll actually pay less in the long run, which — plot twist! — actually makes me the cheapest.
So before we can talk about marketing, we need something worth marketing. We need to get you a niche.