Niching Down (In the Travel World)

We've all heard that niching down is essential if you want to step into your own world of work. But, it can definitely be intimidating. In this post I'll break down why niches are important and how I discovered mine so you can too.

Why are niches important?

Have you ever heard of a professional athlete that specializes in two sports? Or how about a doctor that's skilled at cardiology just as much as dietary health? Imagine reading a book about 100 different topics. Crazy, right? Now imagine reading a book about three topics, or even one. That sounds much more manageable.

Unfortunately we can't all be experts at everything. Of course there are plenty of people who are skilled in a variety of ways, but, they aren't professionals at everything they do! Focusing on everything equates to focusing on nothing and speaking from personal experience, it's one of the easiest ways to lose motivation.

Most of the time we don't need the haystack, we're just looking for the needle. That's the mentality I used when thinking about niches.

Do niches work?

Niches allow you to flex a muscle in one particular area so you can compound your knowledge base and become an expert on one topic.

Once you become recognized as an expert in one topic you can build trust and only do business with your ideal client.

Let’s look at the facts

Take for example this Clayton Dorge project. In December 2020 Clayton created a Twitter account inspired by Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein's book, A Pattern Language. Once a day he tweeted a pattern or chapter from the book - and nothing else. He quickly saw it climb from 500 followers to 4,000 and as of now, over 6,200 followers. Another key to his success was consistency, but that's a topic for a different post.

You don't have to know everything about your niche before you start working in it. That's the beauty of freelance work! When you're getting started, you can find entry level work to do or even create spec, or example work that can help you show prospective clients your skills and most importantly what you can do for them.

How I Discovered my Niche:

• I took a good hard look at what I do everyday and who I do it for.

• I made mental notes of how I was feeling and what work I was doing when I found myself having fun. 

• When I was feeling great working on something I noticed who I was doing it for.

• I then got super specific about a project or work that made me the most happy and as they say, didn't feel like work.

• I also considered my skill set. Was I any good at this project? If not, was there clearly room for me to grow?

  For me, that work was writing a weekly newsletter for a professional traveler. These questions helped me decide on my medium (writing travel content) and my mode of doing the actual work (writing a newsletter). Being able to put together a story about any place in the world with a strict paragraph character limit is my favorite weekly challenge. And now I'm on the road to transfer what I've learned to other clients while racking up as much knowledge on newsletters as I can.

  I will say, it helps if you are at least a bit skilled at what you aspire to make your niche. For me, my newsletter dreams were a little more in reach because of my writing experience. But, that doesn't mean I know everything about newsletter writing or, but I'm on my way!

  What You Can Do Now:

  Everything. Don't stop until you find work that makes you smile.