I wrote a few days ago about my first freelance gig. It was a parish- church with school, on a fairly low budget. They weren’t looking for anything spectacular, which was great because I was just learning the ropes. So I set out to find my first niche.

A niche market is a focused targetable portion (subset) of a market.

I figured if I could get really good at designing one type of site, I could start charging more and build my portfolio. The logical place to start was other parishes. I knew people at other places and asked around. Apparently they already had sites, most of which were donated by parishoners. So it was back to the drawing board.

This was around 2002-2003, around the time Bam Margera started making a splash in the skating and home video world. And, as some of you may remember, there were lots of copy cats who wanted to post videos online in a pre-youtube world. Luckily, I was in high school and knew these groups. I think I found my niche.

I started asking around- small bands, skate groups, snowboard groups etc. I came up with a pretty fair price and justified it by saying that since there was some number greater than 3 of them, it was cheap if they all pitched in. I got some experience, they got a cheap website worthy of posting pics and videos to. 

This worked out for a couple reasons: I was cheap work targeting low budget groups, and I knew these guys personally, but we weren’t close friends. So I was able to sell them pretty easily on a website. Of course, when MySpace got big, I was out of a job and had to adapt, but that’s another story for another time. The lesson here is that by targeting a specific market, I was able get a core group of clients and efficiently design a site I knew worked for them because I had experience making similar sites. Not to mention, all these guys hung out, so I was able to get referrals pretty easily.

Tags: beginning, niche, referrals, tips | Posted in Advice, Stories |