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One of the things you hear about constantly when it comes to freelancing or starting a business is finding (and working in) a niche. Particularly in the web design industry, after a couple of years it’s very easy to fall into the old “jack of all trades, master of none” scenario. A little bit of CSS and xHtml, a little bit of PHP, a little bit of Server admin and illustration, and there you go: you’re just another web designer just like all the others out there.
Finding A Niche
Around about two years ago I started working with WordPress, at the time it was blogging on free wordpress.com blogs as a means of building links for clients of the SEO company I was working for. I didn’t really appreciate what WordPress was, or just how much it was capable of, but I enjoyed using it as a blogging tool.
A couple of months later I found out from a couple of friends about WordPress.org and hosting your own blog – so I started experimenting with it, and several months later EggRage was born.
From there on I started working more and more with WordPress, exploring it’s amazing range of plugins, customising free themes, and eventually creating my own from scratch. From an SEO point of view I discovered that there was almost nothing that got indexed faster than a site running WordPress.
I’m now at the point where I know a lot about WordPress, I know how most of its code works and how to take advantage of its hooks – I still have lots to learn about it but I can confidently say that I’m at an ‘advanced’ level and I really enjoy working with it!
If you run a Google search for WordPress you’ll get about 272,000,000 results (that’s right, 272.. million). So without much doubt, I think I’ve found my niche.
Exploiting The Niche
One of my main target markets is small businesses, so a strong open source CMS is what they need – WordPress falls perfectly into this category. Another one of my target markets is large businesses who need really good blogs to explore social media marketing, WordPress again fits this category like a glove. Another one of my business prospects (potentially) is the premium themes market, which is.. once again.. dominated by WordPress.
So you can see how I’m really going to use it heavily for my business model.
Does that mean I’m limiting myself, and saying that I’m only ever going to work with WordPress? No. I’m interested in some other content management systems like Magento and Expression engine, but I know nothing about them. So for the time being I really need to focus on my strengths.
In the words of Seth Godin (not a direct quote) – Would you rather your customers saw you as trying to do your best? Or as being the best in the world?
Find a niche. Exploit it.
What’s yours?
PS. ‘Niche’ is pronounced ‘Neesh’ not ‘nitch’
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Wordpress is the best CMS out there, it is so flexible that it actually scares me… ha ha.
…wait til you start working with Magento, another OpenSource gem. Combine WP and Magento, and well, you could probably take over the world…
Ooooooh has someone been reading my business plan! ;-) Very well put John, im a recent convert to WP and looking to develop my skills to an advanced level in the next few months.
As I can see its one of the best CMS’s out there and VERY versatile – so as you say, perfect for the small business market.
I will be looking out for those pro themes!
According to most reputable dictionaries, both “nitch” and “neesh” are acceptable pronunciations. Which is preferred in general usage has shifted back and forth several times over the last 600 years, so I don’t think either pronunciation has a strong claim to being (more) correct.
But, anyhow, regardless of how you pronounce it, mine is back-end programming.
Which, really, is an unfortunate niche to have ended up with, because it seems that so many people do web design work with a little PHP and/or JavaScript thrown in and call themselves “web programmers”, so that’s what potential clients seem to expect me to be, but my focus is hardcore programming. I don’t do design. (If you have a design, I can do the HTML and CSS to realize it, but if you ask me to come up with the design myself, you can expect a very boring-looking site.)
Very interesting Dave thankyou for the info! :)
I discovered WP quite some time ago, but have only recently begun to explore it more thoroughly.
My niche is really back-end development too. However, because of some of the very points Dave mentioned, my target customers are designers.
Designers often have basic programming knowledge, or enough of it at least, these days. So it makes sense for me to just make myself available to assist when the coding gets heavy :)
This rescues me from the fact that I’m not a designer too. End-users really want to work with a designer when they decide they need to create (or re-create) a website.
Everyone needs a niche!
Great post. I started using twitter and I can’t seem to stop, its a great tool for communication with your blog users. Feel free to follow me
A good reminder really if you want to avoid being a Jack Of All Trades type. My niche will be WordPress and to a lesser extent, vBulletin (premium themes/styles and custom work).
Back to practising my skills. ;-)