Comments on: Exploiting A Freelance Niche

By: Silver Firefly

Silver Firefly — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:47:30 +0000

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. ;-)

By: Matt

Matt — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 23:30:09 +0000

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

By: Japh

Japh — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:45:23 +0000

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!

By: John

John — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 21:04:50 +0000

Very interesting Dave thankyou for the info! :)

By: Dave Sherohman

Dave Sherohman — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:53:48 +0000

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.)

By: Duncan

Duncan — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:37:22 +0000

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!

By: Curvball

Curvball — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 15:03:21 +0000

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…