Freelancing is crowded and competitive nowadays, even more so on platforms like Upwork and Fiverr.

So what can you do to stand out?

I think the best way is to find a good niche and stick to it.

Here’s why —

You will have less competition

It’s really simple — if you niche down, your service will be more specialized and less mainstream, so there will be less other freelancers willing/able to do the job.

Say you’re really good with Excel, so you want to start freelancing in that area. Sounds great.

Only problem is you’ll quickly find out that this is a very crowded space.

There will be lots of jobs to apply to, but your chance of getting each job will be much lower.

You can think of it this way — if there are hundreds of other freelancers with similar skills vying for the same client, why would the client choose you?

Instead, if you find a more specialized niche, you’ll have less jobs to apply to, but your success rate will be much higher.

Instead of “Excel”, how about these for example:

• Excel for healthcare data analysis
• Excel Macros and Pivot Tables
• Excel for busy founders/business owners

These areas will be way less crowded, and you’ll have a much better success rate looking for jobs like this over blanket applying to anything with “Excel” in the job description.

You will deliver a better service

The more you focus down into one area (or sub-area), the better chance you have of getting really good at it.

If you’re constantly jumping around to different types of jobs and projects, sure you’ll learn a lot, but you can’t really expect to become an expert that way.

I do think it’s good to start broad at first, try a lot of different things, and develop general competency in your area. Importantly, this will also help you identify which sub-niches you enjoy working in and which you don’t.

But if you want to become an expert (and charge accordingly), you need to focus down.

This has a lot of benefits, here’s a few:

• You’ll be more efficient in your work
• You’ll have a better idea what to do and what to expect with each new project/client
• Your clients will appreciate your expertise and leave you high reviews

As a bonus, you also won’t waste as much time applying for jobs or interviewing with clients that aren’t a good fit for your skills.

You will make more money

Why is diamond more valuable than coal? Aren’t they made of the same stuff?

Cliche analogy aside, it comes down to one thing:

Scarcity creates value.

It’s simple supply and demand:

Remember during the pandemic when masks, hand sanitizer and toilet paper were all out in stores, so people started reselling them at 10X the price?

Then right after, when supply returned to normal, so did prices (and the price gougers were stuck with truckloads of goods they could hardly give away— haha karma!).

This is all due to scarcity.

So how you do you create lasting scarcity as a freelancer?

The key is to make sure your service is highly different — something your client can’t get anywhere else.

There’s many ways to do this, but I think the easiest and fastest is to niche down and get to expert level at what you do.

This ensures that clients have very few other choices if they want a service like yours, and so if they want to get you, they need to pay up.

Another good way to think of this is — is your service something that your clients could easily DIY watching Youtube videos, but they just don’t have the time or interest?

Or is it something that they would need weeks of study and practice to even understand the basics?

It doesn’t have to be that extreme, but you get the idea — the first scenario is a commodity service, the second is premium.

Wrapping Up

So there you have it, niche down for better results.

Have you tried niching down?