If you’re thinking of getting into freelance writing, you’ve probably heard quite a few people say that you need a freelance writing niche to get started. There are some freelance writers who say you don’t need a niche to be profitable – and they’re not wrong – but in order to be the most profitable, you need to figure out what subject (or 2-3 subjects) you want to specialize in.
What Is a Niche?
The term “niche” in freelance writing is used to describe your area, or areas, of expertise.
Some freelance writers specialize in a broad category and then specialize further in a few sub-niches. For example, if your broad niche is entertainment, you could further specialize yourself by choosing to only write about movies, or even a specific genre of movies.
Or you could have a few main niches that are somehow related to one another, and one or two sub-niches under each. This helps you specialize without limiting yourself to only writing about one thing. Using the example from above, you could brand yourself as an entertainment writer, but cover anything entertainment-related that you wanted to: movies, books, television, plays, etc.
Now that you have a general idea of what a niche is, let’s talk about how you’d go about choosing your freelance writing niche.
How Do You Choose Your Niche?
Choosing your niche does not have to be as scary as it seems. If you’re stressing out about picking the perfect niche, you will never start writing. It’s important to choose 3-5 niches that might interest you, and just start pitching!
Your niche will constantly change over the course of your freelance writing career. The longer you are a freelance writer, the more you’ll learn about the different niches and writing jobs that are out there, and you’ll end up changing your mind. Like, a million times.
It’s just like college. In high school, you start thinking about what you want to major in once you get to college, and you change your mind frequently. And drastically. Then, once you finally decide and you get to college, you decide that major isn’t for you. And you change your mind once again.
Let’s look at a few ways you can start thinking about your freelance writing niche.
Think About Your Hobbies – What Do You Want to Blog About?
Think about what you like to do in your free time.
Do you like to bake after a long day of work at the office? Or maybe you enjoy spending time with and learning about your pet? Or playing video games? Do you like to spend all your free time binging movies and TV shows on Netflix? Any hobby that comes to mind, no matter how small, write it down and consider it as a freelance writing niche.
When narrowing down what you want to write about, I think that it helps to consider what you would most want to write a blog about. Having your own blog is one of the best ways to have published pieces to show clients. If you love your pet, but you can’t imagine writing a blog about pet-related topics, that’s probably not the niche you want to go with.
Consider Your Experience
If you have any professional or educational experience with something, you can use this as evidence to clients that you know what you’re talking about. Starting as a new freelance writer, you’ll still have to put in the effort to build up your portfolio before you start landing clients, but having that experience will make it a bit easier.
If you hate your job, and don’t want to write about anything related to the field you work in, don’t worry about it. Also don’t worry about it if you never graduated high school or college. You don’t need professional or educational experience to become an expert in a niche.
You just need dedication to learning about that niche and to practicing your writing craft. You’ll also need the resilience to stick with freelance writing after multiple rejections and ghosting experiences. But professional and education experience? You don’t need either one.
Browse Job Boards
If you have no idea what you would possibly choose as a freelance writing niche, try browsing job boards like ProBlogger or All Freelance Writing.
In browsing these job boards, I’ve seen so many unique niches that I never would have even considered in my brainstorming sessions. Look at this screenshot from ProBlogger. There is someone hiring for the following:
- Skateboarding/Surfing
- Dog & Pet Writers
- Blogging About Blogging
- Home Decor, DIY, & Interior Design
- Romance Writers & Christian Autobiography
- Men’s Health
Do You Have to Choose a Niche to Be Profitable?
You don’t have to choose a freelance writing niche in order to get jobs and make money; you can certainly label yourself as a generalist freelance writer and still get plenty of jobs. Though you can make more money by marketing yourself as a specific type of writer.
Think about it. If you’re a business that sells dog products or a veterinary clinic wanting to start blog, and you’re looking to hire a freelance writer, here are your options:
- A writer whose portfolio shows articles about dogs, baking, home improvement, and entertainment
- A writer whose portfolio shows only articles about dogs and various other animal/pet-related things
You’re probably going to go with the second writer, even if they charge higher rates (and you can charge higher rates when you’re specialized), because they look like the authority figure you want writing your blog posts.
That’s not to say that someone would never hire the first writer or that the first writer wouldn’t do a good job. It’s just that from a business perspective, people want to make sure that if they’re outsourcing work, they’re choosing someone who is an expert in their field.
Also, you can’t think about specializing your niche as losing out on jobs because you’re limiting yourself to only one or two niches; instead, you market yourself as an expert and make yourself a better candidate for the jobs you do apply to. (Though as an expert in your niche, a lot of your jobs will come from cold pitching and networking in other areas than they will from job boards. But that’s a separate article entirely.)
Just Start Somewhere
Freelance writing is one giant process of trial and error, and you’ll learn so much over the course of your journey. My initial niche selections were gaming, mental health, and writing. Now, I’m leaning more towards gaming, entertainment, and gaming/mobile tech.
You just have to start somewhere, and go from there. So get out a pencil and a piece of paper and start brainstorming possible niche categories you want to write about.