Today we’re going to be talking about the two keys to choosing the perfect freelancing niche.

This is the first part in a little series. I’m going to be talking about each essential stage of freelancing. So this post shares some tips about that first stage: Choosing your freelancing niche. The next post will share some tips about the second stage: Building your skills. 

The two keys are internal work and external work. 

Let’s dive right in. If you prefer to watch the video, scroll down.

I’m going to talk about the latter. So we’re going to talk about this a little bit out of order because aspiring freelancers tend to do this out of order. 

So external work means research, getting on the Internet and searching up how to work from home, work-from-home jobs, freelancing, anything like that. 

The reason why that should be your step two and not your step one is because if you do that first, you’re gonna fall into one or two pits, and those two pits are information overload and shiny-object syndrome. 

Now, with information overload you Google something like “how to work from home,” and you’re inundated by the tens of thousands of hits you get on Google, tons of free resources, tons of scams, tons of work-from-home opportunities. 

And you suddenly realize, “You know what, I don’t have the mental energy to spend on this. This seems more complicated than I thought it would be. And you know what, I don’t have time, so forget it.” 

That’s information overload. 

Shiny-object syndrome is when you suddenly start realizing, “Hey, everything sounds pretty good. How am I supposed to choose one? Should I be a bookkeeper, should I be a freelance writer? How about a proofreader? Maybe a virtual assistant. Hey, maybe I should sell things on eBay or run an Amazon FBA business.” 

And then you have shiny-object syndrome and that causes something that I call progress paralysis, where you don’t move forward because you feel all of these good opportunities, and selecting one means losing the others and you don’t wanna make that decision yet. 

So that’s the problem with doing the external work first. That’s the thing you don’t want to do until you do the first key. 

The first key is your internal work. 

It’s a deep dive into you as a person, your personality, your desires, your goals, because that’s going to help you determine what niche you should enter as a freelancer. 

So you need to dive deep into that and start to consider, “What are my goals? What do I want my life to look like? Why do I wanna work from home? What is it that I want that flexibility for? What is it that I want that extra time for, that freedom? How much money do I need to make? How much money do I want to make? You know, how many hours do I wanna work? What kind of work do I wanna do? Do I have the skillset for that kind of work or would I need to go and obtain that skillset?”

All of these internal work questions that are then going to generate a kind of list of criteria that need to be met for you to be happy with the freelancing niche that you’re going to select. 

So for instance, if you know that you want to make something like $80,000 a year working from home, I would tell you right off the bat that court transcript proofreading is not the niche for you. 

You’ll never make that amount of money even if you do it full time. That niche has an inherent income cap to it that makes it impossible to reach that kind of number. 

So that would immediately eliminate a shiny object for you. 

So if you have that list of criteria that you have generated because you did internal work, then and only then are you ready to move on to the external work which is researching. 

You research because you want to make sure that the niche is viable, that it’s not saturated with freelancers already, that it’s a good niche to get into, and one that is not a scam. You have to make sure that you don’t fall into something like that. 

I know that happened to me when I first started working from home. The first thing I did was blow $250 on a work-from-home scam…that was a nightmare. 

That almost stopped my work-from-home journey in its tracks. 

And that was because I did the external work first instead of the internal work. 

So make sure to do it in the right order. One, do the inner work and then get on the Internet because then you’ll have a list of criteria that you can use to easily evaluate the opportunities that are popping up on the Internet. 

So those are my tips for you on choosing the perfect niche. 

Let me know in the comments if you have any questions, if you’ve narrowed it down to just those final two or final three, or if you’ve chosen your niche and you’re already in a different stage of freelancing.