Do you struggle with finding clients and making the income you want as a Virtual Assistant? The answer may be narrowing your market.
In the medical world, specialists make more money than general practitioners. The same holds true for the virtual assistant industry. It is true that the riches are in the niches!
So what exactly is a niche? A niche is simply your area of expertise – your specific specialty supported and strengthened by your education and experience.
Having a niche not only defines you as the known skilled professional in your field it also helps provide a path to create an effective, well designed marketing plan targeted to a narrow segment that is comprised of your ideal clients.
It can be frightening and feel limiting to suggest that you narrow your market, especially if you are struggling already. But a narrow market can actually bring in more clients who will pay more for your services. Here are a few reasons:
- Specializing enables you to market your services more effectively and showcase your skills and qualities in a more confident and professional manner.
- It is easier to be very clear about who you help and what you do for them. When you say you can help anyone it is hard for potential clients to identify with you.
- When you have a specialty, you can learn the language and problems that are unique to your market. When potential clients hear you speaking their language they are more confident that you can help them.
- Specializing makes it possible to focus your own learning and training so you can become a real expert in your field.
- When you can be very specific about your ideal client it makes it much easier for your network to know who to refer to you.
- Clients are more willing to pay a higher rate for an assistant who has special skills and understanding of their industry.
So how do you find the right niche for you? My own search for a niche led me to work with authors as a key member of their team. You can read my previous post about The Author’s Dream Team. Here are some things to consider and how I chose working with authors as my own niche:
- What skills do you already have and what kind of work do you enjoy doing most? For me, I really enjoyed coordinating projects. I was good at problem solving and managing a lot of details.
- What are your passions? Think not only of the kinds of work you enjoy doing but what industries are interesting to you. For me my passion was reading. I love books and have always thought that authors were kind of like rock stars. So the idea of working with authors was very exciting to me.
- Is there a demand for services within the industry? The publishing world is changing and more authors are choosing to self-publish. That means that there are a lot of people looking for help to manage all the details that are required to bring their book to the world.
- Is there a training program available to learn more about the specific skills needed to serve your chosen market? I had a lot of the basic admin skills needed but I wasn’t as knowledgeable about the publishing industry as I needed to be. I found the Professional Virtual Author Assistant training program which gave me the foundation I needed.
So take a leap of faith and declare a niche for yourself and focus your marketing to those people to see your profits grow!
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