[00:00:00] If you're a photographer, videographer, or creative, or really any freelancer trying to make money, you need to find a niche. Now I'm not talking to the artists out there who just want to produce beautiful work and don't care about the money. I teach the creative business. And in order to make money from your creative efforts, you need to have a niche.
Today, we're learning how to pick a niche that's profitable. So you can make money in your creative business, niching down and lets you become the authority in that area. And it lets you target the right clients with more money to spend. Let's get into it. Welcome to the creative business launch podcast, where we talk about how to grow your creative business and scale it to six figures, whether you're a photographer, filmmaker, or designer, you'll find something of value here.
This episode will teach you why a niche is important, how a niche will make you more money, how to find a niche in a profitable area. And finally, How this applies into your own business throughout this episode, I'll be referencing principles from this one book called a hundred million dollar offers by Alex Ramosi.
I know most of [00:01:00] you have read it, but if not, definitely pick it up. Okay. So why is a niche important? A few reasons here. One, a niche will make you more trustworthy in a client's eyes. Two, you can charge more if you niche down. Three, it lets you differentiate yourself in a crowded field. Alright, so a niche will make you more trustworthy because you'll become the authority figure in a certain area.
My niche is food and beverage product photography. When a client goes to my website, that's all they see. They can easily visualize their beverage products in my photos. They'll automatically know what they're going to get when they choose to work with me. This is great for me because my portfolio speaks for itself.
I don't have to convince clients that have the ability to take photos of their products. My nichedown portfolio does the convincing for me. When I was starting out, my portfolio had all sorts of different photography. I had headshots, model shots, outdoor, landscape photos, product photos, action photos.
If I reached out to a potential client, they wouldn't be able to really see what I [00:02:00] could offer their company. It looks like I'm spread thin and not really an expert in any single field. I chose to niche down so that in a client's eyes, I became an expert in a certain field. If all my clients are in the food and beverage space, I must be offering something that makes my That makes me better for this industry than other people.
The trust barrier has been lowered significantly because I'm niched down and they trust me immediately. Number two here. I can charge more because I'm niched down. I'm a specialist. I only work with food and beverage clients. If you're a specialist, people will expect you to charge more. Here's a simple example.
If you want a really, really good cocktail, are you going to go to your neighborhood sports bar where they offer all types of food, drinks, and beers? Or are you going to want to go that fancy cocktail bar that has a menu of 10 cocktails? Obviously, the cocktail bar sounds better here because they're specialized.
They're niched down and you better bet that they're going to drain your wallet with their prices too. You can get a 6 at that sports bar, [00:03:00] but if you want fancy old fashioned at that cocktail bar, you're going to be paying 20 bucks. This same principle applies to creative businesses, freelance businesses, okay?
You have to start niching down if you want to charge premium prices here. Number three, niching down lets you differentiate yourself in a crowded field. The barrier to entry in photography or filmmaking or really any freelance business is so low. Anyone with an iPhone and an internet connection can deliver great products to their clients.
But not everyone can be a food and beverage product photographer. that only does action shots. This is very niched down. And by niching down, you can separate yourself from the masses. Really quickly, big companies have photographers reaching out all the time, but how many of those people are niched down to the specific industry, to the specific style that that company is looking for, your niche will set you apart from everyone else that's reaching out there at this point.
I hope you're starting to realize how important having a niche is if you're trying to make money from your creative arts. [00:04:00] So let's cover how to actually find a niche. And actually find a profitable niche. I'll be heavily referencing the materials from section two of a hundred million dollar offers here.
If you haven't read this book, I highly recommend it. So the perfect niche has four things. There's a pain point, there's purchasing power, they're easy to target and they're growing.
Number one, pain, the more pain there is, the more you'll be able to charge for the service. If someone has a huge problem and they hear you can solve that problem, they'll imagine their life without the pain. They're going to be willing to pay you a lot for that solution. If you can figure out the pain of your prospects and walk them through how you're able to solve it, you'll be able to make a lot of money.
Number two, purchasing power. You want to be targeting people that have money. If you target people with a pain you can fix, but no money, then you're not going to make much. If you're great at headshots, you're going to be able to charge a lot more with lawyers than you could with struggling actors, right?
Number three, easy to target. How are you finding the people and companies to reach out to? Are you looking at people on LinkedIn who [00:05:00] are lawyers? Are you looking at coffee shops in your area? You need to get as specific as possible here so you can easily target those clients. Number four, find a growing industry.
A growing industry will be a huge bonus if you become the authority in that space early on. Growing markets tend to have more purchasing power, making this a powerful hack to charging more for your services. Getting all four of these is hard and you don't really need all four as long as your niche isn't in a bad Shrinking market, you'll be able to make money with it.
Just don't try targeting the newspaper industry Obviously the more of these that you cover the more profitable you will be So putting in the work early on to figuring out this niche is really really important because it's gonna pay dividends throughout Your entire career on top of this in the book, a hundred million dollar offers.
Alex Ramosi mentions three markets that actually exist.
The three main markets are health, wealth, and relationships. Almost all of your services are going to fall into. These three buckets here.
The main reason these three [00:06:00] exist is our first point here, pain. If you lack any of these three areas, you're going to be in pain. Therefore, there's always going to be room for people to come in and solve these problems. Let's look at some examples. In relationships, you can become a headshot photographer for people on dating apps.
Wealth, that's what I do. I'm a product photographer for companies. I help those companies make more money, make them wealthier. So now that we know what makes the perfect niche, let's go through some examples in different industries and build out some profitable niches.
If you're getting any value out of this so far, please drop a rating. It really helps the show grow and it's going to help another creative entrepreneur out there.
And while you're at it, hit that share button and send this to a freelancer in your life. Okay, so what is your niche going to be? I'll go through some different areas of photography here, but this applies to really any creative industry. Let's start off with headshots and lifestyle photos. There's a lot of people that do this kind of thing.
So let's differentiate ourselves using the four principles we learned. Number one, pain points. We just learned that health, wealth, and [00:07:00] relationships all have pain points. For headshots, let's go with relationships. A lot of people are lacking relationships, and they're in pain. So, we're gonna start there.
Online dating is huge, and people need photos for their profiles. And that's where you come in as a headshot and lifestyle photographer. Online dating is a growing market. So, that already checks two things off our list. Next, we're gonna make sure that our audience is It's easy to target and has purchasing power.
If you're going to be running ads, you can target by who's single on Facebook. So that makes this really easy. Now we just have to make sure that the people that we're targeting have purchasing power so that we can actually make money. Now there's a lot of single people out there at every single age, but do you think that you should be targeting college kids or people well into their adult life?
I don't know about you, but I was broke in college. Paying a photographer was at the very bottom of the things I want to do. If you want to target people, find people with purchasing power. You need to be targeting the older crowd. So let's just say 35 and older, and that's our niche. We went from a generic catch up [00:08:00] photographer.
That's going to charge a hundred bucks a session. To hedge a photographer that specializes in online dating profiles for people 35 years and older.
Now, since you're so niched down, it would not be ridiculous to charge a thousand bucks a session. These people are in pain. They've purchasing power and you can solve their pain.
So let's quickly go through one last example here. This is the niche I'm in. I'm a food and beverage product photographer. We know the three biggest pain points are health, wealth, and relationships. I solve the wealth problem. My photos will make companies money when they run ads with them. When they update their photography.
On their websites, when they build their brand through Instagram, this is going to help them make money. I target companies with purchasing power. I don't target local coffee shops or restaurants. They don't have any money. I target companies selling online that have a footprint in brick and motor stores.
These companies are easy to target because I'm able to filter companies by their size and number of employees. through lead scraping software. Finally, while food and Bev may not sound like a growing industry, there are a lot of sub niches in this industry [00:09:00] that I tend to target. There's always going to be new CPG products popping up in this space and I can target those niches.
So that niche is exploding right now. Well, there you have it. We learned why niches are important, how to pick a niche by choosing a market that has pain point purchasing power is easy to target and is growing. Now it's your turn. Do this exercise. In your current area of photography or filmmaking or whatever creative space you're in, put these principles to use and start earning money with your skills.
That's all I got. My name is Chris Piatta and I'll see you next time.
