By: Ben Williams
For a long time, freelancing within the UK had a poor reputation. Most saw it as an exploitative work arrangement that helped employers avoid the need to provide costly benefits to workers. We look at ways freelancers can increase their income in 2023.
However, in recent years, and particularly during and after the COVID-19 pandemic, freelancing has seen a bit of a turnaround here. As a result, at last count, over 2 million freelancers were working in the UK, with at least 1.77 million of those depending on freelance work as their main source of income.
In light of that, it’s clear that freelancing is a viable choice for a wide swath of the population. However, that doesn’t mean starting a freelancing career is easy. There are a variety of pitfalls that can cause a freelancer to run into trouble, both financially and otherwise. Among those, a lack of steady work is by far the most common. However, there’s a reliable way to avoid that problem. It’s to choose the perfect service niche that involves enough specialisation to guarantee reliable demand. To help would-be freelancers to do that, here are three niche freelance services that can guarantee steady income in 2023.
- Digital Advertising Campaign Management
Although it may seem that the marketing industry is overflowing with agencies, all vying for scarce work, the reality is that some marketing specialties still work well as freelance niche service offerings. One of them is digital advertising campaign management. The reason for this is simple. It’s that marketing agencies generally use bundling tactics to encourage clients to spend more. That puts the services of many of those agencies out of the reach of the average small business. They simply don’t need the variety of services an agency wants to sell. That opens up an excellent opportunity for enterprising freelancers. By offering their services as advertising campaign managers to small businesses, it’s possible to generate plenty of steady work. It’s a service that every small business needs yet lacks the in-house skills to handle. And learning how to do it isn’t hard. According to Andy Hathaway from Clarity PPC, a Google Ads campaign management specialist, “Digital ad campaign management requires mastering the tools provided by ad giants such as Google, Facebook, and others. But those platforms do a great job of making their tools accessible, intuitive, and easy to learn. So, a freelancer can pick up the skills they need with ease.”
- Local Marketing Specialist
Another amazing marketing niche that can provide fertile ground for a freelancer is to offer services as a local marketing specialist. This is another service that plenty of small businesses can’t access from major agencies, but that’s always in great demand. Essentially, it’s a must for every business with a physical presence, since the majority of people now locate local businesses via the Internet. That means they’re all in competition with one another for the attention of a small slice of the local population.
The key to winning that competition is to appear as close to the top of local search results pages, as well as in business directories and other local resources. And again, it’s another specialty that requires specialised skills that aren’t terribly hard to acquire. For example, learning how to post to Google and its localised pages isn’t difficult. Nor is it hard to master the tactics involved in optimising business websites for local SEO. Armed with the right skills, a freelancer should have no trouble finding steady work among London’s small local businesses or even from those elsewhere in the UK.
- Data Analytics Services
The third and most future-proofed niche freelance service that one might offer in 2023 is data analytics services. As most businesses now know that data is the new key to beating the competition in crowded markets, there’s more work for data analysts than there are people with the requisite skills. This means a freelancer can choose almost any specialty within the data analytics trade and use it to start a thriving freelance career.
For example, one could launch a boutique data firm that offers customer retention analysis services to businesses that need them. Or, one could specialise in offering inventory management analytics services to help businesses lower costs and avoid stockouts. The possible specialties for a freelancer are endless. Plus, any of them can offer a stable income for a freelancer as they continue adding to their data analysis skills. That makes data analytics services one of the rare freelance roles with a low barrier to entry and almost limitless opportunities for growth and advancement.
