Leveraging A Skill You Already Have Into An Online Business
I do quite a bit of consulting to college students who are looking to take their business idea to the next level. Most of the time, a person will come to me with an idea for a business that is based either on some perceived market need or based on some pre-existing skill set.
One of my college student clients had a lot of experience editing papers for ESL students in the real world (on campus) but needed help transitioning her skill into an online business. She had many questions about the scope and competition levels that she would face online. She wasn’t sure whether to focus exclusively on ESL proofreading/editing (her specialization) or to branch out and take on a wider and more competitive niche (I suggested the latter).
This is a very common scenario when starting an online business. It is important to know your market, and to know your competition. As a general rule, I always recommend to “widen” the scope of your business without diluting it. By this, I mean that you should look at your skillset and consider the various markets that could be fed by that skillset. Don’t expand your business to cover completely unrelated markets (this is diluting). But also don’t narrow your target market so much that you under utilize your skillset.
In the case of this client, I suggested that she go online and find 3-4 other individuals who might compliment her skillset and to focus as broadly as possible so as to cast a net that could capture clients from a wide market.
The fact is that given the nature of a website, you can always do more targeted marketing on a page by page basis. So if your site is about proofreading/editing, then you can create sub-pages that are more specialized: business proofreading, essay proofreading, legal proofreading, esl proofreading, and so on.
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