You can do anything. But you can’t do everything!

What?

What do you mean, I can’t do everything?

Of course I can do everything!

Didn’t anybody explain to you that I’m Wonder Woman?!

*FacePalm*

I’ve enjoyed a varied and interesting career that started with hospitality; diverted to retail management; segued into textile design, product development and textile manufacturing; veered into academia and teaching; transitioned into freelance journalism and content strategy; and then morphed into email marketing, copywriting, content marketing, search engine optimization and ghostwriting.

Up until now, all my past work experience and life experience have empowered me to succeed as a generalist freelance writer. I’ve written articles about a vast diversity of topics ranging from investing to ed tech to proptech to ecommerce to supply chain logistics to human resources management.

However, lately I’ve noticed that it’s getting increasingly challenging to keep on top of the tech and the trends in each of the verticals I’ve been writing about. Each of these niches now requires an increasingly more specialized focus.

And I came to a startling realization: I’m trying to do too much.

The problem is, I’m interested in everything.

I place a high value on education, knowledge and learning.

And I want to learn everything; know everything; understand everything.

Freelance writing has massively helped me with this, because the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.

So, in the last 15+ years I’ve been earning a living as a content creator, I’ve been able to learn a substantial amount about all of the industries my digital marketing agency clients and ghostwriting clients do business in. Thanks to this experience, I’m knowledgeable about trends in investing, personal finance, fintech, cybersecurity, data science, healthcare, SaaS, ed tech, education, proptech, insurtech, HR, and the list goes on — because I’m proactive about understanding what my clients and clients’ clients in these industries are doing. Then I take that knowledge and apply it by educating interested prospects about how my clients’ offerings will enhance their lives.

But, looking into my crystal ball (just kidding. I’m not into soothsaying at all — only trend forecasting) I can see that the generalist freelance writer will soon go the way of the dodo bird. The only content creators who’ll succeed are those who are experts at what they’re creating content about. They’ll need to have personal experience and truly be thought leaders in their respective niches.

So, going forward, if I’m going to keep working as a content creator, I need to figure out just one thing to specialize in — because it is getting fairly impossible to understand ALL the fintech, and ALL the ed tech, and ALL the proptech, and ALL the latest Google algorithm updates, and ALL the social media marketing trends, and and and and and and….

It’s just endless.

So, it’s time for me to pivot.

But where to focus?

I’m still in the process of thinking this over.

Thinking this through to its logical conclusion, I realize that, if I want to keep working as a writer for clients in any tech vertical, I will need to stop ghostwriting long enough to create a specialized portfolio of writing samples that I put my own name on.

Because, on paper, I don’t look like a tech writer.

I have a degree in textile design.

And, I have about a decade’s worth of experience working in the textile industry.

And, even when I was working in education, I got the job because of my textile industry experience. I taught college courses on textile design, trend forecasting and apparel marketing to fashion design majors at design school.

And then I transitioned into freelance writing by spending 5+ years writing about crochet (and, later, knitting.)

It was only from there that I transitioned into writing about tech and other topics.

So it doesn’t appear to matter that I’ve built a massive knowledge base about technology by accepting writing assignments for clients in the tech sector; and it also doesn’t matter that I’ve written hundreds of tech articles, because those all have my clients’ by-lines on them rather than mine. (Because I ghostwrite.)

And I fiercely protect my ghostwriting clients’ privacy, so I also can’t use them as references when seeking new clients.

Which means that I can’t prove I did any of that.

So it seems that the way forward is to stop pursuing generalist work, pick a niche, build my real-world experience to become an expert in it and make it my area of specialization.

But I keep getting overwhelmed trying to pick a niche, because there are so many interesting things to learn about on this amazing planet.

So I’m at a crossroads. All the possible paths ahead look intriguing and enticing. Which one to choose?

I don’t yet have the answer, but my long-term plan is to stop trying to do everything, and to make it my top priority to pick a niche and become the absolute best at it.

Thanks so much for checking out my blog today! I appreciate your interest.

XOXOXOXO,


Amy