Let’s take Jane as an example. She loves to draw portraits, and she can design awesome websites as well. She wants to start freelancing in college so that she can have a little extra money on the side, plus close friends have wanted her to draw portraits for them. So she starts telling people she knows that she now freelances and she does portraits and websites. Over time, she discovers that more and more people are wanting her drawing skills more than her website skills, and that promoting her website skills isn’t worth her time anymore. Thus, she starts to focus on doing only portraits for those that commission her for them.
When you start off as a student freelancer, it is ok to offer all the services you know you are good at. However, a word of caution: you should choose only those services that you are REALLY good at. Then start promoting those services. The market will help you determine which service(s) you should focus your energy in. For instance with Jane, most people wanted her drawing skills, thus it was more beneficial for her to drop the website service all together, to focus all of her attention and energy to the service that was bringing in the most business.
This is how companies conduct business as well. If they decide to add a new service to their offering, they take the time to see how well it is working for them. Then if they feel that they are being stretched too far or find that their budgets would be used more wisely by taking them from the least-performing services and putting them toward the most-performing businesses, they stop offering that service.
For students that don’t know what the market wants or aren’t sure how well the market will respond to your unique services, then testing the waters as Jane did is the best thing to do. We can push this even further. For instance, let’s say Jane notices that she is getting much more portrait commissions of animals than of families. It is in her best interest—at this stage and after testing the waters—to promote herself as doing portraits of animals.
Testing the waters and working your way from a broad market focus to a niche focus, as Jane did above, is a great way for student freelancers to find what they want to do and find the market for it as well. When the adequate amount of time is taken to narrow down a market focus, then it leads to not only more business, but becoming an expert in the niche you narrowed down to.
It should be said, however, that starting off doing a niche service will not lead fruitful and worth the effort. You must start of broad enough to be able to compare different offerings with each other to know which service is the best to pursue. So if you are just starting out, or having a hard time figuring out what service you should offer, go ahead and start out very broad and see where the market takes you.