It’s counterintuitive, but necessary, to pick a specific spot on the landscape of writing (insert your craft) that uniquely fits you.

I have lots of conversations with career-builders who admit they’re afraid to specialize. They think it will limit their opportunities—but the truth is, they’re misunderstanding what it means to specialize.

I’ll use the example of marketing.

You can be a general “marketer,” or you can be a marketing automation specialist who helps businesses streamline their lead capture & nurturing.

Which one sounds more likely to get hired? It’s definitely the latter, the specialist, because businesses who need what she does are going to find her right away. She’s one of a much smaller number of marketers who specialize in this. The other one, the general “marketer,” is a commodity—there are ten thousand others just like him.

But what about if our marketing automation specialist also happens to get a lead for some content strategy? If she knows how to deliver on this, can she close this client too?

Of course!

It doesn’t force you to accept only opportunities which conform exactly to your speciality. It’s your business—you’re allowed to accept to other types of work if you desire.

A specialty is merely a stronger signal in one, less-crowded area. Specializing is planting a brightly colored flag in an empty meadow. Not specializing is planting a flag amongst countless other flags. The client sees an abundance of options, and you are left competing with countless others.

Why? You become the obvious choice when you’re not one in a giant pool of options. Specialty reverses the power dynamic from being “the marketing girl who does our blog posts” or “the guy who updates our website” (viewed as a commodity) to being a trusted advisor to whom clients turn for guidance.

It puts you in control of the process, the terms, and the clients you accept. The client is no longer comparing you to other “marketers” they can find on Upwork. They’re seeing you in your own light.

Herein lies the big lesson: marginally smaller client pool, but far easier sales cycle.

It takes boldness and courage to choose a focus, to willingly say “no” to other possibilities simply because they do not match our speciality. But the truth is, when you have the strength to choose a focus, you actually make it easier for the right clients to say “yes” to you.

Within the realm of marketing, what specific focus will you take? For us at PubLoft, it was content marketing—more specifically, search-optimized blog content. (Later, we expanded into white papers, ebooks, guest posting, etc.) Mat chose this route because he felt that blogging was easy enough, and SEO wasn’t rocket science.

You can choose any focus, but you must choose it. Don’t worry—you can always change your mind, pivot to trying a different focus. But if you don’t take action now, you’ll struggle to win clients while charging more. You’ll feel like your wheels are spinning endlessly.

My TOP specialty will be:

If you need help narrowing in on what your specialty could be, try one of the following approaches:

Your job now, in everything that represents your brand, is to clearly articulate this focus and which nuances you choose to serve. You’ll do this by describing the unique qualities that your focus embodies.

For example, you might be a web designer who builds extremely secure Webflow websites (security), a conversion copywriter who specializes in colloquial terminology (relevance), or maybe a search engine marketer who launches and optimizes campaigns very quickly (speed).

Seth Godin suggests a simple yet effective exercise in

This is Marketing

Here are some axes for you to choose from, but feel free to think up your own:

You can, of course, build layers of axes. Some agencies market themselves as all of the above and more. If you can back it up, fantastic. But the XY positioning exposes that even the most authoritative proclamations of speed and performance and trendiness and whatever else are not always all they seem. First-hand reviews from those agencies’ past clients can often reveal the firm’s weak points.

The beauty of the XY positioning is that it forces you to map. Sure, you’re not the only design studio that is trendy and experimental. But you can be more experimental than the other ones, which feels edgier. Or less, which is safer. It all depends on what kinds of clients you want to work with.

The final step is something you will also need to keep doing constantly: learning, testing, and measuring your ability to deliver on your promise of positioning. Whatever you say you are, work to back it up as much as possible. If you find you can’t back up a positioning promise, back off instead, and pick something else.