IT Specialists: Finding Your Niche

IT specialists who find a niche have an easier time marketing and become more successful. Learn as much as you can from your current clients so you know where to find new ones so you can become an IT specialist.
Finding a niche is an important step in becoming an IT specialist. In this article, you'll learn about how to develop your niche.

A Horizontal Niche

Instead of all your ideal clients being in the same industry (a vertical niche), maybe you realize that most of your clients' main contacts are office managers. What do you do next? Take an informal survey. Ask them what their biggest IT problems are, what their biggest business problems are, and make sure that you're working towards becoming a solution to those problems

This will help you retain those clients. But also, more importantly, it's going to give you a heads up on what the big business issues are and what they see as the biggest IT issues. That's going to enable you to craft your marketing pitch to go after other clients that are just like them. Begin looking for mailing lists, organizations, magazines, and conferences where you'll find a lot of office managers.

What IT Specialists Should Know:

For marketing purposes, you need to ask the following kinds of questions about any target market:
o Who are “they”? ____________________________________________________
o What do they read? _________________________________________________
o What trade publications are out there? ___________________________________
o What e-zines? ______________________________________________________
o What newsletters do they get? ________________________________________
o What local and regional conferences might they already be attending? _________
o What trade groups have local chapters that they belong to? __________________
o Where do they hang out? ____________________________________________
o What do they talk about? ____________________________________________
o What do they worry about? ___________________________________________

To get the answers to these questions, talk to your best clients… but only if you want to be an IT specialist with more clients just like them.

Chances are you've developed personal relationships already. So take your clients out for breakfast; take them out to lunch. Tell them you want to be an IT specialist and ask them your questions so you know exactly where to look for more new clients just like your current ones.

The Bottom Line on Being an IT Specialist

To get more clients in a horizontal niche, you need to find out as much as you can about your clients jobs, where they hang out and how you can find more clients just like them. When you do, you've given yourself the distinction of being an IT specialist.

IT Consulting in Micro Small Businesses

IT consulting practices can be done by starting with microbusinesses. Gain confidence by realizing what software and hardware you need to know (and probably already do) to begin IT consulting.

Small business is a hot market for IT consulting. There are different sizes of small businesses and they all have different IT consulting needs. In this article you'll learn some items you should be familiar with in order to provide IT consulting to these businesses.

Micro Small Businesses Defined

Micro small businesses are companies that have anywhere from 1-10 computers; windows based in most cases. Usually these companies employ 1-10 people. Revenue (in U.S. dollars) will typically be anywhere from $100,000 up to about a million or so.

The big differentiator in micro small businesses from others, as far as IT consulting is concerned, is that they have no dedicated server yet. They may be running a peer to peer system and that’s the major reason they are bringing you in there.

Don't have a “crisis of confidence”. Many people, when first entering IT consulting are not sure if their skills are strong enough. But most people will find that they are at least capable of working with at least micro small businesses as a starting point.

Micro Small Business: What Hardware You Need for IT Consulting

You need to know about basic desktop PC support, notebooks, PDAs like palm based PDAs and windows cd based PDAs, printers, how to set up servers and dial up modems, DSL, cable modems a little bit about how to set up surge protection, data line protection, and entry level battery back up units.

Software Requirements for Micro Business IT Consulting

You need to be reasonably familiar with the most popular desktop and notebook operating systems out there. But mainly just the basic Microsoft Windows flavors on the desktop and the desktop’s of notebooks and a little bit on PDAs.

Micro businesses are also looking for a lot of very heavy desktop office automation applications support, basic PC support, basic notebook support, the whole Microsoft Office family, Intuits Quickbooks the accounting software is very popular, the Best Software’s ACT software for management is also really popular.

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