I’ve been looking into Marketing lately. And by lately I mean for the last year, and by “looking into” I mean “desperately trying to figure out.”

Every single bit of marketing advice I found started with one thing: choose your niche.

And that’s where I’d get stuck, every single time. So no matter how clever they were about leveraging your online presence or developing a marketing strategy, I never got that far, because I’d be over there pondering the niche issue.

Cue the recession.

Now, a lot of marketing and small business coaches will tell you there is no problem with the economy, that small businesses and solo professionals all over the place are doin’ it for themselves just fine. To those people, I say, “Bite me.”

When your biggest client is in the financial industry, there is an economy, you cannot stick your head in the sand and deny the recession, and those people make you want to hit things. Preferably them.

So there was more panic and more soul-searching and even a brief flirtation with renaming myself, but in the end it was all just me being a big avoidy-pants about choosing a niche. I was Wembling — waffling, panicking, flailing and wailing, all to keep from having to make this one decision.

It turns out, I was doing it wrong.

The thing is, from all the vague hand-wavey instructions I’d seen about choosing your niche, it was Really Important to be marketing just in one narrow market, because that gets you the best results. And I was interpreting that to mean I had to pick one industry, and start marketing just to them, which is what most marketing gurus either implied or explicitly stated. Except that wasn’t what I wanted, didn’t feel genuine, and thus I encountered this giant block of resistance. To the point where I was considering a whole host of other, stupider options, just to avoid making this one decision.

So I sat myself down, and opened up the Destuckification Sampler I’d downloaded. And calmed myself the heck down, so instead of imitating Wembley Fraggle, I had more of a Mokey thing going on.

Then I paid Naomi from Ittybiz a ridiculously paltry sum to join her new program, and she kindly carved out some time for me that wasn’t on the phone, and wasn’t email — she actually got onto Google Chat with me, which is my brain-fueling format of text and waiting and getting to go back later and see what the other person said. Except with much more immediacy than email.

And in less than an hour, I had a niche. And you know what? It was exactly what I’d been doing all along — a little of this, a little of that, and a whole lot of helping out small businesses who didn’t know where to look for help.

Because here’s the thing — Naomi is smart. She knew that a niche could be “design for monster truck rally promoters,” but that it could also be “one-stop shopping design for small businesses on a budget.” Which I did not know. But now the latter one is my niche.

Even as I type this, cogs are whirling and things are in motion to solidify my niche, including a convenient package of services for a single up-front price. Because I forget that the hardest part about starting a business is as much bracing yourself for scary sticker shock as it is finding a designer whose work you like. And apparently, unbeknownst to me, there’s a million web designers but not very many of us left who are comfortable doing print, too. And a brand new small business needs more than just a website, which of course I knew, because I work with small businesses all the time.

And soon, more of them will know that I know it, and hopefully pay me to do it.