• By Yuwanda Black
• Published 01/26/2012
• Writing

Social media outlets like Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook can be a gold mine for niche marketing – if you know how to do it right. I’m a freelance writer and target several niche markets. I manage to stay pretty busy, while many others struggle. Following is how I use social media to find hundreds of contacts rather easily to pitch my freelance writing services to. I’ll use one of my niches as an example, real estate. I write on mortgages, foreclosures, and other real estate topics. So, how do I find prospects in real estate by using social media. 5 Steps to Building Your Niche Marketing Database Using Social Media This is so easy you’re going to wonder why you didn’t think of it yourself. Following are the five easy steps to take. I. Find Industry Organizations: The first thing I do is find out what the major organizations are in real estate; two that I know of are the National Association of Realtors and the National Association of Mortgage Brokers. II. Visit Websites: Once I’ve found out who these organizations are, I visit their websites. III. Locate Social Media Accounts: Once you find their websites, look for links to their social media accounts (eg, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.). Why would you want to do this? Simple – a lot of their members will be followers. FYI, links to an organization’s social media profile will more than likely be on the “Home” page; sometimes it’ll be on the “About Us” or “Contact Us” pages. IV. Find Contacts: Once I find their social media profiles online (I like to access Twitter accounts), I’ll start gathering contacts from their friends, followers, etc.

V. Build

a Database: Put all of this info in a database. Put as much info as you can about each contact in a file, eg, phone number, email addresses, social media pages, website URLs, etc. Even though you may only use part of this info now, who knows what you may want to use the rest of it for later. How to Grow Your Niche Marketing Database So That Writing Jobs Will Continually Flow In The reason you should enter all the info you find on a prospect in a database is so that you can contact them over and over again. Over time, if you consistently research and add contacts to your niche marketing database, you may have a couple of thousand names in it. This is huge because what you’re actually doing is cultivating your own in-house marketing database. I started doing this for InkwellEditorial, my first freelance writing business, for years because this type of list is the best kind, by the way. As an aside, New Media Words is my second writing business, which focuses on SEO content. While it will be time-consuming to go through and gather info from social media profiles, think about it as a long-term investment in your freelance business. This database is the foundation of your freelance writing business, so never regret the time you invest in building it. As time goes on, you’ll have to add fewer and fewer contacts to get work – if you market to them consistently. But, no matter how busy you get, never stop adding fresh contacts to it. FYI, at the time of this writing, the National Association of Mortgage Brokers has over 2,500 followers on Twitter. From this, I could probably easily cull a few hundred contacts to contact to get freelance writing jobs.

See how easy it is to find niche markets and rather quickly build a niche marketing database using social media?

Yuwanda has been a freelance writer since 1993. She’s published over 50 ebooks and provides free content for reprint at YuwandaBlack.com. In How to Find Unpublished Freelance Writing Jobs, she discusses 7 methods she’s used to find freelance writing jobs that most freelancers don’t have never heard of. And, she notes, “All I did was use the steps outlined in this article on niche marketing.”

by Yuwanda Black