Yesterday you outlined a platform-building plan based on your preliminary target market. You’ve done a great deal of planning and brainstorming in these past two days. Now we’ll talk about simple market research tactics, and how to find out if that market you chose is really likely to work for you or not. We’ll also try to narrow down some of your own personal tactic choices in building your writing platform moving forward, some of which (predominantly online tactics) we’ll pursue in greater depth over the next 27 days of our marketing bootcamp for freelance writers.

Background

It’s not enough to say “here are the types of clients I want to target, here’s what I want to write for them, and here’s how I’m going to market to them.” You don’t know off the top of your head if that plan will work, and it would be utterly stupid of you to pursue it without making sure you know the following things first:

1. Is there a market for the type of writing you want to sell, and within the niche or industry you want to specialize in?
2. Is that market big enough to accommodate new talent like yours, or is it already oversaturated (there are more freelance writers than there are people hiring them)?
3. Will the marketing tactics you’re most comfortable with really be the best ways to reach potential clients in this market, and if not, will you be willing and able to adapt to other types of marketing methods even if you’re not good with them right now?

To help you figure those things out, pull out that trusty notebook again, and get ready to conduct some very simple market research and take some more notes that will help you re-assess and improve your platform-building plan.

Exercises

1. Pull out your target market notes from Day 1 again.
2. I want you to look over your specific target market that you really want to work with. Now number your paper (or document) 1 – 25. Think about potential clients that not only fit within your overall target market, but which could likely afford the general rate range you would like to charge (more on the rate issue tomorrow). Write down any companies or publications that come to mind. Include a “dream client” or two, no matter how unlikely you think it is that they’ll hire you right now. When you can’t think of any more, pull up your favorite search engine and keep looking (until you hit 25 minimum). If you can’t find at least 25 companies within your target market, you need to broaden your target a bit. Wanted to write for health magazines? Consider other publications that pay for feature-length articles — large health sites, newspapers’ health sections, email newsletters for health-oriented companies, etc.
3. When you’ve fine-tuned your target market a bit (or just verified that it exists in a reasonable scale), it’s time to think about saturation. Go to job boards. Do at least five searches using keywords related to your specialty (health writer, medical writer, pharmaceutical writer, pharma writer, fitness writer, etc.). Forget the “freelance” aspect in your search. You want to get a basic feel now for whether or not companies are looking to hire writers (and even if they’re looking for full-time staff now, that doesn’t mean they wouldn’t be open to a freelance option if approached in the right ways). Don’t just go to one site. Look at Monster.com. Look at HotJobs.com. Look at MediaBistro.com. Look at JournalismJobs.com. Indeed.com is a good one that lets you search multiple job sites at once. But also look at places you might generally consider “beneath you.” CraigsList.org, Elance.com, and GetaFreelancer.com come to mind. Those sites often cater more to independent buyers and small business clients (who can have significantly larger budgets than you’d think — I make a nice living working with them, so I should know). Are people looking for writers in your specialty area? Are there a lot of ads, or only a handful across all of those sites? Better yet, do you see some companies advertising several times for the same job (pretty quickly — not talking about turnover issues, and also not talking about crap jobs like for content mills which are always hiring)? If so, what you’re seeing is that people are hiring and they’re not finding applicants they deem qualified. That could be a sign that the market isn’t over-saturated. Look for those signs, and look for signs that people are actively and regularly looking for writers like you. If you meet those two things, then you can feel a bit more confident about your target market choice.
4. Take a look at the master list of marketing tactics I had you write out yesterday in your platform-building plan outline. I want you to now turn them into two different ranked lists, side-by-side. The first list should rank them from the one you’re most interested in and / or comfortable with personally (at the top) and down to the tactic you’d least like to think about, nonetheless pursue. In the second list I want you to start at the top with the tactic that will most likely reach members of your target market (if you can’t make reasonable guesses here, spend some time researching execs with the companies you listed earlier and see where they’re networking online to give you ideas). Now compare those two lists. Try to find tactics that rank highly on both lists — at least five of them to focus on early on (but you don’t want to overdo it and spread yourself too thin). And let me just say, if you didn’t rank having your own professional site up highly, guess again. It’s one of your top five. I don’t care what you write, or for who — it’s one of your top five if you ever want to be a query-free freelancer.

Congratulations! You now have some better direction in building your freelance writer platform. Tomorrow we’ll go into rates and things to keep in mind when setting your prices. Our big project next week will be getting you to setup your own professional website (and if you already have one, you can follow along and pick up some tips to improve your existing site). So if you don’t have a site yet, that means it’s time to spend some money (on a domain name and Web hosting). If you plan to follow along with that part of the marketing bootcamp, have at least $20 set aside (if you plan to pay monthly for a hosting account – if you want to pay yearly so there aren’t recurring costs, you’ll spend more).