Recently, I was reminded that many freelance writers are still new to social media. One Freelance Writers Den member commented that she was down on Twitter.

Why? She had tweeted some writers’ stuff, and they had not immediately reciprocated by retweeting some of her stuff.

So now she was mad at them. She also thought social media didn’t work. She didn’t see how using it would help her promote her writing.

I’ve given out tips on social media before — on how to get the most out of Twitter, and LinkedIn…and I had a guest post with more tips on using LinkedIn, too. Plus a fascinating one recently on Pinterest…though I consider LI and Twitter currently the two most important platforms freelance writers should get to know.

But it seems like we need to back up and talk first about how social media works.

There are a million different platforms, but the principles are basically the same. If you read this a year from now, there may be some new platform that’s the hot thing. But I think the basic idea of how to use social media to promote yourself and find clients won’t change.

The first thing to know is social media is a viable platform for promoting yourself and finding clients, as well as sources for stories, trend ideas for pitches, and lots more. I’ve gotten hired by several Fortune 500 companies through LinkedIn, and did $14,000 of business with just one editor I reached out to on Twitter last year.

So yes, social media is worth doing — if you know what you’re doing.

Here is how social media really works:

• Begin by listening. Social media is a conversation. Listen in and find out what’s going on. Start learning about trends and topics that are of interest to people in your niche.
• It’s about being helpful. Social media is like a gigantic networking meeting. Focus on finding out how you can help others, and you won’t go wrong.
• Start searching. Begin looking for people who are popular and talk about your subject. Watch what they do. Start reading their stuff.
• Learn the etiquette. Every platform has its own flavor. On Twitter, there’s hashtags that help you follow topics, for instance. Get the hang of the slang.
• Make new friends. You can meet the most amazing people through social media. Read and follow people whose stuff you like. Then, connect with or follow them, and start a conversation. Invite them to take a Skype virtual lunch with you. Find out how you could collaborate.
• Reach out proactively. Don’t wait to get discovered like Lana Turner on a barstool at Schraffts drugstore on Hollywood Boulevard in the 1930s. That might happen — that’s actually how I ended up guest posting on Copyblogger — but you don’t want to bet the farm on it. So once you’ve gotten acquainted with some influential people, start sending them stuff and asking them to share it with their audience, as in “Your readers might like [LINK].” If you do this right, the result looks like this tweet on the right.
• Don’t expect tit-for-tat. People are not going to retweet your post because you retweeted theirs, because that’s not the point of social media. It’s not a link-exchange club. Every person is on social media to help their audience with useful stuff and build their reputation so they can occasionally promote their own stuff a bit, too. They’re going to spread your content if it’s amazingly helpful to their followers. If it’s not, they won’t.
• Bring great stuff. You become successful in social media by offering terrifically helpful information to people. Concentrate on writing to serve your readers, and social media will be a great tool for you.
• Don’t waste time on it. You shouldn’t need to spend more than a half-hour a day on all your social media work combined. Don’t turn it into a time-waster.

How are you using social media? Leave a comment and tell us your strategy.

Have you ever wondered why most of the blogging gigs you see pay $20 a post or less?

There are two main reasons.

With writers I mentor, I’ve always emphasized one of them.

Common topics = low rates

Your topic is key.

Are you blogging about pets? Kids? Gaming?

If so, my condolences.

The problem is there are umpty-million people who are qualified to write on these topics.

These hobbyists would love to write about them for free or thereabouts. They just love writing and seeing their name on the Interwebs!

Startup clients = low rates

There are also scads of startup websites trying to monetize lots of content on these basic subjects. These companies seem to place the majority of the online ads for bloggers that you see.

They still don’t know how to make money with their site, in many cases. They may aspire to sell ads against their hoped-for big traffic, but so far it’s not working.

These are not established, successful businesses. Therefore, they don’t have much budget to pay you for blog posts.

Topics and companies that pay well

On the other hand, if you write about surety bonds, or actuarial consulting, or sophisticated medical procedures, you’re in good shape.

Far fewer writers can write intelligently on these topics. Also, these clients tend to be long-established companies in financial services, healthcare or technology.

These organizations make money, so they have more substantial marketing budgets.

So — sophisticated topics and established companies tend to mean better pay.

The other reason good blog-post pay happens

But last week, when I had copywriting coach Chris Marlow on my Freelance Writers Den podcast, we were running down a list of lucrative types of copywriting.

When we got to blog posts, she talked about another important distinction between the type of situation that gets you $20 a blog post and the type that gets you $300 a blog post.

This is such an important difference, I wanted you all to hear it. It’s just a short, 3-minute recording so give it a listen. (Chris also reveals the going rates for blog posts as reported in her in-depth Copywriting Rates Guide.)

If that doesn’t work, you could download it here:

http://www.makealivingwriting.com/Webinars_podcasts/Marlow-Cut-Blogposts.mp4

What have you gotten paid for blogging? Tell us what types of work you did for that money.

Have you wondered if all the great-paying writing clients are hiding out together under a rock somewhere?

Writers constantly tell me they’ve looked and looked at those online job ads, but they can only find the $5-a-post gigs.

That happens because most of the really good writing gigs are never advertised.

To find them, you’ll have to understand how these prospects think, and why they need writers. Then, you’ll have to go out and proactively locate and contact these prospects.

That right there is the difference between low-paid writers and well-fed ones.

Inside the mind of a great writing prospect

The good jobs begin when an editor or marketing manager is sitting at their desk, amidst piles of overflowing workload. They work at a major publication, custom publisher, company, or nonprofit. They are thinking something like this:

The stable of freelance writers I have now leaves something to be desired. These writers don’t turn things in on time. They’re less than brilliant.

OR

One of my staff writers just quit, and I don’t know how I’m going to get my stuff written by deadline. I can’t overload the other staffers, or they’ll quit, too.

AND

I wish I could find some new writers. But I don’t have any time to look. I definitely don’t have time to look at 300 resumes off a Craigslist ad.

So now you know the sort of situation you want to find — a quality publication or company that needs writer but doesn’t have time to search for them.

Identifying good-paying publications

It’s pretty easy to find publications that pay the best. Besides asking around in your own writer community, you could get the Writer’s Market online. Then you can set their database search to $$$$, the top pay level, and start searching.

Presto! A nice list of top payers to target.

You can also scan publications including the Wooden Horse magazines database, Editor & Publisher, and Media Bistro’s How to Pitch Guides for more publications intel.

One of the best and least-frequently looked niches for good-paying publications is trade publications. Trade pubs cover a particular industry in-depth, for business owners in that field. Daily Variety, for instance, is for executives in show business, and Ad Age is for marketing execs. You can see lists of them at tradepub.com. If you have some related knowledge, think about marketing yourself to trade-pub editors.

Another great niche is custom publications. These are magazines and newspaper inserts created for companies by a publishing company. You can check out custom publishers — many of whom publish many publications in an industry niche — at their industry group the Custom Content Council. I’ve had one custom-pub client — easy, $.50-a-word work on newspaper special sections, where they hand you all the sources. These can be steady sources of good-paying work.

Identifying good-paying companies

The key here is to think big. Many writers get stuck writing for solopreneurs or small businesses. These don’t have big marketing budgets. To earn more, you need to identify larger organizations with bigger budgets.

How big? Well $1 million is a good start, $10 million is better, $100 million better than that, $1 billion really terrific, and the Fortune 1000 are awesome. Depending on where your writing career is at, one of these categories should work for you.

For example, my first copywriting client was a small local startup that sold call-center software. The second was a $1 billion global corporation. You don’t have to pay your dues for years and slowly inch your way up.

To get started, target industries where you have some experience or find the business owner easily accessible. These could be:

• An institution you have personal life experience with, such as a rehab clinic that took care of your sick mom.
• A local, independently owned store you love to shop.
• A small business in an industry where you once worked.

If you’ve got a few clips from small-business clients and are ready to move up, here are seven resources for finding bigger clients who may need marketing writers.

1. The business section of your local paper. Scan for news of growth, acquisitions, new locations, new products, new funding. All of these may spur new marketing efforts. You can assume most of the stories you see here originated with the business doing publicity to promote what they’re doing. They do marketing, so they may use freelancers.
2. Your local business weekly. Similar to the above situation, except these are all business news, all the time. Smaller ones may flat-out reprint companies’ press releases or do pages of release-driven “business updates.” Grab an issue, and you’ve got a prospect list.
3. A Book of Lists. These directories of the top and fastest-growing companies in every imaginable industry are available for more than 60 markets.
4. An industry directory or guidebook such as the Chain Store Guides. The deal with these is they give free trade-publication subscriptions to all the companies willing to give them their data for the guide…which often includes revenue, so you can quickly focus on larger companies with bigger marketing budgets.
5. Venture capital news. It’s my experience that newly funded startups spend like big companies — they often need to quickly ramp up their business to satisfy investors. VCAOnline has a great searchable news database where you can search by city name or industry buzzwords to find companies that have landed venture funding.
6. Your library’s database subscriptions. Many libraries have useful databases they subscribe to that could make your searches easier — maybe they’ve got the paid level of Hoovers or Lexis-Nexis for searching press releases. Be sure to ask your librarian what resources they might have to help you identify companies and their size.
7. Niche job boards. OK, not all online job boards are bad. Ones that focus on an industry, or where the listers have to pay to post their notice, can have better-quality gigs. Do some sleuthing to find boards that are appropriate for your writing niches. For instance, I got one good-paying blogging gig of a Gorkana finance alert (since I’m a business dork).

Where have you found your best-paying clients? Leave a comment and share your success story.

Bamidele Onibalusi

One of the most interesting success stories I’ve ever come across on the Internet is YoungPrePro, the website of Bamidele Onibalusi. He’s an 18-year-old blogger in Nigeria.

You read that right. Eighteen. Nigeria.

You think you’ve got problems finding good-paying blogging clients? Oni is just going into college and lives in a country with sporadic electricity, little infrastructure, and no PayPal access. The name of his country is synonymous with “scam,” yet he’s gotten blog clients to trust him and pay him real rates.

Now he makes over $5,000 a month from his online blogging, which where he lives is a small fortune. (He also has an Alexa ranking for his blog that makes this blog’s look like a tiny little nothing. Seriously. Check it out.)

I learned about him the way most people do — through his prolific guest posts on major blogs.

I’ve always wanted to find out more about how he became a successful paid blogger, and I recently cornered him (virtually) for a quick interview. Enjoy:

CT: How old were you when you got started blogging and how did you discover it? What are your main earning methods on your site?

BO: I first discovered blogging when I was 16, in late December 2009. I have always been interested in ways to make money without working for others from a very young age. The first article that introduced me to blogging was written by Steve Pavlina, and it helped me realize the importance of giving value first to an audience before expecting something in return. I started YoungPrePro four months later, in April 2010.

The main way my blog makes me money is by helping clients discover me. I haven’t really gone out to market myself to clients. They all come to me, thanks to my blog!

Here’s an analysis of the techniques I use to make money from my blog at the moment:

Freelancing: I’ve been writing and guest blogging online for a few years now, and I like to think I’ve learned a lot in the process. I currently have four clients. I help two of them market their websites by helping them write guest posts that get published on other blogs and I help the other two as a regular paid contributor on their blogs. Most of these clients discovered me after reading my guest posts on top blogs, and the one that I contacted personally hired me because I included a link to one of my guest posts published on Problogger. Freelancing currently constitutes over 95% of my income from blogging.

Partnership: I did this for a while in 2011, and it is something I plan to do a lot more of in the future. I once partnered with an email list plugin developer and we sold a few copies of the product to my audience.

Affiliate Marketing: I promote a few products every once in a while and the results vary depending on the product I promote. Affiliate marketing is something I plan to invest a lot more effort into this year.

CT: How do you technically do this from your locale? How did you get your website up initially?

BO: This was the real challenge. It still surprises me how I was able to overcome it.

When I was just starting out, I didn’t have the money to afford quality internet service and I also didn’t have enough money to run a generator [to compensate for the] poor electricity service in my country. What I did was to partner with a café owner in my locale. I was even able to crack the network of some of my providers to get free access to the Internet, so I helped the café owner get free internet to offer to his customers, while I got a free pass to use an internet-enabled computer in the café whenever I want.

I didn’t know whether it was legal or not when I did it – I was a really determined 16-year-old-kid who spent 20 hours at a stretch learning to create my first website. I was determined to do anything to make my blog a success.

Things are better now. I now make money from my efforts and I’m able to run on a generator, and I can also pay my monthly Internet expenses. As to my equipment, I have two laptops, a mobile dongle, a headset and three cameras. I use my two laptops almost every day, mostly for my writing. I used free themes when I was just starting out, but I changed them a lot, and I now have two designers who help me with web and graphics design.

Infrastructure in Nigeria is still very bad, but it won’t stop me from achieving my dreams if I’m really determined.

CT: How did you get people to trust you and hire you as a paid blogger when you’re a teen from Nigeria? Also, how do you take payments since you can’t use Paypal?

BO: It surprises me myself, but I guess the truth will always prevail. When I wanted to start blogging, I knew the challenges that came with being a Nigerian online and I contemplated using a name that doesn’t make me seem Nigerian. As someone who had great visions for my blog that might eventually require me to be physically present with people, I decided to stick to who I am.

One thing that really helped me was borrowing the brand and reputation of successful bloggers online, by guest blogging. Even as a Nigerian, when most people see me on blogs like Problogger, DailyBlogTips, ReadWriteWeb and Business Insider, they will eventually want to know what I’m doing. My readers were able to trust me due to the value I provide in my articles, and also because they keep on seeing my work on some of the biggest blogs online.

I still can’t figure out why Paypal isn’t ready to support a country of 150 million people and millions of internet users… but I’ve been able to get help from clients and friends. Every client I work with respects me, as most of them came to me through my guest posts on big blogs. They want the same results I’m getting, so they are happy to pay directly to my bank account [also known as automatic bank transfer or ACH]. For the clients that don’t pay directly to my account, I ask them to send the money via Paypal to my other clients for me to receive, or to help me make some purchases online.

CT: How did you get started guest blogging on big sites? What was the first big guest post you had? How many guest posts have you done – any idea? Talk about what that has done for your own traffic.

BO: Guest blogging on big sites wasn’t easy at first, especially considering my background and my use of the English language when I was just starting out. I remember sending out a crap guest post to Copyblogger around two years ago when I was just getting started, which was rejected. I still look at that guest post today and laugh at myself for sending out such crap to a blog like Copyblogger.

My first big guest post was on Maxblogpress’s Maxblogger almost two years ago, and it sent me around 1,000 visitors when it first went live. I have also written for blogs like Problogger and DailyBlogTips, and I have gotten anything from around 300 – 1,500 visitors from my guest posts on most big blogs.

I can’t remember exactly how many guest posts I have written, but I’m sure I’ve written over 600 guest posts for my blog alone, around 300 of which I wrote in just 8 months. To say guest blogging has contributed to my blog will be an understatement — guest blogging is the foundation of my blog.

CT: Any guest-blogging tips for us? What do you think has made you so successful?

BO: Here are some of my top guest blogging tips.

Be determined: My first guest post for most big blogs was rejected, but I didn’t give up. I have published around six guest posts apiece on DailyBlogTips, Problogger, and MaxBlogpress, a guest post on ReadWriteWeb, a guest post on Business Insider, and a guest post on JohnChow.com. Most of these blogs rejected my first pitch, my use of English was poor when I tried submitting to them, but I didn’t give up. I was determined to get published, and I got what I wanted. My first idea now gets published on most of the above blogs because I took the advice of the editor to heart, I took some time to understand the audience, and I never took any rejection personally — and you will get a lot of rejections if you are to really succeed as a guest blogger.

Give your best: Look at the most recent guest posts on your favorite blogs, look at what they have in common that relates to the blog they are published on, and then use that to develop a unique post that relates to that blog.

Be smart: Most blogs will not send you any traffic, but that doesn’t mean you should stop guest blogging altogether. Guest blogging can be very good for SEO, and writing for blogs without traffic can benefit you on the long run if you know what you’re doing. I currently average 800 visitors from Google alone every day, and this was as a result of 31 guest posts I published in one week a few months ago. I was getting around 200 – 300 visitors on average then, but 31 guest posts in one week added 500 daily visitors to my blog over the span of a few months. No single blog I have written for have ever sent that much traffic, but I guess they did. I wrote an article about the challenge that outlines my process a few months ago.

CT: What are your 2012 goals for your business — what will you do next?

BO: Aha, they are so big that thinking about them sometimes makes my heart leap. For this very purpose, I have worked on my home office for months now and it is finally ready.

I have several big goals for this year, and some of them are:

• Make my blog the very best this year by improving the quality and practicality of my articles (check out his new design!)
• Write a minimum of 30 guest posts on big blogs and a minimum of 30 guest posts on small blogs every month. These guest posts will lead to a funnel  on my blog. The posts on the big blogs will lead to my home page which will soon be turned to a “Copyblogger-like” squeeze page, and the guest posts on the smaller blogs will link to individual articles on my blog for SEO purposes. I know I only have so much time to achieve this, but I will be cutting down on client work significantly this year, and even though it will really affect my income, I think it is a short-term sacrifice for a great future. I can work for clients to make what I need to cover my basic expenses for the mean time and then focus my time on growing my business.
• Increase engagement and value among my readers by creating a “reader challenge” towards the middle of this year, and then use it as a way to make them trust me even more.
• Focus a lot more on building my list. I’m working on gaining at least 10,000 more subscribers this year.
• Partner with other writers and influencers in my field.

CT: Are there any mentors you had who helped you? Who have you learned from?

BO: It’s funny, I don’t have a mentor yet. I’m kind of a guy who loves to walk it all alone, but I’m changing over time as I’m starting to realize the importance of relationships to living an effective life. I do respect some guys online, though, and the two on top of my list are Glen Allsopp from Viperchill.com and Pat Flynn from SmartPassiveIncome.com. Those two guys rock and their content have always been a guide and inspiration to me.