Manta.com is a dream come true for you when trying to find clients for your social media management services. They have over 87 million registered businesses owners (with full contact details), and there are new businesses adding themselves every day.

Manta.com is essentially an online community for promoting and connecting small business owners and the users tend to be very serious about marketing their business online, which makes them great prospects for your social media marketing services.

You can create an account for free and there is also a paid subscription available called ‘Access Pro’. The paid version costs $9.95 per month and we highly recommend that you get it, because it will allow you to get much richer data and details on the businesses you contact which will help you to close more deals. However you certainly can start out with the free version and then upgrade to the pro subscription later when you are already making money.

The Strategy

First you just need to do a search for a business type in a certain location. Manta has businesses registered all over the world but you will get the best results searching for US based businesses. And seeing as you will be doing the work from home anyway, it really doesn’t matter where you are in the world, or where the businesses you contact are.

In this example we will search for ‘Plumbers in New York’.

We see here that because the Access Pro option has been activated, you are able to narrow down and see companies that were formed as far back as “1 week ago”, however it’s fine if you don’t have this feature.

Once you perform a search, you want to look out for businesses that have been ‘verified by Manta’. This shows up quite prominently in the search results and means that the business owner has claimed their business listing and is active in Manta, these are the businesses you want to be contacted.

The next thing you need to do is click on one of the business listings and check when it was ‘updated’ by its owner, the more recently it has been updated, the better. As this shows that the business owner is active in Manta and is currently interested in marketing their business online.

You then need to get their email address from the listing (you may need to click a link that says ‘view email’)

The next step is to take a quick look at their website (and Facebook/Twitter page if they have one) and come up with a couple of different ways that you could improve their business with your social media services. Examples of things like this would be:

• Posting more regular content to their Facebook and Twitter accounts if they are quite inactive right now
• Creating social media accounts for them if they don’t already have them (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Pinterest etc.)
• Creating videos for them (using something like Animoto.com)
• Helping them get more followers or ‘Fans’ if they don’t have many
• And any other social media service that you can think could help them

Then you can send them an email based on the following template:

Now that is a basic template for you to work from, but you should try and customize it a little for each business that you email. When you glance over their website and social media accounts, try and pick out at least one thing that directly relates to their business and include that in the email.

Once they reply to you, try and get them engaged in a conversation about marketing their business through social media and then slowly introduce your services. Make sure that everything you say to them is focused on their business and helping them get more results from their online marketing investments.

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