I wanted to get into hospitality writing several years ago, but I had no clips. I had plenty of clips in small-business writing, tech clips and feature stories galore. But every time I approached a hospitality content-marketing client, they wanted hospitality clips. I was learning the hard way that even more so than in journalism, content marketing clients want industry experience.

Then one day, I was pitching my weekly stories to a well-known small-business website where I was a regular writer, and I got the idea to pitch some stories for small-business owners in the hospitality business. It worked. The editor loved my idea for a profile on a green hotel and gave it the green light (pun intended). A few weeks later, I wrote a story about managing teen employees and used restaurant and hotel sources as my examples. Not that long after, I pitched another article about using iPads in the hospitality industry. I kept intermixing a few hospitality stories with my other topics for the next few months, until I had several solid clips.

I then took my clips and pitched to a hospitality technology magazine that was a perfect blend of my tech niche and my budding hospitality niche. They didn’t need as many hospitality clips, since I also had the specialized knowledge from the tech side. I ended up writing for this pub for many years as a contributing editor and have branched into many more hospitality markets, including landing a regular gig with Samsung. Those four stories helped launch me into a new niche, hospitality technology, that has been very profitable because there are not busloads of hospitality tech writers sending Letters of Introduction’s every day.

And so was born one of my favorite and most successful strategies for growing my business – purposely pitching double-niche stories, which I define as stories that cross multiple niches. A writer friend who wrote about tennis regularly for several publications told me a few years ago that she wanted to get into personal finance writing, but didn’t have the clips. I suggested the double-niche strategy to her and brainstormed a number of stories that she could pitch to her tennis clients and also use as personal finance clips – how to budget for tennis tournaments, the best rewards credit cards for tennis players, retirement saving for tennis professionals, and how to decide whether joining a tennis club was a smart financial move.

Here the five steps to pitching double-niche stories:

1. Make a list of 3 to 5 new niches that you want to branch into. The niches should be in demand, not oversaturated with writers, and very specific. Most important, you should enjoy writing about the topics and find them interesting. I have never been successful in a niche that I didn’t find interesting but started writing about just because I thought I could earn a lot of money.
2. Make a list of the current publications you write for that have editors who ask for pitches. These may be either journalism or content marketing clients.
3. Think about the readers of the first client publication, and then go through each of the niches you listed in step 1 to see if any of those topics would be of interest to the client.
4. If yes, then brainstorm specific topics for the niche and the client.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for each client and each niche listed. Hopefully, at this point, you will have a list of story ideas that you can begin to pitch from each of the niches.

Here are three important things to keep in mind with double-niche stories:

• Think of writing double-niche stories as a long-term strategy, not a quick fix. In fact, whenever possible, especially when you are growing your business, you should be thinking about how you can use each story that you write to gain future business.
• The story must be completely relevant and interesting to your current client and audience. If you pitch stories that are not a match for what your current editor wants, then you may soon find yourself down a client. This is the most important priority when pitching a double-niche story.
• Intermix the stories about your new niche with other stories that you pitch. I waited a few weeks between hospitality stories and wrote about many other topics. This way, I wasn’t shortchanging my current client or readers.

Have you used the double-niche strategy? Do you need any help with double-niche ideas? Post here, and we will help.