My friend is an Art Collector, and not only an investor or collector - that’s what he does for living - he has been doing this for many years - and has now moved into music instruments and rare books.  It is interesting to see how technology has made so many changes to what he does the best.

In the past, it relies on word of mouth, even needs to open up a shop and track what clients has bought or interest, and this has taken a hell out of time and you probably end up with just a handful of clients and you can never grow outside your city much, unless you are a big time bidder.

With today’s technology - my friend has been doing well in terms of “Client Profiling” - and you may have guessed - you can use great social networking websites like Facebook, LinkedIn, Xing and others - Jigsaw is also useful.

His marketing technique is quite straight-forward, althought, it took him almost 2 years to fully documented the process:

1) You can search - and target company executives - he targets top company executives if he has a large pirce (US$50,000+) to sell or rare instruments - with a possibility these folks will buy a rare music instruments for their kids.

2) I should not say this - but proportionally speaking - certain ethnic groups tend to be wealthier than others - he can sort them by their last names, be it wealthy Jewish families, Arabic families, Chinese familes - many of them are regularly reported on the press which can be searched on Internet

3) By their professions - again - not hard, he was targeting at some of the top traders at financial firms for instance.

4) By targeting at specific cities - say, Upper New York, Boston, Orange County or certain places in Australia or UK

Thanks to Internet, he is now doing very well because of the target marketing - and he will never dream going back to work for someone else again.