Entries from October 2008 ↓
Now, I won’t pretend to know it all when it comes to landing freelance writing work. After all, my first gig was one that the client approached me about, rather than the other way around. In fact, some of my more successful long-term client relationships have been that sort: people who sought me out because they believed I could meet their needs.
Still, you can’t build a business by expecting people to show up on your doorstep. I’ve said before that opportunities aren’t made, they’re painstakingly crafted. To be successful, you’ve got to get out there and make some sales.
Freelance bidding sites
You know these sites. Elance, Guru, Scriptlance and so on. These sites offer a place for clients to post a project and freelancers to bid on those projects. I’ve had some success over time with this kind of activity, and my work on these sites has led to at least a couple of long-term clients.
I could (and probably will, one day) write a series on these sites. There are so many different elements that it’s hard to know where to begin. Rather than trying to do that here, let me just offer four of the most important things I’ve learned about bidding sites:
- Ignore the abysmally low bids. Just because someone else is working for $2 an article doesn’t mean you have to. It just means you have to demonstrate added value to get those higher rates.
- Customize every bid. Yes, it takes time. But you really need to engage the potential client if you’re going to capture her interest. Speak directly to her needs, both written and unwritten, in your bids.
- Showcase your best work, and plenty of it. Include links to your freelance writing portfolio, and attach a relevant sample to your bid. In my case, a link to this blog increases sales by a significant factor.
- There are plenty of different styles of work at these sites, from copywriting to SEO articles to blogging. Pick one and focus on it to maximize your success.
Freelance job sites
There are a number of these out there, but many of them have the same info every day. Two of the ones I check regularly are John Hewitt’s PoeWar and Deb and Jodee at Freelance Writing Jobs. These sites have plenty of potential, but they’re also more competitive. Whereas you might find a dozen gigs a day with eight or ten competitors at Elance, you’re going to find 20 gigs a day with 200 or 300 competitors at these sites.
Beyond that, though, these sites offer a different type of work that what you’ll find at the bidding sites. Here you’ll find a higher concentration of blogging gigs, for example. You’ll also find more long-term assignments and actual “jobs,” if that’s the thing you’re looking for.
Cold calls
I’ve done cold calling, to be sure. If there’s a niche that you’re an expert in, or perhaps have a special knowledge of, it’s all right to contact webmasters of those sites and offer your services. Your rate of success with cold calls is going to be lower than it is with the other methods, but it’s something to try. You may find that you have a knack for this type of sales (I don’t) and make a killing.
Networking
If bidding sites have provided me with some of my long-term clients, networking has provided me with the rest. Whether it’s using social media to connect with other freelancer writers who are looking to outsource, or whether it’s a client’s recommendation to a colleague, word of mouth is still one of the best ways to land clients.
Networking is a bit tricky, though. You can spend all day networking and never land a client. You can network with someone in your field just for fun and wind up forming a long-term partnership. For me, it’s hard to know early on what kind of fruit networking will bear. While you can’t rely solely on networking to get you writing gigs, don’t count it out altogether.
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So, what about you? Where do you find your freelance writing clients?
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Introduction
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Education
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Honing Your Craft
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Planning
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Building Your Portfolio
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Finding Work
As several folks mentioned in the comments from the previous post in this series, having a good business plan doesn’t mean that your business is going to succeed. Now, NOT having one can have a seriously detrimental effect on your business, and even put it under. But the way you execute that plan has a lot to do with your success.
Today, I want to talk about the next step on your writing business journey. Once you’ve built that business plan, you should naturally start trying to land a writing gig or two. I’ll talk next time about where to find writing work, but for now I want to focus on something that will help you immensely when it is time to do that:
Building your portfolio.
A good portfolio is, in my estimation, one of the most important assets of your freelance writing business. It displays the quality of your work, demonstrates the depth of your skills and gives potential clients a reason to choose you.
In the print world, a portfolio generally takes the form of “clips.” Clips are, in many cases, articles that you’ve written that are literally “clipped” from the newspaper or magazine you’ve been published in. The challenge with online writing is that much of the writing you do will be “ghostwriting” – that is, you won’t get the byline.
This was one of the challenges I faced early in my freelance writing career. I started out writing in one niche for a single client. When it came time for me to branch out, I found that I had no work samples to show prospective clients. In my case, I worked around it by getting permission from my client to refer potential clients to my articles on her website. But I’d have been much better off if I had a solid body of work I could point to.
So, let’s get practical for a few minutes. What makes a good freelance writing portfolio?
A good freelance writing portfolio is accessible.
If you want to showcase your talents to a prospective client, you need to make it easy for the client to see your work. That means reducing the number of clicks required to see your portfolio. That might mean you set up a website with work samples. It might mean you keep copies of some of your work as MS Word documents, to be attached to emails.
My best portfolio tends to be right here. This blog is one of the most important resources for my freelance writing business. I found that, once I started including a reference to my blog on my freelance writing bids, my sales went through the roof. In fact, bids that included my blog outsold bids that didn’t by a margin of 2 to 1.
However you do it, though, you don’t want to make your client look under every rock on the Internet for your work. I’ve been published all over the web, including some big names in the writing business like Freelance Folder and Freelance Switch. While I could send clients links to those articles, it’s much more convenient for the client if I include them as attachments.
A good freelance writing portfolio is diverse.
Every freelance writer has his favorite style of writing. Certainly a part of what you can do to market yourself as a writer is to brand yourself as the expert in a particular niche or style of writing. Still, the Internet is a funny place. What’s popular today may not be tomorrow. To make it over the long haul, you must have a diverse set of skills. On top of that, having a diverse set of skills means that you have a more diverse set of potential clients.
I keep, at any given time, more than two dozen work samples in my portfolio. It includes the best examples of my sales writing, blog writing, website copy, SEO keyword articles and several other types of writing. I also try to vary the niches, as well, showcasing some of my areas of expertise and interest.
A good freelance writing portfolio showcases your best work.
It should go without saying, but your portfolio needs to be error-free. Even if it’s work you’ve published already, it’s worth an extra proofread to make sure everything is as it should be. Simple grammatical or spelling errors can cost you potential clients.
Along that line of thought, it’s important also to realize that, by including something in your portfolio, you’re saying “I can do this again.” As such, the work you do for a client needs to meet that same level of quality. There’s nothing more frustrating for a client than to see great work in the portfolio followed by a substandard deliverable.
So, what about you? Do you have a freelance writing portfolio for your business? If so, what kinds of things do you include, and what form does it take? Feel free to include a link to your portfolio in the comments section.
Follow The Journey: Other Posts In This Series
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Introduction
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Education
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Honing Your Craft
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Planning
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Building Your Portfolio
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Finding Work
Today I want to continue talking about how you can get started with your Freelance writing business. Before I get too much into it, though, I want to send you off to read about why these tough economic times really are the best time to start your freelance writing business (Make sure to come back, of course, when you’re done reading it.)
Let’s talk some about planning, shall we?
One of the biggest reasons small businesses of any sort, including freelance writing businesses, fail is because they don’t have a solid business plan. I can tell you from personal experience that this is the case, because it happened to me.
it was 2000. Our second child had just been born, and I was working at a power plant as a Network Administrator. I had just been hired from a contract position to full-time, and was in a great place in terms of my career.
Still, I was already showing signs of IT burnout. I wasn’t happy with my job. I’d been selling computers and fixing computers on the side for years, so we decided in July of 2000 to start our own computer business. I quit my IT job, rented an office, and hung my shingle.
Six months and $30,000 of credit card debt later, my business folded. I went back to the IT world, defeated.
There were many reasons my business failed. One was the economy; in the fall of 2000, the economy started a downward trend. That’s a factor that can’t be ignored, but it probably could have been overcome.
No, the bigger component to my failure was this: I didn’t plan my business. I didn’t have an organized marketing campaign, a thorough understanding of the local market, specific business goals and milestones that I was working toward, an understanding of inventory control or any sorts of overall strategies. I just took out some ads and hoped people would call me.
Needless to say, this wasn’t the best of strategies. I had some folks call me (mostly through word of mouth; I wasn’t yet a skilled copywriter). But it wasn’t nearly enough.
So, how do you plan your freelance writing business? Just like you plan any other business. You study your market. You write a business plan. You develop specific strategies, goals, and tactics.
Now, I could go through how to do this, but let’s be honest: it’s been done. I’m not going to be able to tell you anything about writing a business plan you can’t find elsewhere. So, instead, let me point you to the best resource I’ve found for planning a business: The Small Business Association Small Business Planner. Give it a look, especially the sample business plans.
Follow The Journey: Other Posts In This Series
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Introduction
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Education
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Honing Your Craft
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Planning
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Building Your Portfolio
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Finding Work
Last time, I talked about the importance of becoming educated if you want to start a freelance writing business. I talked about becoming educated about business, about the nature of freelancing and about writing itself. I want to use that last concept as a jumping-off point for today’s post.
You see, in my mind, there is no more important task for the freelance writer than really understanding her own writing, seeing where it fits in the larger context of things, and improving her craft.
I’ve said it before: one of the great challenges that the Internet presents is preserving quality writing. You see, great writing matters online. There are plenty of websites out there with poorly-written content that serve only to attract search engine visitors and send them on their way. While this may be a successful business model for some, to make your living as a freelance writer you need to move beyond this kind of writing.
Honing your writing craft is a part of that process. It takes a dedication to quality, and a commitment to continual self-improvement.
Let me give a real-life example. One of the newer areas of freelance writing I’ve been exploring lately has been writing sales letters. Six months ago, when I sold my first sales letter, I can honestly say that my first attempt was pretty sad. I had a lot to learn about how sales pages work, about the progressions involved, and about the kinds of voice that a sales letter needs in order to convert.
So, what did I do? I worked at it. I researched it (we’re back to education here, of course). I discovered that there are a number of approaches to sales letters. I found one that fit my personal writing philosophy and my style, and I practiced. Today, I’m writing sales letters on a regular basis, and they’re vastly improved over those first efforts. Not only that, I’m getting positive feedback that they’re working.
So, how do you do it? How do you go about honing your craft, in preparation for starting your freelance writing business?
There are plenty of ways to improve your writing, but here are some general principles you should keep in mind:
- You write. Plain and simple. Write every day. Write many kinds of things, test out different ideas, and see what you’re capable of and interested in.
- Beyond that, you need to be willing to critique your own writing. Set your writing aside for a day or two, and come back at it. Slash it up with a highlighter and pen, and then rewrite it. Keep doing this until you feel like the finished product is something worth selling.
- You also need to be willing to put your work out there for others to critique. Join a writer’s forum, post to a ratings-based article directory like Helium, or find yourself a mentor. Find people who are willing to give you some honest feedback about your writing, and be willing to accept that feedback.
Like most things in life, becoming a great writer is less about being inspired, and more about being dedicated to the task.
Follow The Journey: Other Posts In This Series
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Introduction
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Education
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Honing Your Craft
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Planning
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Building Your Portfolio
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Finding Work
photo credit: liveandrock
If I were to start my freelance writing business over, I’d do things differently. There are plenty of hurdles and unnecessary difficulties I’ve had to overcome, based on the way I came about it.
Still, I wouldn’t trade it for anything; however I got here, I can confidently say I’m more happy with my career today than I have ever been at any point in my life.
So, this series really is an effort to identify some of the steps I missed in my business, some of the steps that I did get right, and some of the steps that I maybe did out of order.
The first thing I’d do, if I were going to start a freelance business, is to get some education.
Now, I started my freelance business around the time I was working on my Master’s degree. I had plenty of academic education. I didn’t need lessons in grammar or style. As a humanities major studying history, I had to become an expert at very direct and precise writing.
Still, there were some important things that I didn’t know, that I couldn’t really learn in a classroom.
Business education
I dabbled, around the turn of the millennium, with my own computer business. It failed miserably, within a year of opening. There were a variety of factors that went into that failure. Some of them I could have prevented. For example, I had very little understanding of marketing, and even less understanding of how to do some basic business tasks such as keeping an inventory of commonly-sold items. And don’t even get me started on the accounting nightmare.
Some of these things, in retrospect, I could have learned in school. A course on marketing, one on business management, and one on accounting would probably have really helped shore up my business skills at the time.
When it came time to start my writing business, however, I had learned from many of those mistakes from my first business flop. I was able to avoid most of them. I set out to learn everything I could about those weak areas, to shore them up. Over time, I’ve studied all sorts of business subjects via books, blogs, ebooks and even just talking with other people in business.
Do I consider myself an expert in business today? Nope. I have what I need to run my business, and even see it grow by leaps and bounds, though.
Freelance education
If I were to start over today, I would try to spend some more time learning about freelance work and the freelance marketplace before jumping in. I’d spend time on blogs like this one and others. I’d ask questions about how the freelance marketplace works.
One of the ways that this hurt me, in the early days of my freelance business, was that I really didn’t understand the marketplace. I had a wonderful client who paid me a decent price for my work, and her work was nearly enough to meet my budget. However, when I went out and tried to find other work, all I could seem to find was offers to write $3 articles.
I didn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t realize that, just like in other types of situations, you get what you pay for. Those $3 articles are, typically, very poorly written, often inaccurate, and just plain bad writing. I felt sheepish, though, bidding so much more than these low bids that I just left some opportunities behind.
So, how do you become educated about freelancing? There are plenty of ways. I mentioned reading blogs – that’s one way. There are also some decent books on the subject. In terms of eBooks, I’d highly recommend How to be a Rock Star Freelancer (read my review here). You can, just like with business, talk with other freelancers. Find out what they’re doing, what the business is like, and what you can expect.
Writing education
Writing online isn’t like writing for print. It certainly isn’t like academic writing, either. It’s a very different world. There are many aspects that, when you first start out, you aren’t going to understand.
For example, understanding the difference between web copy and website copy is important if you’re going to freelance online. Knowing when to use a personal tone and when to use a professional one is important, too. It doesn’t hurt to have some understanding of the basics of copywriting, either.
For my part, I came about this all backwards. I learned, first, how to write SEO articles. Granted, SEO is an integral part of web writing, and it’s an important skill to have. But there were other skills, such as copywriting, that I had to learn slowly, over time. I learned new ways of writing in response to business opportunities that I was missing because I didn’t possess the required skills.
If you start your freelance writing business with several types of writing skills at your disposal, you’re going to have a leg up on the competition.
How do you learn to write? Again, you’ve got lots of options. The one difference with learning to write is, in my estimation, that all of the study you do won’t do you much good unless you practice the techniques. Writers become better, in many cases, simply by writing and editing their own work.
So, what about you? If you have a freelance business, are there areas you wish you’d been more educated in when you started? If you’re not freelancing yet, do you think it’s realistic and important do learn some of these things?
Follow The Journey: Other Posts In This Series
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Introduction
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Education
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Honing Your Craft
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Planning
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Building Your Portfolio
How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: Finding Work
photo credit: Menlo School
