Entries Tagged 'How to Make Money from Your Writing Online' ↓

For a couple of weeks now, the discussion has been going back and forth between Men with Pens and Freelance Parent about the costs of starting up a freelance writing business. One side argues that you can start up a freelance writing business on the cheap, with a couple hundred dollars or less. The other side argues that a freelance writing business has the same kinds of startup costs that any other small business has - and that you’re going to put out ten times that amount or more.

I’d encourage you to follow those debate threads. Each side makes some good points, to be sure. If you pin me down and force me to offer my opinion, I’ll say that any small business, whether they’re freelance writing, plumbing or basket-weaving, can benefit from a significant cash investment in the beginning.

Now, for my part, I started out with no investment. I fell into the freelance writing business quite by accident. I put nothing but time into the business in the beginning, and I did just fine.

(Of course, that’s part of it, isn’t it? If you don’t have cash, you need to have time. Ideally, you’ll have both.)

However, it wasn’t until later on in my freelance writing business, when I was able to invest some money in some tools of the trade, some new office equipment and some marketing that my business really took off. It also helped that I found a mentor who’d been where I had been who could teach me a thing or two.

If I were to start my freelance business today, I’d spend some money. I’d make sure I had the right computer and the right work environment. I’d hire a writing coach for at least three months, and I’d buy Freelance Rockstar Freelancer and Write for the Web. I’d spend some money on marketing. If I wanted to make money blogging, I’d get into Blog Mastermind. I’d probably even hire a Virtual Assistant to help me keep organized.

So, what are the real costs of starting a freelance writing business? I can honestly say I’d put them somewhere between $0 and $20,000. Am I trying to play both sides of the fence here? I suppose I am.

The real cost of starting a freelance writing business is this: It is the amount of capital you can raise, spent in the most efficient way possible. For every dollar you can’t spend, you have to make it up in blood, sweat and tears.

Starting capital doesn’t guarantee your success, just like the lack of capital doesn’t guarantee your failure. But having some startup cash for your freelance writing business does increase your odds of success.

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

How To Start Your Freelance Writing Business: A Jump-Start

How to Start Your Freelance Writing Business: The Costs

photo credit: (UB) Sean R

We’ll pick back up on this series later in the week, folks.

In the meantime, I want to tell you about a great way to get your business off the ground. The guys over at Men with Pens are running a contest with a top prize of almost $12,000 in writing business resources, including a month of coaching from yours truly.

Go Enter The Men with Pens Sticky Business Contest today!

(Incidentally, it’s Harry, James and Charlie at Men with Pens who are responsible for my new theme today, as well. If you like it as much as I do, get over there and have them design your site.)

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

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.

———-

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

Photo by EveryNobody

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

photo credit juhansonin