Earlier this year, Cara Siera was featured in $1,000 100 Ways by Nick Loper, the business guru behind Side Hustle Nation. Recently, one of Nick’s readers reached out with some questions about getting established as a freelance writer. We’ve got all the deets right here.
While specifically discussing experiences in the field of content writing, many of the principles below would be useful for starting a business of any sort – especially if it involves remote business-to-business services.
Get a copy of $1,000 100 Ways. I’m on page 130, in case you were interested.
Getting Started as a Freelance Writer
If you’re interested in a writing career, you no doubt have the skills to back it up. There are two main steps to starting your freelance writing career: building an online presence and getting your first clients.
Build Your Brand Online
Today, most people immediately turn to Google for whatever information they need. For a business to succeed, it needs to be visible where people are looking for it – online. The following steps have been beneficial for me – I’m confident that they’ll help get your business off the ground, too.
Create a Portfolio Website
My first step was to create an online portfolio on the Wix.com platform. There, I listed everything I’d ever published, no matter how insignificant – even if the article was published with no attribution or byline. I included hyperlinks when possible. I also updated the portfolio regularly as my clients published the articles they’d purchased.
Another function of the portfolio website is to clearly outline what services the business offers. In my case, this was editing, proofreading, ghostwriting, content writing, and photography. I also clarified the types of work I wasn’t willing to accept. For example, I came to abhor writing resumes, so I removed that service from the site.
Should you list your prices on your site? That’s up to you. On the one hand, listing your price will eliminate inquiries from low-budget projects who won’t end up hiring you anyway. On the other hand, it locks you into a price – you can’t set a higher price for a particularly difficult project.
Don’t forget SEO, regularly posting, and all those reasons clients hire you to write for their sites.
Set Up a LinkedIn Profile
Next, set up a LinkedIn profile and link it to your website. Your LinkedIn profile is much like a resume – it highlights your education and work experience. You can link your publications there, too. Also, select the setting that lets recruiters know you are open to new employment. Clients or companies may contact you through LinkedIn messaging.
That’s how I started working with the photography company Ocus – a recruiter reached out to me on LinkedIn. Learn more about how to become a professional photographer.
Set Up Yelp, Google, and Bing Business Listings
At the outset, we mentioned that people often Google the services they need. If they type “writers near me,” you need to be on top of the list!
Listings on Google, Bing, and Yelp are free, and they may also offer free advertising credits.
Here’s another tip: be sure to include a contact phone number. When you look up a business, you expect to be able to call them. People will expect the same from their writer or editor. If you’re not comfortable putting your personal number online for everyone to see, consider getting a digital phone number to use for your business.
Create Social Media Accounts for Your Business
Facebook and Instagram are the big players here. The key is to create a professional account separate from your private social media. Make sure that everything you post reflects well on you professionally – don’t post anything you wouldn’t want your boss to see.
Getting Your First Clients
Now that clients have a means of finding you, how can you convince them to hire you and get paid?
“The Website”
I chuckled a bit when I realized that my comments in $1,000 100 Ways had been edited to remove the name of “the website” I used to launch my business. Well, I’m going to reveal it here, because I think it is the best jumping-off point for freelance writers: Textbroker.
Textbroker is a marketplace platform that connects writers with businesses, organizations, or individuals in need of written content.
Here’s how it works: you’ll complete a sign-up process that includes a short writing sample (150 to 250 words) based on a given prompt. From your sample, you’ll be given a rank as a two, three, or four-star author. This determines which articles you’ll have access to and how much you’ll be paid per word (you can always improve your rank as you go along).
You can then select orders you’d like to work on from a pool of “open orders” that are organized by category. This is what makes Textbroker superior to other content/creator websites like Upwork or Fiver – there’s no bidding or competition. You won’t waste days trying to land a gig (and perhaps not landing one at all). Once you click on an order, you have a few minutes to decide whether you want to work on that item or not. If you accept an assignment, it’s yours. Textbroker is there for you as a definite source of income.
Granted, Textbroker’s open orders offer just 1.4 cents per word for 4-star articles. Yes, that’s a bit low. In my first few weeks on the platform, I only made about $6 per hour. But it gets better in time. Here’s how:
- You’ll quickly learn what type of articles you like and what you don’t. You may find that certain clients are more picky, while others just say “I want 300 words on this topic” and take whatever you give them.
- You may be asked to join teams. Teams complete high volumes of orders for a single client. When each article is formated the same, you can work a lot faster. Teams also offer higher per-word rates.
- You can also get direct orders. If a client likes an article you wrote from the open orders pool, they may ask you to create more articles for them. Direct order rates are ALWAYS higher than open orders, and you can negotiate your own rate.
Are there any drawbacks to writing with Textbroker? Yes. In addition to the low per-word rates, your articles are not attributed (your name is not in the byline) and you may not even know where they’re being published due to strict client confidentiality standards. If you do happen to know the client’s website (i.e., if they give you a blog post link as a sample for writing style, etc.), you have some great material for your portfolio.
Getting paid is also easy on Textbroker. There’s no chasing down clients or sending invoices. Each week, you can request a payout for articles that have been accepted.
I first started using Textbroker in 2016, and I still work with a few direct order and team clients via the platform. I appreciate having a go-to source of work between outside projects. But you’ll want to expand your business beyond this one website – you don’t want all your eggs in one basket, after all. How can you grow your business?
Back to Branding
We discussed online branding above, but I think it’s worth reiterating here. Google searches, links to my website, my LinkedIn profile, and Yelp listings have been among the most successful means of finding clients – or, you could say enabling clients to find me.
What About Cold Calls?
One of my favorite resources, when I was starting out, was The Well-Fed Writer: Financial Self-Sufficiency as a Commercial Freelancer in Six Months or Less by Peter Bowerman. Cover to cover, this book helped me get my feet on the ground in the content writing industry, and I highly recommend it.
There’s just one caveat – I don’t believe in cold calls the way Bowerman does.
I tried. I rehearsed. I wrote out a version of Bowerman’s cold call script on an index card. And I didn’t get a single response.
In case you’re wondering, cold calling is a type of telemarketing in which you advertise your services to someone. Maybe you offer them a great deal and tell them why they need you to write for them.
I also made cold calls in the form of emails and postcards. I handed out business cards. Nada. Zip. Zilch.
For me, making my business visible to other businesses who are actively searching for a writer or editor online was the best way to go. This could be due to the fact that I’m from a “small” city – no skyscrapers – where most businesses don’t use outsourced writers or editors. That said, I also found that I enjoyed working with companies across the country and across the world more than with local contacts. Remote work eliminates the need for work brunches or coffee shop meetings!
Should I Offer Free Samples?
It’s often taught in the realm of content creation and graphic design that you might have to offer free work to a client in order to prove yourself. In my experience, that doesn’t work. Companies that don’t want to pay you in the beginning aren’t likely to pay you later.
If you need a few portfolio pieces, go for it. But remember – you can also create portfolio pieces based on imaginary businesses or your own passion projects. So long as it displays your skills, it doesn’t matter whether it was for a real business or not.
There are times when pro bono work can benefit you in profound ways. Maybe there’s a website you can submit an article to that may give your profile link some exposure or look really, really good in your portfolio. For me, that free work was for Brevity, an online journal of the literary magazine Creative Nonfiction. Publication with Brevity gave my portfolio a solid start. And today, I still submit sometimes.
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One part Lois Lane, one part Jimmy Olsen, one part Johnboy Walton, and a bit of that Clark Kent secret identity thing thrown in for good measure.
Cara Siera is a freelance writer and photographer with a passion for travel and exotic cuisine. Join Cara, her husband Marc, and one very spoiled German Shepherd on their next great adventure.