As a freelance writer, you need a wide variety of skills to succeed. Perhaps the most important skill outside of good composition skills is the ability to successfully market your services. Keep this in mind: if nobody knows that you are a freelance writer you are never going to succeed.
I feel strongly that you should market your freelance writing services everyday. While this can be a difficult pace to keep, it is crucial to your overall success. This is not to say that you have to spend hours on end marketing your business, but a few minutes here and there will definitely help.
How can you market your services on a regular basis? As of late, I have been doing this in several ways. First and foremost, I have been sending query letters like crazy. There are some days when I send out three to five queries without thinking twice. Have I had any success? Over the past month, three queries have turned into a project with two of them being long term. This is not the greatest percentage, but sending queries is a number game. If you get enough of them in the pipeline you are sure to find publications that are willing to work with you.
Moving on, marketing your freelance writing services through cold calling and emailing can work to your advantage as well. When doing this, you will be targeting businesses as opposed to magazines and other like publications. Even if you are turned down, you never know who will call you back in the future. I have been told no on hundreds of cold calls, but soon enough some of these people call with a request for help. Simply getting your name “out there†will help you immensely.
Whatever you do, make sure that you are marketing your services on a regular basis. It may be difficult to do this on a daily basis if you are extremely busy, but try your best. As you increase your marketing initiative the amount of work that you receive will follow suit.
After posting my monthly freelance writing income report, I always receive a large number of emails asking a variety of questions. This time around, it seems as if the most popular question is: which freelance writing topics are most profitable? As you can imagine, most writers want to get involved with the industries/topics that pay the most. But in my opinion, this is a mistake. Instead, I feel that you should work on topics that are of interest to you, and then find ways to make them profitable.
If you only chase projects and topics that pay well, you are going to find out soon enough that you are not having as much fun as you could. When I started my freelance writing career, I stuck to a handful of topics that were of great interest to me. They included sports, travel, and real estate. Anytime that I would receive a project on one of these topics I knew that I would enjoy it. For this reason, I spent a lot of time querying publications that fit into these categories in one way or the next.
Of course, expanding over time is very important. Although I still dabble in the three topics that I started my career with, I deal with many others on a regular basis as well. Generally speaking, you want to narrow in on a few subjects that you enjoy, but make sure that you do not back yourself into a corner.
Are there are topics that pay better than the rest? Over my time as a writer, I have not really found an answer to this question. I write for some sports magazines that pay $.25/word and others that pay at a rate of $.10/word. It is not so much the subject you are writing on than it is the company or publication that you are working for. If you want to make more money you do not need to change what you write about, but instead find companies and publications that are willing to pay you what you are worth.
Just like me, you will find that pinpointing the most profitable freelance writing subjects is next to impossible. Do not spend your time chasing after the jobs that you “think†will be the most profitable. Instead, make a list of topics that you enjoy, and then find the best paying clients within those industries.Â
Like many other freelancers I have spoken with, the first two months of 2008 were relatively slow for me. With that being said, things were not as bad as they could have been. My freelance writing income in January exceeded $5,200, and in February I went over $5,600. While I would have been semi-happy with another month in this range, I really pushed for more in March. When everything was said and done, I ended up posting a nice number:
Number of Completed Projects: 21
Payment by PayPal: 18
Payment by Check: 2
Payment by Bank Wire: 1
Total Income: $7,532.21
To what do I attribute my March income success? Generally speaking, I do not have a concrete answer as to why my income jumped nearly $2k. When looking at the numbers, you will see that I completed three fewer projects this month than last. To go along with this, I only added a couple new clients to the mix. The easiest way to explain this increase is that my regular clients sent more work my way during the month of March. There is a chance that this could stay the same in April, or that things could fall off to the workload that I was taking on during the first two months of the year.
At the end of the first quarter of 2008, I am quite pleased with my overall progress. Although I had hoped to average $7k/month through the first quarter, I am on pace to earn more this year than last. But with nine months to go there is no way of knowing how things will shape up.
What is my income goal for April? Like always, I hope to break $4,500. It would be nice to capsize this month’s income, but doing so will be a tough task. Of course, I’ll try my hardest and let you guys and gals know how things go!
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