How to become a freelance writer according to one who's billed $5M
5 Tips To Find Clients, Land Work, And Get Paid
To become a freelance writer, the first step is to find someone who’ll pay you to do it. It takes a tremendous amount of dedication and perspiration to succeed as a freelance writer and the best way to steel yourself for the journey ahead is get your income sorted out. Do that and the validation of being paid for your work will buoy you through the hard times.
From experience, I can say that a freelance writing career can be freeing in unexpected ways and confining in others. The greatest irony is that while you are technically free to choose any client, you will, for reasons related to not having to eat cat food for dinner, find yourself picking clients that can pay.
Paying gigs won’t always be passion projects. But at the same time, your interests can bend a client’s topics toward subjects dear to you. Writing for Mixpanel, a product analytics software, I got to cover topics I care about such as sleep deprivation and the environmental crisis. For others, I inject discussions of history and philosophy into articles that’d otherwise just be about software.
It may sound counterintuitive, but becoming a freelance writer can provide greater income stability than a full-time job. That’s because a full-time job is all or nothing. If you’re fired, you lose 100 percent of your income. Freelancing, on the other hand, is flexible. If you’re fired by one of your seven clients, you lose 14 percent of your income and can quickly backfill. What may seem less stable on paper is, in practice, actually more reliable.
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Who is a freelance writer?
A freelance writer is someone who writes for businesses or publications on a contract basis. The word has its etymological roots in a term for medieval warriors for hire (literally, lance for hire, or “free lance”). Unlike full-time writers, freelancers are responsible for managing their own employment, finding clients, and paying taxes. And unlike the original free-lancers, chainmail is optional.
How to become a freelance writer with no experience: What I wish I’d known
Nobody knows exactly how to become a freelance writer until they start doing it. Some people begin by taking writing courses. Others moonlight for small clients on the weekends. No two writers have the exact same journey so don’t worry about what anyone else is doing. Whatever path makes the most sense is probably right for you.
That said, if you want some guidance, here are four steps that can help you kickstart your freelance writing career, based on lessons I learned along the way.
1. DON’T BUILD A WEBSITE (AT LEAST NOT RIGHT AWAY)
When many freelancers start out, they imitate what they see other professionals doing. They build a website, set up social media profiles, or place ads. But this strategy can backfire.
Building a website is one of the least effective ways to accumulate clients in the early days, especially since it takes time and effort for a website to accrue enough domain authority for people to find it through Google search. Plus it’ll distract you from the real work you need to be doing: Finding people to pay you and producing quality work for them. Right now, that should be your top priority.
If you really need to host your writing portfolio somewhere, save your money and create a Google Drive folder of your best samples to share with prospective clients (it’s free!). Or, if you really want a “homepage,” you can use a service like Authory which, for a small fee, will save copies of all your writing from around the web and host it all in one central location.
As you begin to build a roster of clients, you can put more effort into building your online presence. But keep in mind that these marketing efforts are a long-term strategy—not a way to kickstart your freelance career. For that, you’ll want to leverage your network, or start building one.
2. IF YOU HAVE A NETWORK, USE IT. IF YOU DON’T (YET) HAVE A NETWORK, BUILD ONE.
Who do you know who runs a business or a marketing team who can pay you to write? I bet you can think of a former employer, an old coworker, or a family friend. These are the individuals who already know, like, and trust you—people who are likely to hire you for freelance writing gigs based on familiarity alone. The US Bureau of Labor and Statistics reports that 85 percent of jobs are filled through networking.
If you can’t think of any immediate connections, try casting a wider net. You can try joining marketing Slack groups in your area (where marketers often post requests for freelancers) or cold-messaging folks on LinkedIn with relevant job titles in industries you want to write for. In-person events related to your niche are also a great way to meet people who might be looking for writers with your particular set of skills.
I don’t recommend going directly to freelance writing gig sites and expecting to make a living wage. Any promise of finding work quickly is often too good to be true. Freelancing sites like Upwork, Freelancer.com, Fiverr, and the like are flooded by similarly hopeful aspirants who drag down the pay to unsustainable levels. Far better to find your own clients—it pays more and offers more useful lessons.
3. Ask For The Work Before You Feel Qualified
Nothing holds freelancers back like their self-limiting beliefs. They erect all manner of false barriers and self-sabotage out of a fear of succeeding and actually having to do the work. They say, “Oh, I’d have to be published” or “I haven’t taken a writing course yet.” I can say as a writer who hires other writers, it’s the people who doubt themselves who are typically the most qualified. Simply by reaching out, the under-qualified often get the job. Don’t tell yourself no. It’s too much work. Let others do it for you.
If you follow this principle, you’ll find you get a lot of surprise yesses from clients. You’ll find they aren’t necessarily looking for the best writer—they’re looking for any writer. If you present yourself and look halfway serviceable, they’ll want to believe you. They want to end their search and get back to what they’re supposed to be doing. Lots of freelancing is just about showing up. Once you’re in, you can prove yourself.
You will hear no, too. Nos are terrific. They tell you all the ways in which you can sculpt your offering to get more yesses. Someone asks to see your published work? Wonderful. Go get published. They say you don’t have pieces in the right publications? Terrific. Which ones would they like to see? One by one, you can address your buyers’ objections and build a sales approach, pitch, and portfolio of work that’s increasingly effective.
4. FIND YOUR NICHE
Niches are the key to charging high rates and making your freelance endeavor sustainable. You can even have several. But know one area so well that people will pay you for your knowledge. For instance, I write for B2B SaaS startups. SaaS marketers pay me a generous rate because I write so much for the industry that I’m already abreast of all the news. I know who competes with whom, who integrates with whom, and which stories are being told and which aren’t. That allows me to be a tastemaker, judging successful topics and saving the client months of costly experimentation. Do likewise for yourself.
Don’t yet have articles published in the niche you want? Self-publish them. Sites like Business 2 Community, Business.com, CustomerThink, and Thrive Global let you submit your own articles without much involvement from an editor. You can also pitch and write for blogs and industry publications that, while they don’t pay, give you credibility in an area that’ll earn you paying work. For instance, I used to work for Marketo, a respected name in B2B SaaS marketing. They’ve never paid me a dime for writing for their blog (they get so many submissions, they don’t have to). But saying, “I write for Marketo,” has earned me at least a quarter of all my business over the last five years.
5. Conduct cold outreach
Your immediate network can only get you so far. At some point—hopefully early—you’ll have to reach out to strangers and ask for work, also known as outbound sales. If sales sounds daunting, I’m here to tell you it’s not.
Sales isn’t what you think it is. It’s not about being smarmy and doing finger guns. It’s about politely knocking on a lot of doors in search of people who your writing can help. For a marketer who’s flush with budget but starved for time to write quality blog posts, you appear like a savior. Those people will thank you for reaching out and gladly pay you (it’s not their money, anyway—it’s the company’s). Sales is about finding enough of those people to sustain yourself and writing so well that they find you indispensable and offer you more and more work.
Eventually, you won’t have to sell anymore and you can spend most of your time focusing on the craft.
Go forth, noble warrior
While guides like this one can help get you oriented, it’s just as helpful to jump in and get started. Experience, after all, is the best teacher. But just because freelancing is a solo career it doesn't mean you have to go it alone. I highly recommend connecting with other freelancers and finding folks who can help you troubleshoot your challenges and celebrate your wins. (Like with sales, start with the people you might already know and go from there). And we’ll always be here with writing resources to help you along the journey. Feel free to check out our blog, visit our resource page for freelancers, or subscribe to our newsletter.
