Freelance
Writers' Series
Career & Business
Development Help
How to Quickly, Cheaply & Easily Find Freelance Writing Work This depends on many factors, but primarily, your niche and your marketing budget will determine how you find freelance writing work to a large degree. I can only tell you how I do it. So, here goes … Remember, I’ve been at this a long time -- since 1993. In the beginning of my career, when I did mostly editing and copyediting, I found a lot of my work by word of mouth. As I come from a publishing background, I had industry contacts I relied on for my first projects.
Satisfied customers
then recommended my services to other customers and so on. The Best Way to Find Freelance Writing Work When You Are Just Starting Out Compile a Contact Database: I recently started to do SEO writing, which I wrote about here. Even though I’ve been a freelancer for many years, as this was a new genre for me, I had to start from scratch. Every day, I scoured the internet for companies to contact. How did I know which ones to contact? As I wanted to write SEO content, I typed the term “seo company” into Google and literally went page by page, clicking on every result returned, finding the contact information, and sending an email to them. If I couldn’t find the name of a specific person to contact – and most times I couldn’t – I’d use an opening line like:
Dear XYZ SEO Team: This way, at least they know I’d dropped by their site and wasn’t spamming them. Tip for finding contact info: Read the “About Us” page. Sometimes, you can find info on the owners/managers there. When it did list this, I always use a formal introduction, eg: Dear Mr. Smith. If you make contact with a certain number of companies every day, eventually you are going to get work. Depending on your niche, it can be hours, days, weeks or months – but you will get work. Another example: Years ago when I ran my editorial staffing agency in New York City (Inkwell Editorial), when we started the staffing division, we used to send out a certain number of faxes/emails per day. We’d get the newspaper (usually the New York Times) and go through the classified section – every single job listing – and write down the fax number and/or email address. Then, we’d fax/email them a short note introducing our service. Because we had no money to market initially, this is how we got job orders to start rolling in. In fact, this method worked so successfully that when we were able to hire a full-time office assistant, one of her primary duties on Monday was to go through the Sunday Times and gather those fax numbers and email addresses, and send out the flyer. The beauty of it is, once a client uses you, if you service them well, they will likely become a client for years to come. This is the quickest, easiest, cheapest way I know of to get work – consistently and persistently contact a certain number of companies every day. Where most fall down is that they give up too soon, ie, they don’t do it every day. Try it for 30 days and see what your results are. I practically guarantee – unless something is wrong with your message – you will get work.
Good luck!
In this ebook, I
outline exactly how I went from 0 clients to 14 writing
assignments in
The best part,
I’ll show you how to start from scratch – with no experience, no samples and no
Read here about my $250, five-hour day – after marketing for just over a week.
Freelance Success Stories:
There are freelancers who make very good livings at what they love. Inkwell
Editorial's newsletter features these successful professionals who put to rest
the phrase, "starving freelancer."
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