Freelance Writing Job: One Secret to Becoming a Six Figure Writer

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December 8, 2009

I love Twitter because I find out so many interesting things about how other freelance writers conduct their careers. Yesterday, I was scrolling through my Twitter stream and clicked on a link from this fellow freelance writer. It was an interview conducted with six-figure freelance writer Kelly James-Enger.

A Six-Figure Freelance Writer Reveals One of the Secrets to Her Success

The Editor of the site, Maya Payne Smart, writes of Ms. James-Enger:

She credits her success to the decision to specialize: She could handle more assignments while doing less legwork. “I just found it saved me a lot of time. You can reinvent the wheel over and over again with stories like how to lose weight. Since I have the knowledge and background, it makes things easier.”

six-figure-freelance-writing-job

Ms. James-Enger’s road to success spoke to me on many levels, but this really stood out to me because it’s what I’ve been telling freelance writers for years, eg, in the June 2006 article entitled, The 3 Most Common Mistakes Freelancers Make (& How to Remedy Them), I wrote:

. . . I’m adamant that freelancers should specialize. It’s not that you can’t go outside your specialty, but if you target a specific market, you build your client list that much faster and can service them better. Once you have your bread and butter clients, you can choose a secondary market – if you feel it necessary.

The Road to Being a Six-Figure Freelance Writer: 2 Reasons to Specialize

Build Client List Faster: If you have a specialty as a freelance writer, it’s easier to find clients to market to because you’re not spreading your marketing efforts too thin.

For example, if you wanted to do legal writing, it’s easy to find prospects to market to, eg, The Bar Association, legal website directories, or do simple Google searches using relevant keyword phrases like “legal websites”.

Increase Your Hourly/Project Rate: To paraphrase Ms. James-Enger, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel when you specialize. In essence, you harness knowledge you already have to turn out more work. But since you’re working with the same subject matter, this cuts down on research time, writing time, editing time, etc.

Same skill set. Different clients. Higher rate per hour/project.

I experience this first-hand all the time. I have several clients I write for on a weekly basis. I write articles and/or blog posts for them covering the same subject matter. When I first started with one client, it was an area that I was only tangentially familiar with. After almost a year of writing on this client’s subject matter though, I am intimately familiar with it.

Now, I can write a 400-word article and a 250-300 word blog post in 30-45 minutes. When I first started it would take me anywhere from an hour and a half to two hours.

As another example, the first SEO writing gig I landed was for a mortgage site. I went on to write hundreds of articles in other niches for this client who gave me my initial shot as an SEO copywriter, but he hired me first and foremost because he needed some mortgage articles written and I had pitched him as a real estate/mortgage writer. 

And, we all know how the whole “SEO writing thing” has panned out for me, right? :-)

Want to Be a Six-Figure Freelance Writer Quickly?

Specialize!

Does it mean that you can’t take on writing projects outside your niche? No, absolutely not. As six-figure writer Marcia Layton Turner says in another post in the six-figure writer series on the above-referenced site:

Try not to say no to an assignment unless you are sure you cannot do a stellar job. Ask for more time or different parameters, but don’t turn down the work. If you do, the editor will find another writer and you may lose a client.

One of my mottos has always been this: If you want to achieve something, find someone who’s already doing it and emulate them. So if you want to be a six-figure freelance writer, take advice from these two ladies, for they are where many strive to be.

Hope you’re having a great week!

Yuwanda
P.S.: Find this post informative? Follow Inkwell Editorial on Twitter.

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One Response to “Freelance Writing Job: One Secret to Becoming a Six Figure Writer”

  1. Blogging Tips: One Way to Breathe New Life Into Old Posts : Inkwell Editorial says:
    April 8, 2010 at 6:28 pm

    [...] written in Feb 2005, but is still relevant – as I talked about in a more recent post, Freelance Writing Job: One Secret to Becoming a Six Figure Writer (Dec 2009). [...]

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