Are you pitching like mad and seeing no success? You don’t get it, because you check the job boards constantly, hustle day and night and want to get paid for your writing.
As a new freelance writer, you may think all you need to “make it” are good writing skills and a knack for researching any topic, but you’re missing one important part to making a living from writing.
You have probably heard the saying, “People do business with people they like.”
Have you ever noticed how you keep going back to a particular service provider or business that may not necessarily be the best in their field, yet you return time after time?
If you’re anything like me, X/Twitter takes up a lot of your time.
Whether you’re scrolling through a trending hashtag for a laugh or two or desperately stalking your favorite celebrity, it’s that kind of place where time seems to disappear.
As freelance writers, most of us blog as a way to generate traffic and showcase our own content. If that’s the case, your goal is probably to keep your readers coming back and recommending your work…right?
Like most of you, I was an avid blog reader long before I was a blog writer. Over the years, I have subscribed to hundreds of blogs. Some I stuck with and some I discarded along the way.
Marketing is not a task most writers look forward to. It is, however, a necessary evil.
I hear you groan at the thought already. It’s nice and safe behind your laptop. Getting out there is scary. But the importance of including networking in your marketing strategy cannot be stressed enough. To land clients and grow your business, you need to get out there.
It finally happened:
You landed a guest post on a very popular website. You don’t want to screw this up, so you take the next week to fine tune your piece.
You research extensively, make sure to link back to other popular posts on the blog and spend hours crafting the perfect headline.
Already have a LinkedIn profile? Good! Perfecting your LinkedIn profile is the first step to finding freelance clients through that network.
That’s not merely enough, though. With over 380 million users already on LinkedIn, you are in for a tough ride if you rely solely on your profile to land writing gigs.
How you handle yourself on the network and how you communicate with your connections is far more important for your success on LinkedIn.
Freelancing has taken off in a big way in the last few years and it is predicted that by 2020 more than 40% of the US workforce will consist of part-time or freelance workers.
Certainly, the US (and to some extent the UK as well) dominates the freelance industry and making a success of a freelance writing career is much easier if you are based in the US or UK.
For the rest of us international writers, it’s a lot more challenging. We face challenges US and UK-based writers do not have to contend with.
