You just landed your first freelance writing client. Fist-pump!
You’re excited and can’t believe someone will actually pay you to write. You can finally call yourself a freelance writer. But, with that excitement comes some apprehension.
You realize you need to know more than just writing to be a freelance writer.
They hired you, so now you have to act like you know what you’re doing. Invoices? No problem! Oh, you need my post to be SEO friendly? Easy peasy. Upload to your backend? I’m right on that.
Before you know it, you realize you need to know more than just writing to be a freelance writer.
Anxiety creeps in and you pray you don’t make a mistake when dealing with your new client.
Your Role As a Freelancer
Your clients hired you either to save them time and/or make them more money. For most small business, entrepreneurs and solopreneurs, time is a non-renewable resource. They can’t get it back.
So, they outsource basic tasks – like content writing – to free up their time to allow them to focus on the important things.
And when they ask you to write a post and submit it to them, they expect it to be properly formatted and done in the proper way.
Let’s look at three ways you can submit your work and what that looks like.
1. Upload to Their Content Management System (CMS)
Your client may want you to upload your post into their backend. If you’re lucky, it’ll be something you’re familiar with like WordPress – trust me though, it’ll probably be WordPress as no client would expect you to be familiar with a CMS that has a low market share.
When submitting your post in their backend, clients may also ask you to:
- Set up your author profile
- Set the Meta description
- Set their Yoast SEO
- Schedule the post
- Upload images and fill out the Alt tags
If you want to learn even more best practices, check out my complete course for new writers. I share these types of tips and more that will help you become a freelance writer.
2. Email
Most of your clients will probably have you submit your post as a MS Word document. It usually doesn’t get much easier that that. You provide the document, images and your author bio (if it’s bylined).
Just make sure you properly format your post. This means using styles and using proper line spacing.
To make sure you have proper line spacing, right-click in the styles bar and click modify.
On the bottom left-hand corner, click on format and choose Paragraph. From there make sure your spacing is set to Auto (8 pt. if you are using Windows).
3. Sharing
A popular way to submit your work is via sharing. You can do this with Google Drive. You write your post in Google Docs share with your client.
Just make sure you are using styles here too! Line spacing can be a bit cumbersome. After each sub-heading you have to set your line spacing to “Add space after paragraph.”
Important Points to Remember When Submitting Your Work Through Email
Clients appreciate when you email your work properly. It saves them oodles of time.
I recently got this email from a site owner:
So, let’s look at how we can email our work to our clients the right way.
1. Email Subject Line
For one-off submissions – guest posts, ad hoc projects, infrequent submissions – make your email subject line explicit. I tend to label my subject line, “Article submission” or “Blog post submission” and then the title of the post.
This makes it easy for your client to recognize it’s a new post since they may have a team of writers and are often getting tons of emails a day.
2. Author Bio
For bylined pieces it’s a good idea to provide your author bio when you submit your first piece to your client. And a good practice is to provide an HTML version.
If you have a WordPress site, you can just draft up your author bio and use the text mode of the post editor to grab the HTML version.
3. A Zip File of Your Optimized Images
For some of your writing pieces, you may have more than just one or two images in your post. For example, technical posts, digital marketing or WordPress based posts can have a lot of screenshots to enhance the content.
Instead of plopping them one by one in your email, it’s a better idea to compress your images in a zip file. Here’s how to make a zip file on Windows and Mac.
Look Like a Pro (Even If You’re a Total Newbie)
Doing these little things will definitely wow your clients and could lead to a recurring gig down the road.
Found this helpful? If you want a successful freelance writing business in the quickest amount of time and have the best outcome, consider enrolling in my course for new writers.
Over to you – what’s your primary way of submitting your work?
Love these tips as a newbie myself! Thanks!
Thanks Elna,
A really useful and straightforward guide which I will try to put into practice with my
own writing a little further down the line.
Kian
Excellent share and you’ve provided some useful tips. The same tips can be very well applied for guest posting.
Saving this post for the next submission!
Hi Elna,
Excellent share and you’ve provided some useful tips. The same tips can be very well applied for guest posting.
Thanks!
Excellent!
This is really helpful to our newly developed digital marketing platform Pink Cat Media to create more engaging content.
Thanks a lot for sharing the tips!
Great tips! I realized I need to work on my formatting, lol. Many thanks!
Hi Elna,
These are aweesome tips, even for a pro to remember. I’ve saved it for future reference. You rock gilry!
Bren
Hey Bren,
Thanks so much! Glad you liked my little lesson. That’s just a sneak peak of what I teach in my course!
Excelent tips as always.
Thanks for the knowledge!
Thanks Ale!
Proper formatting and submitting are my two big pet peeves and I am working hard at letting everyone know there is a right way 🙂 It’s annoying though when you write something in MS Word and then transfer it to WordPress and all the formatting disappears. If you follow my tricks that won’t happen and it’s something I teach fully in my course!
This is a really useful article, thank you. Previously, I sent in a really basic version of my byline, with the hyperlinks dangling about. The tip about formatting it in HTML is so simple, yet so important.
Hi Toby!
Yeah, I found submitting my author bio in HTML to really add a nice touch to my submission. Clients take note of that. And I know I would like it if guest contributors did the same. Because if not, I have to just do an extra step and it takes time out of my schedule for that.
Any time you can save time for your client is something you should do!
Thanks so much for this a great resource…Evernoting it now.
Hi Jayne!
Glad you enjoyed these tips! If you ever need to boost your career, consider my course 🙂
Hi Elna,
Very good points you’ve made here. It’s not just the writing but delivering value at every step of the client interaction. Loved how you broke it down into actionable bits to wow the client.
Wish you a great year ahead!
Patricia
Hi Patricia,
Thanks so much! It’s true as freelance writers we are more than just a writer. We have a lot of tasks delegated to us and it’s our job to ensure we accomplish them all with every client piece we send.
I’m on the hunt for every freelance writer to use styles and proper line spacing with MS Word or Google docs as most clients prefer this method of submission 🙂