If you want to be a freelance writer one of the tasks you have before you is to find work. As a freelancer, you’re responsible for finding the work to make bids on so that you can keep your cash flow positive. Locating high-paying freelance writing jobs is possible, but you need first to be ready and then know where to find them.
Know Your Audience
Understanding who you want to write for is an imperative that cannot be skipped. Many people will often say that they’ll write for anyone about anything because they’re fast at learning topics. However, it’s hard to market that. You can take that work if you want to as it comes, but you should market with a focus to the audience who can afford to pay you what you want to earn and who need work about topics you are familiar with.
Get Clear on The Types of Projects You Want to Do
Knowing the type of projects, you want to write also helps. For example, if you’re going to be a grant writer that is an entirely different type of writing than if you want to ghostwrite Young Adult novels or write blog content about all things WordPress, for instance. You need to know what you want to work on and who needs that type of work.
Know the Movers & Shakers
Once you’ve identified your audience and the types of projects you want to work on, now you need to find the movers and shakers in that arena. Not the writers. You want to find experts to follow in the niche who have followers. Those followers may be people who need the writing, and the expert may also need the writing. It totally depends on the niche, but remember that you don’t want to always hang out with other writers you want to hang out with people who need your services.
Publish Your Own Work
While you’re working on finding high-paying freelance writing jobs you want to keep writing. The only real way to get work in a creative arena like writing is to have samples in the niche you want to write about including the different types of content from blog posts, to emails, to copy, to eBooks and so forth. Publish it on your own site or to Amazon as a Kindle book so that you can show people your work. While you’re writing, you might as well get published in industry magazines (for pay and for free) using your own byline. This will help you get more work.
Set Up Your Website / Portfolio
Using the information that you’ve gathered, and your knowledge about your audience and the niche you want to write in, set up your website as a portfolio but also as a landing page that helps weed through the audience and onboard new clients. For example, you can add a scheduling app to let them schedule discovery calls to a landing page offering your writing services.
Get the Right Systems & Tools
Don’t skimp on systems. At the very least you need a three-stage funnel which will require an email autoresponder, a website, and a scheduling app. The way it works is that someone sees a link to your site on your Author Profile on Amazon, or LinkedIn (or anywhere) they click it. Once clicked they will go to a landing page to sign up for a discovery call. Then they’re on your email list, and once you talk to them, they’ll be that much closer to choosing you if you’re right for each other.
Pitching regularly is a necessity if you want to keep your client roster full. Setting up automation to make some of the pitches easier to come by is always helpful, but you’re still going to have to submit a lot of pitches. Most people will have to make about 10 pitches to get one or two projects.
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