Starting a freelance writing career isn't as easy as you think, but there's no reason you can't make it easier on yourself with these seven easy steps.
Starting a freelance writing career isn’t always as simple as it sounds — but it can be easier with the right approach. If you’re wondering how to become a freelance writer and feeling unsure where to begin, you’re not alone.
Many aspiring writers dream of building a flexible, independent career. Freelance writing offers plenty of benefits, from setting your own schedule to choosing the clients and topics you care about. But taking that first step can feel overwhelming — especially if you don’t know what to expect.
Whether you’re exploring freelance writing for beginners or ready to take your first paid gig, we’re here to walk you through it. In this guide, we’ll share seven actionable steps to help you start freelance writing with confidence and clarity — no guesswork required.
Before you can begin your journey as a freelance writer, you'll need to choose what type of niche you want to focus on. Be more specific about your industry to increase your chances of finding work.
For example, you might be interested in writing about sports and athletics. But, it's worth specifying in particular areas, such as athletic training, injury prevention/rehabilitation, etc.
This will give you more ‘depth’ as a professional writer and allow you to bring more to the table when looking for prospective clients. You’ll also benefit from focusing on multiple images that are related to each other to help expand your presence in a particular industry. Focusing on a particular niche can help in creating more targeted and relevant writing samples. Creating writing samples for your chosen writing niche is essential to showcase your skills and attract potential clients. You can upload these samples on your website or publish them on platforms like Medium and through guest posting.
So, although you may be interested in technology, finance, and real estate, you will have to build up these portfolios separately, which is something that can be particularly time-consuming.
As you may anticipate, it’s not reasonable to expect a large number of clients to hire you if you aren’t able to prove how effective you are as a writer. More often than not, clients will want to see a handful of relevant samples to demonstrate your freelance writing skills before they consider taking you on for a project.
So, this means you’ll need to get your best samples together before you begin searching for freelance work.
If you’ve written in the past at a professional level, this process is relatively straightforward. If you don’t have any past projects that you can showcase, however, you’ll need to write your own samples from scratch. This means creating content for imaginary clients to build a portfolio when you don't have past projects to showcase.
This means creating content that you would make for a client as though you were working for them. You do this to illustrate what you’re capable of. Afterward, you’ll need to gather your samples in a centralized location that’s easy for clients to access.
In the majority of circumstances, having a professional website is the best method to do so.
Being a freelance writer is something that you can’t entirely separate from yourself as a person. It becomes a sort of lifestyle, and you can expect your personality to bleed into your writing (and it should).
To take this a step further, freelance writers should heavily emphasize branding themselves appropriately. This means there should be a consistent theme or set of attributes among anything you put out online, including social media posts.
Having a dedicated writer website is crucial for establishing a professional online presence. It helps attract high-paying clients and serves as a platform to showcase your work and network with other writers. Writing guest posts for other platforms can also help build your brand and showcase your skills.
For example, a professional freelance writer who specializes in technical writing isn’t likely to post memes or political humor on their professional social media account. In general, this individual’s way of communicating should reflect their writing, which in this case would be formal and pragmatic.
The more comprehensively you brand yourself, the better idea potential clients will have of what you’re able to provide. So, be sure to keep this obligation in mind throughout the entirety of your freelance writing career.
In an ideal world, you would have clients knocking at your door to see what type of content you're able to provide for them. In reality, though, your situation will be far different during the early stages.
In fact, you may not have a single client approach you for the first year or two that you work as a freelance writer. So, you’ll need to master the art of pitching your capabilities to potential clients. Actively seeking and pitching clients is a fundamental aspect of securing work as a freelance writer. Setting aside dedicated time to pitch clients, especially through cold pitching, can be particularly effective for beginners to secure work without facing intense competition. Freelance job boards can be highly competitive, making it difficult for newcomers to secure work, so alternative approaches like cold pitching are recommended.
One of the most important things to remember is that you should keep your pitch as short as possible, as not everyone has the time or desire to read through a long-winded email. A general template to remember is to briefly introduce yourself, explain what you have to offer to that individual, and provide a link to your portfolio.
Put simply, the easier you make it for a client to learn about you, the more likely they are to actually do so.
As previously mentioned, it’s imperative for you to have an outstanding portfolio in order to show the type of work that you can provide to clients. But, this won’t take you very far if you don’t showcase your work effectively.
For example, if getting your ad copy featured in a Coca-Cola advertisement is your highest achievement, you'll want to showcase that with a high-resolution photo. Showing up with a blurry, low-quality image of your work won't do you any good — it won't matter how good the copy is.
To elaborate, you should seek to optimize the experience that your clients have when looking through your work. This means that they should be able to seamlessly switch from one project to the next, avoid the need to download projects to view them, etc.
Otherwise, you may find that people quickly lose interest, which will cause you to lose out on potential business. As time goes on and you secure more projects, you should replace the weaker pieces of your portfolio with stronger ones.
Eventually, you’ll have a well-rounded portfolio that is full of quality projects, something that will drastically increase your chances of getting hired. Collecting testimonials from previous clients can also build credibility and showcase the value of your services.
Even though you’ll be writing for a living, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t seek to improve your skills in your free time. In fact, it’s fairly easy for freelance writers to stagnate if they are consistently writing about the same topics and never expanding their knowledge. Remember, formal training is not necessary for success in freelance writing; practical skills and determination are what truly matter.
Instead, you should allocate a certain amount of time per week toward learning about the industry, refining your technical abilities, and exploring new avenues of your niche that you could succeed in. Practice writing regularly, whether through blogging or other means, to continuously improve your skills and establish credibility in the freelance writing market.
With the rise in popularity of various AI tools and writers, you can also use these to your advantage to brainstorm new topics or develop your writing even further.
For example, you may write primarily about software development and cybersecurity. By learning all that you can about the technology space, you'll be able to provide higher-quality content to clients through your increased knowledge.
Other ways that you can improve your writing abilities include taking online courses, enrolling at a local community college, or even visiting a writing workshop.
This is something that many freelance writers (as well as freelancers in general) struggle with during the early stages of their careers. This is particularly true for those who are coming from traditional 9-to-5 jobs, as those often require far less time management than a freelance career does.
It's essential that you do not get in the habit of wasting the time that you should spend working. This could easily lead to establishing a cycle where you stay up late into the night in order to finish projects that should have been done hours (or even days) ago.
Since everybody functions differently in terms of what time of day they're most productive, there isn't a set schedule that works for every freelancer. This flexibility is one of the benefits of freelance content writing and the work-from-home writing jobs it provides.
What you should aim to do, though, is calculate the amount of money that you would like to make within a month and then figure out how much time you need to spend working each week in order to reach this amount. Then, you need to figure out when you plan on working during the week.
Regardless of how you choose to work, be sure to hold yourself accountable for falling short and reward yourself for reaching goals. This will help you stay motivated as time goes on.
But the above information will make the process far smoother. From here, you’ll be able to know exactly how to get started as a freelance writer and jumpstart your career as soon as you’re ready to dive in. Having a well-defined marketing strategy is crucial for enhancing client connections and project opportunities, leading to better client acquisition and brand visibility.
Online writing plays a significant role in building a successful freelance writing career. Want to learn more about what we have to offer? Feel free to reach out to us today and see how we can help.
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