Every aspiring freelance wants to succeed in their writing career. So  I’m going to share with you my 10 best pieces of freelance writing advice. So if you take these 10 things to heart I can all but guarantee by this time, next year you will have a thriving freelance business.

#1 Cold Emailing

Cold emailing is better for getting freelance writing jobs than job boards. You might get dishearted already by the job boards if you don’t get any positive response from them even after trying a die-hard. It’s really easy to go to freelancer.com or go to Upwork and be like cool! I’m gonna apply for a couple jobs and you’re gonna feel really productive. The chances are you’re not going to get those jobs and then you’re gonna repeat and gonna keep going to the jump boards and guess what? You’re going to keep not getting work, and if say so,  you do get work, it’s probably not going to pay you as well as it should.

So how can cold emailing will be handy? Cold emailing always gets you more jobs than freelance job boards over the long term. It’s going to get you higher-quality jobs, more repetitive jobs clients that keep coming back to you and they’re going to be higher paid.

So is it as easy to do? No, it’s going to take a little more time, a little more prep work, little more tedious, but it works way better.

#2 The Boring Jobs Pay The Best

Yeah, it would be great to be a travel writer but you get flown all over the world and you get whined and die. Do you stay in luxury hotels and meet at Michelin-starred restaurants and you spend and get paid thousands of dollars to go and do this.

That would be great! everybody would love to do that. But here’s the problem with that. Everybody would love to do that so it’s hard to get those types of jobs and if you do get those types of jobs they’re not going to pay very well.

So if you’re actually trying to build a business that’s going to support yourself then don’t go after the luxury travel jobs. Go after the boring stuff like B2B writing, finance writing, health writing, medical writing, SEO, and boring stuff like that.

Write basic boring jobs. That’s the stuff that is going to pay the bills more often than not. If you can get really good learning about random topics that are probably going to be pretty boring, you can build a highly lucrative freelance writing career.

So if I were you, I’d stop thinking about how you’re going to get paid to write about your favorite thing in the world or something about getting paid to write about your hobbies.

Go after those boring jobs, those finance jobs, those tech jobs, those B2B jobs. I know it’s intimidating, it’s not your kind.  All the boring stuff that nobody wants to write about because usually, those jobs pay very well, and as an aside, chances are you do want to write about more interesting things.

#3 A Portfolio Website Isn’t Critical

It’s great to have I recommend it.  But if you’re just getting started as a freelance writer and you’re struggling to build that portfolio website if you’ve been spending weeks trying to perfect everything trying to get the photos in the right place maybe you’re struggling with Squarespace or WordPress, stop!

It’s nice to have but not a must-have at the beginning stage. Start doing your cold emailing and start looking for jobs instead. But if you’ve leveled up from the absolute beginner, then the portfolio is great and you should have samples of your work regardless of whether or not you have a website.

So make sure you’ve got some samples but don’t worry about the website. Yes, it can help you get jobs, and it can make it easier to build rapport and build trust with potential clients but you can absolutely 100% get jobs without it. And if you’re spending too much time spinning your wheels on that, skip it for now and start reaching out and pitching for jobs because that’s what’s most important.

#4 Embrace The Milestone Mindset

Embrace what I call the milestone mindset. You probably got some sort of financial goal, maybe it’s to make $5000 a month. If that’s the only goal, you’re not going to succeed because you’re going to be so frustrated by the amount of time it takes you to reach that goal that you’re going to get burnt out. You’re going to start spinning your wheels & probably going to end up quitting before you get there because you haven’t had milestones along the way.

You haven’t had small victories that you can celebrate. So rather than only focusing on that one BIG financial goal, set dozens of smaller milestones and celebrate those every time you hit them. So maybe just reading this post, maybe that is a milestone to read one freelance writing educational article. Or fragmentize your small victories like:

Buy your domain name, check √

Get a Hosting account, great check √

Send one pitch email, check it √

Get your first client √

Make your first dollar √

All of those things you should be celebrating. Create a series of milestones rather than one big financial goal that you don’t necessarily have control over. To be widely clear, many of these milestones should be based on actions you can take.

So rather than make a thousand dollars, it should be sending 100 email pitches because that is something you can control and that is going to lead to making a thousand dollars. You don’t really have control over when you make that amount of money. You only have control over the actions you take to get there.

#5 Other Freelancers Are Friends, Not Foes

Of course, you have to join popular forums like warrior forum or freelance writers den where you’ve got a bunch of people in there that are all trying to do the same thing. Everybody’s trying to make it as a freelancer and you might look at all those people as your competition, No.

Those are the people that are going to help you as you build your network of freelancers. Guess what? all of those people are looking for jobs they’re finding jobs and often they can’t perform the job that has come to them. Maybe it’s not their area of expertise, maybe they’ve got too much work, maybe they took on a large project and they need additional writers.

Often your best source of freelance writing jobs is going to come from other freelancers. That’s why a place like Our Community is so valuable because so often we have people that have gone through the course they’ve got successful freelance writing businesses and then they come back and say hey now I’ve got more work than I know what to do with we need to find some writers.

So don’t look at other freelance writers as the enemy because the more people you get to know, the chances are very good those people are going to be sending some jobs your way.

#6 Get A Freelancer Friend

A freelancer friend is probably the best thing you can have as a budding freelancer. So how on earth are you gonna get freelancer friends, very easily, from social platforms, and social forums like I mentioned above, just Google it.  The best place that I recommend is FaceBook, Linkedin, and Twitter.  I would say do this along with the cold emailing to really give yourself the best job of getting more freelance writing work quickly.

#7 Write Every Day

So what I got to become a successful writing business that I give you is to write every day! build a habit of writing every day. If that sounds like a struggle to you make a word goal, a hundred words a day that’s all you got to do. That should take you like five minutes.

When I’m writing more it means my business is more successful. I’m creating more content that’s going to get me more revenue and that’s going to lead to more people. Everything I do right now online comes back to writing.

So if you want to be a freelance writer getting in the habit of writing is going to be really helpful because as a freelance writer guess what you’re gonna have to do a lot of writing and if you’re not prepared to do that, you’re going to struggle. Start now, start writing 500 words a day. thank me later it’s.

It’s probably the best habit you can build in your journey to become a better freelance writer.

#8 Learn How to Send Personalised Emails

If writing every day is the best habit you can build then the best skill you can learn I often say is copywriting! It is the best skill you can learn. The best skill you can learn as a freelance writer and an online business owner is learning how to send personalized emails. I said in the beginning that cold emailing is the best way to get jobs, but learning the skill of sending a really thorough personalized email that’s going to get open that’s going to get a positive response and is going to lead to a conversation is one of the most valuable things you can learn in life.

Most people send the exact same email template to everybody they are reaching out and that’s what you have to set yourself apart. You want to do something different. So you want to do some research on every single person you email and then you want to send a thoughtful note. So learning that skill because it is a skill like learning how to send an email.

# 9 Be Organised With Your Business

Be organized with your business and the best way I have found to do this is to use a tool like Streak, which is basically a CRM for your Gmail inbox. It allows you to track all emails you’ve sent, and it allows you to schedule emails. Get a free chrome extension of streak that will help you a way better to manage and organize your tasks.

With your follow-ups, you’re going to make it much more likely to get a response from the people you’re emailing and that’s all you’re looking for at first you just want them to respond you just want them to open up the door for a conversation because then you could start building rapport and you can potentially get a job. If nobody responds then you’re kind of screwed. So by using a tool like a Streak and comparing that with personalized emails you’re just increasing the chances of them responding to you positively.

#10 Treat It Like A Business

The last piece of advice I want to give you if you’re an aspiring freelance writer is to treat it like a business. chances are you’re still working you have a full-time job maybe you have kids you probably are doing this as a little bit of a side hustle and you don’t have 40 hours a week to devote to this, but what you need to do is every Sunday sit down, plan out your hours, think of this as like you’re doing a business.

So every Tuesday from 7 pm to 9 pm you are working on this or whatever it might be. Set your hours and truly treat it like a business. Treat it like a meeting, treat it like any appointment that you would never cancel or never miss as soon as you start treating this like your business. You are going to start getting results and start getting paid as if it’s a business.

But if you don’t take it seriously and constantly pushing it to the side, you’re not going to succeed. You’re going to get frustrated and you’re probably going to quit altogether.

So if you’re getting started freelance writing or if you’re struggling currently as a freelance writer take a step back, treat it as such, take it with that type of serious commitment and you’re going to see major changes in the success of your business.