You may have heard a lot that freelance writing is the best way to build an online business, and you took their advice, you listened to them (that person might have been me) but then you actually start going through all the work. You start setting up your site, you start pitching people for jobs, you start trying to find clients, and sheesh! nothing happens! Nobody wants to give you freelance writing work and you might be thinking hey Ali! You’re full of crap! That is not the best way to get started online. Apart from how qualitative & persuasive your writing is, what are the most common freelance writing mistakes you should avoid while doing your freelance writing stuff.

The reason that you’re not getting those freelance writing jobs is probably pretty simple. You’re probably making one of five critical mistakes that new entrepreneurs mostly make. That, fortunately, is super easy to fix so that’s what we’re gonna talk about today.

The five biggest mistakes new freelance writers make that keep them from getting high-paying jobs that allow them to quit their job, spend more time doing stuff they love, and travel the world or whatever they’re willing to do. We’re gonna talk about it today. Let’s roll into this.

There are five common mistakes that new freelance writers make so they don’t get their business to the point they want to be.

1. You Aren’t Focusing on Marketing

Alright, let me ask you a fairly simple question if you were to say what is the number one most important thing for a business to make money, get new sales, and bring new customers. What’s the most important thing a business can do to generate sales and customers.

If you said marketing, you’d probably be right. Marketing is one of those simple fundamental things that is crucial to all businesses and mistake number one is that most freelancers don’t spend any time marketing, now let’s face it.

Marketing can be scary if you’re not a business person if you’re not an entrepreneur if you’re not an extrovert if you don’t like social situations if you don’t like putting yourself out there if you’re afraid of rejection if you’re scared of any of those things. Marketing can be terrifying and that’s why most freelancers don’t do it. The whole reason you probably want to be a freelancer is so you can be anonymous and you can work online and not have to actually talk to people in the real world.

But here’s the thing, marketing is essential to any business, and freelancing is not exempted from this. One of the biggest things you can start doing right now is instead of worrying only about your website, instead of worrying only about your writing samples, instead of worrying about all of a little bit new show, that is important it’s gonna help you build a business that’s gonna help you get jobs, but start worrying a little bit more about the marketing for your business.

Start spending an hour a day on marketing and let’s be realistic. How much time are you actually spending right now on marketing tasks? Guess! It’s an hour a day! Isn’t even an hour a week. If you’re like a lot of new freelancers it’s probably even less. So how do we change that? What are some of the marketing-related things you can do for your freelance business starting right now that will actually matter?

Set Up a Big List

One of the first things you should do is set up a big list.

You’ll need to create a big spreadsheet of every potential client that you can find. You can do this by going to Google. Google things like a digital marketing agency, SEO agency, SEO company, marketing company, etc. You’re gonna have hundreds if not thousands of potential leads if you do that. So, create a spreadsheet with the contact information for all of those people and start creating your list.

So, set aside a little bit of time every day to peruse job boards to go to in-person events. Now once you’ve got the list, set aside a few minutes a day to email some of those people. Start with three a day, and send three personal emails to potential clients a day. If you do that, I’m willing to guess within a month you’ve got a client, probably a high-paying one, and probably more than one client. Look for other marketing social media writing meetups that you can go to and get to know people in person. Go and hunt for new and potential clients by yourself. Take the Hints: Linkedin, Facebook, Writing Job Boards Online, Twitter Hashtags, Quora, Writing Blogs.

2. Think Like a Business

You’re probably not thinking like a business. You’re probably not even treating it like a business. Maybe you are merely focusing on ‘I’m gonna be a freelance writer’. No, you are a business, start thinking about the specific things you can do that are going to make your business money. Your potential clients don’t care about what color scheme you’ve been obsessing about on your website, they don’t care about the perfect headshot, they care about what you can do for them.

So, what are you doing to make sure you’re articulating the value you can provide to a potential client? Think like a business, think strategically, and don’t worry about the business structure in the business set up, the LLC, or whatever. Don’t think like ‘I can’t do anything until I have a business bank account’. No, don’t worry about any of that because those are details that are just going to get you bogged down. You are already a business.

If you’re in the United States, by default you are a sole proprietor you don’t need anything additional than that when you’re first getting going. Don’t be overwhelmed by all the extraneous technical stuff. But do worry about the business things that have the potential to make you money.

3. Improve the Quality of Your Pitches

Mistake number three. Your pitches are substandard. About 98% of the pitches I get for guest posts or links or interviews, they’re horrible like really bad and I’m guessing that there’s a good chance that some of your pitches are really bad. They’re either too boilerplate. You’ve got a template and you just sent the same thing to everybody or you’re not giving enough information to help someone make a choice about whether or not you can actually be beneficial to their business.

Fortunately, this is a super easy fix. How do you do it? How do you send better pitches? It’s pretty simple. Be personal, be a real person, treat the person that you’re emailing like a real person so you’ve got your big list of potential clients, and go to their website. Who is the person that’s going to be in charge of deciding whether or not they should hire you? Use a tool like an email hunter or LinkedIn.

Be professional but be brief. Ask for permission to send over more information. Respect their time and most importantly give them an out “it’s totally cool if you’re not looking for writers right now but I’d love the chance to work with you now or in the future”. By giving them that, out it shows that you respect them personally and the chances are at the very least you’re going to get a positive response.

Work on the personalized pitches and it’s gonna give you fruit in the long term.

4. Follow Up

Mistake number four! You’re not following up. You send that email; you send it out there and then you forget you’ve ever sent it to them. Because it was probably an inauthentic mail merge thing and you didn’t realize who you’re sending it to either way you’re not following up properly or if you are following up, you’re doing it in kind of a douchey obnoxious way.

So, most of the follow-up emails I get are automated. It’s from someone that’s saying ‘oh I just get lost in your inbox’ or something. But this is really important so I know you wouldn’t have intentionally neglected it.  So, I didn’t want to hear from you, to begin with, let alone your automated follow-up.

So, when you’re actually following up you at least want to be authentic and you want to be respectful of their time. Again address them by name. Personalize it like Hey! I totally get it there’s a chance that’s might have gotten lost in the shuffle just wanted to check back in to see if you had a chance to check out my previous email, if not or you’re not interested that’s totally cool just let me know and I won’t bother you again.

Doing that again respecting their time, respecting the fact they might not be interested in going to make them that much more likely to be interested. It’s sort of counterintuitive but showing someone respect and showing that you treat them as a real person that’s gonna go a long way, don’t do automated follow-up sequences, set a timer, or a notification to ping you. If somebody hasn’t followed up and then send them a personal email.

Give more value to being personable by sending real messages to real people because most people don’t do it. Just be authentic you’re already ahead of the game, you’re gonna start getting more jobs in opening up more conversations, they might not hire you right away they might not need a writer right this second. But if you can open up the conversation then that leaves you with the opportunity to do something in the future as well that’s what this is all about.

Just making relationships, making contacts so that over the long term you have a lot of potential leads, a lot of potential clients, and a lot of potential people to work with.

5. Be strategic About Your Writing Samples

Then the most important thing you can do is at least show you’re a good writer. You know the writing stuff that’s gonna allow your personality to shine through. Write stuff that shows how to proofread and you have correct grammar. It doesn’t really matter what the topics are about, as long as you can prove that. It’s informative, entertaining and you can be a reliable person.

Those are what people are going to be looking for. They’re gonna look at a piece of writing and say okay! This might not be around the exact topic that we need but they clearly are smart they’re engaging and they’re good writers. Let’s give them a chance.

Meanwhile, I definitely recommend you get your freelance Services website set up so that you can show people what you’re all about. You can let that personality shine through if you’re just getting going and that’s a roadblock for you, then write these posts on LinkedIn or write them on Medium, write them somewhere where you can point people towards to say hey here are some examples of my work.

If you’ve already got a blog of some sort then just leverage that. That’s going to do a good job of showing off your personality. That’s gonna do a good job of allowing people to dig into some of your writing samples and some of your blog posts to get a sense of who you are. So, don’t be afraid to leverage a brand or a resource that you’ve already got if creating something new is proving to be a challenge.

Summing Up

So there you go! those are five huge mistakes and if you fix any one of those mistakes, you’re going to start getting more jobs, more high-paying work, and more consistent work.

Think about your marketing, treat it like a business.

Start sending better pitches,

Follow up on your pitches and really think about your writing samples.

And how you’re coming across to the world or someone who might be thinking about hiring you.

If you do that you’ll friend your freelance writing business is gonna blow up in a good way and hopefully open a lot of doors to give you more freedom to allow you to work from home or travel or do whatever you want to do in life.

That’s what we do here at the blogging regime. We help you build a business that gives you more freedom so that you can spend more time enjoying the things you want in life.

Just drop a comment below I read every single one and I’ll do my best to respond. Thanks for being here.

Cheers!