Freelance writing is the most considerable business that beginners can start online. Because it’s the ultimate bridge business. It’s the one thing you can easily start this week even if you don’t have a ton of skills. You don’t really know what you’re gonna do, but you need to start making money relatively quickly. It’s the best resort to bridge that gap from being in a job you don’t really like or being unemployed to building some skills, some momentum, and some income. You can figure out what’s gonna be next in your life. So how can you become a freelance writer? we’re gonna talk about it in a bit more detail.

There’s a handful of different types of freelance writing like;

SEO writing

Content writing

B2B writing

Copywriting

And everything else that relates to writing. The process for becoming a freelance writer within any of those mediums is all pretty similar. If you’re not totally sure what type of freelance writing you want to do yet, I’ve written a post on the best types of freelance writing for people that are just starting out. So, make sure to go take a look at that post after this one.

1. Take Stock of Skills You Already Have

Step One to becoming a freelance writer is to take stock of the skills you already have. You can become a freelance writer in literally any field any industry. If you’ve already got certain expertise in a certain field, you definitely should try and leverage that. The best way to do that is to make a list, go through your work experience, your hobbies, your skills, things you really like, things that people ask you for advice on your education, your volunteer experiences. These are all things you could potentially draw from for your freelance writing niche.

So, first off, you have to identify your current skill set, make a big list of every skill, every piece of knowledge, so we can go through it and figure out how to resonate with a profitable niche and your background.

2. Choose a Niche

Okay, the second thing is to take a look at that list you made, and then we’re going to choose a niche with freelance writing. You could be tempted to say, ‘well I can write things for anybody’. Well, if you’re someone who’s looking to hire a writer, do you want a writer that can write on anything, or do you want a writer that specializes in your very specific topic? You’d definitely prefer to hire a writer who specialized in his niche, rather than hire a generic one.

It’s pretty hard to choose a niche when starting a blog, most of the beginners get stuck at this. So, you don’t need to be hard enough while choosing a niche at the beginning. And it’s okay to start writing, rather than focusing on which niche is best fit for you. But as long you go in your freelance writing career, you’ll gonna realize that now it’s time to get further niche down in your industry.

Let me exemplify this to you. Say, you love to write about pets (by the way, this is a great niche due to high search traffic) and you wanna write about it. You start writing on pet care, pet foods, best pets, best dogs, cats, birds, etc, and you are kind of generic in this niche. Now if you further niche down and focusing on just ‘pet care’, you’re getting more specific in your niche. If you funnel it down further and deciding to write about ‘dogs care’, that’s gonna be your specialty and that’s what most professionals and companies are looking for when hiring a freelance writer, and they’d prefer you over a generic writer in this niche.

Bear in mind that it can take some time to figure out what your niche is. Don’t be afraid to start out broad and then niche down as you go. It’s okay to start broad but as you start to hit on things, and as you start to figure out where your expertise comes into play, that’s the phase where you’d really focus down on that.

3. Research On Your Niche

Step three is pretty simple, once you’ve got your niche, you should research that specific niche. Make a big list of all the businesses, all the agencies, all the blogs, websites, the social media accounts of everybody within your industry, even if not everyone is a perfect fit to be a client for you. The more you know about this industry, the better off you’re going to be.

By having that list and by having the contact information of all those people when you start reaching out to try and pitch people, you’re going to be that much more knowledgeable about the industry with what you’re trying to break into.

4. Create Your Target Client

Okay, we’re progressing well! So, the fourth step to getting started with freelance writing is to create your target client or customer’s avatar. You’ll need to find out the exact person that would be your potential client.

You should ask questions like:

Who are they?

Where do they live?

How much money do they make?

What do they do for a living?

What do they do for fun?

These are all ways you can really start to get a good sense of the exact person you’re marketing towards. The more you can get in their head and understand what they need and what they want, the easier it’s going to be to offer them.

Let’s use an example. Let’s say you want to start writing about smart homes and connected devices. So, make a list of all the products this target person is using in their day-to-day life. It could be smartwatches; it could be other smart devices; it could be different apps; it could be connected car technology. These are all things that kind of fit in that smart home universe. And the bigger list you’ve got, the more you’re gonna be able to understand that person.

Next, make a list of the different places they get their information online. What are the different websites they read maybe it’s, Wired, Mashable, TechCrunch? If you’re going to get into that industry then you want to start reading those publications as well. You have to be familiar with the concepts and the things and the news they’re going on within this industry.

So, when you’re talking to potential clients you can be up-to-date relevant and be speaking the same language as them. Then start thinking about where could I write about this, and what are the types of writing I could do so you might be able to do product blogs, trade magazines, trade publications, industry sites, and other tech blogs. So, as you start breaking it down you should have a pretty good idea of the types of people you’re going to pitch.

You can write about this potential industry when it comes to the types of writing you can do. You can have a long list. It could be blog posts, white paper, thought pieces, it could be eBooks, it could be product launches, sales emails. I mean it could be any number of things so start making a list. By the time you’re done with your customer avatar, that’s exactly who you’re trying to write for.

Once we’ve got all that figured out. You’ve got a little bit of a game plan. Well, it’s time to start actually putting this business into motion.

5. Build Your Freelance Writer Website

Now once you’ve further down the road in your freelance writing career, you’re becoming a brand. Broadcast yourself as a brand by building your freelance writing website. I personally recommend WordPress because it’s the most flexible and the most robust way to do it. It’s also incredibly easy to start with. You can check my post on how to make a website using WordPress for this.

You’ll need to build up your content on your site where people are actually just organically finding you.  But when you’re doing outreach and you’re sending people emails and you’re going to events for meeting people and you give people a business card or whatever it might be the first thing they’re going to do is they’re gonna go back to that website and like, okay who is this person? Is this someone I actually want to hire?

Having your site is super important. It doesn’t necessarily have to be super robust. Either you have a home page, an about page, a services page where you talk about the things you can do for them. You might have a rates page where you talk about your pricing, a contact page, and then maybe a blog where you write about things that are relevant to the industry and you use that as a way to show off your writing ability and specifically have a handful of samples that show the different types of writing that you’re capable of.

So, this is a site you can set up in a weekend. They’re generally pretty easy to do like I said we’re keeping this basic but you want to have a way for people to check on you, make sure you’re the real deal and actually start developing a little bit of rapport so that people can see what sets you apart from the other random writers down the street.

6. Sign Up for Professional Writing Websites

Okay, the next step in that process is to sign up for a couple of professional writing websites like contently, and skyward which are the two that I recommend most. There are a whole lot of writing websites these days but contently and skyward are a good start. You can also opt for the other sites if you’d prefer to work on them, not a hard rule!

Those are good ways for you to build a profile and actually start finding some work within your industry. So, while those are two of our favorites and they’re two of the biggest.

7. Contacting Agencies

So, the next step is you actually wanna start contacting marketing agencies directly. You know sites like skyward and contently can be great to start getting your feet wet and finding some work. But often the longest term and the best paying customers and clients are the people you reach out to directly.

The personalized sort of email is well-fit for your writing business. It can be sort of painful and time-consuming, but over time it works. It truly is a numbers game. If you send 500 personalized emails even if it takes you a couple of months to do it. The chances are you’re gonna get a few clients out of that and there’s also a good chance that if it goes well.

Those are gonna become longer-term clients that pay you pretty well. The key to doing this correctly though is don’t just write a template, mail merges it, and send it out to a bunch of different people, hundreds of people. That’s not going to work or at least it’s not gonna work well. Take the time, research the person you’re pitching, send a personalized email, spend ten or fifteen minutes researching this, being thoughtful about it, follow-up appropriately because these agencies get dozens of emails a day. Do something to at least show you, and you’ve to respect them enough to send them something personal that wasn’t just a blanket template email.

8. Use Social Media

The next step is to actually consider social media as a place to start building relationships and getting potential freelance clients. LinkedIn specifically, is absolutely phenomenal for this. And frankly, most people don’t really think about it. They overlook LinkedIn even though that’s where most of your target customers are probably hanging out so here’s the best way to leverage LinkedIn to get freelance writing clients. First, find the company that’s in your target niche and spend some time cruising through their website, cruising through their blog, getting a sense for the type of content they’re creating.

Now what their site is all about, the things that are important to them, and getting a sense for the style with which they approach their content. Then go to LinkedIn and click on jobs you might get lucky and this company may actually be looking for a freelance writer, if so, that’s awesome. If not, then click on people and that’s gonna give you a list of all they’re from.

People that are on LinkedIn that work at this company. So, look for the people with titles that have anything to do with marketing or content or social media. From there, set up a contact request with a personalized introduction.

Do not, under any circumstances, pitch them for a job in this first introduction.

All you’re trying to do now is establish content. Start a relationship and get a conversation going. If you do that with enough people in your industry there’s a good chance that you’re gonna find some jobs along the way.

Finally, here’s one of the biggest things you have to do if you want to be a successful freelance writer is you have to start thinking of yourself as a business rather than just having a little side hustle or blogger or whatever you want to do.

You truly have to be consistent with your efforts. Have a plan for how you’re going to build relationships and pitch clients and spend some time every single day on marketing your business whether that’s sending cold emails, whether that’s talking to people on LinkedIn, whether that’s working on the SEO for your website, whether that’s creating content for yourself, whether that’s going to meetups, whether it’s looking on contently and skyward for projects.

I mean there’s all sorts of things you could be doing to build your brand, to build your business, and to find clients and if you’re not consistent with your efforts, you’re gonna get frustrated when you don’t have results and you’re gonna give up and probably go right back to your day job.

But if you truly invest in yourself and treat this like a business. Within days you could be paying writing work that’s gonna allow you to make the transition from being unhappy, doing something that you’re not stoked on, not having a job to actually bring in some money, having newfound confidence, having newfound skills to eventually building a longer-term legacy business that you’re gonna be running for years to come.

Final thoughts

Alright, this is the simple process to get start your freelance writing business. The most important thing is to carry on this, you need to be patient and consistent in your work. If you’re doing a day job, just let sometime in a day to this. In the beginning, you’ll need to focus and set a small goal. Don’t be overwhelmed, start taking a little step, and there you go!

Remember that the small but consistent steps always lead to a high altitude!