The freelance writing landscape has entirely changed over the last year because of AI but that doesn’t mean the freelance writing business has faded away. In fact, it’s actually a very good time to build a freelance writing business because people are realizing that AI isn’t going to solve all of their problems, and they’re realizing that although AI is generating good content but it’s not appealing one and it’s without a soul like you’re dealing with Frankenstein.

So today I’m going to share with you 10 different types of freelance writing businesses that you can get started today. We’re going to start with some obvious ones that we’re going to work our way up to some of the ones that you might not have thought about, some of the more unique ones, some of the newer opportunities that you have this year. So if you’ve been looking to get into freelance writing you need a little bit of a kick start and you want some ideas …

1 Content Generalist

Number one and this is going to be the most common type of freelance writing you’ll find and that is a content generalist. You’re the person that can get hired by an agency, a blog, or a business and you can write an article around whatever they want you to do. I’m sure by now someone has told you that you have to Niche down.

Well, guess what! You don’t have to Niche down. You can start as a generalist, dabble in some different ideas, figure out what resonates with you, see where there’s a market, and then you can Niche down over time as you figure out what industry, what Niche, and what type of writing aligns with you and your personal goals.

The caveat to this is it’s getting more difficult to be a generalist because that is one of the easiest types of content for AI to recreate, however, that shouldn’t dissuade you. You should still try, you should still start building your business. But you should also consider some of the other types of freelance writing that we’re going to talk about.

2 Niche Expert

Number 2 is a direct response to what we’ve just said and that’s a niche expert, a subject matter expert that is where you get really good at one topic and you become the go-to person in your industry for that type of writing.

Say you’re an expert in a tech writing niche and you write about how-to manuals, device operating instructions, how-to guides, or these kinds of tech writings, then companies whether they need a marketer with deep tech knowledge, or they just need someone that can write about their Tech products, so you can do all of those things.

So when they’re looking at a generalist versus an AI versus you that has hands-on tech writing experience with all of those things who are they going to pick? Well, it’s pretty obvious choice. However establishing that expertise and figuring out where there’s a market can take time and it can be difficult, maybe you already are an expert and you already know what that industry is, if so great, lean into it.

But if you’re not super clear on what that is for you then don’t be afraid to start broad as a generalist and then narrow it down over time.

3 B2B Writing

The 3rd type of freelance writing you could pursue is one of the most lucrative out there and that is B2B writing. That’s where instead of B to C writing or Businesses to Consumer where you’re writing for people like you and me. You’re creating business-related content for other businesses.

You see there’s a lot in bigger corporate Industries like Finance, Education, and Health there are all sorts of opportunities to write business content for other businesses, and because these are usually very large and very well-funded organizations that means they also pay well. I’ve seen some freelance
Finance writers that have made upwards of a dollar a word for relatively simple articles, and if
You can find a couple of clients like that, well it doesn’t take long to have a full-time business.

4 Copywriting

The fourth one is where everybody wants to go but most people shouldn’t get started and that is copyrighting. Copywriting is the art of Being persuasive with your words if you can learn the art of copyrighting where you can convince someone to take an action with your words and be persuasive like that you will never get hurt for money ever again.

Copyrighting is kind of tough to fake it till you make it. You have to have full confidence in your ability to sell to get people to take that action and until you practice it and until you get some small wins you’re going to have a really difficult time to get other people to hire you to do that.

So unless you have a really strong persuasive writing background, unless you have a really strong sales background this is usually something you’re going to work up to, and not necessarily a place you’re going to start but once you get there, that’s where the opportunity to have a big six-figure sustainable freelance writing career is going to thrive.

5 Technical Writing

Okay, this is the type of freelance writing that’s often overlooked and that is technical writing. If you’re really good at details following instructions then maybe you can write instructions every single product out there that has an instruction manual needs someone to write that instruction manual and that’s one
of the jobs that a technical writer can do.
If you have a very specific niche technical expertise then there’re all kinds of companies in that industry that are probably going to want to hire you because finding that person can be difficult to find.

Technical writing is definitely not for everyone, it’s not always the most fun. It can be a little bit tedious and can be really challenging and thought-provoking you can get paid well for doing all that struggles.

6 Content Repurposing

The 6th one is content repurposing. There’s more content on the internet than ever before and more of a demand for content on the internet than ever before. So what smart brands and smart businesses are trying to do is they’re trying to create as much content from as little input as possible.

If someone can say go record a YouTube video and then they can hire someone to transcribe that, turn it into a blog post, or a social media post, tweets or X tweets or whatever they call it now, edit those things down into Instagram reels and turn it into emails. If you’re really good at taking one piece of content and disseminating that into a variety of different channels there is a huge opportunity out there for you.

This is one of those things that can go beyond writing. If you have some video editing skills that can really come in handy here. But even if you take a YouTube video and transcribe it and turn it into an email, blog post, or social media snippets and clips and quotes, that is something so many people are looking for right now and I think that represents one of the biggest opportunities in freelance writing
These days.

7 Prompt Writing

The prompt writing is kind of brand new it’s going to become far more popular in the years to come. AI is the talk of everything everybody thought freelance writing was going to die because AI was going to take it over but I’ve got good news for you. What’s ended up happening is that all these companies decided to fire their Freelancers and fire their writers and say cool! We’re going to let AI take everything over they’re going to create all of our content until they realize their content sucked and nobody wanted to read their content and it wasn’t doing it because there wasn’t very much thought behind
coz it was all artificially generated.

What so many people thought would happen is you’d just enter in a couple sentence prompt and all of a sudden you’d have a beautiful final piece of content. Well, that’s not really how AI Works. In order to get the best output you have to have the best inputs and that comes down to writing prompts. Often times you can have a prompt that’s 500-600 words long in order to get the result that you’re looking for.

So if you’re an expert at using AI tools and writing prompts that gets good results, then there’s going to be all sorts of people that will be looking to hire you because everybody wants to use AI. They want more content and save time and want all the benefits of the promises that AI has made, but most people aren’t willing to spend the time and money to get those results. So that’s where your part has come to play.

If you can invest in yourself and you can learn those skills and you can become an expert prompt writer there’ll be all sorts of brands and companies and publishers that would like to hire you to help run their content division. Most of these Brands don’t care how you get there as long as you do it well.

So all these brands that want to get into AI, they need someone smart who really knows what they’re doing in order to get the desired results. So if you’re willing to invest time and energy that’s a skill that is going to pay off for a long time to come.

8 Transcriptions

The transcription is something that’s maybe a little bit of a dying breed because of the AI apps for this, but there’s still a big opportunity there. Especially in the medical field, medical transcriptionist is still a very real thing. There are freelance opportunities for you to transcribe video content, audio content, and a lot of handwritten content that needs to be digitized.

So yes there’re a lot of tools out there to help make this easier and faster. There are plenty of organizations that have so much of this work. They need someone to manage that process and especially if you can learn how to use some of the latest digital tools out there to help you speed up that process and make it more accurate.

9 Proofreading & Editing

Number nine proofreading and editing. Yes grammarly is out there and yes it’s mostly pretty good but it’s not that good to be fair. I use grammarly all the time and it is helpful but with some blog posts, I get someone prompting me with a mistake or an edit. So there’s still a big opportunity for proofreading and editing jobs.

if you are a detail oriented person this is especially true considering self-publishing is more popular than ever. So there are a lot of people who need a proofreader or an editor to read their books, white papers, and sales pages, there’s an unlimited amount of content that can benefit from a second set of eyes and while tools like grammarly are pretty good they still aren’t quite as good as having a detail-oriented person do it by hand.

So if that’s you and you really like to get into the details and the nitty-gritty of the content, there’s a good opportunity to freelance.

10 Email Outreach

Finally, the last type of freelance writing that I’d consider is email outreach. There is an art to email outreach. People who can send a cold email that actually gets opened and gets a positive response that is one of the most valuable skills you can learn.

I’d say copywriting is the most valuable skill, well this is a subset of copywriting that has very specific tactics strategies, and methodologies. But if you can learn how to do it, all of a sudden a whole new world is going to open up to you and most people don’t know how to do that.

So there are a lot of companies that do cold emailing for a variety of things. Maybe it’s SEO and needed backlinks or they want to get guest posts or trying to get PR opportunities, whatever it is.

If you can be the person that a company can hire and say hey I’m going to go write all these cold emails for you, I’m going to get you a bunch of leads, a bunch of clients, and make you a bunch of money, there’s a big opportunity.

So specializing in email outreach is still a huge industry that’s often overlooked by Freelancers. There are all sorts of different types of writing that are going to fall into some of these categories. Learning how to write a proper sales page, how to write an about page, how to write an email sequence, and how to write a good newsletter that’s engaging and gets people to sign up. These are all kind of forms of copywriting but you can specialize in any one of those and create a sustainable freelance business.

So my goal to write this is just to open up your mind to the freelance writing world that exists right now. Many people are gonna be like oh my God! AI is taking over everything, the world’s coming to an end and there’s no opportunity at all.

So I’d rather say, there’s so much opportunity right now. You just have to understand the new rules of the game. You have to be persistent, you have to have a thick skin and you have to be willing to be a little bit creative and figure out what sets you apart and you can do that within any of these types of freelance jobs that I just talked about.

So I hope you found this valuable & would appreciate your thoughts in the comments section.

Cheers!

Also read: How to build a writing habit in 10 steps