Freelance Writing: Simple Tips on Complicated Topics
Personal Marketing – How Should a Freelance Writer Market His/Her Work?
There is a wide variety of competencies a freelance writer requires for success. However, I would rank marketing as one of the most critical skills, right after facility with writing. Why?
It is simple – if you freelance, then, by definition, you don’t have a consistent and stable job. That is why marketing yourself is so important – it flushes more jobs out of the underbrush! We have addressed this topic before, but let’s have a quick refresher! Here are some techniques:
Samples: be ready to offer examples of your best work. If you have created exclusive content, sharing such material might raise issues of copyright infringement. To avoid this, we suggest that you craft a number of samples specifically to introduce your work to prospective customers.
You can, if you are careful, take the thrust and general outline of a successful paper, and re-work them with additional material and different illustrative instances for your arguments. If you have thought deeply about a particular question, you doubtless have more than one paper in you on the same topic! Offer to forward samples by mail or by web.
Résumé: be creative with it! We certainly don’t mean to imply that you should fabricate anything, but rather that you should present yourself in a manner that distinguishes you from other professionals out there on the market. Consider the examples of the ways graphic designers lay out their résumés.
I’m sure that since you are a freelance writing professional, you can find ways to ‘color’ your CV. Use active verbs, specify achievements, use numbers, times, volumes, and other tangible facts to add substance to your work history. If you can do so legally, include links to anything of yours that has been published on the web.
Without breaching the confidentiality of your past clients, list general topics about which you have written in the past, as well as unpaid experiences and hobbies. List your time zone to signal your times of greatest availability.
Your goal should be to make your work and life history interesting to read. At the same time, it must be fully and accurately informative.
Don’t forget to connect your online and off-line presence! Be sure to include your online contact information (addresses, Facebook pages, Twitter accounts, website URL) on all your correspondence, business cards, email signature, flyers, and any other form of communication. Your professional identity has to be visible and accessible without need for searching or guesswork.
Some online publications currently claim that Twitter and Facebook are changing blogs and blogging, as we know them (you can Google this topic, if you are interested). If you have a blog, you need to be able to connect it with your social website pages (using Facebook, and Twitter badges, etc.).
Make sure to mention your blog in your online correspondence and activities. For example if you have posted an article, be sure to request readers for comments, instead of just asking them to respond to you in a message. This increases buzz , and therefore traffic, at your site, giving your writing the impression of greater impact.
We also understand that there might be other freelance writing communities in which you might be interested, apart from ResearchWritingCenter.com (which we know is the best of course). Thus, if you want to explore them, we have no objection. Well, we might be a bit jealous:)
After all, we realize that sometimes orders that you find appealing are not available through us: maybe because they weren’t placed with us, or perhaps because they already had a preferred writer assigned to them.
When all is said and done, our main goal is to help you prosper as professional and responsible freelance writers. That’s why we want to make sure that you develop fully as masters of the literary arts! Clearly, the more experience you acquire, wherever you acquire it – the better you become at what you do! Duh!
Another suggestion I always share with freelance writers, is to avoid letting the information in your head get too stale! This means that you need to stay abreast of your field, in writing generally (for example, if citation requirements change), and current with world news. A freelance writer needs to be informed about everything going on in the world, above and beyond their field of expertise.
How can you achieve this if you are not on a campus with access to an online database? An inexpensive way to manage this in more specialized or technical fields, wherein scholarly journals are accessible only through costly subscriptions, is to search on the table of contents for the premier journals. Even just reading the titles and abstracts of articles regularly can often offer clues to what is transpiring in your discipline.
Thank you for your attention! Have a great day 
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