Freelance Writing

The growth of the internet, especially over the last ten years, has lead to a huge increase in the number of people turning to writing as a means of earning their living. The ability to write a document electronically and deliver it online within minutes to the customer, has lead to an explosion in the number of methods available to writers to get work. The flexibility that a writing career can offer when combined with working at home is attractive. As a result, the competition is fierce with more writers entering the marketplace every day from all over the world.

It’s imperative that you ensure your writing is of the highest possible standard to ensure you attract customers with high quality output.

As well as good quality writing, you’ll need to get a flavour of the market that you’re aiming for. If your forte is fiction, you might target magazines that publish short stories. Alternatively, you may have a more practical and informative approach to writing and be more suited to technical writing, web copywriting or article writing.

If you are trying to sell an article without a prior commission, you will need to research your target publication or market. It’s important to ensure that the article you write would ‘fit’ with the style, type and subject matter of the publication’s other pieces. The article will need to be something that the editor would want to publish, possibly related to some current hot topic or significant upcoming anniversary.

If you can write articles, take a look at constant-content.com. This is a site, through which, you can sell articles to webmasters, either as unique articles for use only once, or as reprint articles for use by many webmasters. It's becoming well known and many freelance writers are starting to show some earnings.

Whatever your specialist area, it’s essential to understand what is saleable writing and what is not. If you are taking on a technical writing contract, the content, style and depth of treatment of your work should be entirely in accordance with your customer’s requirement and the commission you have been given. For this reason, you would generally not be able to produce a piece of technical writing and then decide who to sell it to.

If you have received a commission for work, this should specify the subject matter, the length and possibly the required style for the publication that has commissioned the work.

An excellent resource, well worth perusing regularly, is online-writing-jobs.com which has a comprehensive list of job postings that you can look through.

Web Copywriting

For some, the term copywriting is linked to sales or promotional writing but is nowadays more associated with the writing of web page content. Whether you agree with the definition or not, there's no doubt that the opportunities to produce web page content (or copy?) as a freelance writer are growing.

The contract/contact sites mentioned are good starting places for this kind of work, but so are some of the webmaster related forums. Take a look at the digitalpoint.com copywriting forum for a good example. The site is more targeted towards webmasters and search engine optimisation specialists, but the copywriting forum is frequented by many freelance writers looking for work as well as webmasters looking for writers to produce original content.

Freelance Contract Sites

A booming type of site is the direct contact/contract site. These sites started out generally for software coders but now carry all types of work including content writing for websites, and editing or proofreading contracts. Some of the most popular ones at the moment are:

You will notice that there is stiff competition on these sites especially from Asia and the Indian subcontinent where the prices quoted can be much lower than those of equivalent specialists in North America or Western Europe. They are well worth watching though, as new projects are posted every day and the demand for native English speaking writers is very high.

You will soon be able to tell by looking at the pricing, whether or not this is a market area that you are willing to operate in.

You will notice that there is stiff competition on these sites especially from Asia and the Indian subcontinent where the prices quoted can be much lower than those of equivalent specialists in North America or Western Europe. They are well worth watching though, as new projects are posted every day and the demand for native English speaking writers is very high.

You will soon be able to tell by looking at the pricing, whether or not this is a market area that you are willing to operate in.

Ad Revenue Related Sites

There is an increasing number of websites claiming to pay you directly for your ad-hoc writing these days. Unfortunately, the sums involved are generally minimal and are invariably linked to the website’s page advertising revenues. Generally you will submit a piece of writing or an article which will be automatically published on a page within the website. This page will generate advertising revenue and you will receive a percentage of this revenue through time, based on the number of visitors to the page. The likelihood of ever earning significant amounts of money this way is very small. These sites can be helpful though, if you’re looking for subjects to practice your writing on and get your name established on the internet. Two very popular sites are:

More Reading

Read our Where, When and How and Getting Organised pages for more tips on how to approach freelancing and writing in general.

For an excellent blog posting with great tips for how to train and prepare yourself for freelancing, take a look at Vangelis Bibakis’ Midnight Blogging page. This relates to computer programmers but contains some great tips that are equally applicable to the home-based writer. Alternatively, take a look at the FAQ page on writingthoughts.com for some great observations and info.

For a bit of lighter relief, try Mr Lemley’s Top 7 Rules of Freelance Writing.

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