AaronTurpen.com

Once you’ve committed yourself to becoming a freelance writer and have set up your business practices (a plan and your financial bookkeeping), you’ll need to find work so you can begin to generate an income.  Your primary source of new clients and jobs will depend on the type of writing you’re focused on and whether you’re brand new to the business or have already established some connections.

The Newcomer to Writing

I’ll start with the newcomer.  All of us started at this point sometime and most of us made a lot of mistakes as we stumbled through the process of building a writing career.  Just remember that as a writer, you have two assets: your name and your reputation.

The more well known you are in your chosen field of writing, the higher your rates can be and the easier it will be to find new work.  The better your reputation is, the more likely you are to find people seeking you out directly as opposed to having to find new work yourself.

The best advice I can give the new writer is to always remember that your name and reputation are paramount, so always proceed accordingly. Finish the job and do the best work you can every time, no matter what.  Whether the job pays $10,000, $100, or is being done gratis, do your best work.

Here is what you’ll learn as a new writer: this business requires a lot of work.  I mean a lot of it.  Expect to make $1-$5 an hour on average while you’re establishing yourself.  That could take a month or a year or several years, depending on your chosen genre and abilities.  Once you’ve begun to establish yourself, expect the hours to stay grueling, but the money to begin to increase.

There are several avenues for the beginning writer to find publication, but many of them will pay little or nothing at all.  These jobs will usually establish your name and reputation, however, and are a good way to build a portfolio.  To find these jobs, first set up your online profile.

Head to LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and other places on the Web and build your profile there.  Start your own blog, if you have a specific area of interest you’d like to write in.  For instance, to help establish myself as a writer on environmental and eco-technology subjects, I started a blog on Blogger.com (for free) and eventually built a website with its own domain and hosting as the blog became popular and I became more well-known.  You can view Aaron’s EnvironMental Corner to see what I’ve done, if you’d like.  Blogging puts you out there regularly and allows you to flex some creative muscles that you might not get to do with paid projects for other people.

To find places to get published and begin building your name, start with blogs, non-profit groups in your area of expertise, and your local newspaper.  There are thousands of publications out there that are struggling to get established or are on a very low budget who will be more than happy to use your writing if it doesn’t cost them much.  These usually “pay” by giving you a link-back in a small author’s bio.  To utilize that, make sure you have a website, a LinkedIn or Facebook profile, etc.  Twitter is best used to promote your writing once it’s published.

On of my early biographies to appear on articles I wrote for small publications looked like this:

Aaron Turpen is a freelance writer living in Wyoming, USA. He writes on several subjects including the environment, alternative-fuel vehicles, and politics. You can find him on his website at www.AaronTurpen.com.

Note that while the bio is simple, it contains enough information to tell people who I am and what I write about without appearing to be a sales pitch.  Shorter biographical blurbs are more likely to be used by editors than are long, wordy ones.

Once you’ve begun building a portfolio, you should begin looking for paying jobs.  We’ll get to that next.

The Established Writer

If you’ve already established connections in the writing/publishing business, you can probably leverage those towards more work.  Most of my work, for instance, is by referral and from repeat clients.  Even those of us who’ve been doing this long enough to have connections, however, will need to sometimes find new business.

As an established writer, you should have already done the things I’ve outlined in the above section for new writers.  If you don’t have any networking set up online, you should start right now.  It’s amazing how often otherwise unrelated links between one or another of your social networking profiles can end up panning out.

Not long ago, I was working for a guy in California and had a hole in my schedule to fill and make some extra money.  I mentioned this to the client, who put it on his Facebook Wall.  Someone in his network saw it and clicked over to my Facebook profile.  She sent me a private message and asked if I would be interested in writing a short series of articles on a particular subject.  I took the job.

Without social networking, I would never have linked up with this woman and gotten that job.  Since then, I’ve had people approach me through both Facebook and Twitter and, in fact, one of my steadiest sources of traffic to my personal and professional blogs is from Twitter.

Next week, we’ll look at how to find work when your network and connections aren’t paying off or if you’re new to the game and haven’t established a robust network of contacts and colleagues.

Related posts:

1. Finding Writing Work: Resources for Getting Jobs