BEGINNERS’ GUIDE TO FREELANCE WRITING: THE PLANNING

The most legitimate way of earning money online is using your creative skills. As a blogger, we are already gifted with creative skills. Most importantly, anyone with the gift of writing can pursue a career in freelance writing.

There are probably billions of newspapers, news portals, magazines and websites right now in the world. Every virtual space in the WWW runs with content. Leading brands, commercial farms, entrepreneurs and even the bloggers need help with creating content for their website.

The demand of creating content has given birth to the digital content marketing and freelance writing careers. If you are well enough put your thoughts in a piece of paper or as in this case, MS Word, you are good enough to start freelance writing and build a work from anywhere in this world.

But how do we start freelance writing? How to get work as a freelance writer? How to get clients who will pay a decent rate? Is my writing good enough to demand money?

We are going to discuss all the questions so that you can also start freelance writing, dear friend!

In this beginners’ guide to freelance writing, we are going to learn the following:

1. How to start freelance writing
2. How to choose your niche as a freelance writer
3. Where to look for freelance writing work.
4. How to pitch as a freelance writer
5. How to create a writer’s portfolio
6. How to increase your productivity as a freelance writer
7. Social Media accounts to follow as a freelance writer
8. Books to read as a freelance writer

Please note that this blog post is the first part of the Beginners’ Guide to Freelance Writing.

Read: 10 SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS TO FOLLOW AS A FREELANCE WRITER

How to start a freelance writing

How about you start with researching?

Yes.

In this first part, I will be guiding you to choose the right direction for your freelance writing. And this direction starts with reading and researching.

There are three ways you can go for.

First, you can register for any freelance writing website like Upwork, Freelancer or iWriter.

Second, you can apply for content writing jobs under any content writing firms.

Third and the most important one, you can pitch to various websites and magazines which pay fixed amount of money per article.

The first two options, they are always subjected to the following factors

• Highly competitive. People from all over the world bid for any writing assignments and only the pros make it to get the assignment.
• Pay is very minimum. The starting pay ranges can start from as low as .50 paise per word.
• You do not have any say in the matter of pay or the deadlines for the work. If you are not ready to go by the clients’ norms, fine, there are thousands waiting for the same assignments and they may want to work at lower wages than you.
• There is no dignity. If you lower your wages to get working assignments, you may never able to get good orders and there is little difficulty to raise your writing rates.
• Most of the content writing farms want you to write non stop for them, like 2-3 articles of 800 words per day. It affects the creativity and making you quit even before you have started.

This is why I never suggest the new writers to apply for any writing gigs from the freelancing websites and apply for any content writing jobs from home. The promises would be great but if you fall in this trap once, you will regret it forever.

Freelance writing does not have to be a low paying job or something that you do not enjoy. It can be a fun job and rewarding if you are alert from the first day where you would apply for such writing gigs.

Yes. There are still people who would not want to exploit your inexperience and writing skills.

There are lakhs of magazines and websites in various fields who are constantly looking for fresh voices. Take any field be it food, travel, health, technology, aviation or fashion, people always love to read and know about new and fresh things.

You can be that fresh voice and get paid by following some important steps.

And there are magazinese and websites which pay up to $500 per article (which is equal to 35,000 INR as of August, 2018) Imagine writing at least two articles per month which pay around 10K regularly.

But as amazing as it sounds, it is not easy to land such gigs in your first attempt. The road is full of thorns and disappointments.

You need to be patient but aggressive in applying for such writing tasks.

But how do you do that? Well, let me show you the steps.

These steps are not easy and taste your patience but at the end of the day, they are worth of every minute you invested.

These steps are called W.R.I.T.E.

And it also starts with research. Research and planning about how you would proceed.

Choose your writing niche

First let us research your niche. The process of choosing a topic you will write is crucial to your success as a freelance writer.

You can read about how to choose a niche for your blog

Choose a topic which interests you greatly. There is no point of writing a topic that you do not enjoy. To write better, you need to enjoy writing the topic.

Look at the following figure. It clearly shows how to choose the right niche for your freelance writing career.

Choose a niche which you love to write, you can research if you are new to this field and something that the readers want to read. (After all, there is no point in writing a subject which no one reads)

Read: How To Choose Freelance Writing Niche

Research the market

Before you even start contacting different magazines and website editors, it is important to know about the market.

Read magazines and websites in your chosen genre. You can easily install any app which allows you to read different magazines in a nominal price.

Similarly, you can also read various websites articles.

Now go through the articles. Check their style of writing. Check the editors and regular contributors. Check their Twitter accounts and keep note of what type of content they share.

Note down everything. Now compare your style with them. I am sure your style of writing would match with any of them to some extent. Pitch to those articles first.

Now, it’s time to W.R.I.T.E.

W.R.I.T.E. stands for Writing-Reading-Interaction-Target-Earning

It is a system that I follow to pitch to different magazines and lending article gigs. It will help you to create the confidence to earn money by freelance writing.

Writing

It involves researching and writing about your goals as a freelance writer. Writing down your ideas and working on it after doing thorough research will give you confidence and clear path of where you want to apply.

Divide your content ideas according to the magazines you have shortlisted. Choose 2-3 topics against every websites/magazines.

Then start writing down a small note on why you think that these topics would be suitable for the particular magazine/website’s audience.

Also write down 4-5 lines about each topic.

Now, write down a cover letter on whom you are and why you want to write for the magazines. If you have some online writing samples, this is the place where you would want to insert to give yourself creditability.

(What is writing samples? More on that and how to create it in my next blog post.)

Now, it is time for reading.

Reading

This step involves reading the about page of the magazines and their submission guidelines. Read everything carefully. This step is often crucial to know if you have done the first step accurately or not.

For example, some magazines want the full article and some want only the idea of an article. Read it carefully and then go back to your first step and change the necessary. Once you are done, it’s time to interact.

Interaction

Most of the magazines have a dedicated email address for submission. They also have dedicated social media accounts where you can ask about anything.

Craft the first email carefully following all the guidelines from the website. Mostly it involves 2-3 paragraphs in the email body about you and your ideas, cover letter and writing samples.

Never send the article unless the magazine asks for it. You can also interact with the magazine on the social media occasionally about the content they publish.

Twitter and LinkedIn are the best places to get prompt response in this matter. Normally the submission desk can take up to 4 weeks to reply to your email. If they do not reply, politely inquire about your submission. In most cases, they reply if there is a possibility of them publishing your content.

If they do not, it’s time to move on and apply for another. The rejection hurts. Trust me, I have felt the pang more times than I can actually count.

But the mantra here is to pitch unless your ideas are accepted by more than 2 magazines. The email from the submission desk also negotiates the pay for the article.

Target

Once you are set to write for the magazine or website, you will be given a deadline. You can choose that deadline as your target or you can do what I do.

I set an economic target for every month. And I always pitch to the high paying magazines. If I get accepted by a magazine which pays $100-500, I write only 2-3 articles which would help me in achieving the target.

Writing 2-3 articles per month helps me to devote my time into other writing like this blog and my books.

Earning

Once your article is published, it is now time to get paid. Most of the magazines which pay good are based out of India.

In this case, you can create an account in Paypal or Instamojo. Some of the magazines only pay in Paypal but you also can share your Instamojo link with the concerned authority.

You can create a Paypal account here. Once you click the link, choose the option freelancer.

To create an Instamojo account, click here.

So, I hope the W.R.I.T.E. would help you to crack the freelance writing and earn money.