By Joe Dyton
One question I am often asked is “Where do you find your freelance writing clients?” Funny enough it was the same question I asked when I was at the early stages of my freelance writing journey. I was always most interested in reading the “Where to find freelance writing clients” section of books about freelance writing. After all, there’s no freelance writing business without clients to write for.
What I realize now is that freelance writing clients are everywhere—you just have to know where to look. Here are a few places where I have found freelance writing clients—and I think that you can, too.
Job Boards
This is a great spot to start finding freelance writing clients. When you cold pitch, you have to ask the prospect if it has a need for freelance writers. Job board posts let you know exactly what they are looking for in terms of job duties, workload and if you’re lucky, the estimated rate, so you can determine if that post is worth your time to apply.
The other way you can use job boards is to look at posts for full-time jobs with the job title you’re looking to do on a freelance basis (blogger, staff writer/journalist, copywriter, social media content writer, etc.) You can reach out to these companies and ask if they could use a freelance writer while they conduct their search (and possibly beyond!).
Some of the job boards I’ve had success with include:
• Journalismjobs.com
• BloggingPro
• ProBlogger
• Indeed
• ZipRecruiter
The downside of job boards is you’ll have a lot more competition than if you were to look for companies to pitch on your own. If you’re seeing a job on a board, so is everyone else. This is why job boards should be one place to find freelance writing clients , but not the only one.
Former Employers
If you’ve worked for a few companies, who better than them to pitch your services to? This is especially true if you wrote for your previous employers when you worked for them full-time. They know your writing abilities, so they will be more comfortable having you as a freelancer than a stranger. You will start to find there’s no easier place to pitch your freelance writing services to than somewhere that already knows you.
If you did not write for your previous employer(s), that’s OK. You should still reach out to them. If you worked at a smaller operation, ask if you can write marketing materials, rework the company’s website copy, write blog posts or contribute to/create a company newsletter. Did you work for big corporate clients with marketing, public relations or content teams? Find a contact within those divisions and let them know you’d like to contribute.
Friends, family and former colleagues
Again, take some pressure off of yourself when it comes to pitching and reach out to people you already know! Send out a mass email or post on your social media platforms and let your contacts know that you’re looking for freelance writing opportunities and to please let you know if they hear of anything. You never know who will know of someone who’s looking for a writer and when!
Do you still keep in touch with old colleagues? If so, look at where some of them are working now. If it’s somewhere that you’d like to write, reach out and see if they can make an introduction. When companies need a freelance writer, they often need one right away. It will be music to their ears if they’re presented with someone who an internal colleague can vouch for. It eliminates the time needed conducting a search—on both the company’s end, as well as your own.
Yes, I know I already mentioned LinkedIn in the Job Boards section, but I also wanted to give it its own space. I wanted to break out LinkedIn because with the right strategy, clients can find you on the platform, rather than the other way around. We’ll go into more details about LinkedIn strategies in a future post, but I’ll say now that having “Freelance real estate and insurance content writer” as my LinkedIn headline has gotten me work that I didn’t have to go looking for.
Putting the right key words in your profile can go a long way towards finding freelance clients, or rather a great way for clients to find you.
Creative Recruiters
Looking for and pitching clients can feel like a job on its own. It can also become tougher to make time for it as you start to get clients. Creative recruiters can take some of the search burden off of you by looking for prospects on your behalf. Since you’ll supply them with information about you (topics you feel comfortable writing about, experience, desired rates, etc.) the recruiter can present prospects that are a good fit.
It will still be up to you to sell the prospect that you are the writer for the job, but you don’t have to worry about searching for companies to pitch. There is a trade off, however—the recruiter makes money off of placing you with a client. If you found the client yourself, you’d get 100 percent of the rate you negotiated. That is why like with job boards, make recruiters part of your overall client finding strategy, not all of it.
Recruiters are looking for gigs for other writers too, so you’d be wasting valuable time if you’re sitting around waiting for them to send you leads.
Finding freelance writing clients might be tougher than the writing itself. What makes the search easier is knowing exactly where to look—fishing is a lot easier if you have a guide that tells you where best spots to catch fish are, right? My hope is this post will make it a lot easier to locate your next freelance writing client targets.
Thanks for reading,
Joe
Joe Dyton (@JoeDyton) is the President and Founder of Dyton Writing and Editing, and a freelance insurance, real estate and personal freelance writer. He’s written for Connected Real Estate Magazine, GEICO and Student Loan Planner. He can be reached at joe@dytonswords.com.