So, you want to learn how to be a freelance writer? Freelancing is a great option to keep yourself supported as a college student. If you’re exploring work post-graduation, you know how little American grads get paid starting out. This is why many motivated individuals have started turning to freelance to generate extra income and earn money off of skills they developed in school.
In this article, we walk you through the basics to succeed in the writing gig industry.
Seek Out Training
Don’t worry, you don’t have to have an English degree (although ideal) to qualify as a writer. A degree or diploma in related fields such as psychology, journalism, and sociology helps immensely, as studying the arts builds up the critical skills needed for writing. If you don’t have the time or money to get a degree, look up online certificate courses to build your skills. As long as you can write well and demonstrate reasonable skill through your writing samples, we promise you that a university degree (or lack thereof) won’t be an issue.
Attract Clients
You’ve got the training, now what? Begin by looking up industry-specific sites like Problogger and Freelance Writing Jobs. Check out job boards (this list by Elna Cain is super handy) that post daily, well-paid gigs. You can also always put your services up for hire on marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork. This reduces your headache significantly, as clients will come to you rather than the other way round.
Take On a Few Starter Jobs
Everyone has to start somewhere, right? To build up the credibility you require to land well-paying gigs, you need to begin with low-paying jobs to generate feedback. We won’t glamorize this – starter jobs aren’t fun, and you’ll be doing a lot without much ROI. But once you’ve laid the groundwork with a few jobs, you’ll have work samples to show future clients. And a writing portfolio is the hot ticket to graduating to better-paying gigs in the industry!
As you begin writing, be sure to create a business entity for long-term success. An Employer Identification Number, or Tax ID Number, is what the IRS uses to track your payroll taxes and identify your business. Be sure to pay attention to your IRS EIN filing so that you’re set up for a stress-free tax time (both for federal and annual taxes).
The beauty of this business is – anyone can become a freelance writer. While degrees and past qualifications certainly help, freelance jobs are open to pretty much any individual who can show off their stellar writing skills. And it’s profitable too! Use writing as the tool to transform your income (and life) today!
As a former banker, Jim McKinley uses his background and skills to provide advice and valuable resources to anyone who needs help with their financial literacy. In his spare time, Jim spends time with his family and his dogs and he maintains his website Money with Jim.
Aspiring to become a writer as a college student may seem retro from a certain point of view. With so many modern occupations related to IT, AI, and digital industries, becoming a writer can seem antiquated.
However, book publishing is still on an upward trend despite eBooks and audiobooks becoming more popular. As a college student, you are in the perfect position to shape your writer’s career into something truly special. Before you jump into it, here are a few things to keep in mind as you start your writing career.
1. It Might Take a While Before you are Published
Before you devote yourself to a writer’s career, you should know that getting published isn’t easy. Take Brandon Sanderson, a giant of modern fantasy literature, as an example. Sanderson wrote 13 novels before he managed to sell even one, after which publishers took notice of him and the rest became history.
His story serves to drive an important point home – you will need supplementary income to live off of before you go big as a writer. While he was developing his literary universe of interconnected works, Sanderson worked full-time in a hotel. Becoming a writer takes passion, dedication, and discipline. If writing is your calling, this bump in the road won’t stop you in the slightest.
2. Look for Inspiration in Contemporary Writers
While you can look for your writer’s muse in the literary geniuses of the past, it might be better to look to contemporaries for inspiration. Depending on the literary genre you feel drawn to, and whether you gravitate toward prose or poetry, there are dozens of writers to look to. Haruki Murakami is a writer whose surrealist writing is juxtaposed with existing historic facts about art, philosophy, and music.
He is the prime example of how pouring “yourself” into your writing can result in mesmerizing, world-renown writing. Research their careers and look for the roots of their writing career to see how they came to be where they are now. Taking “writing” from a pedestal and seeing it objectively will allow you to get a much better perspective on how to succeed going forward.
3. You will have to Dedicate Time to Develop your Writing Voice
When it comes to the subject of writing, originality isn’t as important as much as your writing style and voice. Take Dan Brown, the renowned author of Angels & Demons, and many other Robert Langdon books. His writing style is far from beloved by literary critics. However, each book he publishes is a best-seller almost immediately – why is that?
It’s not so much about “what” you write about as it is about “how” you write it. This is why you should also look for admission services help if you are writing your admission papers as a future freshman or college student. Put in the effort to hone your writing skills and a style unique to your personality – that’s what publishers and readers enjoy about authors.
4. Set your Daily Writing Schedule and Stick to It
Discipline is a major component of becoming a successful writer. While it is true that you cannot create art under pressure, writing a book is a monumental task that will take months, if not years. For a good example of a disciplined author, we need to look no further than Stephen King, who needs no introduction.
His writing habits consist of working on new materials four hours a day, each day. This has resulted in King producing writing materials for his publishers at an unprecedented pace. As you begin to develop your career as a writer, you will have to create a strict schedule and abide by it. Writing a few sentences here and there won’t help you reach the point of looking for a publisher any time soon. Put in the time to express your ideas in writing every day, and the results will speak for themselves.
5. Consider Freelance Writing as a Professional Exercise
Lastly, there is a way for you to both work on your writing style and earn an income while developing your career. Platforms such as Upwork and Fiverr offer a plethora of projects in a variety of niches for writers such as yourself.
You can work as a blog writer, ghostwriter, or content creator for websites in need of different types of writing. This will help you manage your financial situation until you reach a point where you are ready to present your work to a local publisher. Freelance writing is also flexible, meaning that you can pause or quit if a better opportunity arrives, making it a good choice for college students.
Getting from Here to There (Conclusion)
If becoming a writer is what you are passionate about, there will be no stopping you once you hit your stride in writing new materials. Be mindful of the reality that writing isn’t easy and straightforward. However – it is a battle with yourself to remain focused and dedicated enough. If you can manage that, you will build a successful career as a writer straight out of college, doing what you love.
Author’s bio. Jessica Fender is a professional writer and educational blogger at Bestwritingadvisor, an aggregator for useful college resources and websites. Jessica enjoys sharing her ideas to make writing and learning fun.
To put it simply, a marketing copywriter is a person who creates texts to sell products. It can be email messages texts to send them to probable customers, materials for advertising, articles for company websites, or short slogans for TV or radio. In other words, it does not matter what kind of text marketing copywriter delivers, but it does matter how it impacts the company sales volume.
The need for marketing copywriting specialists is huge: there are 3,406 Marketing Copywriter jobs on the Glassdoor site with an average salary of $25-200K per year.
Where to Start
The main must-have skill for a marketing copywriter is the competence to create in readers the desire to act. For instance, to click the Buy button right after reading the text in the company blog, or to visit the company website after hearing the advertising slogan on TV. Therefore, a proficient marketing copywriter knows how to make entertaining content and understands how it will impact readers.
So, if you are interested in a marketing copywriting career, you should find out more about marketing strategies and PR. It will be not enough just to catch the main trends or tricks for marketing copy. Still, since selling is very connected with human emotions and behavior, it will be incredibly useful to study a bit of psychology.
Also, you must not forget about writing skills themselves. Although a marketing copywriter sells products, his or her tool for doing so is words. That means, your materials must be easy to read, informative, catchy, and entice customers first read till the end and then react in accordance with your marketing intentions, whether it is purchasing, checking the website, or something else.
Additional knowledge can enhance your copywriting CV. For instance, if you want to get a marketing copywriter job in an IT company, a degree in Computer Science will look like a strong advantage.
Steps to Become a Marketing Copywriter
Step 1. Defining your current skills
Now, when you know where you want to be, you need to define where you are at this moment. Maybe you are an experienced freelance writer; then you have to improve your skills in marketing. Or maybe you have just started your way, but you have already successfully participated in some volunteering projects. Explore your potential: sometimes, it is not apparent what heights you can reach.
Step 2. Boosting your skills if needed
Once you have defined where you have a gap in knowledge or experience, fill it with training or practice.
Step 3. Create a portfolio (you can get some freelance orders for that at low price)
It is essential for the copywriter to tell potential employees about the quantity of your experience and showcase the examples of what you can do. So, your portfolio becomes as important as your CV or even has more weight.
How to create a marketing copywriter portfolio:
● Find a task at the freelance exchange, from your friends in the field, or even create it on your own. But the first two options are preferable. Why? The explanation is below.
● Fulfill the task and measure its results. The master in marketing copywriting creates not just grammatically correct and interesting copy, but copy that helps to achieve some marketing goals. So you need to show this to potential employees. That is why it is much better to take a real task than to come up with it on your own. This is not always easy without experience, so just do the best you can.
Step 4. Finding an internship or full-time jobs
The path really begins on this step. Many newbies think that the hardest part is getting a job, but actually, you have to work even harder once you get it.
How to Make Progress at Work
While working as a marketing copywriter, you need to continue improving your writing and marketing skills. To do it effectively, you must learn to take an example from other people’s work, ask the right questions, and critically evaluate yourself. Specific marketing metrics will significantly help you with this last point: checking whether the copy achieved its goal with conversions, a percentage that shows how many customers read the text and how many of them did desirable action (buy, click, etc.).
You will also find the following tips helpful:
● Read more. The more you read examples of other people’s good work, the more you understand what to strive for, and the faster you notice your own mistakes. For writing skills, any text is fine, but only marketing samples are useful for mastering your selling techniques.
● Determine for whom and for what you write. It’s essential to do this every time before you start working on a new piece. Always keep in mind that your text must accomplish the task. Draw in your head a portrait of your potential reader and answer the questions: what he or she wants, what he or she is interested in, and, most importantly, how to hook them.
● Follow the trends. Marketing is a very changeable area, so it’s important to know what is essential and relevant now or you will be hopelessly outdated. You can find out what’s trending on Medium from the blogs of the top experts.
How to Grow
A specialist in marketing copywriting can work on enhancing one’s skills in the niche or move into related areas. The first option might involve career growth to becoming the head of the department. The position will require writing articles, building strategies for development, and giving subordinates tasks. The second option is possible due to the fact that marketing copywriting already combines two specialties. So you can grow in the direction of pure marketing, up to the creation of your own agency.
Marie Barnes is a Marketing Communication Manager at Adsy, where you can write as a guest blogger. She is an enthusiastic blogger interested in writing about technology, social media, work, travel, lifestyle, and current affairs.
Where am I in my writing journey, you ask? Well, I’m a little more than two years into what I’ve called “re-entering” the writing world after a nearly ten year hiatus. And I’m happy to say that while I’ve still got a long way to go before I meet my biggest personal goals, I’ve made a lot more progress than I initially thought possible in this short time period.
I’ve become comfortable with my blog and Facebook writer page, despite the almost paralyzing trepidation and confusion I felt when I first realized I needed to make these things a reality. I post and engage regularly with readers and writers from all over the country and different parts of the world, and found that I enjoy doing these things much more than I ever thought I would. I’m also pleasantly surprised at how blogging and posting regularly has helped me maintain discipline as a writer. My handful of followers can always be counted on to give me a boost of confidence when I need it most, or help me out when I have questions that only other writers seem to know the answers to.
Highlights in my day include those emails with lists of open calls for submissions. I click on them excitedly, wondering what writing opportunities await and drumming up ideas as I scroll through the links. Knowing that there is a market for subjects I’m writing about – from mental health to genre fiction — keeps me encouraged. The favorite posts on my Facebook feed are those from writer pages posting similar opportunities or encouraging writers of all experience levels to share their work or boast about their good news or accomplishments.
Now I’m at the point where I actually have a few publishing credits to brag about, and each acceptance email or kind word from a reader is validation that tells me I’m on the right path. I can finally say with confidence that yes, I am good at something. I can thank someone for a compliment without feeling guilty or embarrassed. I can tell others I’m a writer without feeling like an imposter.
But the best part about writing is the opportunity to encourage others. When I write about mental health, I think about myself back in the days when I was experiencing full blown depression or anxiety, and I hope I can bring comfort and light to someone who may be experiencing the same thing. And when I share my writing milestones, I hope I’m encouraging other writers too.
Stacy Alderman has recently had her writing published by Heart and Humanity, HrStryBlg.com, and Hometown Odyssey. She has completed two correspondence courses with The Institute of Children’s Literature and self-published two novels in 2016. You can find her on Facebook and WordPress at Quirky, Confused, & Curvy.
When Stacy’s not writing or reading, she’s probably watching Penguins hockey or (thinking about) traveling. She lives with her husband and fur kid near Pittsburgh, PA.
Almost every aspiring author dreams of what their life as a published author will look like some day: Multiple best-selling novels. Lines that stretch out the door at book signings. A cabin in the mountains. Books made into movies. Fat advances. And, of course, spending every waking hour either typing up the next Great American Novel or responding to fan mail.
Obviously that picture is far from the reality of what the life of today’s average novelist looks like. In order to make a living in today’s writing industry, most authors don’t just write books. They also teach. Speak. Blog. Write freelance articles. Offer coaching, consulting, or freelance editing services to other writers.
Yet with all of the possibilities for today’s writer, how are we supposed to know which paths to pursue and what kind of business model to create? After all, being an author is equivalent to being an owner of a small business. Sometimes I can become distracted by all the ideas floating around in my head that I forget to remind myself of the Big Picture of my writing career—the reason I’m pursuing this dream in the first place.
So, for the new year, I’ve decided to re-evaluate my business model and where I currently stand along my writing path. How am I doing this?
By returning to my Ultimate Dream as an Author.
Of course, your career as a writer might not look the way you originally thought it would. But I believe that, if God has given you the desire and dream of being an author, then it must’ve been for a reason. He has a plan and a purpose for this gift of yours. What is it that He’s planted inside of you? Why do you feel like you’ve been called into this profession? Is it to reach the lost? To provide lighthearted and clean entertainment?
With all of the possibilities for today’s writer, it can often be tempting to get carried away in all of these money-making avenues. As you begin a new year in your writing journey, it might be wise to re-evaluate where you currently stand by going back to the start, to the very moment when you first felt that tug on your heart to pursue writing.
I advise doing this by getting alone with God and your journal. In your journal, write the answers to these questions…
What did I originally envision when I first felt called to pursue writing?
Is that the same vision I have in mind for my writing career today?
Are the steps I’m taking today leading me toward reaching this Dream Author Career?
Are the decisions I’m making supporting my mission statement as an author?
What do I believe God wants to accomplish through my writing career?
By answering these questions, hopefully you’ll be able to see your writing career from a big-picture perspective—beginning from the time you first dreamt of being an author, to where you stand today, and finally, where you’re headed. As you journal, spend time in prayer and ask God to give you the vision He wants you to have for your writing career. If you’d like to take it a step further, you could even summarize this vision down to 1 – 3 sentences, write it on a post-it note, and stick it on your computer or at your desk. That way, any time you come across a career-altering decision this year, you can see if it supports this vision.
Sure, that crazy dream you first had when you dreamt of becoming an author might be a stretch. But what if there’s some truth in that? What if God gave you those desires for a reason?
Every new year brings with it an exhilarating rush of possibility. Another chance to reach higher, try harder, and pursue new goals. But before we rush toward planning the path before us, let’s not forget to first be still and seek our Guide, the giver of this gift. Tune your heart to His. Is the path you’re headed one that’s been mapped out by Him?
With every step, let’s seek His direction and guidance. If we do that, then we’ll remain in His will. And who knows? The vision He has in mind for our writing careers might actually exceed anything we could ever imagine…
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