“In your e-book, do you explain what kind of clients need web content? You see that is what I want to specialize in however, I am not too fond of those low-paying job boards. And I may sound naive, but established businesses already have web content right?”

In the e-book I don’t go into detail about types of clients because, simply put, nearly every type of site online is a prospective client for some Web writer (although it obviously varies depending on what niches and such you specialize in).

However, I do go into a list of types of Web writing. For content specifically, I can think of 3 quickly off the top of my head:

1. SEO Web Content
2. Authority Web Content
3. Business Blogging

I’m not fond of those low-paying job boards either, and don’t use them. You certainly don’t have to.

Fortunately, established businesses rarely want to let their content go stale. Remember, Web content refers to things like articles and blog posts – not something like a company About page that may be written once and ignored for months or years (even if it shouldn’t be).

Web content can do a few things, all of which businesses need on a continued basis:

1. It helps to build an authority / expert status for the client in their industry. If the site is stale, and they’re not actively keeping up on changes, news, etc., then their Web content isn’t accomplishing this goal.
2. It helps to bring in search engine traffic and ad revenue. There are always more keywords to target, and therefore more content that can be written, up to what their budget allows.
3. Content can also entertain – when you see something like a celebrity gossip site, they need fresh Web content to keep their audience.
4. Web content is also vital for building a recurring audience for any type of site or blog. Good content attracts them (and natural links), but the only way to keep that audience (having them come back repeatedly, spread the word, etc.) is to keep on providing more good content.

Think about the big content networks or online versions of magazines as an example (think BusinessWeek.com or Entrepreneur.com). They’re loaded with content. They could get rid of all writers they’re paying, keep the existing content they have the rights to, and make a pretty penny from ad revenue anyway. But they don’t do that. They want constant fresh content on all of their sites. Why? Because that fresh content keeps traffic numbers up (and allows them to earn more ad revenue than they otherwise would), builds word-of-mouth for the company as readers link to articles and spread the word, and establishes an image for them that attracts type-in traffic (people will still come through links and search engines, but when we type in a URL manually, it’s generally because a site has established an image that we trust).

In the case above, we’re mostly talking about authority Web content – there’s a constant demand for it, especially among established sites. The same is true with a lot of buyers looking for SEO content, albeit in a somewhat different way:

For them, it’s quite possible they’ll setup a static site targeting a few keywords, and then leave the site alone to earn ad revenue. Others will continue to add content to attract more traffic if it’s a good niche for them. More importantly though, you need to understand that these types of webmasters rarely run just one site. If they find success with SEO content, they’ll generally launch quite a few of these sites. So if you get in with one, they’ll probably need a writer for future sites beyond the initial one you’re hired to write for.

While this group accounts for most of the cheap writing ads you’ll probably see online, there are also clients willing to pay much more. I charge $200 for a 500-word article, and I have a few clients who found me and come back when they’re launching new sites, even though I don’t actively solicit this type of work. The keys, as with getting any type of high-paying Web writing gigs, is in how you market yourself and how well you network.

There’s just no getting around those two things if you want to avoid the freelance sites. Early on, you may find it’s easier to pitch clients directly by looking for sites you’d like to write for. While many don’t advertise that they need writers, hearing some good ideas from you might persuade them to give it a shot. Later on, the idea is to build a solid referral network and online visibility so that prospective clients actually come to you far more often. It takes time, but it’s worth striving for.

Then there’s the blogging group I mentioned. The whole point of blogging is to have the blog updated regularly with fresh content. These can also be very lucrative gigs (although very often ghostwritten). A lot of companies are looking to add a company or industry blog, but the owners, CEOs, etc. don’t have time to handle the blogging themselves. In many cases they’ll hire a ghostblogger. If it’s a niche-oriented blog instead of a company blog, you’ll be more likely to find potential bylined work.

I hope that answers your questions or concerns about the demand out there from established businesses. While there are certainly some that simply don’t have the budget to keep things updated, many are in need of new Web content on a constant basis. Don’t let the low-paying advertised gigs get you down. If they’re not paying your rates, they’re just not in your target market. Others will be. They just take a bit more digging to find early on.

What are “Business Clients?”

When I talk about business clients (sometimes “corporate clients” depending on your target market), I basically mean any client that’s not a “publisher client.” A publishing-focused client generally contracts articles for a content-based website, online magazine, etc., where they’ll earn through ad revenue or some other means (they may pay writers revenue share, by pageviews, flat fees, per-word rates, etc.).

Business clients, on the other hand, have another purpose in hiring writers – you’re hired to help them reach a business goal with more direct results in mind.

For example, business clients may hire you to write press releases with the purpose of getting them media or blog coverage. They might hire you write white papers for online distribution to attract their own clients. Perhaps they’ll hire you to write sales or marketing copy to directly help sell their own product or service.

Who Cares What Kind of Client They Are?

OK. Publishing clients are a little different than business or corporate clients, but why should you care? I mean, writing is writing, and as long as you get paid what’s the difference, right?

The big differences are these:

1. Business writing generally brings in more money, and
2. Far more companies need some form of business writing at one time or another than those looking simply for content.

The Perks

Obviously getting paid more is a nice perk, right? Here’s an example, using my own most common form of writing – Even someone charging on the low end in press release writing can often bring in $.10 – .20 per word, where I see the low end of Web content writing more along the lines of less than $.05 per word. On the high end, I know press release writers charging well over $1.00 per word. Personally, I charge a flat fee, but it often works out to the $.50 – .60 per word range for that type of writing. Not too shabby, given that I still charge modestly in that particular specialty.

I also mentioned the strong demand. When it comes to focusing on Web content, you’re limited to Web publishers for most of your client work. However, when you focus on business clients for your Web writing, you’ll find that nearly all companies have some type of Web presence (or want to create one), and managing that often involves a need for strong Web writers.

These types of clients also don’t have long lead times, like some larger Web publishers do, which can be nice.

You’ll also often be asked to consult on the direction of the project before you begin, which allows you to essentially serve the role of consultant in addition to writing (meaning more income if you charge extra for that by the hour).

In many cases, I’ve found far more freedom in business writing than Web content writing as well – this goes back to taking on that consultant role. You’ll often be hired for being a specialist by these types of clients, so they’re turning to you for your expertise, and they’ll often give you plenty of room to work creatively (although that obviously depends on the client).

If these perks appeal to you, what kind of writing can you actually do for these business clients?

Types of Business Writing on the Web

• Web Copy – General (such as the basic copy on a company’s site, like their homepage copy)
• Advertising Copy (like that used in a pay-per-click campaign)
• Sales Letters (anything from software to e-books can be sold through online sales letters)
• Press Releases (many companies these days are looking to distribute news releases online)
• White Papers (it’s quite common for white papers to be distributed on the Web in .pdf format)
• Product Descriptions (if a company is selling products online, someone has to write the descriptions to help make the sale)

Web writing also goes beyond actual websites. For example, you may be asked to handle email newsletters or internal communication distributed electronically. Increasingly popular is corporate blogging as well – you’ll blog about company or industry news on the client’s behalf.

As you can see, working with business clients doesn’t even necessarily mean you won’t be writing Web content – there’s simply more at stake than the actual publishing common to so many clients in the webmaster group advertising for Web writers.

Give this client type a try, and I’m rather confident you won’t be disappointed.

Now I’ve tried a few different services or methods of selling informational products, including manual delivery with Paypal payment buttens, E-junkie for payments and secure delivery, and Clickbank.

E-junkie is by far my favorite of those methods from a seller’s perspective. Here are some of its benefits:

• E-junkie can be used to sell pretty much any kind of informational product you could imagine.
• You can sell up to 10 different products (you can sell an unlimited number of each) for just $5 per month – other service levels exist if you need to sell more.
• They don’t charge transaction fees (Clickbank’s biggest problem – they really add up).
• They don’t charge a setup fee (Clickbank does).
• You can easily create discount codes for promotions (you can’t with Clickbank).
• E-junkie gives you secure delivery built in – for example, you can set a time limit on each download link set, or a maximum number of downloads before a link expires to stop people from passing around a static download link (you can’t do this with Clickbank either).
• You can still accept Paypal payments, among other options.
• You can run your own affiliate program there (the only problem is that you deal with the affiliate administration and payments yourself – although they do give you the tools and reports – the affiliate issue is the only area where Clickbank comes out on top).
• It can be used in conjunction with other programs – for example, if you want to have an affiliate program through Clickbank but want E-junkie to secure your downloads and delivery, you can do that (that’s what I’m doing now with the first Web Writer’s Guide e-book).
• When you make a sale through E-junkie, you get your payment right away (unlike services like Clickbank where they hold the payments and pay you weekly, bi-weekly, etc.).
• You have complete control over your guarantees if you want to offer one (or return policies) – you don’t with Clickbank, where you have to abide by their return policies.

E-junkie’s a great service. I love it. I went with the E-junkie / Clickbank combo strictly to have Clickbank manage the affiliate program. Honestly, that program hasn’t done much for my e-book sales other than cost me more money (I lose nearly $4 of every sale I make myself, which would be unneccessary since I was making those same sales solely through E-junkie without the added cost). Unless that changes quite significantly, I’ve already decided that the future e-books in my series here will be sold exclusively through E-junkie without the affiliate program.

If you’re looking to start selling products of your own, I urge you to give them a look. The interface is pretty intuitive even if you’re new to selling informational products, the prices can’t be beat, and you retain a lot of freedom that you would lose with other services.

How does someone accomplish this lofty goal with so many people out there writing and developing content on a regular basis? You must become a prolific article writing machine. Read on if this is your goal.

Find Hot Topics

Start every day using a search engine to find out the hot topics of the day. You can always use Google Blog Search to see and read what other bloggers are saying about the latest news in any category you wish write about. If you have a niche already picked out, start subscribing via RSS Feed to keep up with what your favorite bloggers are saying, as well as the most popular ones.

Offer New Perspectives

You don’t have to sit there and regurgitate the same information like everyone else; offer new perspectives on your favorite topics. Sometimes differing from what the crowd is feeling and saying can be controversial and help generate traffic for your writing. This will help increase your visibility, name recognition, and future visitors.

Quick Brainstorm

Learn how to read, research, and write on-the-fly. You must give yourself a few moments to take in new information, and then spend ten to fifteen minutes free writing about what you have learned. At the end of this step, you should have several starting points to choose from.

Sort Out Sub-topics

For every article you’re considering authoring, you need between three and ten sub-points, depending on the article length you’re trying to achieve. Think about all those “Top 5” articles you read on the web. Five points and you’re good, simple as that.

Elaborate on Each Sub-topic

Two or three sentences are really all you need to get the article in an easy-to-read and smooth format. Take a second to look back through this article. Anything look or seem familiar to you? Using these quick steps to help you create content can make a huge difference in your output, and ultimately your recognition as a writer.

By-line:
This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of top online colleges. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com

The Text Link Issue

If you’re not familiar with the supposed problem of selling text links on your blog, I’ll super-summarize for you:

Google doesn’t like it – nope – uh uh – if you do it, you might get a Google slap (they’ll remove your pagerank, which may also lead to lower rankings in Google’s engine for your key search terms).  In essense, Big G says if you sell text links, you’re gaming their system (because everything we do is solely about them, right?). Even if your own links are completely valid and natural, and even if your blog is filled with high quality, original, authority content (the stuff Google’s supposed to love and want to show up high in their search engine), they’ll bitch slap your blog into oblivion if you use this advertising method without including the no-follow attribute or using javascript to serve the links (so they won’t influence pagerank).

As far as I’m concerned, Google can bite me, and more bloggers need to be prepared to say the same thing. Why?

First of all, you have the right to earn from your work. You also have the right to maximize your earnings. No one, including Google (who’s pissed because their own algorithm is faulty and they didn’t have the foresight to envision this problem back when they created the boom in this ad market themselves) should tell you how to run your business (which is what your blog is if you’re using it as an income stream). And if you’re serious about your business, you won’t allow someone on the outside to do that.

On top of it, by penalizing sites, they’re making what amounts to a quality judgment call on your site – their pagerank is supposed to be related to the value they place on the site (meaning what it’s offering to visitors). Many folks are naive enough to trust that. To place a quality score against high quality content because they disagree with an advertising model amounts to (in my eyes) misleading their userbase. They also don’t account for a difference between those true spam blogs who will publish any link paid for and those who follow strict guidelines in reviewing, accepting, and rejecting advertisers based on their target audience.

And that’s who you need to please – your audience; not Google.

Google Slave Syndrome

There are other ways your blog can become a slave to Google.

1. You can rely on them for most of your traffic.
2. You can rely on them for most of your income (such as through Adsense).
3. You can rely on them to dictate what you can and cannot do in building your site / blog / community.

I’m of the mind that you shouldn’t allow yourself to fall victim to any of these situations. Am I saying you shouldn’t care at all about getting traffic via search. Of course not. But you should diversify where that traffic is coming from, and you shouldn’t build a blog or other business model solely or primarily around one source like Google.

Am I saying you shouldn’t use Adsense? No to that as well. While I don’t use Adsense on this blog, I do use it on others. However, I’m smart enough not to make it a majority of my income source. You should work it into your mix; not make it your bread and butter.

So let’s get into what’s really important. How can you diversify your income streams and traffic?

Diversifying Income Streams on Your Blog

• Join affiliate networks such as Clickbank or Commission Junction – Promote products or sites that you can honestly feel good about recommending to your visitors.
• Sell private advertising – this may be text links, banner ads, video ads, sponsored posts, audio ads if you also run a podcast, or any type of private ad sales relevant to your site or blog.
• Create your own products – Write and sell an e-book or report, and sell it on your blog (like you see me doing on this blog). You could also sell scripts, software, forms, graphics, Web templates – anything at all that’s (again) relevant to your audience.
• Contextual advertising – Adsense is an example of this, but there are other ad networks. If you opt to steer clear of Google altogether, get turned down for Adsense, or their ads just don’t work in your case, try another until you find a good fit.
• Membership sections – If you run an extremely high quality blog with a lot of content, you may want to add a paid members-only area where people can read premium content.

The most important thing you can do in diversify those income streams, and keep testing different mixes and placements until you learn how to maximize your revenue on your particular blog.

Diversifying Traffic Sources

• Create authority content – this is the most important thing you can do to bring in traffic beyond that from search engines (and it actually increases SE traffic in most cases anyway). Why? Because top notch content is easy for other people to link to, talk about, comment on, share via social bookmarking sites, etc. In other words, the most valuable thing you can do to increase your own traffic is to get other people to spread the word for you. It’s simply a case of good PR (sometimes called word-of-mouth marketing or viral marketing, depending on the method).
• Give something away – this is in line with creating authority content. Put together something more than your typical blog posts. Offer a free short report or something. Not only does this give people an additional reason to spread the word and stop by the blog, but you can use it to build your list if you have one and increase visitors on a more regular basis through that newsletter or email feed subscription.
• Make news – you want other people talking about you, and press releases can help you do that (download my free report on press release writing if you’re new to it – I’m originally a PR pro if you didn’t know that). The key is to truly do something newsworthy before sending them – that’s the only way to get high quality traffic out of them (and increased conversions, depending on what you want that traffic to do).

Those are just three things you can do which are relatively easy, and which can bring in a large amount of traffic. Don’t just choose one – do them all, and then some. Participate in social media tools or social networks, comment on other blogs, write guest posts for authority sites in your niche, do a virtual blog tour, etc.

Look beyond Google in all respects now, and you’ll build yourself a far more stable audience and income source for your blog in the long run.

First things first – what’s the difference?

When you hard-sell, you essentially scream “buy from me!” This would be something like cold calling, cold email pitches, advertising, etc.

The soft sell is much more subtle – this is where networking fits into the marketing mix, among other tactics. Today I’d like to talk about one soft sell tactic, which happens to be my favorite – content.

Why Content Works as a Soft Sell Tactic

I know it’s cliche, but content really is king. Quality content educates, informs, or entertains. It attracts repeat visitors. It leads to natural referrals. It helps to build an image or reputation. And from the freelance writing perspective, content sells!

What do I Mean by “Content?”

Content can take many forms. Here are a few types of content you can create that can help you soft-sell your writing services:

• E-books
• Reports
• Blog Posts (your own or guest posts)
• Articles / Features
• Forum Posts
• White Papers
• Answers (on LinkedIn, Yahoo! Answers, etc.)

How Does Content Help You Sell Web Writing Services?

When you help people solve a problem, or answer their questions, you build a reputation as an authority in the subject matter. That’s attractive to prospective clients, who very often prefer hiring specialists if they can afford to. I’ll give you an example.

I do a lot of soft-selling through content for my press release writing service, and I have for years. It brings in a lot of business. I offer content in a variety of outlets – I post on forums about press releases (where my target market hangs out). I write blog posts about it. I even wrote an e-book about it. That information is “out there” for prospective clients to find when they’re looking for information. The idea is simple – you educate a potential client. By doing that, you have visibility with them that your competitors don’t have. If, or when, they’re ready to hire someone, you have a leg up – you’re already in their mind.

I can’t even begin to tell you how many new clients I’ve gotten where they come to me saying something like “I saw your post on X blog or forum, and I can tell you really know what you’re talking about. I’d like to hire you.”

What’s particularly interesting is the fact that clients who find me this way are often the least likely to complain about my rates being higher than other writers’. When you establish a certain amount of authority with that client, they’re able to hire you more on value than price – what you bring to the table in terms of your expertise.

Does Content Have to be Free to Bring in Sales?

There are obvious benefits to offering free content like blog or forum posts – that content naturally reaches more eyes. That said, paid content can be equally effective, giving you a combination of a marketing tactic and an additional income stream (one of many reasons I suggest freelance writers create e-books and reports).

Start looking for places where you can share quality information with your potential client base / target market. Share. You don’t have to blatantly pitch yourself to bring in sales. The soft sell can do that, and more, without making you uncomfortable the way hard sell tactics sometimes can.

Therefore, when writing for the Web, it’s essential that you pay a bit of extra attention to proofreading – especially with client projects. Here are a few tips that won’t take terribly long, but will help you catch errors that you might otherwise miss:

1. Read it aloud. – Whether writing an SEO article, a sales page, or a blog post, try reading it aloud before either delivering it to your client or publishing the piece to your site or blog. When you read it to yourself silently, you’ll see what you expect to be there rather than what’s actually been typed (because you know what you meant to say). This is especially true when the piece is fresh in your mind. Reading aloud can help you catch subtle errors or things that simply don’t sound right (like a run-on sentence).
2. Take a break. – Don’t publish or deliver the writing until you’ve waited at least a few hours after its completion. This helps to counteract what I just mentioned – you won’t have what you were trying to say fresh on your mind, so you may catch errors you would miss if proofing it directly after writing.
3. Get a second opinion. – While this is extremely important if you’re not writing in your native language, getting another opinion from an unbiased source can be beneficial to any Web writer. Another reader can be especially helpful by letting you know whether or not you’re conveying your points (you may know what you’re talking about, but does your writing really help the reader understand it?).

These tips may be simple, but they go a long way towards improving your writing for the Web.

Today let’s talk about other things you can do to prove your value to prospective writing clients – things you can do to justify your fees and not get paid bottom-of-the-barrel rates:

1. 

   Case Studies - If you specialize in writing marketing copy for websites, you can demonstrate your value by publishing case studies of work with past clients (for example, show how much conversions increased with the use of your copy). If you specialize in SEO content you may want to offer a case study on how successful your articles were in attracting search engine traffic for a client, in comparison to other content on their site. Obviously, you’ll need permission (and information) from past clients to use this approach, but it does work.

2. Testimonials - Even if clients don’t want you publishing traffic stats, conversion rates, etc., you can ask them if they’d offer a testimonial for your website. New clients will very likely factor that feedback into their decision to hire you, especially if they’re familiar with any of your past clients whose testimonials you’ve published.
3. Pricing – Like it or not, even your rates give a potential client some idea of the value you provide. Remember, value does not equal price / cost. Pricing is just one component of overall value (what they’re ultimately getting when they hire you – ex. they’re not just getting articles; they’re getting authority content that will build or improve their own reputation, attract organic traffic, and bring in natural backlinks). If you undervalue your own work, or constantly let yourself get “talked down” to much lower rates, the client isn’t going to value your work as much as they would if you know your own worth, understand what you’re really offering, and stick by your rates (which reflect what you’re offering).
4. Demand – Here’s another “like it or not” for you: clients tend to see more value in a writer whose services are in constant demand. If you keep your schedule full and the client comes to you, you have a better chance of getting paid higher rates than if you run to the client begging for work constantly. That’s not to say you should never approach the client. For example you can followup with previous clients to mention a special offer, check in with past clients who may have pre-paid for something but never completed the order (I have a few clients who regularly do this, so I touch base periodically to see if they’re ready to finish up their prepaid articles, press releases, etc.), or you can solicit work by advertising your services somewhere. Look at it this way though – if a prospective client sees that others value your work enough to keep you pretty busy, there’s a better chance they’ll do the same (and if they don’t, you can always move on because you’re not desperate for the gig).
5. A Little Something Extra – One thing you can do no matter what phase of your career you’re in is to offer something extra – an add-on or “bonus” if you will. You can do this in a lot of ways. For example, you might say “order four articles and get the fifth one free.” Obviously you would have already accounted for this in your overall rate structure, but to the prospective client what they see is that they’re getting more for their money. Another approach would be to offer a free consultation (a marketing copywriter might consult for 30-60 minutes with the client on ideas to further market their website beyond the copy they were hired to write). The great thing about this is that you get to learn more about the client’s needs (which means you may be able to pitch them on additional services to help them meet those needs).

What other ideas do you have when it comes to demonstrating value to clients? How do you get them to pay you more than the highly-talked about $5 per article types of rates? Perhaps more importantly, how do you realize your value yourself?

Something I like to talk about when I’m chatting with new writers is moving beyond that client work and writing “for yourself.”

What is “Writing for Yourself?”

When you write for yourself, you’re not being contracted to create something based on the needs of a client. You become the client! You have absolute control and complete freedom, and rather than a one-time payment, in many cases you’ll earn recurring income over time.

E-books as a Form of “Writing for Yourself”

E-books are one of my favorite things to work on as far as my “me” projects go. As you know, I’m soon launching the first e-book in the Web Writer’s Guide series. I also previously wrote and sold a short e-book called Press Releases Made Easy (which is now available for free through ProBusinessWriter.com).

Both of these projects have been completely different for me. My press release e-book was created at the demand of my clients – some simply wanted to better understand press releases. I spent a “whopping” 5 hours writing it – yep, that’s it! At that point it was just 18 pages (the updated version available on the site listed above is now 20 pages). It earned me far more during the time it was being sold than I would have earned by billing out those 5 hours to clients – and the income kept coming in. When you aren’t expecting it, it’s like a pleasant little surprise every time you see a new payment rolling in (you’ll learn to love that feeling).

The new e-book is over 80 pages (it will likely be closer to 90-100 pages when the edits are complete). It took me months to put together (a big difference from the first e-book). I ran a 14 Day E-book Writing Challenge at my freelance writing blog a while back. At the end, I felt my work was too general, and that it would be better served as an e-book series. So I spent further weeks separating that information, expanding upon parts of it, and weeding things out to target the more narrow niche of freelance Web writing. That’s how the Web Writer’s Guide series and this blog were born.

My point is this – when you write for you, you get to decide how much time you want to put into a project, what you want that product to “look like” after the fact, and how much you want to earn from it (you’ll get there with a combination of the right pricing strategy and the right marketing plan). The only deadlines you’ll face are the ones you choose to set for yourself, and a little bit of discipline will go a long way in letting you work your own writing projects around client work that pays the bulk of the bills in the meantime.

Pick up a copy of Launching a Successful Freelance Web Writing Career after the e-book launches to learn more about residual income streams available to Web writers. Keep your eyes peeled for updates on its pending launch (hint: in less than 2 weeks)!

That’s a load of garbage.

If you’re really cut out to be a freelance Web writer (where portfolios come more into play than full-time employment), you’re going to spend time building credentials and properly targeting your market long before you actually start offering services. When you finally get to that point, there’s no good reason for you to not already have at least a handful of portfolio pieces showcasing your Web writing abilities within your niche or specialty form of writing.

Is Non-Paying Work Ever OK?

Am I saying you should never do non-paying work, when building your portfolio (or after)? No. What I am saying is that you should never take on a non-paying freelance Web writing gig solely for portfolio pieces. It should be paying you in other ways – and I mean more than saying “well this person might give me a referral.”

Why doesn’t it matter that the person receiving the free content might refer you to others? Because people do ask what their friends or colleagues paid, and if you’re going to charge $25 per article, but they know you did a piece for their friend for free, you’ve now set yourself up to be low-balled in your referral base – not smart.

When is a non-paying gig worthwhile? When you’re getting more out of it than you’re losing by not charging. That might be a marketing benefit, exposure, or some kind of contribution to your image. We’ll look more at that below with specific ways to build a writing portfolio with no paid experience under your belt.

Ways to Build Portfolio Pieces with No Experience

• Blogs and Content Sites – If your specialty is Web content writing in the personal finance niche, an excellent way to start building a portfolio is to launch your own blog on personal finance. This not only lets you showcase your best work (you can send a link to the blog or specific articles to prospective clients), but can also serve as an income stream through advertising (and I’ll tell you from experience that if you keep working at it, your blogs can earn you decent money).
• Article Marketing – This is one of those situations where it’s not a bad idea to write for free. The key is getting the most marketing value out of your articles written for this purpose. For example, many writers submit articles to large article directories. I’d suggest against it. They lend little credibility. Instead, send free articles to niche article sites or even to blogs in your specialty area that may accept them as a guest post. For example, if I want to get more exposure in a specific business niche, I may write a free article for Work.com because they carry more credibility with a built-in business audience than article directories do. Again, you can link prospective clients to these articles. Since most are non-exclusive though, if you do go with an article directory instead of targeted options, I would suggest forgetting the link, and instead publishing it directly to your own portfolio site.
• Write for Non-Profits – This is one other area where I’d say it’s OK to write for free (or simply at a discount) early on. What does this offer you that free articles for a profit-based client can’t? It’s an image-builder. Non-profit involvement is often a good PR move. And let’s face it – what looks better? A reference from a branch of a large and respectable non-profit agency, or a reference from a random webmaster no one has heard of, wanting free or $5.00 articles? Take a wild guess. If it doesn’t lend something to your credibility or image, don’t do it for free.
• Write Mock Pieces – This is my least favorite option for portfolio-building if you have no actual experience. To put it simply, you create a “fake” piece. This doesn’t really work for articles (there’s no such thing as a “fake” article really). It works well for marketing copy and similar things though. For example, if you plan to write business plans, you may want to write a fake one for a non-existent company similar to those in your target market. The benefit here is that you can later use them as a template to speed up the process on future projects, and you’ll have more creative freedom. In addition to using mock pieces when you’re new, they can work well if you can’t share full actual samples (again using the business plan as an example – clients won’t want you sharing their private business and financial data enclosed in them with other prospective clients).

Using the Sale to Build Your Portfolio

Here’s something else to consider – run a sale. This can work when you’re new, or more experienced. Let’s cover sales for the new, inexperienced writers here.

The key is this: Don’t go around saying something like, “since I’m new, I’m going to write articles for a while at $5.00 per article, and then raise my rates later.”

Instead, try something like this (again based on relatively low rates for easy example purposes): “My regular rate is $20.00 per 500-word article. I’m currently offering a 50% discount on first orders from new clients only.”

Why is the second route better, using the numbers in the examples?

1. You’re not emphasizing your “fault” (in this case that you’re new) – you’re going to let the quality or your credentials in the niche or specialty speak for themselves.
2. You’re putting a limit on the low rates up front (only first orders, and only for new clients).
3. People like discounts. Saving $10.00 on an article can be even more attractive than paying only $5.00 for one if you “sell it” well with your marketing copy in your sales announcement.
4. You’re not immediately starting off by trying to compete with lower-tier writers (once you start feeling like you have to compete with them, you may always view them as your competition – they’re not). What’s worse is that trying to compete with them, even temporarily, can permanently put you in the same league as those lower-quality writers in the eyes of your target clients. Once you create a certain image with buyers, it can be very difficult to break out of it.
5. You’re letting prospective clients know up front that you place a certain value on your work (your regular rates). This helps to ensure that you’ll attract clients willing to pay those rates if they continue with you past that first order.
6. If you’ve taken the time to properly set your writing rates to begin with (again to get those regular fees), you’ll know how many lower-rate clients you can afford to take on and still get by. Most Web writers who simply start off very low because they’re told they should don’t honestly know what they need to begin with – they’re trying to market solely on price rather than running a responsible business (and that’s what being a freelance Web writer essentially is).

Start Building Your Portfolio

Now that you have a few ideas to get you started on portfolio pieces, get to work on building a portfolio that will attract clients, increase your credibility, and demonstrate what you feel your writing is really worth.

I’d love to see how other writers are keeping their portfolios online (for those with public portfolios). If you would like to leave a link to yours, please feel free to do so in the comments. While both of mine (my copywriting pieces are on my PR site) are soon going under construction for a site move and a site overhaul, you can currently find them at http://jhmattern.com/portfolio and http://firstratecontent.com/portfolio.htm.