How To Instantly Add 30% To Your Freelance Writing Income
By: Nina Quist
Tags: Entrepreneurship, Writing, Freelance Writing, Copywriting, Writing Tips

How To Instantly Add 30% To Your Freelance Writing Income

5 Ways Simple Things That Will Make You More Money

Photo by Joe Caione on Unsplash

What if you could make a lot more money — with the clients you already have, and with the content you’re already writing?

You can!

In this article, I’ll share 5 smart ways to make more money — without writing more articles. I’ll show you how to:

Add value to the content you’re writing — without writing more!

Save your clients time and money (they will love you for it!)

Earn MORE MONEY with the content you’re already writing!

Ready? Let’s go!

First: let’s talk about socks, baby!

What, socks? Yes, socks!

Photo by Nick Page on Unsplash

Have you ever worked in a clothing store? If you have, you’ll know it’s waaay easier to sell a pair of socks to someone who’s already buying a suit than to someone who’s not buying anything.

Now, why is this? It’s because once we’ve committed to one purchase, our guard is down, and we’re happy to keep spending. This is basic sales psychology, and luckily, it applies to writing clients as well! (In marketing and sales lingo, this is called cross-selling.)

One of the most efficient ways to quickly boost your income is by selling more to the clients you already have.

Since you already have a relationship with the client, the process is super simple. No need for time-consuming introductions or relationship-building. You just shoot them an email or give them a call, offering an additional service that complements your current agreement. If they find it useful (and they will!), you add it to your next invoice. Ka-ching!

All you need to do is offer the right “pair of socks”, and it will be a done deal. So let’s move on and have a look at some “freelance writing-socks”, shall we?

Let’s get started!

1. Provide Selected Images

Add the perfect images to your content — and save your client time and money.

Offering images with your blog posts is a fun and easy way to add value to your work. Every blog post needs an image, right? Many editors are more than happy to pay the writer extra to pick out the perfect one.

I know what you’re thinking now: “but I’m no photographer!”. The good news is, you don’t have to be. All you have to do is find a suitable free stock image online and submit it together with your text.

Photo by Dan Gold on Unsplash

So, where to find images?

Many websites offer royalty-free stock images that you can use. For photography, I would highly recommend Unsplash or Pexels, and for illustrations, you can head to sites like Mixcit. If you need to edit your images, but don’t know how — check out Canva. It’s a super intuitive online design tool that makes editing and design easy-peasy for anyone, even if you feel clueless.

Now, I know it may feel counterintuitive that you’re charging for something you’ve downloaded for free. But what you’re actually charging for is not the image. It’s the time and effort it takes to find the image. And, of course, your impeccable taste ;)

2. Write Social Media Captions

If you’re writing blog posts for your clients, chances are they’ll want to share them in social media. But doing so takes time, and each social media post’s success depends a lot on the copy in the captions.

By offering your social media clients captions to go with your content, you’re not only saving them time — you’re increasing the chances of your content becoming popular and performing well. Talk about a win-win!

Photo by Merakist on Unsplash

Here are the most common social media channels that you can offer to write captions for:

Instagram

Twitter

Facebook

LinkedIn

Snapchat

Tik-Tok

They all have their own vibe and regulations, so you’ll need to adapt both the number of characters and the tonality to each platform.

Bonus tips: If your client doesn’t have a style guide for social media content, offer to write one for them! A document specifying tonality, imagery and messaging for every channel is something every company should have. This will make you come across as an expert, and will be nice extra money for you as well :) And once you’ve done one — it will take you little time to offer the same service to other clients. Go get ’em, tiger!

2. Provide Metadata

If you’re writing for the web, this one is a no-brainer. Because if you’re not providing metadata, it means your client will need to write it themselves. So offering to write optimized metadata is usually highly appreciated!

Photo by Rajeshwar Bachu on Unsplash

What is metadata?

Metadata is little snippets of information about your text, written to help Google find it. It’s the information that shows up in the Google search results, and usually include:

SEO title

Meta description

Image Alt Texts

Think about it. You’ve already written the blog post. So you know what it’s about, and you know the keywords. That means you can knock out metadata in no-time!

And the great thing is that if you offer to include texts for SEO, you can not only charge an extra fee for that– your clients will love you for doing so. It will save them time and make you money.

4. Create Custom Data Charts

A super-quick and really cool way to level up your content game is to offer custom data charts as an add-on. This is something I’ve only started to do recently myself, and let me tell you: clients love it!

Photo by Lukas Blazek on Unsplash

Original graphic design, even in its simplest form, will make your article much more valuable. And don’t worry, you don’t need to be a savvy statistician to pull this off!

All you need to do is pull some relevant numbers from your article and visualize them in an image. It can be a simple pie chart, Venn diagram, or histogram, highlighting what you’re writing about. Including original graphic content like data charts makes readers more likely to share it and link to it, and it helps position your client as a thought leader.

5. Offer Content Tune-ups

Offer to go through your clients’ older content and update, improve, and optimize it. Doing so is great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) because Google prefers content that has been recently updated.

Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash

Here are some examples of what you can include in your offer:

Adding more internal links in the content, to newer content written after it was initially published.

Optimizing headlines with the relevant keyword.

Turning shorter content into longer and more informative articles.

Going through and optimizing metadata.

Update the article with new and relevant information

Linking to new and relevant research

That’s it for today! I hope you found these tips helpful and that you’ll try out at least one of the tactics with your clients.