Where To Find Freelance Writing Gigs — A Guide
By: Daniel Rosehill
Tags: Freelance Writing, Freelancing, Freelancers, Freelance Tips, Freelance

Where to find freelance writing work? There are various directions to take

On the freelance writers’ Reddit (/r/freelancewriters) as well as on just about every writers’ forum in existence there is a flurry of near daily questions all asking permutations on the question: “where can I find work as a freelance writer?”

Despite how often this question is asked, the answer doesn’t change over time. Or if it does, it only does so every X many years (for instance, there was a time before marketplaces were a thing).

I’m writing this post for the benefit of anybody that stumbles upon it as well as my own. Because constantly filling your pipeline with leads is vital — as I have repeatedly emphasized — and it’s also useful to diversify your lead-hunting toolkit.

Doing any one thing over and over again — like cold pitching — gets boring. From a simple efficacy standpoint, I also reckon that a blended strategy bears the best fruit.

With that in mind, here’s my runthrough of the various places in which one can find freelance writing work. I’ll add some observations based on my own experience. And I’m dividing these roughly into inbound and outbound approaches. I find it helpful to think through this rubric because, in my experience, it makes a difference as to the type of client you’ll attract.

Outbound Methods

Cold calling — and cold emailing — are outbound methodologies

In a nutshell this means “you find them.” These methods bring you out into the big bad world in order to find your next freelance writing clients.

Cold pitching:

In the context of looking for freelance writing work, we’re generally talking about cold emailing rather than cold calling. You could also add potential clients on LinkedIn and try to strike up a conversation that way.

For cold emailing, I like to use LinkedIn to identify points of contact and Hunter.io to track down their contact details. I also use Klenty to build automated drip email cadences.

There are a few things to say about cold emailing. Firstly, it’s massively time consuming. You need to (ideally) make sure that you’re contacting a finely curated pool of contacts and to personalize your pitch.

I’ve used it successfully to land both direct clients and agencies. However, the results have sometimes not been pretty. Many writers have remarked that cold pitch recipients are aghast to discover how much professional writing costs — even if it’s only a few hundred dollars.

There’s also something about cold pitching that feels like it sets you up on the back foot. Particularly in an ultra competitive market like freelance writing, that might be a competitive disadvantage you could live without.

Finally — and maybe this is just me — but I find that going through this process for any length of time gets quite depressing particularly as your likely success rate is reasonably low. It’s also repetitive, particularly if you go through the motions of doing it every year or so — as I did for a while.

My advice is to be very tepid about cold emailing. Laser-focus on some very high value prospects and email them personally one by one. Do that now and again and only when you’re genuinely very interested in the idea of working with an organization. True enthusiasm is hard to fake.

Advertising:

Next up on the list is advertising. Traditionally this means buying spots in newspapers, on radio, etc. In the modern era we’re talking about digital advertising and PPC.

No experience to offer here, I’m afraid, although it’s on my list of tactics to try. Google and LinkedIn are probably the best ad networks to target.

Job applications:

If somebody is looking for a freelance writer(s) then there’s a good chance they’re going to post on some job board.

There’s ProBlogger, LinkedIn, and other places like Facebook groups — among many other sources including remote / digital nomad specialist boards (really, there are a lot).

My observations are similar to cold pitching. If you’re applying for remote writer gigs you’re giving yourself pretty terrible odds and are potentially up against thousands of other applicants all of who might be undercutting you.

Marketplace:

You can sign up on Upwork or Fiverr and start doing gigs this way. Again, the odds here seem terrible to me. I’ve also never worked through a marketplace and my zero gig history has scared away the few leads I did manage to talk to. There are lots of writers that have figured out ways to cut through the race to the bottom and come out on top — but I’m unfortunately not one of them.

Trade shows:

Not relevant right now but one that writers operating somewhere where a lot of potential clients are physically based (major cities like New York and London) should almost certainly consider. Go out to where clients are likely to be and try to meet them in person.

Word of mouth:

Lots of people build their freelance writing businesses on this alone and I think that if you can you should do so (while also covering some other bases just so that you’re eggs aren’t all in the basket of your network).

Tap into your professional network. Put out feelers indicating that you’re looking for freelance writing work next time you’re hanging out with friends or former colleagues etc. I think this merits its own category (vs. cold pitching) because it really requires a different approach.

Inbound Methods

Now let’s look at ways in which you can try to bring potential clients to you. I have a couple of hesitations about how well inbound can work for freelancers (if we all do it, isn’t it going to get a lot harder for any one of us to cut through the noise?).

But in general I think that this is a much more wholesome and automatically preferable way to go about doing things.

Inbound marketing:

Inbound marketing is a whole methodology and encompasses a lot of different activities which are all centered around becoming more discoverable.

If you don’t know anything about inbound then you can get a good handle on it in an hour or so or by taking one of Hubspot’s courses.

As many writers spend a lot of time working on content marketing clients and for inbound agencies we also have a natural leg up here: we just need to do for ourselves what we do for our clients.

Knowing a bit about digital marketing and keyword research would be very useful too — as would a subscription to a service like Moz, SEMRush, or Ahrefs.

Inbound and content marketing go beyond activities like starting blogs and podcasts. In fact, it’s a whole methodology. Put yourself in the shoes of your target customer. What would they be searching for to find someone like you? Then, help them with that process.

Public relations:

Closely allied to this is public relations (PR). Raising your profile and establishing yourself as an authority on some subject you write about is a good way to draw clients to you.

You could sign up for HARO alerts and pitch the media for comment on anything you have expertise on.

Referrals:

Getting your current clients to send you on more work is an ideal way to grow your freelance writing business. If you freelance for a medium or large organization then you could also ask your point of contact to push you on internally. This is unlikely to happen without you taking action. You need to be proactive about asking your clients to recommend you. And, of course, you need to do good work for them?

Which Do I Recommend?

Personally, I’m excited about inbound marketing. While I’m undoubtedly a few years late to the party, I’ve already seen concrete results that it works — just last week I received two leads through landing pages I had added to my website in the summer.

In fact, I wish I had done this a few years’ sooner rather than spend so much time on methods like cold emailing just because I was familiar with them.

The freelance writing market is also incredibly competitive. Therefore, I think it’s always worth asking “where are people hunting for work?” — and then try something completely different (yes, I’m a contrarian).

Personally, I reckon that not enough freelance writers get out from behind their computers and engineer ways to meet potential clients face to face. And that too many don’t pay attention to their blogs because that’s what they’re doing for clients every day.

Word of mouth is a great method too. Activities such as building networks and inbound marketing are both more enjoyable than outbound methods that aim to distract people into providing attention.

Ultimately, a mix is good. But include in it the most probably candidates for success.