Writing Blog

So now you’ve got your samples together, you need to go out there and apply for those jobs. There are many available – you just need to know where to go look for them. The first two places I would recommend are Getafreelancer and Guru.

www.getafreelancer.com
www.guru.com

There’s no need to become a paid member in either one – not till you’ve learned the ropes. So join up as a free member and then start bidding on the jobs, taking care to attach your samples when you bid. You can apply for projects where they ask for articles to be written or articles to be rewritten, Leave the SEO writing aside for the moment – more on that in another post.

Don’t get disheartened of you don’t get any replies. In the beginning, many find it difficult to get that first break but once it comes, the going is usually easy. On both the sites, you need to work hard and get feedback. Many people who post projects prefer to hire writers who have a ten-star rating on Getafreelancer or a five-star rating on Guru.

There are a number of other sites too – some ask that you pay a small amount for a trial period. You would do well to go register on all of them and keep checking them regularly for jobs that would suit your kind of writing.

www.elance.com
www.scriptlance.com
www.directfreelance.com
www.gofreelance.com

Once you know your way around these sites – and don’t be afraid to experiment – since you haven’t put any money down, you have nothing to lose – then you can think of becoming a paid member. Paid members usually get the better jobs and they don’t have to pay as much out of their earnings to the site. In most cases, you recover that money once you’ve done a few jobs.
In the next post, we’ll talk about how to post your samples up online – for free!

Stumble it!

There are so many people who call or email me saying, “I can write – my friends used to tell me I wrote the most amazing letters.” I always know what is coming. This is usually a precursor to telling me they know I write for clients in the virtual world and would I please recommend their name to some client too? No, I don’t blame them – far from it. However, I do tell them that they need to write something so that the client can get a feel of their writing style. I don’t hear from most of them after that. The few who do take the trouble to put something together are the ones who a year later, are so busy writing, they very often don’t have the time to say Hi. There was one young stay-at-home mother who asked me the same question around two years ago – today she earns a lot more than I do and I’ve yet to meet someone who works so hard and loves what she does!

Where you can apply and how to find online writing work will be dealt with in another post. This part needs to be addressed first because samples are so important. At the outset, let me warn you that there might be clients who ask you whether you really have written everything you sent in. This is not, I repeat not the time to get offended. If you knew the number of scams that go on in cyberspace you would pity some of these clients. People send in samples that are just copy-pasted from articles on the Internet and then, when they get a project to do, they either farm it out or they give in rubbish. Very often after having got an advance. So bear with the client. Many clients like to be able to be able to chat with you on any of the chat sites. This is one way for the client to see if you really do write the way you claimed to write.

Now for the samples. A good number when you are sending in articles is 5. They should be around 500 words each and preferably cover five different topics. This will show the client how versatile you are. You should put the topics you are most interested in right on top. Say you like travel – then a travel article has to head the list. In case you do not like doing certain articles like those on hardware or software or anything else, do let the client know well in advance so he can make alternate arrangements if he has to give out those topics.

This sample folder should be enough in the beginning. Later on, you might want to make one folder for article samples, one for SEO or search engine optimization samples, one for blog post samples, etc. We could take a look at that once we’ve talked about what SEO is and how to do blog posts for clients. These five are a good place to start so put those articles together and you’re ready to start a career of writing on the Internet.

Stumble it!