When you’ve created over 900 posts full of free help for freelance writers, it’s hard to remember every single post. Becomes a bit of a blur!
But a few posts stand out in my memory, because I keep sending their links out to struggling writers, week after week. They’re posts that address a writer’s critical need to understand some aspect of freelancing.
You’ve got urgent questions about how to make it as a freelance writer — and these are the posts that deliver the answers.
I can’t remember where I put my sweater half the time these days, but there are a few key posts that come easily to mind, because I find myself sending writers off to read them again and again.
After nearly a decade (!) writing this blog to provide help for freelance writers, these seven posts seem to address the most common problems freelancers face:
1. How to Figure Out Your Best Freelance Writing Niche
I often hear from writers who’ve spent a year staring at their bedroom wall, imagining themselves as freelance writers. They finally emerge and announce, “I’ve decided upon healthcare as my writing niche.” (Or finance, pets, parenting, real estate, or whatever.) And it makes me wanna scream.
That’s not how you find your most lucrative writing niche. This post describes how it really works.
2. The New Freelance Writer’s Quick-and-Simple Guide to Getting Started
Probably the top question I’m asked is, “How do I get started?” So I finally did a post to provide this kind of help for freelance writers. It outlines the basic time-saving steps that make for a rapid launch. Spoiler alert: Those steps don’t include joining UpWork or Fiverr.
3. The Deadly Math Mistake That Will Make Your Freelance Business Fail
Many freelance writers make bad assumptions about pay when they get into this line of work — and these errors can leave you broke and crawling back to take another hated day job. This post lays out the basics of how to calculate what you really need to earn as a freelance writer (a topic we delve into in detail in the first session of my upcoming Close the Sale bootcamp).
4. Earn Money Online: 92 Websites That Pay
My reader feedback tells me the #1 service I can provide on this blog is to connect writers directly with paying markets. That’s why we’ve been publishing a growing number of different lists of paying websites each year, including an annual ‘big list.’ This link is to the most recent one.
Stay tuned for another market list soon! I say, if you’re going to ‘guest post for exposure,’ why not also earn a paycheck for it?
5. Watch Out For This Income-Killing Online Writing Scam
Scam-busting is a regular feature here on the blog, which I consider a public service to the writer community. (See all the exposés here.)
This particular example goes out (almost daily) to prospective clients who email me each week, asking if I would take $50 or $100 to slip a link about them into a Forbes post. Or better yet, to write a whole post about them on a major site and pass it off as something I independently found interesting, as a reporter.
If you’re offered any of these career-ending ‘opportunities’ to torch your hard-won reputation for a pittance, you can send those gray-hat prospects to this link.
6. 3 Simple Ways to Find Better-Paying Freelance Writing Jobs
I wrote this one quite a long time ago. But it continues to offer my best basic primer on how to quickly leave the poverty mindset behind and discover where the real money is in freelance writing.
7. 5 Ways to Get Your Flaky Freelance Client to Pay
Next to death and taxes, nothing is so certain in freelance writing as that you’ll occasionally get a client who owes you a payment — and suddenly stops returning your calls. Recently, I’ve seen more than one writer use these tips to get their check.
More Get-Started Help for Freelance Writers
If you need more, I’ve organized a whole page of my top resources for new freelance writers. But these are the posts I use most often, to quickly fill writers in on the realities of freelancing.
What freelancing resources do you need? If these posts don’t cover it, leave me your question in the comments.
