Make a Living Writing
One of my favorite fellow writing bloggers is Seattle freelancer Carol Tice from the site Make a Living Writing. I am fortunate enough to have been a guest on one of Carol's Wednesday Freelance Free-for-Alls amidst a lineup of some pretty heavy hitters. Interestingly enough, it wasn't until after I was made a guest that I became aware of the value of Carol's site.
Carol has been acutely aware of the real secret as to how to make a living writing for years. That secret is to promote yourself as a writer to as many people as possible in the most professional manner available. Promotion isn't as difficult as people think, it just takes guts. In fact, I never would have been a guest on Carol's site if I hadn't e-mailed her out of the blue, confident enough that if she'd ignored my e-mail, she'd be missing out on the value I could provide. Different pages on her site suggest contacting the people already in your network, cold calling new clients and a host of other methods.
Before you spread the word about your writing services, however, you must be prepared to wow potential new clients with a professional looking website. Personally, I've used the suggestions on Carol's site to improve my freelance writing hub page and to most properly showcase the work I've already done to prospective new clients. Even if you have a blog, it is best to create your own separate site to showcase your work as a freelance writer. While it's great for a prospective client to see what you're an expert in (in my case, self-help for writers), someone who is looking to hire you for something completely different (one of my clients hired me to write about vaccines and biological weapons) might want to make sure you can write on multiple subjects.
As a freelance writer who is new to the industry (by your choice or not), you will be pleased to see many different markets that are worth tapping. When I began writing full time, I thought that $15 at Demand Studios was the best I could get. Carol's Make A Living Writing website has shown me the light, as it were, to projects that could earn me much more.
You can take a look at Carol's site right here and therein you can learn more about her book, her classes and her freelance writer's den, which is her current major project. I will be writing more about Carol and her Make a Living Writing products in the future on this blog.
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