Freelance Writing

Finding Your Specialty in the World of Freelance Writing

If you’re lucky enough, and talented enough, to make your living as a writer, you need to be relentless in your pursuit of work and of your craft. Often, freelance writers find the best way to make the days pass in a happier and more productive manner is to find a specific area of the freelance writing writing market in which to specialize.

Types of Freelance Markets

There are plenty of industries that use the talents of freelance writing professionals, including advertising, business-to-business (B2B), entertainment, finance, medicine, publishing, science, marketing, real estate, and the technology market. Non-profit organizations often hire writers to do small jobs for them, too, rather than have a full-time writer on staff. Within these industries, there are a number of types of freelance writing jobs available:

Creative Writing. Of course, all writing is creative, no matter how mundane. Even the most tedious writing projects offer a good writer a chance to wield a creative brush, whether it’s an article about composting, an ad for metal siding or a description of a condominium
development in downtown Baltimore.

Ghost Writing is an increasingly popular way for writers to earn money, working for clients who purport to be the actual writer but really outsource the jobs, put their own names on the work, and pay the writer – sometimes, but not always, quite well. You could find yourself writing an e-book, a pamphlet, web copy or advertisements.

Proposal and Business Plan Writing. People who own businesses don’t necessarily know how to write, and often need to hire someone to create proposals, business plans and other documents. Depending on your skill sets, this sort of freelance writing can be very lucrative. But you do need to have a mind for technical details along with the ability to write great copy.

Public Relations (PR) Writing offers freelancers the chance to do work of a very diverse nature – ad copy and layout, and even designing brochures, newsletters, press releases and media kits for clients promoting products, people and businesses.

Technical Writing involves anything and everything, well, technical, from user manuals to system documentation. Great technical writing depends upon a freelance writer’s ability to organize, structure, and develop the details of technical content. Getting freelance jobs as a technical writer usually requires prior experience or training.

Web Content Writing People who own websites often want to increase their web presence and ensure they come up on search engines by having writers create web pages called KRPs (keyword-rich pages). This area offers a lot of work for freelance writers, with the need for such documents increasing as more and more Web entrepreneurs find ways to increase the number of hits to their websites.

As you can see, there are a lot of opportunities for freelance writing – so get to work and use your abilities to create a career you love.