If the promises of the Internet are to be believed, there is TONS of writing work just WAITING for an intrepid writer to get rich off of, right?
Yes and no.
There ARE, in fact, plenty of writing gigs available for even beginning writers. How do you get these writing projects, sometimes referred to as gigs?
Advertising. The simple truth is that if you want to get paid for your writing, you have to let people know that you are offering writing services, and you have to know what those services are and how much you charge for them. Yes, a BIG part of finding work relies on your understanding of how long it’s going to take you to do a specific type of project or job.
Build Your Reputation As A Professional With Honesty
Honesty is the best policy for any number of reasons, but the best is because honesty is the easiest way to make sure that you aren’t charging too little for the work you do. That means that in the beginning, you might want to underbid or even offer to do your first project for free as a way of getting some experience under your belt. If you do some website content, for example, and you see it takes you a few hours to get done, you’ll have a better idea of what to charge the next client that will be a fair rate for your time.
But it’s important to remember that you CAN get paid before you’ve gotten a resume put together. The resume or writing portfolio you have to show potential clients the work that you can do is important for getting better paying gigs. After all, every employer, whether they’re hiring a contractor or whether they’re hiring a business, wants to know that you’ve had some measure of success in the past and doing the kind of work they are hiring for.
I mean, if it was your money, wouldn’t you want to know that the person you are paying has been paid by others who are happy with the results? So you have to be able to show something to prove that you can do the job.
But if they are going to get a good deal, they might be willing to take a risk that will allow you to earn while building out your own writing portfolio.
And the closer you can get to showing them a project that looks like theirs, the more easily they can visualize their project being successfully completed by you.
Where To Find Paid Writing Gigs
Honestly, these gigs are everywhere. The trick is that there are also tons of SCAMS mixed in with the genuine opportunities. But there are PLENTY of writing gigs out there that you can use to build your portfolio with.
There are job boards where people are looking for freelance writers and even communities like Best Seller Authors will put out job ads and have job boards where people can request bids of writing projects.
These jobs are everywhere if you go looking for them – but to make your life easier I’ll link to a bunch of resources at the end of this article that you can go through. For now the biggest thing as a beginner that you should be keeping in mind is that the way that you get these jobs is by advertising.
Advertising is simply the process by which you let other people know that you are willing to take money for a specific job or product that you make available. So the short answer is you advertise to people that you are a writer looking for work.
Since advertising in general is a pretty big topic, we’ll go into various methods for advertising different types of writing services in future articles. Heck, you can spend money on advertising, or even use your writing skills to publish content that helps you advertise your services using platforms such as these to hone your skills.
And heck, you can even use a training program like this to help direct your writing towards paid opportunities to build your examples for clients.
Because ultimately that’s all you’re doing as a writer who is getting paid to write is that you’re trading time for money. Either your trading your time for somebody else’s money or you’re trading your money for somebody else’s time.
