Isao asks,

To build our writing portfolio, is it more important to write in places other than our own blog (and write many) or to pick a place with reputation (and keep the standard high)?

Writing somewhere other than your own blog is critical to building a portfolio that will interest clients and editors: they all want to see that someone else has hired you first and was pleased with your work to the point of using it. No matter how good your writing skills are, no one wants to be your first client.

That said, it’s reasonable to focus on just two or three places to write when you’re first building up your portfolio. It’s best to have clips or samples from at least two different projects in your portfolio, but you don’t have to have work from a dozen different places. You may not need more than a handful of samples in your portfolio, especially if you focus on one type of writing. However, it’s best if not all your samples are from the same projector publication.

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Gina Blitstein asks,

How do you get a client to be more forthcoming about articles? She knows what she wants but can’t articulate.

Clients who have trouble describing exactly what they want are a fact of freelancing life. Sometimes you get the client who has an exact word count, research materials and everything else ready for you from the start. Sometimes you get the client who wants something to market her business, but has no idea of what that something should look like.

It’s important to be prepared to ask that second type of client plenty of questions in order to work out what she wants. Sometimes, asking what the end goal she’s hoping for is a good starting point: from there, you can work backward to lay out the project’s parameters.

There is one tactic that seems to work well with some clients: I’ll ask if there are any similar articles or other projects that they’ve seen from other companies that are like what they want. While I won’t copy a project exactly, having an example can provide the starting point I need to talk to my clients.

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If you have any questions about the business of freelance writing, send them my way and I’ll answer them next weekend!

I know my name makes me stand out. In general, I think that’s a good thing: I’ve had lots of clients choose me because I stand out in a crowd. I’ve also had more than a few clients think they were working with a man and were very surprised to find otherwise. It has occasionally bothered me — there are plenty of photos of me floating around out there, which any client doing a little due diligence is bound to come across. Over all though, I tend to get a chuckle out of the confusion and move on.

Right now, though, I’m wondering if having a name that isn’t clearly feminine has worked in my favor.

Yesterday, Copyblogger posted a piece titled, “Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants.” I almost didn’t read the post, assuming that it would be interesting but just another post about marketing that I could afford to skip. But that comment about women’s underpants wasn’t just a clever headline. James Chartrand really does wear women’s underwear — because James is a woman.

I encourage you to read the whole post, but it boils down to the fact that James discovered that she could land a lot more clients by using a male pen name.

It’s a tough truth that there are still clients out there that, without even thinking about their decisions, offer male writers better gigs and better pay. It’s not just a question of gender, either — many clients are likely to choose writers with ‘American’ names, or at least names with European roots, rather than Indian or Hispanic.

So What Are You Going To Do About It?

Using a pen name is an option: James demonstrates how useful it’s been. However, there are some logistics that are worth considering before you jump into writing under another name:

• If you’re choosing a name of the opposite gender, you may not be able to talk to your clients on the phone without a lot of explanation.
• Signing contracts and accepting checks under another name can be tough. At the bare minimum, you’ll probably want to create a business so that you can use the business’ name for things like taking payment.
• You may have some fall out when clients and others learn that you aren’t who they think you are.

That last one is one of the biggest concerns in my mind. A little ambiguity isn’t too bad. My clients and I tend to get a laugh out of any situation which gets me addressed as ‘Mr. Bram.’ But I’d never want my clients to even consider the idea that I was deliberately trying to give them the wrong impression about myself.

Using a pen name full-time, as James does, can be difficult, especially when you get into questions of ethics. I think that James has handled it well — she explained the situation on her own, without prompting — but if you’re considering doing something similar, think about what it will take for you to approach the idea with the same honesty. It’s not a trivial matter.

When you need more work, it seems like all ideas are on the table. Cold-calling, offering a free ebook, networking… but what about advertising? Most freelancers don’t advertise their services in the traditional manner. Most of us just don’t have an ad budget big enough to take out even a square inch in the local paper on a regular basis. Then again, most of us don’t have an ad budget in general.

But there may be some situations where advertising our writing services make sense. With online ads often costing pennies, the return on even a small advertising budget could be useful. If you’ve got any sort of product, be it a template or an ebook, it’s even more reasonable to consider advertising.

Simply advertising freelance writing services may not be practical. If you check out the level of competition you’re facing on Google AdWords for phrases like ‘freelance writer,’ you’ll quickly realize that there are some other writers out there driving up the price. It’s only when you start looking at more targeted niches that you can get the best prices on. A good example would be ‘freelance copy writer,’ instead.

Another option is advertising on sites that cater to your target market. If you write marketing copy for small businesses, for instance, check out some of the blogs covering marketing for small business. They offer a lot of information about marketing — enough that many small business owners hoping to do the work themselves will get overwhelmed. If your ad is there in the side bar when they start looking for alternatives, you can land a client or two.

Personally, advertising is not my favorite marketing method, simply because of the cost. I’d rather spend the time on putting together a guest post or cold-calling. However, if you’ve got the budget, though, and you’d rather not spend the time, advertising makes for a great alternative.

Jennie asks,

My question is about the value of Elance.com and other freelance hiring sites. I accepted a project from an Elance client which will be completed in January 2010. After I complete the project, I am not sure what I will do with my Elance account. Do you believe, as Robert Bly does, that Elance pays poorly overall? Is there a better, faster way to find potential clients? Or is the old-fashioned cold-calling route the way to go?

I think that Elance and other bid sites can be useful as starting points for freelance writers. They provide a simple way to start building up a portfolio of work as well as to find work quickly — which can be a key concern when you’re first starting out. However, in the long run, I think that moving away from such sites is the best option in the long run. Projects posted on Elance, do typically pay lower rates than those you find for yourself.

You don’t need to make an immediate leap away from Elance, though. My suggestion would be to transition to finding work from other sources. A good starting point is to start looking for projects on other job boards and among the listings that sites like FreelanceWritingGigs.com and AllFreelanceWriting.com publish on a regular basis. You can also start marketing yourself: by building up your reputation as you reduce the amount of work your find on Elance, you can find higher paying clients without having to worry about having enough work at any given time. There are plenty of ways to market yourself (start with the 31 posts listed here) and cold-calling is only one element of it.

The downside to leaving Elance is that marketing yourself as a writer is not immediate. It takes longer to find those better paying clients than it does to submit a bid on Elance. You get the benefit of more money, but it requires an investment of time on your part. As much as I’d personally rather not work on a bid basis, it can make a lot of sense for a freelance writer who is only able to work a few hours every so often.

I had the chance to talk to a group of writers about promoting themselves online using blogs and other online tools. Katy Berube asks a follow up question,

I am sold on doing many of these things online. My concern is what happens to my content if these websites fail. I saw what happened to Magnolia (web book marking site) and understand that google notebook is no longer supported. If I put my whole life out there…how do I back it up? Am I crazy to be concerned about this?

That is a very legitimate concern — especially for writers who are in the business of creating content. For sites you control, such as a blog on your own domain, backing up your information is relatively simple. However, with other sites, it can be harder. In some cases, you can send information between sites (including to your own) so that you can back up information — that approach works with Twitter, Delicious and some other sites. There are also now several tools for downloading and backing up your social networking profiles. Most recently, I’ve seen Lifestreambackup — I received a free account in order to review the service for Web Worker Daily —which can backup Google Docs, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and plenty of other sites. There are other tools out there, but I’ve actually used Lifestreambackup and know it to be reliable.

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Got a question about the business of freelance writing? Post it in the comments or email it to me and I’ll make sure you get an answer next week.

Marketing is more than landing clients. It’s more than who will ask you to work on a project — it affects who YOU can ask to work on a project.

Today, I had a milestone in my writing career: I’ve been writing for some decently well-known websites for quite a while, including one which occasionally provides content to the New York Times. One of the best known newspapers chose to pick up one of my articles and run it on their website.

As proud as I may be of this situation, the fact is that the entire situation came about because of the time I’ve poured into marketing myself.

The article in question is an interview — the subject is very well-known in certain circles. I didn’t actually seek out this particular interview, though. Because I’ve networked with people in the field — it’s a niche I routinely cover — one of my contacts actually sought me out to set up this interview. He works with the interview subject and knew that she would be in my area, just before they had a relaunch of their site and offered to set up an interview.

My marketing directly translated into an interview that went all the way to the New York Times website. Marketing goes far beyond simply adding to the list of clients you write for — it can add to the list of people you write about.

Social networking sites, like LinkedIn and Twitter, offer a huge opportunity to promote yourself and your writing services. But the techniques that a writer can use to promote herself on those sites aren’t quite the same methods that everyone else is using.

Promoting Yourself, Not Your Clients

Most social media users don’t have much choice in what they promote — they write their own blog and have their own website, but they don’t show up anywhere else on the web. By just promoting their own blogs and websites, they’re getting traffic exactly where they want it to go in order to draw attention to their products and services.

Writers, on the other hand, may have articles and other examples of their work popping up on a whole variety of websites. Typically, those aren’t websites you control — or you earn a profit from beyond your payment for your article. That means that generating traffic for those websites shouldn’t be your first choice. Instead, you want to promote yourself and your services.

This sounds a lot easier than it actually is. I write for a long list of websites and my first instinct is to post links to each new article of mine as it is published. I want all my followers on Twitter and all my friends on Facebook to immediately see just how amazing the new article I’ve written is. But if I post literally every link that contains some bit of my writing, I’ll never be able to get those people to pay attention when I really want to get attention for my own blog or my services. By the same token, if I do nothing but post about how awesome I am, they’ll rapidly lose interest.

Finding Balance

All of that means that you need to find balance. It may mean that you can’t pass around every article you work on, as well as your own blog posts and projects just because you can wear out your followers. But sharing your very best work (and maybe promoting a few articles and projects that aren’t yours but that you find interesting), with just a little extra emphasis on your own blog or website can let you connect on social networking sites. It is important to be involved, beyond promoting your own work, of course — but when you can promote yourself and your services, you should.

As you might have figured out last month, I’m very interested in marketing — especially when it comes to the opportunities available for freelancers and small businesses. In part, that’s because I think that marketing such a business has to be different from marketing a larger business. Market This!: An Effective 90-Day Marketing Tool, by Sherry Prescott-Willis, provides a tool that addresses the needs of a smaller business.

Market This brings together information on building a marketing plan — but it’s not a dry textbook meant to help you crank out a plan an inch thick. Instead, it’s a short guide (less than 200 pages), broken down for someone who’s already busy running a business. I read this book a section at a time and still quickly got through it: it’s written so that you can actually do something to improve your marketing before you finish bringing an entire plan together and, when you do complete that plan, you’ve got clear action steps. With Market This‘ guidance, you can create a marketing plan that actually reflects what’s going on in your business, rather than trying to generate pages of numbers and analysis — that may work in a company where an entire department is devoted to marketing, but if it’s just you, that analysis isn’t likely to happen.

The book is somewhat general: it’s meant to guide just about any kind of small business or startup. But it does offer a clear primer on marketing, no matter what business you’re in. If you need a little help with the basics, I encourage you to check Market This out.

As usual, I’m giving away my review copy. You can enter to win by leaving a comment with a question about marketing yourself as a freelance writer before Friday — and I’ll answer those questions on Saturday, as well as randomly selecting the winner. I’ll pay postage anywhere within the U.S. If you win and are based outside of the U.S, I’ll ask you to cover the difference between domestic and international postage.

I’ve spent the last week recovering from writing 31 posts on marketing your freelance writing and fitting in an overall vacation. If you weren’t able to follow along in July, here are links to all 31 posts:

Day 1: Setting Your Goals
Day 2: Consider Your Services
Day 3: Identify What Makes You Special
Day 4: Review Your Website
Day 5: Review Your Marketing Materials
Day 6: Develop Your Elevator Pitch
Day 7: Request Testimonials and Recommendations
Day 8: Create A Blog For Your Website
Day 9: Add A Newsletter To Your Site
Day 10: Explore Your Niche
Day 11: Create a Job Board Strategy
Day 12: Plan for Querying and Cold-Calling
Day 13: Create Your Own Swipe File
Day 14: Develop an Online Identity
Day 15: Choose Your Social Networking Sites
Day 16: Join A Professional Organization
Day 17: Attend Local Events and Groups
Day 18: Go to Conferences
Day 19: Team Up with Other Freelancers
Day 20: Offer Resources to Your Clients
Day 21: Improve Your SEO
Day 22: Offer Discounts and Special Deals
Day 23: Advertise Your Services
Day 24: Build Your Expert Reputation
Day 25: Look at Marketing Materials Beyond Business Cards
Day 26: Create a Newsworthy Event
Day 27: Connect With Other Writers
Day 28: Prep A Side Project of Your Own
Day 29: Promote Your Work
Day 30: Compare Your Progress To Your Goals
Day 31: Make Marketing A Habit

The feedback I’ve gotten is incredible, and I’ve decided to go ahead with a full-fledged ebook based on the 31 posts I’ve written. However, I’m adding a lot more resources to the ebook. It’s already 63 pages long — and I’m pretty sure that I’ve got plenty more to add. I’ll be leaving the posts up, of course. You’ll still have access to the basics right here. But if you want more information on anything I discussed, the ebook will be a great resource. It will also be the only way to get a copy of the information I shared via the newsletter, if you didn’t get it already. I’m working hard to get it ready to go as soon as possible.

To be truly effective, marketing can’t be something that you do just once in a while — especially for a freelancer. Instead, marketing must be a habit, something that you make time for every day. It can be tough for freelance writers, because that means extra work beyond the writing that is actually paying the bills and it can be difficult to focus on marketing if you’ve already got a full client list.

Just the same, freelancers must market. The typical explanation is that you never know when one of your clients will cut a project and that you have to keep hustling to line up new work. It goes beyond that, though: even if your plate is always full, you can want more. What about better paying clients? If you’ve been writing for a while, it’s important to keep marketing so that you can land new clients who are willing to pay higher rates — after all, most of your existing clientele is going to expect you to keep working at the same price you’ve always worked at.

Set Aside Marketing Time

Many part-time freelancers make a point of setting a certain amount of time aside for writing. Whether you’re full-time or part-time, it’s important to do the same for marketing. Even if you can only manage working on your marketing efforts for 15 minutes a day — well, that’s 15 minutes of marketing you weren’t doing before. That sort of time frame may require some very careful choices on just which marketing tactics you’re going to devote yourself to.

As you practice your marketing skills, you’ll be better able to handle the process — you’ll be able to expand your efforts, and build on your existing reputation. Ideally, you may be able to expand the amount of time you spend on marketing, as well. There is no set amount of time you should be spending on marketing your freelance writing, but I don’t think an hour a day is out of line. That sound like a lot of time, but think about what you may be using that time for: writing query letters, blogging, even going to events. Those sorts of activities pay off when you spend some time on them.

The longer you make a point of marketing, the more of a habit it will become. Marketing yourself and your writing is a great habit to have — and it will come in handy no matter what the future of your freelancing career looks like. Whether you want to write articles from here to forever or you want to build up passive income strams, you’ll need to be able to marketi yourself to meet your goals.

Bringing In Outside Help

One of the reasons that freelance writing is such a flexible business option is that we’re each pretty much responsible for every part of operating our businesses. The number of freelance writers who bring in some outside help — whether we’re talking about tasks like marketing or bookkeeping — is pretty low. But that doesn’t mean that it isn’t an option.

If you’ve got a pretty full plate as far as work goes, it may make sense to hand off at least a little of your work to someone else. I don’t recommend it as an option for a freelancer first starting out: such help is going to cost a little money and it’s harder to make sure your help is handling a project the way you want if you haven’t done such projects yourself. In other situations, however, a virtual assistant or some other help can make sense. Depending on the virtual assistant you talk to you, you can outsource a wide variety of your work. Personally, I prefer to outsource tasks I don’t enjoy (like bookkeeping) so that I have more time for tasks I do enjoy (like marketing). But even within the larger area of marketing, you can get a lot of help. There are virtual assistants who will update your website, hunt down editors’ email addresses or design your business card. It’s just a question of what you need help with.

Revisit Your Marketing Plans

As you continue your freelance writing career, make a point of revisiting your marketing plans regularly. Your focus may shift — you may want to explore a new niche or target new clients. Those shifts can require some corresponding changes in your marketing efforts: you want to make sure that you are where your ideal clients are at all times.

You don’t need to completely change your marketing plan on a weekly or monthly basis, of course, but checking in once a month or so to make sure that you’re still progressing towards your goals can help you to decide that you’re still on track. If you feel that you aren’t meeting your goals, or you’ve slowed in your progress, then it may be time to revise your marketing plans.

How do you schedule your marketing tasks with the rest of your work?