How to Become a Freelance Writer with No Experience

If you have always wanted to be a freelance writer, but never knew how to get started or what it would take to be successful in the field, this blog post is for you. In this post, we will go over how you can become a freelance writer with nothing but an idea and some free time.

Do you want to start freelance writing, but don’t know where to begin? If so, then this blog post is for you! We’ll take a look at the best ways to get started with no experience. They include finding your niche, learning about SEO and keywords, building an online portfolio, and more.

Freelance writing can be an incredibly rewarding career path if you do it right. It gives you the freedom and flexibility of working from home, while also allowing you to make some serious money doing what you love.

Set A Goal

Before picking a niche or creating writing samples, take a moment to dream about where you want this freelance writing journey to take you.

Do you want

• The freedom to work from anywhere and travel the world
• To get paid to write things for other people
• To make money, publishing articles and books under your name
• An agency with clients of your own and a team of contractors or staff working for you

There’s no wrong answer, just a goal. When I left my corporate job in the Spring of 2018, I didn’t think I had a clear goal. I just wanted to make a living writing from anywhere (even if anywhere was my living room). In the years that followed I tried social media writing, ghostwriting, and chasing down leads on my way to building my own little content marketing empire. It bombed. As an introvert, I really don’t like having to talk to others unless absolutely necessary — that’s what I loved about my old job, I could go for days without talking to anyone. But in the rat race of building an empire, I was emotionally drained, creatively suffocated, and broke.

Nothing changed until I accepted that building an empire isn’t my dream. All I wanted was to make a living writing from anywhere. There was nothing in that dream about building empires or having bylines or managing a staff. That opened my mind to opportunities to work with writing platforms and agencies and to pitch articles to sites. Within a month, the game changed. I managed to triple my income, working 3 to 4 days a week.

So, find out where you want this journey to take you and use it as a north star to guide you through the decisions about how to start and where to go from there.

Pick a Niche

If you want a shot at being successful as a freelance writer, your best bet is to pick an industry or niche that you’re passionate about. It can be anything from technology, personal finance, travel, health & wellness — literally anything under the sun.

To paraphrase Jonathan Stark, no one business owner is thinking, “Finally, someone who just writes blog posts.” There are 57 million freelancers in the US alone, according to 99firms. But they aren’t your only competition. There are marketing agencies, writing service companies, and content creators who perform the same tasks that you do. That means you need a way to stand out from the crowd. You have to actually become one in a billion.

Niching is one way to set yourself apart. By dedicating yourself to writing in a specific industry or committing to a certain style, you can easily become an expert freelance plumbing writer within a few years.

Think about it. If you owned a plumbing business, and you were choosing between two freelance writers for your monthly blog posts, who would you choose — the person who has written ten different posts about plumbing or the other candidate?

When you niche down, the competition thins out, and it’s easier to get seen.

Create a Portfolio of Work

You should have a writing portfolio, especially if you’re starting out with no experience. Whether it’s on your own website, on a Medium blog, or on your LinkedIn profile, you need to be able to show potential clients the work that you can do for them. Your portfolio should be tailored to the type of work you want to write (press releases, blog posts, novels) and the industry you want to serve. You want to make the decision easier for prospective clients. You vs the other candidate. The more tailored your portfolio is, the easier it is to pick you.

Once you’ve decided on a niche, it’s time to write 3 to 5 sample pieces for your portfolio. Having a clear industry in mind makes this so much easier because there’s less guesswork about what you should write for these pieces. Using our plumbing example (because after I’m done here, I have to write two blog posts about plumbing), you can type “plumbing blog topics” into Google and find over 100 content ideas to choose from. Pick five different topics from the lists and get writing.

When you’ve completed those five pieces, it’s time to publish. Don’t wait until your portfolio is complete and perfect before sharing it with the world. You can share one at a time.

Make It Easy for Clients to Find You

You’ve built your portfolio and published it, now what? You have to make sure that clients can find you. This is where the money lives — in leads. And those leads don’t just appear out of thin air; they come from lots of different channels like Search Engines (your website or blog), LinkedIn (that’s where business owners are), and other websites.

Guest posting is a great way to put yourself in front of potential customers. Make a list of blogs and websites that accept guest posts. Since you have 3 to 5 sample pieces on your blog already, you can show these when pitching a guest post. In a search engine, type “your niche” + “write for us”. Most guest posts will be unpaid, but that’s okay. You’re not looking for a byline and a link to your portfolio site. Bylines are gold because they show editors and clients that someone trusted you to write for them. After three or more bylines, you can even start pitching articles to places that pay you to write for them.

Send Regular Pitches to Your Niche

Welcome to the grind. Here’s where you find a lot of your work as a freelance writer. If you have to, write 100 pitches to get two or three responses back who might want to hire you for their content needs. That means that if someone doesn’t reply right away, they probably won’t ever respond, and it’s time to move on.

If having your own clients doesn’t matter much, you can approach agencies or apply to writing platforms to start earning money within a matter of weeks.

In the meantime, keep writing samples, keep guest posting, remember your mission. Post that statement somewhere where you can see it when you can to give up.