First steps in freelancing

Once upon a Mac keyboard, I had a moderately successful freelance writing career. I mostly wrote for PR companies (yes, selling my soul, I know), but the pieces I really enjoyed were the ones where I got to do Real Writing. 


I'm not entirely sure why, but friends keep on referring their friends who want to start freelancing to me for advice. Rather than write the same email over and over again, I've decided to turn it into a blog post - see below. 


My best advice: Deliver on-topic clean copy, on time (or even better, ahead of time). Editors will love you, and use you again and again.


Disclaimer: I certainly do not claim to know everything about freelancing. But these thoughts are based on my experiences. 

The best I can suggest, when it comes to building up your freelance portfolio, is to start by buying different magazines - everything from Women & Home to Your Family to Engineering News or whatever, getting a feel for who their reader is, and then pitching an article to the editor that you think will be interesting to their reader. 

Maybe send a sample of your work with the pitch, but they're more likely to take a story idea that talks directly to their reader, than a random article that's been written without a brief and sent to a lot of magazines in the hope that someone takes it. 

A friend of mine has had some trouble with people sitting on her ideas for months on end, meaning that she's lost out on opportunities, so it might be an idea, in your pitch, to include something along the lines that if you haven't heard back from them in one month, you reserve the right to pitch the idea/angle elsewhere. Just a thought. 

These are just suggestions - virtually none of my freelance work was for articles in magazines, it was mostly PR writing and corporate stuff - and there's no small measure of that kind of work available out there. 

As far as contacts go - I don't have many any more. 

A good place to start is also to build your own blog - not only will it keep you writing (and you can never get too much practice at that), it will be a good place to showcase your work. If you do this, make sure that it's not just a diary of what you did and where you went though - make it interesting, challenging, insightful. For eg, you could build a bit of a portfolio of travel writing examples based on your experiences abroad, or you tackle a theme that is close to your heart (my pet project is organic gardening, for example). Don't scoff at this - my husband recently employed a writer I found through her blogging.