How do I Become a Freelance Writer with No Experience?

Benjamin Ehinger
3 min readFeb 24, 2021

I’m going to provide the fast answer to this question and a much longer answer.

Quick Answer:

How do I become a Freelance Writer with No Experience?

  1. Treat it like a business
  2. Choose a niche
  3. Create a freelance writer website
  4. Write some samples
  5. Market yourself
  6. Find clients
  7. Get paid
  8. Rinse and repeat 5 through 7

Sounds simple enough, right?

Let’s look a little closer at each of these.

Treat it Like a Business

Too often, new freelance writers don’t treat their new career like a business. As a freelance writer, you’re opening a business.

Acting like a desperate employee won’t get you paying work and won’t help you keep clients.

Choose a Niche

Choosing the right niche isn’t easy and it’s not 100% necessary to become a freelance writer with no experience.

When I started, I wrote about a number of subjects since I accepted nearly every project I received. Today, I specialized in a handful of niches.

It’s best to choose one niche you enjoy writing about, but not 100% necessary. If you want to choose just one niche, make sure it’s something you love writing about.

Create a Freelance Writer Website

Creating a website may seem difficult or daunting, but it’s much easier than it used to be. Plus, going through the process of creating a freelance writer website will allow you to learn about some of the things you may be providing your clients.

You’ll want to include the following pages:

  • Home
  • About
  • Portfolio (about you and where your samples go)
  • Hire Me or Rates
  • Contact Page

It’s also a good idea to include a blog and provide some blog posts about your niche.

Write Some Samples

The samples you create will be the best marketing tool you have, at least at the beginning. About 90% of potential clients will ask for samples, even if you have them displayed on your website.

Write at least two relevant samples for every niche you want to cover.

Market Yourself

For many new freelance writers, marketing is the hardest part. There are so many easy ways to find clients, however.

Start with social media and start following people/companies you’d like to write for.

You can even provide something of value while building up your portfolio of samples. Here’s how:

  • Find 10 websites of potential clients you want to write for
  • Check out their blog and see what type of topics they like to write about
  • Choose a topic and write a killer blog post for them
  • Reach out through email or through the contact form on their website and deliver their free blog posts

This strategy has worked to help me land dozens of high-paying clients.

As a beginner, you can use each blog you write with this strategy as a sample, as well. Just make sure you don’t actually publish it on your blog. Instead, create a downloadable PDF or link to the URL once your new client publishes it on their website.

Read the full post, “How do I Become a Freelance Writer with No Experience?” from the original source, BenjaminEhinger.com

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