Freelance Writing Questions: Dealing With Difficulties

Catherine asks What did you find most difficult when you first began freelancing? And how did you overcome that difficulty?

When I went freelance, I faced two issues. One was a lack of contacts. The other was a lack of recent clips.

While I’d been lecturing, I’d done the occasional freelance piece, but since I wasn’t writing about metals or education, the contacts I’d made in those fields weren’t much use to me. The same went for the clips — I had plenty of academic papers to show, but not much normal, everyday writing.

Getting Clips Quickly

In order to get some clips quickly, I started doing some article marketing. That meant writing articles on any topic that I could think of and publishing them on EzineArticles and other sites.

I also did a lot of reviews on consumer sites. The goals was twofold: to get back into practice and to have some examples to show off. One of the articles I wrote led to me getting a paying job writing about education (ironically!) and the work has been flowing steadily since then.

Making Contacts

The issue of contacts was solved by accident, because I started blogging and happened upon a site that attracted a lot of writers and publishers. One thing led to another and I was soon getting regular work from a couple of agencies.

I’m not saying it’s this simple for everyone. I had an advantage, because I had been writing for more than 17 years when I went freelance, so I didn’t have to worry about skills but about promotion. I’ll be talking about that in another post.

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