Passive Writing Gig Hunting — Get Paying Clients to Find You

By Dana Prince

When you work as a freelance writer, job hunting can be a big part of your day and because time is money, doesn’t it make sense to handle it in a way that saves you time and increases your income? I try to handle job hunting in the same way as making passive income. Here’s how I do it:

A lot of writers augment their income with passive article writing sites like eHow, Askables, InfoBarrel, and HubPages. If you’re making time to do that, you can also make a little time for self-promotion — — which can be an even more profitable way to increase your income.

Passive Income Benefits

When working for passive income streams, actions done today can pay you back repeatedly. I know people making $1,000+ a month cumulatively on articles that they wrote last year. It may take time and effort now for payoffs tomorrow but it might pay you tomorrow and the next day and the day after that as well.

So, why not perform an action that can get more results more than once with respect to hunting for writing jobs? With passive writing income sites, you can write once and get paid many times. Consider promoting yourself online with actions that you take once but that can lead to repeated results. Let’s call this…passive job hunting.

How do you do this? Self-promotion. Self promotion for writers is vital in terms of building your brand so that clients come to you. Self-promotion can take time and cycles now but can pay you off repeatedly in the future. Some freelance writers spend an hour a day querying and applying to jobs and while you should continue to keep your eyes and ears open for great job opportunities, doesn’t it seem easier to try to have people also come to you because they’re looking for an expert at a specific niche or writing style and found you listed as an expert somewhere?

Google — A Writer’s Best Friend

Google can be used to build you up as an authority by telling people who search for a press release writer, white paper writer, legal blogger, or (insert your specialty here)_____ writer, that you are the most relevant result. Because most web writers, through writing for clients and content factories, get to pick up a thing or two about search engine optimisation and social networking, they can do a great job of promoting themselves by applying the principles they use for clients to their own promotional efforts. If you’re helping your clients rank as #1 for the widget they sell, you should be able to help yourself become #1 in the SERPS for the widget that you sell.

Here are three tips to help you do that:

1. Start a website. Create a professional-looking business website. I started mine at Hostgator for $45 ($35 for 3 months of hosting and $10 for my URL) two years ago and it has done wonders for me! The site builder made it easy to set it up and I did it over a weekend.

2. Write articles for article directories and link them back to your site. Optimise them for the keywords you want to rank for.

3. Social bookmark your articles on places like StumbleUpon, Mixx, Reddit, Twitter, etc.

4. Repeat steps two and three each and every week.

Even one article a week over time can help you. Instead of having to troll job boards every week to fill up your schedule for the following week, you’ll eventually begin to get a steady stream of queries from clients who find you online. Your one application for a job gets seen once. But your self-promotion efforts can result in articles and your site being seen by many.

When people find you, it’s much easier to land the job. They’re already partially convinced that you’re right for the job and you can often make even more money this way because you set your own pricing.

You spend time every day searching for jobs and reading the blogs you love to read so why not take an extra few minutes and write a self-promotional piece for yourself?