Writer Without Portfolio

If you’re planning a writing career, then you need to have a way of showing off your work to prospective clients. Most people don’t just jump into writing; they have written all kinds of things for years and like the process enough to think of turning it into a career. The question is, have you got a writing portfolio? Many of us don’t think about this early enough to keep the kinds of clips and samples that will attract potential clients.

Save Obsessively

If you’re just starting out, the most important tip I can give you is to be obsessive about saving everything you write. You never know when it might come in handy. A sample lesson that I wrote for a course got me a job writing educational material for a client — and it wasn’t even part of my official portfolio! Since you don’t know exactly what you will need, keep everything, either online or on paper.

A Home For Your Writing

That brings me to my next point. Get a website of some kind. If you don’t want to spend money on hosting, then create a Squidoo lens that you can use to showcase your work. Combine that with some online storage (such as DropBox) and you can upload PDFs, Word documents and HTML files and link to these from your lens. This is an easy way to create an online writing portfolio. In the long run, it’s probably better to buy a domain name and hosting, but this will keep you going till the money starts rolling in.

What To Include

So you’ve saved everything and you have somewhere to showcase your work, but what should you include in your online writing portfolio? The short answer is: your best work. If you can’t judge what should be in there, ask someone who will give you an unbiased opinion. In other words, someone in the business, not your best friend from school. I’ve done that for some writers through my mentoring service — it’s amazing how different your work looks when you get someone else’s perspective.

Organizing Your Portfolio

If you have a lot of items in different areas, then you need to think about organizing it. You can do this by date or by theme, depending on what you want to highlight. If you want to show that you have done a lot of work recently, then date is a good option, but if you have lots of areas of expertise, then organization by theme is a better bet. Of course, it is impossible to cover every possible theme, but if you apply for a job, it’s easy to rearrange your samples to include the themes that clients are looking for (provided you’ve done the work, of course).

Beyond The Basics

Those are the basics you need for a writing portfolio, but that still won’t answer all of your potential clients’ questions. If anybody has said anything positive about your writing, get their permission to include it on your site or page as a testimonial. Include some kind of introduction to you and your approach to work — clients want to know if you can do the job and will deliver on time and to spec. Your writing portfolio takes the place of a first interview with a potential client so it’s worth taking time to get it right.