If you’re trying to start a freelance writing career, you have probably already noticed that most potential employers, editors, content managers, etc. want to see a nice cover letter and some writing samples.
The cover letter is easy to take care of, you just need to follow any simple template you can find online, explain what your goals are and what you can offer the client/company and you should be set.
But what do you do about providing writing samples when you haven’t done any specific work for anyone yet?
How do you get a potential client to trust in your writing skills when you don’t have any real proof of what your capabilities are?
You can get past this bump in the road with two simple steps.
Step one: Starting a blog up is a great way to start a freelance writing career. This will give you a sufficient amount of writing samples you can show to potential clients. Find a niche you enjoy writing about and post every couple of days. This will give clients an idea of your writing voice and your ability to stay current within a niche.
You can run several blogs if you have several areas of interest. Even if the potential job you are going after is not within your niche but you still feel like it is something you could write good content for, your blog will show the client that you know how to write with good structure, spelling and grammar. It is possible to run an art blog that you love, but have a client hire you to write good, concise articles about something different. All it is really about is using your blog to prove that you can take knowledge and put it into an article in a readable way that the average person can understand. Plus a blog gives you a chance to write about something you like as a freelance writer and that’s always a bonus.
Step Two: Not all types of writing is easy to portray in a blog. For instance, if you want your freelance writing career to go toward the marketing field e.g. landing pages, email campaigns, resumes etc. a blog probably won’t do you a lot of good.
What you need to do to get your freelance writing career off the ground is write your own content. You can call them dummy pieces. Make up a make-believe company and write an outstanding landing page for them or make up a fake person and write them a resume and a cover letter. You can make up a fake email that looks something like this:
Dear (Fake Name)
Don’t forget to sign up for our new daily newsletter etc.
You will receive X amount of benefits and be able to stay up on the most current news and events we have going on from month to month. etc.
(Make it Short and Sweet) (Two to Three Short Paragraphs)
Sincerely,
(Fake Name or Company Name)
Make them look just as professional as you would if you were making them up for a real writing gig.
The idea here is to have something that you can give to a client that shows them if you were writing about their company or their cause, they would get something similar to the samples that you give them. There is nothing wrong or illegal about the process, you’re just trying to show someone what they need to see to make an informed decision about your skill.
If you have a hard time making up a company, which if you are a good freelance writer you should not, you can always choose an existing company and write a copy for them and replace the name with something not real afterwards. Remember it’s not going on the internet for everyone to see, it’s just going to be passed along to any potential clients to prove you can write good compelling content and that your writing voice matches up with the type of piece you’re writing.
When I started my freelance writing career, I had cover letters, press releases, landing and squeeze pages, grant proposals, SEO marketing content articles, fake email campaigns and more. Plus, I ran four of my own blogs so I would have some type of real internet presence. All of this eventually scored me my first couple of gigs and from there gave me links and samples of my work that I did for clients. In the end, slow and steady success followed.