Looking to boost your freelance writing income? While there are lots of ways to find new clients (in fact, I’ve listed some of the small ways you can find new work as a freelancer over on my Pitch Slap Wednesday guide), it’s always handy to have other ways too. Let’s dive straight into some ideas of how to boost your freelance writing income, from the obvious to the more unusual.
- Ebooks – The world of self-publishing means you can now create your own ebook and add it to Kindle or your own site. This is unlikely to make you big bucks, but it’ll keep things ticking along. It’s also a great lead magnet for a Facebook advert, so if you’re looking to increase traffic to your site, ebooks are well worth a try. If you already have great content that you want to bundle up together in an ebook, try Beacon.by, a WordPress plugin which exports posts into a beautiful format (free if you don’t mind the logo, there are paid versions too).
- Copywriting services – An obvious-for-a-reason option. If you’re good at writing, you may also be good at copy writing – as long as you’re comfortable with adapting to different writing styles, have a strong grasp of spelling and grammar and you’re comfortable with being a ghost writer occasionally.
- Teach. Speak to local collages, arts centres and community centres about teaching classes on anything you feel you’re an expert at – from content writing to social media. You can also sell your courses through a teaching platform like Teachable, who have a handy FREE 7 step guide how to get started here (affil, they’re the platform I use)
- Sell small packages on Fiverr (affil) or People Per Hour Hourlies (I wrote a guide on these a couple of years ago). Think blog post title suggestions, taglines or small about pages.
- Repackage your content on Medium and LinkedIn Pulse, to potentially reach new clients.
- Update your social media to let people know exactly how you can help them, and make sure you link them to your services page rather than the homepage. The less steps potential clients have to go through, the better.
- Pitch to websites that pay for articles. Look, being featured in Huffington Post might be something some freelancers are keen to, but there are plenty of websites that will give you exposure AND money. There are bundles of guides for which websites will pay you to write (many of them USA-based), but I like this overview from Crunch of freelance job sites that pay well. They mention Contently, a site I was recently featured on and saw a big jump in subscribers and readers from, so it’s well worth looking at.
- Write the kind of article you’d love to write for your ideal client. You want them to stumble across it and say “I have to have the writer write for me!”. Again, this is where Medium comes in handy.
- Matched Betting. This is something Emma at From Aldi To Harrods has talked about (lots of her guides here), and is essentially risk-free, tax-free betting. If you’re good with spreadsheets, it’s definitely worth trying out (she earned £12k in 12 months doing it). If this kind of option appeals to you, you may also want to look at taking paid online surveys. Again, From Aldi To Harrods has a lot of info on that.
- Need money quick? Package up your services and run a ‘sale’. You might offer 10-30% off your prices for a week, offer 5 content pages for the price of 3 etc. I would only do this occasionally (my general rule is ‘Don’t reduce your prices if asked, reduce the amount of work you offer for their budget).
