Writing Your Way To Wealth Part 3

In the last post, I discussed where you might find some freelance writing opportunities, but before you start searching, it’s important to understand some of the kinds of texts your clients might want you to create. Keep in mind that not all writers can create all kinds of texts. Some writers are great with sales materials but terrible with well-researched articles. Likewise, some writers are great with short blog style postings but write awful sales copy. The trick to being a great freelance writer is to understand the types of texts you’re good at creating and handling those jobs as often as you can. That will allow you to build a strong client base and begin working your way into other types of text if its appropriate. Here, we’ll discuss the three most common kinds of texts you’ll be asked to handle.

Blogs

Blogs are pretty popular on websites, and for good reason. They’re not only easy to write, they’re easy to read, and they make a great marketing tool. Unfortunately for many site owners, though, blogging takes up valuable time that could be used elsewhere, so lots of sites outsource their blog work.

Blog work doesn’t pay as well as some texts might (the going rate is about $5 per 250 word post), but the writing is usually fairly conversational, which lots of new writers are good at. The only real drawback to blog work is that in most cases you’ll have to post it yourself, which means logging onto a client’s site every single day and making the post.

SEO articles

SEO work is the “bread and butter” client base for most freelance writers these days. If you’re not already familiar with it, “SEO” stands for “search engine oriented.” Most sites want to rank high with the major search engines, and in order to do so, they ensure that their pages have a high keyword density. So, if your client runs a site that sells lawnmowers, he’s going to have a list of keywords that need to be incorporated into your articles at a specific density. The theory is that this will help his site be one of the first people see when they type a given keyword into Google or another major search engine.

SEO texts are fairly easy to write. Most clients just want short, informational style articles on the keyword. The difficult part, though, is ensuring that you offer SEO text that meets the client’s keyword density standards without sounding idiotic, and when you have keywords like “fireplace outside kitchen,” it can sometimes be a little tough.

SEO texts also pay very little. Most writers charge based on word count, and the going rate for a 500 word text is about $8 to $10 among inexperienced writers.

Landing Pages

Since much of your work will center on clients who have ecommerce or other informational sites, many of your jobs will center around writing pages for those sites. While most clients are willing to tackle the “About Us” and “Privacy Policy” themselves, few are willing to write their own landing page, as that’s where the real action takes place.

A “Landing Page” is, literally, where a customer lands after clicking on an advertisement or search engine listing for a particular website. As a landing page writer, your job is to get customers to stay on the site and click through to a sale. That means you have to be very convincing while you’re writing a landing page, and your clients will expect high conversion rates from your work.

The great news about landing pages, though, is that they pay pretty well. In most cases, you’ll be rewarded with $30 to $50 for your work on a 500 word text.

Blogs, SEO texts, and landing pages make up much of the work you’ll be asked to take as a freelancer. There are, though, many other texts clients might ask about, and we’ll be discussing some of those in our next post.