Becoming a freelance writer is, in large part, understanding how to create texts that you can sell to various companies and institutions. The first step toward creating those texts is understanding the kinds of things you’ll be writing.
In the last post, I talked about landing pages, SEO articles, and blogs. Let’s get into a few of the more technical writings you may be asked to create.
Press Releases
Companies like media exposure, and when they do something great or innovative, they submit press releases to various media outlets hoping they might be the next big story. While many of the larger companies have in-house PR departments to handle this sort of thing, most small to medium sized businesses hire freelancers to handle press releases.
In order to write a press release, you not only need to be familiar with general press release format, you also need to have the language skills to turn the ordinary into interesting. Instead of simply writing that company X donated one third of their profits to a microcredit loan institution, you have to find an angle that might get people interested in the story.
Finding the right angle and the right words to tell that story is probably the most difficult part of writing press releases. The pay, though, for documents like these is pretty good. If you’re simply writing the text, expect to handle about 800 – 1000 words at a price of $100. If you’re writing and releasing the text, you can charge up to $150 as a novice, but finding the right release channels is pretty difficult.
Sales Letters
Nearly every ebook, nearly every new product, nearly every new site has a sales letter. These are designed to be infomercials about the product being sold. Usually full of testimonials and bullet points about the product, e-book, or site, sales letters can be very difficult to writer. Most clients will demand that you guarantee a conversion rate (the rate at which customers will read your letter then buy the product), and if you don’t produce great rates, your future as a sales letter writer is certainly in question.
In order to write great sales letters, persuasive writing skills are a must. Understanding which words to use where is essential, as is understanding basic sales letter format. The reward for your hard work, though, is a much higher rate of pay. In general, you can charge $250 for a 5 paged letter.
Ebooks
If you’ve always wondered how your skills might fare as a nonfiction book author, an ebook is a good way to find out. Many sites these days offer downloadable ebooks either as a free gift or as the product itself. From writing about how to be a vegetarian to getting your puppy potty trained, there are ebooks about nearly every topic, and entrepreneurs are coming up with new topics or new ways of approaching old topics every single day.
Ebooks are not terribly challenging to write. In most cases, you’re given either a topic or a table of contents and told how long the text should be. From there, you simply complete the research and fill in the blanks. As a result, though, the pay rate on these isn’t as good as you might expect. Most clients aren’t willing to pay more than $10 per page, and it’s quite a bit of research and time to write an ebook.
If you’re interested in becoming a freelance writer, look into some of these texts we’ve discussed. Read what others are writing. Understand the basic formats and rules before you begin to engage clients, and your business will be a bit more successful.
In the next post, I’ll discuss how to avoid some of the pitfalls of freelance writing.
