Okay so you are here. You are here because you want to learn about freelancing. You must have heard, one way or another, how freelancing is a good way to make some part time money. You are right. But you also know of content writing and blogging and SEO and it is all a big confusion. Don’t worry. We will get you started just right. This will be an in depth guide on what freelance content writing is and how you can get started with it. So grab some popcorn and read all the way through because it is going to be everything you need to learn before getting a freelance content writing gig.
What is freelancing?
Forget about the content writing. We will start with freelancing. Freelancing has little to do with the job of writing itself. When you are applying for a job, it is either full time, part time, home based, remote or freelance. Freelance is the time allocation for your job. A full time job is an office based day time job or night time job. A part time job is good for people who want to pursue studies at the same time or don’t have enough hours in a day to dedicate to a full time job. As a freelancer, it’s your responsibility to use plagiarism checker software to maintain the quality of your work. A home based job is a job that may be full time or part time but you are not required to go to the office. You can do it all at home. Likewise, freelancing is a type of job. Here, you are working from the comfort of your home and you don’t have specific work hours. You work as flexible for you. The work is mostly contract or project based.
Why is freelancing so great?
A lot of people who are either students or people who want to make some side income get into freelancing. This is great because the timings with freelancing are flexible. You are not accountable to anyone to mark attendance at a desk job. You have a task to complete in a day and you can do it whenever you want. You may be going to college during the day and you can work at night. You could be working at night and freelancing during the day. When it comes to time, you are your own boss!
In freelancing, you can take onboard as much work as you want. This means that if you have holidays coming up and you will have extra time, you can choose to increase your work load and make extra cash. If you have exams going on, you can choose to slow down. You can make tons of money or little bit. It is all up to you.
Freelancing is a huge word. It is not limited to writing. You could be a freelance graphic designer. You could be a freelance video editor. You could be an academic writer. You could do data entry work. There are jobs that allow you to serve as people’s virtual assistant. Most of the freelance jobs are creative but you can research on it to find just the right job for you. You can be a freelance marketing consultant and writing e-books at the same time. It is all on you how you shape your career. However, content writing will be the focus of our attention today.
Is content writing same as blogging? What does freelance content writing mean?
Content is of all sorts. You have graphic, video, audio and text content. However, content writing is of course text content. When freelancing, you may be writing web content, creative content and what not. Web content is the content that goes on the websites that you see on Google. A lot of written content is created every single day. Why? Because websites can later monetize this content. How they do this is another discussion. However, remember that content is important for websites. Also, content quality means everything.
Blogging on the other hand is a bit different. Bloggers are website owners who create a website where they share personal experiences and knowledge. This could be about anything. You could write a blog about pregnancy to sports cars. Anything that you can ever imagine of searching on Google, you can create a blog about it as well. It is as simple as there. The niches are endless. The main difference between just content writing and blogging is that you need to necessarily own the blog in blogging. As a content writer, you could be working with multiple blogs at once, writing about different things.
When you combine freelancing and content writing, it becomes freelance content writing. This means that you are taking on content writing gigs but as a freelancer.
How to get started with freelance content writing?
Now that you fully understand what content writing is and how you can do it as a freelancer, we will get to the discussion on how you can get started. There are multiple guides out there on this topic but we will share with you all the golden rules that you need to get started.
Connect with right platforms
The first thing that comes to mind is to where to go when you want to get some gigs. You need to learn about platforms that can help you connect with the prospective clients you will be working with. First of all, try to connect with local content creators in your country. Join Facebook groups for content writers. Likewise, visit websites like Fiverr and Freelancer. These are the standard freelance platforms where outsourcers and creators connect. The sign up process will be mentioned on the websites and you can openly offer your services there. People who are interested will leave you a message and guidelines. You will be required to complete the task and reply them back. Once that is done, your order is marked complete and your payment is transferred in your bank account.
Quality is everything
There are different rates that are offered by companies. However, if there is one thing that everything is the content creation industry depends on, it is the quality of the content. Without quality, you won’t be paid well. But what is quality really? Well, in essence, it is content that is well- researched and well- backed. You want to create content that shares valuable information. Likewise, how you structure that content also matters. If you are sharing valuable information but you are not connecting with your readers well, your message fails. You don’t want that. You want to create content that is flawless in every way. And this is something that you will develop over time. However, as a tip for the starter, don’t compromise quality from the very start. As much effort you will learn to put into your content, the more you will be able to charge for your content over time.
Work for free
In the beginning, you may find it difficult to connect with the right people. People will ask for content creators with experience. You will not have it but that is completely alright. We all begin at some point. We all take our first step. You will notice that it is not just the experience people will seek when considering you for a gig, they will ask you for samples. You need a portfolio as a content writer. People want to see your work before they can assign you a task. This portfolio builds over time as you complete a lot of assignments. As a beginner, you can ask people to give you a sample topic. You will be paid if the content is approved. Working for free can help you build samples. Other than that, you can try to get published on platforms that welcome readers’ content. Once you have your name published on a website, it gives you an authority. You will have credibility with the people you are working with.
Learn about plagiarism, keywords and SEO
In the content creation industry, it has been a practice to copy content from the web. This is known as plagiarism and it is practically stealing. You are doing a highly unprofessional and unethical thing. Also, it is very easy to get caught for plagiarism. It only takes a couple of seconds to find out. For websites, plagiarism can even lead to a lawsuit. However, for you, it means a bad image. A bad image in the industry will ruin your freelance career. Plagiarism is one thing to look out for.
A lot of times you will be assigned words alongside topics of your content. You will be required to incorporate these terms 2- 3 times per 100 words. These are known as keywords. For starters, just use the keywords as many times as you are told. This is because keywords help in ranking websites better. Ranking brings us to SEO i.e. search engine optimization. It is the process of working with various content and website factors that help websites rank on search engines. This is important for websites you create the content for. Learn about SEO as much as you can to better cater to your clients’ needs.
Choose the right content tools
There are a lot of content tools that can help you create better content. To start with, you can use a word counter tool and a grammar checker tool. The tools do exactly what their names suggest. They are available for free on the web. You can also use a readability checker that allows you to see how well the content is structured and if or not it is readable for the visitors. All these tools will suggest you ways in which you can amend your content. These are amazing tools that will help you excel at your job.
Now that you have the required details for getting started with content writing, we wish you good luck!