How to Start Freelancing Part 2

how to start freelancingby Joe Wallace

In my first post on How To Start Freelancing (part one of 1,000,000) I discussed how to properly outfit yourself to do the work. From here we’ll assume you’ve got your tools and are ready to get started. What next?

Let me start by saying there are very few hard and fast rules about freelancing that apply to all comers. The first hard and fast rule you should take to heart is this:

The freelance journey is a personal one. It’s almost like spirituality–it NEVER works exactly the same for everybody. The sooner you accept the fact that you’ll be engaging in a unique journey that won’t go exactly as planned, the quicker you can recognize opportunities that come your way as legitimate ones. Even when they’re non-traditional, unusual, or otherwise not written about in the how-to-freelance books.

Now that we have THAT out of the way, here’s some specific advice on what to do next.

Evaluate the subject matter areas you know best and try to focus your earliest efforts on writing on these subjects. What magazines are you interested in within your specialized knowlege areas? Don’t discount ANY of your hobbies, either. Take stock of the websites and mags you read that cater to your passions and consider writing for these publications first.

Whatever you do, don’t just fire off a query letter at this stage–instead, look at the mags in question and ask yourself the most important question you can ask before going to an editor. “What is this mag NOT doing that I as a reader would not just like, but LOVE to read?”

Once you have an answer to that question you stand a fair chance of getting a GOOD response from the editor of that web page or magazine. Outline the article, write a first draft and see how you like it. We’ll go over next steps in the next post in this series.

One important note–as your career develops there’s a very good chance that you will NOT be writing the articles ahead of time and trying to pitch them later. But you have to get started somewhere and this is a very good way to clarify your thinking in the early days when you’re second-guessing yourself to death. We’ll cover how to stop doing that in a later post.

joe wallace editor/writer

Joe Wallace is a full-time freelance editor, writer, and pro blogger. He has been writing professionally since 1991. His gigs include web editing for Motorola.com, social media and copy writing for FHA.com and VALoans.com, he ghost writes and runs the retro/vinyl junkie site Turntabling.net. Contact him at jwallace242 (at) gmail.com.