Applying for Freelance Jobs? The One Thing To Remember

freelance-writing-advice-3by Joe Wallace

I know some people think I’m too hard on freelancers–in my FZ writing, I’ve done everything short of telling (some) people to go back to their day jobs. I hear cries of, “Joe, you’re just too mean!”

But now some OTHER freelance sites are saying what I’ve been saying for ages, and it seems that I’m not such a bad old editor after all. Case in point, a recent post at Freelance Switch called,”How NOT to Apply for a Freelance Position.”

Freelance Switch put out a call for designers and other creatives a while back, and wouldn’t you know it, they got tons of really crappy responses. I feel their pain. One missive from the post goes, “…out of all who applied ONLY 10% actually provided what was asked for.” Holy crap, you got as much as 10%? How’d you pull THAT off?

Here’s the secret to applying for a freelance job. Ready? Grab a pen, you might wanna write this on your arm:



90% of the applicants or more you compete with for any freelance job, query or other communication will NOT apply or query properly and make an ass out of themselves. The secret is to be one of that magic 10% and follow instructions to the letter, make your communication clear, concise and direct, and make quite sure everything is spell-checked and accurate. According to Freelance Switch, some of the responses to their call for creatives didn’t even include contact information. How pathetic.

Being one of what I call the ten percenters means carefully reading the guidelines and being a total stickler for detail. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? So how come 90% of all the responses come back as useless garbage?
A mystery for the ages.