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Freelancing the Web

© Roxianne Moore

Using the Web to Promote Your Services For a freelance writer, marketing and getting assignments can take up as much time as writing. Query letters, direct mail to businesses, searching through market guides, studying magazines or other markets...it all takes up valuable time.

Using a web site as a promotional tool is one option that many freelance writers overlook. Yet this is one type of marketing that keeps working for you even when you're working on other projects. Sure, you have to check your messages, update your sample articles and add new services. But a web site gives writers an opportunity to give editors and potential clients a good, long look at their work. After all, direct mail packages usually don't contain a resume, ten sample articles and a catalog of the continuing education courses you teach. Even if you could stuff all of that into an envelope, you'd pay a fortune for copies and mailing. And you'd know that your prospect would read one or two pages and toss the rest. With a web site, though, you can pique their interest and offer a variety of support materials to show what you can do.

Paul Lima has been promoting his freelance services online for about three years. He's also promoted online writing courses for two years, and recently began promoting his book. Web promotion brings in only about 20% of Paul's business, with the rest being brought in by direct mail and cold calls. But, he claims, it brings in "almost all of [his] online writing course business," and costs "nothing but time to create the web site and reply to e-mail." It has also "generated dozens of leads" for his book The Rat Who Saved Christmas which also cost nothing but time to promote.

Robert Smith, a Vancouver-based freelancer, has two introductory pages. This one is kind of "cute," lighthearted and looks like it belongs to a fiction writer (he does write children's fiction). Home & Page features a photo of his house, and has a more serious tone appealing to businesses.

Smith has been using the Web for promotion for about a year. His experience has been quite different from Lima's, in that cold calling and referrals still bring in all of his freelance writng business. However, he recommends the Web for other freelancers. "The thing about the Web," says Smith, "is you have to be there, whether it's cost effective or not. Go for it."

The copyright of the article Freelancing the Web in Resources for Writers is owned by Roxianne Moore. Permission to republish Freelancing the Web in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.