90 Percent of Writers Make THESE MISTAKES Finding Freelance Jobs and Clients
Your best freelance writing jobs and clients aren't posting about high-paying work. Finding freelance clients means doing specific needle-moving activities that MOST writers miss while they're trying to sort through freelance jobs online posted to low-paid job boards, recruiters, or small businesses (who definitely aren't your diamond clients).
In this video, you'll see exactly how to get clients whether they're copywriting, content marketing or content writing, or content strategy clients, what specific to-do's you need to accomplish to move the needle forward in your freelance writing business, and how to track results for your ultimate best business.
________
Freelance Jobs: MISTAKES 90 Percent of Writers Make Finding Freelance Clients
Your best freelance writing jobs and work will never be found publicly. This is one of those dirty little secrets that a lot of seasoned veteran writers know that newbies don't or that people that are in their two or three or five years sometimes into their freelance writing business. When you're looking at job boards or when you're looking at all these different types of listings, that's not where your best clients are.
Your best clients are working behind the scenes on a plan or a project or a deadline. They're looking for you to reach out. You need to plant those seeds So if you're looking for how to get your best clients if you're looking for copywriting or content marketing or content strategy or brand messaging clients You need to dig for those.
I always call it digging for diamonds So the first way that we are actually going to dig for our diamond clients our number one thing Is that we're going to start building up our eye for these diamond clients So I always call it your new pair of glasses You are kind of looking for the attributes that make up your diamond clients.
What are the green flags? How much revenue do they make what does their website look like? What about their linkedin? What are the commonalities between all of these different things you want to make sure? That you're collecting data on this. It's not about sifting through hundreds of job ads. It's not about asking everybody for referrals.
Especially not strangers. Don't go to strangers and ask for referrals. That's a whole nother thing. But when we're looking for these freelance clients, it's your job to go find them and this has been a long time honored tradition So when there was no internet people would cold call When there was no phones they would send letters or they would walk around town like they would go and do the footwork To make it work your job is to do that But digitally right you need to use your digital footprint to go find these clients This digging for diamond clients also means that you're kind of figuring out.
Why did I like This client you're looking at your best clients and you're like, why did I like this client? What worked for me? What didn't? What was my favorite part of this project? Why do I want to move into doing more of this project or doing more of this content and kind of keep track of all Of those really important things.
When you're moving into this I want you to kind of think about it as like it's your job to uncover these diamonds It's your job to kind of be the archaeologist in your business. It's not about trying to find people who are posting It's not about getting on a platform and being like these are the only jobs that are there It's Because what ends up happening is you get into this mindset that there's no good clients.
And I've seen this happen a whole bunch of times recently and over my 11 years as a freelance writer Is that whatever's happening on the job boards? Whatever's not getting posted, whatever's happening in the platforms, or whatever's happening with name favorite tool here, whether that's Copyscape for plagiarism, or Grammarly for grammar and punctuation checks, or AI copy, all that stuff, people panic.
You don't have to panic when you're working with good clients and you know how to find this work. Your job is to dig for them, look for those attributes, find the collection of data about why this was your best client. What do they look like? What type of niche were they in? What type of company were there?
That, or were, were they? There we go. So your job is to get all that data and your job is to be active, right? So our second thing here that we want to do is be active. You want to make sure that you are sending your LOIs and pitches. So when you're working through All of these freelance things with your business and figuring out what projects you're doing and what niches that you're in all that good stuff What I like to do when I'm sending my LOIs my letters of introduction is really work with templates Because the whole goal is that you're actually sending these templates that are customized per niche and you're making sure that these templates are Connecting with your clients quickly and accurately I always talk about it as like it's a drive thru.
Your job is to be like, Hi, do you need help? I'm qualified. Here's some clients and niches. Buy and then leave. That's your job. It's not to convince them or sell them on the first thing. This is a big mistake. A lot of writers, once they start digging for diamond clients, they start thinking, Oh, I have to sell them from the first time that I send this LOI.
The whole goal of this LOI or pitch is to sell them. If I was sending a pitch to a magazine, yeah, my job is to slam that idea, is to really kind of go in hard on that idea. But if I'm reaching out to business clients, that's my first time meeting them. I don't know what's going on behind the scenes. I can't do a lot of intel on them other than what's on their website and LinkedIn and what kinds of content they're already creating.
With a magazine, I can get a ton of intel because those things have been around forever. I can read 50 to 100 back, back issues of those magazines or I can find 50 to 100 articles and say, Oh. This is what they're doing. But when I'm looking for business clients, I kind of have to use my own Intel. I'm kind of making my Intel as I go learning about my clients, digging for them.
So as I'm doing that, then I'm creating these templated LOIs. Your business clients are busy. They don't have time to read your 900 page LOI. They need you to get in and get out and give them the most important information and your job is to send a bunch of those. Your job is to send them as you go, right, over time.
So I usually recommend that we're feeding the marketing beast at least 50 to 75 LOIs a month or you're doing at least an hour of marketing every day. Now for me, I always got demotivated by the idea of 50 to 75 LOIs because I would get like 48 or I'd get 61 or 78 or whatever if I didn't hit above or exactly in the right number I would beat myself up.
So I started with an hour of marketing a day So if that's kind of where you are I would start with an hour of marking and marketing a day and I would really kind of hone in on who's answering What's going on? Keeping a tracked spreadsheet of that, um, and making sure that you're paying attention to the trends in your business.
This is another big mistake that I often see with writers is they don't pay attention to the gold of how many things they've sent. They just send them and they never track them. They never know who answers and why. They never pay attention to how many they've sent over how long a period of time. They never pay attention to their overall response rate.
They're so focused on like, did they open it? No one cares if they opened it. No one cares if they opened the email. We care if they responded. So if they responded, we can do something with that. That's an action, right? We can go and respond to them or follow up or do whatever we gotta do. But no one cares.
This was always a weird thing that I thought when I started out was that everybody was like, I have a mail tracker and I'm tracking who opens them. Who cares? Like, the deliverability of email nowadays is like, fantastic. You don't have to worry about deliverability or spam or bounce rate, like, unless you're being spammy in your LOI template, which is a big no no.
Um, but most of the time you don't have to worry about it. Your job is to plant your seeds. Your job is to go out there and do that and make sure you're sending the right amount of seeds or at least doing one hour of marketing a day. Your job is to figure out who's responding and why, what kinds of projects do they need help with?
What are they telling you on your calls? And you're keeping track of all this data. That's your job. Your job is to start figuring out where the gold is in your spreadsheet, where your LOI spreadsheet, where you're tracking everything. Your job is to watch the trends in your business. Now I don't want you to be spinning your wheels.
When you spin your wheels, what ends up happening is you just like try to send as much out to as many randos as possible. That's not the goal. In order for you to have great clients and for you to have great freelance work, it needs to be a process and a system. You need to make sure that you're doing things in a way that you're, That are repeatable, or that you can track.
Because the most successful writers, and in my own business, that really is what makes the difference. The people who get stuck at a plateau, or the people who, um, end up getting messed up somewhere in their process, or they have trouble doing their work, it's because they don't follow a system. It's because they end up getting stuck somewhere, and they, they Have you ever heard that quote that talks about like, uh, You don't, um You like fall to the level of your systems or habits, so you don't like rise to this level, you fall to the level of your systems and habits.
This is what happens to a lot of writers. They fall to whatever their default system and habit is Versus trying to fix that default and fix that habit over time. They end up falling back into this disorganized Mass mess of sending marketing out which is lois and pitches or they end up in this place where they're stuck making a number, right?
Whatever that number is, they're stuck at that number for a really long time. They're kind of missing the forest for the trees. They're not tracking then looking for the gold nuggets in their spreadsheet or whoever their clients are. Um, and they're also not looking for the important information that's in all these websites and in all these LinkedIn.
So that's LinkedIn profiles. So that's what we're going to talk about for number three. So our third thing when we're kind of looking through our jobs, or we're looking for work, or we're sending our LOIs and pitches, most of the time LOIs for businesses, Your job is to look at the things in their websites and in their linkedin company pages Okay, so you're looking through your list of potential clients your job is to notice commonalities Your job is to say hey i've noticed that the last 10 websites.
I looked at had this thing write that down I noticed that the last four websites missed this thing write that down Because the more you can analyze their website And the more you can analyze their linkedin company page and the trends in their business You The better you are at finding clients.
That's kind of your new pair of glasses Is you start noticing these things and you start noticing what makes great clients for you and then you capitalize on that Your job is to kind of pay attention instead of trying to barf all over everybody with lois and just send as many as possible Your job is to pay attention to how this works And the more websites you can look at the more loi company put pages the more profiles you can pay attention to You The better you are at identifying your best clients, the better you are at figuring out who's the right fit for you, why you're reaching out to them, what types of projects they're working on, how you can help them, what things they might do in the future.
So then you can end up getting into this kind of marketing consultation or, or content strategy advisory role, because you've read through hundreds of websites while you're sending these LOIs and you've read through hundreds of LinkedIn, um, profiles. And you've read through the content on their website.
What type are they creating blog posts? Are they trying to grab subscribers? Are they creating guides or infographics? You have so much data that you've packed up that then it's a lot easier to move into something like the idea space or strategy space because you've built up this knowledge base over time and then you get more paid for your knowledge versus the typing, right?
Versus the actual execution of the content. So I want you to make sure that you're paying attention to all these different things and that you're getting all these pieces in place. So your job is to pay attention to the trends. Look at all the content, right? Look at the website, look at the LinkedIn and track the things that are working.
So I don't want you to get stuck in a lot of the mistakes that I made when I first started out getting on platforms or trying to squeeze blood from a stone, basically from a client who's definitely not a longterm client. I want you to kind of pay attention to the trends that you're seeing. On the outside and trends that you're seeing on the inside from doing calls with them.
What are they saying? What types of content are they talking about? Do they have longterm goals? Are they going over what that content looks like if it's successful, right? All of that stuff that leads you on a better path to working with the right freelance writing clients for you versus being on job boards or, or searching all over the internet for stuff that's not posted.
Your job is to kind of look at these things that make up great freelance writing clients and great freelance writing clients for you by paying attention to all these trends. And if you've been marketing for a while, I want you to go back through your spreadsheet. I want you to go back through who you've sent LOIs to or whatever you track it in.
You know, I don't care if it's a spreadsheet or something else, but go back through what you've been tracking it in. And figure out if there's any kind of stuff that you missed. Who's responding and why? Who signed a contract with you and why? What niches are they in? What revenue is that company? Like, how does that all work together?
So I want you to kind of gather those things up and start looking at that. Because this is something that I think a lot of writers forget to do. They just send all the marketing. And then they're like, why isn't this working without paying attention to what they're doing in the process. So go back and look at your stuff.
Make sure that you're paying attention to all of these little, um, tidbits and data points in your stuff and stay away from the platform. Stay away from the job boards. Remember that you are digging for your diamond clients. You are paying attention to what's going on as you look through their website and LinkedIn.
You're paying attention to what they say on calls. That's kind of your second part of the process. They're talking on calls about their goals or their content or who their audience is And you're kind of tracking that over time as you get on more calls So the more marketing you do the more you look at these websites and linkedin the better your pair of glasses gets The better, uh, the more calls you get on the more you listen And respond the better things get you kind of notice these trends you kind of pay attention to these red light characteristics or these red flags and you start noticing kind of things that are popping up where you're like, wait a minute like This isn't the right client for me.
This doesn't sound like my other client that was awesome This does sound right or they kind of explain their project and they start saying things like we're just creating content for content's sake basically Uh, or they're like, oh, we just were told we need to do this or uh, we're just you know Trying this thing out because like we heard it was a good idea.
They don't actually have a plan They're not executing that plan. They're disorganized They don't have goals. They don't know what success looks like or they say crazy things like I want to be on the first Page of google or we need to do a lot of seo writing or like we need to rank better Which is just not part of the problem Like that's not the problem.
The problem isn't that the problem is much deeper than that So if you're kind of hearing that that usually means you're working with smaller clients who are kind of looking at small potatoes Versus the bigger picture Because we know that if you do the work right, if you hop in there, there have been articles or there have been types of content that make companies millions of dollars.
That is the conversion of doing good content. It's not about just like, Oh, the right keyword in the right place. And we're pleasing the robots. That's not it at all. It's really about getting those goals, measures of success, putting the content in the right way, um, understanding how to create great content for a specific audience.
And kind of building that brand around pain points of that audience and understanding how that product or service of your client helps. That's all important stuff. So when you're looking for these kinds of freelance jobs, I want you to make sure that you're going through your LOI processes. If you are looking for that LOI process, I have a free seasoned veteran cheat sheets that you can grab.
It's at mandyellis. com slash cheat sheet. You can go grab that to find the marketing process that I follow, the marketing process, the other seasoned veterans follow, and it'll help you kind of get to that next level with your marketing and help you find the right job. better clients and identify them.
So I hope that this has been helpful. I hope it's kind of given you a new viewpoint on how we're moving forward with our freelance writing. We're digging for stuff. We're putting in the work. We are doing all the sweaty stuff now so that we can enjoy the benefits later. We're not just trying to pick the lowest hanging fruit because it's just in front of our face We're trying to set ourselves up for success with the right framework So I hope this has been helpful and in next week's video We are going to be talking about how to get the right copywriting clients So we're going to move into a little bit more about copywriting clients how to kind of move into that what that actually looks like Projects all those good things. So I will see you then.
________
Ever thought, "I wants the steps seasoned freelance writers know by heart?" Get them FREE with my Seasoned Veteran Cheatsheet, your step-by-step client, marketing, and onboarding checklist to Forge Gold-Standard Freelance Success.
Want to 2X or 3X your prices overnight? Check out my FREE Pricing Guide tailor-made for freelance writers and content strategists.
Want a step-by-step blueprint proven by clients and students to grow a high-earning freelance writing business you adore? Check out my course, Freelance Writer Wealth Lab.
Looking to fast-track your freelance writing success? Join my 5-day lightning-speed course, Runway.
Need some tried-and-true marketing, LOI, cold email, LinkedIn, and contract templates proven to get responses and results? Snag my template bundle.
Want weekly actionable advice plus updates on new freebies and when Freelance Writer Wealth Lab opens for enrollment? Join my email list here AND get my Free Pricing Guide.
Want to follow me for inspiration, tips, and to stay connected?
So psyched you’re joining me on this freelance writing adventure!
