Freelance writing is a good career option, even now in 2023. Although a lot of people have adopted generative AI as their content creation solutions, people who value true quality haven’t been quick to abandon human writers.

If you are thinking of starting a freelance writing career, or if you are looking to give your existing one a little boost, you are at the right place. In this post, we’re going to be looking at some expert tips that you can follow for that.

Navigating a Freelance Writing Career

Tip number 1: Properly Probe and Understand Your Client’s Requirements

The reason that we’re mentioning this tip right at spot number one is that a lot of people can go wrong with it. Even experienced folk can sometimes make the mistake of not properly understanding the requirements of their clients and creating content accordingly.

Quality alone is not enough to help you stand out as a freelance writer. Rather, you have to utilize that quality in the right direction and you have to mold it according to the requirements of your client(s). That way, you can build lasting and beneficial relationships with your clients and grow your reputation.

Whenever you are approached by a client for some work, you should ask them to clarify all the particulars about the content they need. Our own practice is to ask the client to clear up:

• The exact word count for the content they need
• The tone they require
• The tools that they need the content to satisfy (in terms of AI detection and plagiarism)
• Whether or not they need images and visuals in the content

And so forth.

When you clear up all of these things with your clients, there is nothing that you can go wrong with when you provide them with the content. There won’t be anything for them to complain about and you will be able to do your work more efficiently.

Even if the client does not actively give you any details and just provides some off-hand generic instructions on how they need the content, you should ask them to be clear.

Tip Number 2: Conduct Proper Research and Make Your Content Valuable

This tip is more important now than ever, considering how AI is so readily available for people to use as a content writer substitute.

One of the main things that you should ensure in your work is that your content should be based on solid research. It should provide helpful information and be valuable throughout.

In order to do this, you have to conduct proper research for the topic that you want to write on. Once you are clear about the instructions and your client gives you the green light to get started on the work, you should spend a considerable amount of time doing research.

You should look at the content that is already published on the topic. Reading existing content helps you get an idea of the things that you need to include in your own work to make it high-quality. Plus, you can look at the stuff that the existing sources have missed and then include it in your content to make the latter really stand out.

Other than that, during your research, you should also garner facts and figures to include in your content. Adding facts and figures to your content helps to make it more reliable and authoritative.

Tip Number 3: Follow Writing Best Practices

If you want to win over your clients and keep them for the long run, you need to impress them with the quality of your content. There are different aspects of your content that describe its quality.

Some best practices that you can follow when writing your content are provided hereunder:

1. Before you write, create a plan or an outline for the content. Then, when the writing process starts, you should stick strictly to it. This helps you to keep your discussion concise and relevant to the topic. Plus, if the plan is laid out beforehand, you don’t have to think about everything on the spot.
2. Write with readability in mind. Make sure that the content can be easily read and understood by the client and their audience. Use easy words, and keep your sentences and passages short.
3. Be careful about keeping the content grammatically perfect. You can do this by being extra mindful about your words and sentences while you write and then proofreading everything once you’re done.
4. Add images and illustrations to make your content engaging. Instead of sending your client a boring wall of text in a Word file, you should add images and color to it.

While there is a lot more that you can and should do, these things are some of the most important ones.

Tip Number 4: Utilize Online Tools

Using online tools for writing work can be a great idea for freelancers. Tools can help you in saving time and in improving the quality of your work.

Here are some instances and examples of online tools and how they can be utilized by freelance writers:

• As a freelance writer, you can use AI assistants like Google Bard to help you come up with content ideas and outlines. You can tell them the topic that you want to write on and the guidelines you’ve been given, and then ask them to help you out. Here is an example:

• You can use online paraphrasing tools like Paraphrase-Online to improve the quality of your text. When you write your content, there are going to be different areas that you’ll find to be a little lacking in terms of flow, style, etc. You can paraphrase them using an online AI paraphrasing tool so that they get better. Here is an example to show you what we mean.

• You can also use online tools for the whole proofreading and editing part. If you want to make sure that there are no grammar or spelling errors in the content, you can use online tools like Grammarly. They can check your content for you quite quickly, and you don’t have to spend a lot of time on it yourself.

Conclusion

Of course, we won’t say that this post is all and everything about what you need to do in a Freelance Writing Career. Rather, these are a few tips—very useful and handy tips, mind you—that you can follow to help your career go off to a great start.