Hello DPers I am a writer with no less than 7 years experience. Writing is my hobby and so far, my main income comes from writing. Almost all of my clients come from this forum and a number of freelance sites. Well, what I want to ask is " can I get clients outside of this forum and other similar forums? Can I search for clients by contacting website owners directly? Thanks for your answer
Obviously, you can try, but I doubt that it will be effective though. Most of them are writing their own stuff and if they aren't they will offer you pennies for your work. You need to create "a need". If there's no need, there's no demand and no real pay for your work. Did you try Facebook groups/Reddit/Digg/Twitter?
If would try freelancer sites instead of contacting website owners directly. The website owners may consider your offer spam, while the buyers on the freelancer websites will find your offer at the moment they need your service.
Thanks for your answer. I have tried Facebook Groups but so far, I got nothing. Maybe I should try Twitter, Reddit and Digg
Okay, noted, Could you suggest sites like iWriter? Some of them require only US citizens, closing my chances to join.
I used to hire article writer many years ago at RentACoder. This freelancer marketplace was acquired by Freelancer.com so you can give it a try
Yeah Right, You can contact website owners directly and create your own service website to make more familiar in organic search engine result pages.
You can write them yourself it takes s**t loads of time but you may get orders by that. What I would do I would connect with people through linkedin and try to find clients there. The thing is that you must prove them that you are good. SO try to make a portfolio of your articles, stylish and nice and jsut share it with your connections.
Don't forget that if your clients only weigh 100 pounds each, then to get tons of them you need a MINIMUM of FORTY (40) clients. However, if your clients weigh 400 pounds each, then finding tons of clients is much easier since you only need TEN (10) clients to meet your goal.
I think you'd do much better by joining other forums, and freelance sites and picking contracts from there. Like Qwikad said, directly contacting webmasters will need some sort of automation bulk email sending, which would be spam. Manually this will be too tedious...
Hey Deltamas, I haven't sold articles to website owners, but I have sold social media marketing/lead gen services to business owners using that direct marketing approach (finding potential client names and email addresses on their websites and then pitching them in the email) so I'll share my experience here. As it relates to your second question: "Can I search for clients by contacting website owners directly?" Yes, you can, and I did send 2,000 emails to cold leads. With that being said though, I spent a whole lot of time gathering the data, then sending the emails manually. Later on, I found out about web scrapers (not legal) and even though I could get the data faster, the response was still relatively low (about 2% response rate). Then you have to get them on a call, build rapport, and pitch them. This was a very tedious and long process, and I wouldn't recommend it because I spent a lot of time and the results weren't that good. Also, I was selling lead gen (every business needs leads), if you're selling articles it's going to be even tougher. What I would do instead is start building your own site, where you showcase your writing skills and show the clients you've worked with. Get some testimonials from clients who were super happy about the job you did. This way you'll start building your personal brand and won't have to chase clients, but you'll have a system that brings in leads organically. Next thing I would do, Is to create a compelling offer. Writing for the sake of writing isn't very compelling to business owners. If you can build a sales page where you explain how these (I'm guessing, Seo copywriting articles?) will get your clients brand awareness and get them more leads for their businesses, then that would be a lot more compelling to business owners because every business needs leads. Hope it helps. If I weren't clear enough or you need more elaboration, feel free to contact me or comment.
LinkedIn is a perfect place for you then. BTW there is a nice tool to automate the process of clients generation - https://linkedhelper.com/ As I working on B2G sales for so many years I know that searching client on LinkedIn is actually hard work and you need time for building a relevant personal network.