How to make a portfolio of written work to get into freelance marketing?

Hello,
I am the recent graduate looking for a job. I would like to get into freelance marketing to gain some experience and maybe make some extra money.

I have a portfolio but it's just something I put together so, I'm not sure it's done correctly.
It is all written work (no graphics), what should I do to make it proper?

I am unable to upload my portfolio.

 

So what is it that you can do ?
What are you good at and what kind of work would you like to do ?

 

There are many types of portfolios depending on the nature of your work and the type of "job" you are looking for for example an artists portfolio will contain samples of art work, a Photographers portfolio will contain samples of pictures , A writers portfolio will contain samples of published works etc. You need to decide what your area o expertise is then go from there

 

In marketing a lot of potential clients want to see results you have gotten, web page rankings, successful ad campaigns, etc.

 

I definitely want to get into written work. Eventually, I would like to get into making brochures and things like that. But initially that won't be in the cards for me.




I know that a portfolio consists of things that you have done in the past that might entice someone to give you an opportunity to complete a project on their behalf. What I don't know is how to structure the portfolio.

 

Well first off all: if you need more projects, offer 3-4 free writing gigs here or go to fiver and offer your skills there.
When you have enough of them to fill the portfolio, get yourself a small website, tell something about yourself, and have your portfolio there.
Go to freelancer, and start trying to get as many gigs there as you can. Try to send it to 100 people there looking for someone like you, you will see you will get some jobs.
It might involve getting the first jobs done for less then you would charge normally, but that way you build trust, and trust means more customers coming your way!

 

To me, the key to getting started will be positioning yourself in a specific niche associated with your writing. Perhaps you can tailor your portfolio to make the case that you are a good option for a specific type of client with a specific need. E.g., perhaps you can show evidence of being a writer who is good at developing technical pieces for a specific B2B market. Or maybe you can show evidence of good experience writing marketing content for consumer goods.
You want your portfolio to tell and story and make the case that you are suitable for the work that you are seeking. The order and structure of the portfolio are less important than the overall message and evidence that are presented in it.

 

Offer a discount or do a few jobs for free to build up a good portfolio.

 

As an established writer, I can tell you, if you're looking for online work, then your portfolio is essentially a set of URLs that you can demonstrate to clients a broad range of REAL writing work.

This means that you will have to start gaining only experience - at whatever cost, and use that writing work, that exists on real websites, to get more work.

This will be worth much more to you to clients than a plethora of random articles collated as .doc or .pdf files.

Start writing for websites for free and submitting articles that your think they will like to publish. Sign up to sites that have an open content policy, but some sort of editorial scrutiny. When your articles are published on real sites, collect all the links and then use them to promote your work.

This way you can demonstrate that you have real experience working with editors, covering pertinent topics, understand web content (i.e keyword rich SEO writing) etc.,

 

Like Kuz23 said, you need to show off something that's live and working but I think it would be nice if you had screenshots of every article with a small watermark somewhere. You would then show off this as an image gallery. Just my 2 cents