It is imperative that you ensure your writing is of the highest possible standard to ensure you continue to attract clients with high quality output. In addition to good quality writing, you will need to get a flavour of the market that you are aiming at. Your forte may be fiction and so, you may target online magazines that publish short stories.
Alternatively, you may have a more practical and informative approach to writing and be more suited to technical writing or web copy writing. Whatever your specialist area, it is essential to understand what is sellable writing and what is not. If you are taking on a technical writing contract, the subject, content, style and depth of treatment of your work should be entirely in accordance with your customer’s requirement and the commission you have been given. For this reason, you would generally not be able to produce a piece of technical writing and then decide who to sell it to.
Article writing, on the other hand, will require a different approach. If you are trying to sell an article without a prior commission, you will need to research your target publication or market. It is important to ensure that the article you write would ‘fit’ the style, type and subject matter of the publication’s other pieces. The article would have to be something that the editor would want to publish, possibly related to some current, hot topic or significant anniversary coming up. If you have received a commission for work, it should specify the subject matter, the length and some indication of the required style for the publication that commissioned the work.
An excellent resource, well worth perusing regularly, is www.online-writing-jobs.com which has a comprehensive list of job postings. Freelance contract sites or direct contact /contract sites can be a source of new jobs. Though these sites started by providing a means of sourcing cost- effective software coding, they now provide several types of jobs including content writing for websites and editing or proofreading contracts. Some of the most popular ones are www.getafreelancer.com, www.rentacoder.com, www.guru.com and www.elance.com. They are well worth perusing regularly as new projects are posted everyday and the demand for good English speaking writers is very high.
