Five Ways To Expedite Your Writing Success – A Guest Post

Success isn’t something that happens overnight in the world of freelance writing. It takes time and effort to realize success – the longer you spend working as a freelance writer, the more successful you’ll become. Like any other business out there, it relies on “traction” – once you’ve landed that first writing project many others should follow suit.

Of course before you can achieve success you have to define it. Most people would define a successful freelance writer as someone who gets paid well, lives comfortably, and receives lots of recognition for the work that they do.

Here are five great tips to help you on your mission to become a successful freelance writer:

1. Client retention is key: One way in which you can bring in lots of work is to retain the clients that come your way. Bringing clients on-board in the first place is probably the hardest part of being a freelance writer – so make sure you treat clients like royalty to ensure they return to use your services time and again. Repeat business is good business.

2. Beat deadlines: Writers are infamous for missing deadlines – that’s just how it is. If you want to expedite your success as a writer you need to get to grips with deadlines. Don’t just meet your deadlines – beat them. You’ll get a warm fuzzy feeling when you do, and your clients will be extremely impressed too. It’s smiles all round!

3. Reshuffle your portfolio every week: If you’re one of those people that throws a portfolio together on day one of being a writer, never to revisit it, your portfolio could be costing you clients. Make sure your portfolio displays the best, most current work that you’ve completed – after price, your portfolio is the number one criteria that clients take into account when hiring.

4. Settle for nothing short of perfection: Most writers start off extremely enthusiastic then get a little too comfortable. Standards start to slip and the work they hand over to clients starts to fall well short of what is expected. To expedite your success as a writer you should aim for perfection on each and every project you complete. Never ever hand over work that could be improved.

5. Explore different ways to market your service: I’ve already touched upon the fact that getting clients in the first place is the hardest part of being a writer. For that reason you need to explore various ways of lead generation – post about your services on related forums, setup your own website, post adverts on Gumtree – think about the many different ways in which you can market your service. The more marketing you do, the more clients you’ll end up working with.

So there you have it – five great ways in which you can expedite your success as a writer. The only person who dictates how much of a success you’ll be as a writer is YOU! If you believe in yourself and what you do, there’s no reason whatsoever why you won’t become a success – enjoying all of the perks that come with being a successful freelancer.

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Nick is a freelance journalist and content editor over at http://www.contentwriting.org. After working on some of the UK’s top newspapers during his time in university, Nick turned his attention to starting up a website content writing business. Nick’s business now works with small, medium and large businesses based in many different countries around the world.