As somebody looking to establish themselves as a writer on the internet, you may have found that it is often difficult to get writing business, particularly if you don’t have a writing portfolio available.
A portfolio is a record of your writing style and it just shows the type of written requests you’ve successfully completed in the past. Anybody looking to hire a content writer would generally want to see the portfolio, they want to check the quality of the English that’s being produced and whether the writing style fits in for own particular needs and niches. But how do you generate a portfolio if you’ve not got one?
There are three ways which you can look at to do this. First of all, you could just write articles for your own use and then you can use these as the basis for the portfolio. Secondly, you might want to give a discount to get initial trials in to produce a portfolio. And finally you may want to right speculative articles and sell them entirely separately which could form a basis for the portfolio at a later date.
When you’re looking to write speculative articles for your own use then that’s great. There are no problems with doing this. There are any number of sites on which you can place these articles. But the very best place to do it is on an owned content-rich site which you’re going to be producing. So say you’ve gone into internet marketing then maybe you’re going to produce is a whole host of articles on internet marketing and you put them up as part of a blog or as part of an article bank. By doing so you’ve gotten some use out of it and you’ve got backend money either using AdSense or other services or promoting affiliate products. So you need to write articles for your own use and these can also form the basis of a portfolio.
The second thing you can do is to look for clients and offer them a discount to take you on as a beginning content writer. Your discount might even be free. Who could resist being given a free article or two? Just on an idea that you will provide a testimonial form and they will give you a testimony back. That’s what taking on clients at reduced price means. It’s a win-win situation. You get the testimonial and you get the item to use in your portfolio. So you need to look around at anywhere where clients are found and just by giving away one or two sample articles you should be getting more business along the way from a portfolio. You may even get these clients who you’ve given the article away for free to take you on as their regular content writer in the future.
The final thing you can do is to write a set of speculative articles to sell and this is fairly straight forward. First of all, you need to identify a niche which there is money in. For instance many sites out in the world focus on areas such as exercise, weight loss, marketing, many standard subjects which are an interest to people. In other words if you’re solving somebody’s problems, probably an audience for it, take that interview and just write a set of five articles or ten articles ready to sell. Then find a single person who wants to buy a set of articles as ready-made content for a site and you can sell this to them on the understanding that you use this as part of your portfolio. By doing so you’ve quickly got a portfolio together and it’s a win-win situation. The person buying the articles has ready-made content for their site, you have a portfolio ready made to go with it. And you can just advertise these on standard forums for writers for hire.
There you have it. Three ways which you can use generate a writing portfolio if you don’t already have one.
You need to make sure all your writing looks like the best of your ability, your English grammar and spelling is correct. And you cover any points you spend to make. But generally you can do this by writing articles for your own use on your own sites which is then reused as a portfolio. You can give a discount to potential clients or providers by offering them one or two articles for free to develop this portfolio. Finally you can just put together a set of niche specific articles which you can sell to a single person to use for their site but also to use as a basis for your marketing portfolio. Put these three ideas together and you’ll have a writing portfolio in no time which you can be proud of.