Portfolio Career - Steps for Freelance Writing

The next stage to achieving a Portfolio Career is to start to establish the income streams. One of the potential income streams that I have identified is Freelance Writing. I think I will enjoy this area of work especially if I can concentrate on the appropriate categories.

Freelance writing is becoming a real boom industry at the moment due to the explosion of the internet. The amount of new information that will be produced in 2010 will be equal to the amount of information that has been published in the last three thousand years put together.

This is possible due to the volume of websites that now exists on the internet. All of these websites need content in order to stay relevant and attract people. If they attract people then they will earn more money in advertising.

So, the market for the writing of this content is huge. Due to the business models of websites they do not have in-house writers that are paid on their staff. They raise a request online for freelance writers to bid on and, depending on the level of expertise and quality that they are after, they will make a choice. There has been a rise in the freelance writing market places where projects are offered up and bids are collected.

In order to win a bid the writer must suggest a competitive price for the work, but also ratings are given to each writer, and also profiles of the writer can be viewed in order to give the employer an idea of quality. These three factors will go towards a decision being made. Obviously, therefore, if a writer is established and has many articles under his belt, all with high ratings, then they can demand a higher price due to confidence levels of quality.

How can you break in to this world of dangling pound notes? I have bought an ebook called Six Figure Freelancer and it describes the step-by-step process to establish yourself. Surprisingly it does not seem hard and because of these low barriers to entry, you can expect a large amount of competition. Also, as it is online it is opened up to the whole world and I will suffer from the impact of lower standards of living in developing countries. A person in India will charge a lot less than my hourly rate to produce the same work, and so I need to concentrate much more on quality. Once set up this should be okay, but breaking into it will be harder because of the lack of proof that I can back up my obvious quality. That obvious quality that purveyors of this blog could verify from the rooftops.

Steps required to take part:

- Register on the online market places
- Create a profile on said market places
- Bid for work, at first by either, 1) reducing the price, or 2) creating my own requests for work (clever)
- Once the ball is rolling, then create my own website that I can direct prospective clients to, and begin to establish regular income streams with the same people that begin to know and trust the quality that I produce.

Easy.

The good thing with all of this is that it can be done whilst I am still working 9-5.

I am concentrating at the moment on finally editing the book that I have written, and getting that to a stage where I will be happy to start giving it wings. Once this is done, I will then throw my energy into the freelance writing, and let you know how I get on.