The decision to start freelance writing feels like it has to be momentous, you know?

Like, in your head, you think, Am I allowed to call myself a freelance writer? I didn’t major in English. I’ve never written professionally. Is this even legal?

You will (probably) not get arrested for calling yourself a freelance writer.

You can agonize over this decision for weeks, wondering if you’ve earned the right to label yourself a writer.

Then, you finally decide that, yes, you ARE in fact a writer, and you face this whole new problem: How to find writing jobs that will pay you money.

Little secret for you: everyone has to start somewhere.

At some point, every single freelance writer has to get that first writing job.

Sure, some people go freelance after they’ve worked for a few years. Maybe they wrote articles for a magazine as a staff member or worked in the marketing department of a company. But at some point, they started at those jobs, and it felt just as intimidating.

Every writer has to write a first piece at some point. For some, that beginning is so far in the past they’ve forgotten the details. For others, the starting point is literally just a few steps behind them.

Everyone starts somewhere — and it doesn’t have to be overwhelming.

Here’s a list of things you don’t need to do to start freelance writing.

• Build a website.
• Update your resume.
• Go to networking meetings.
• Get a degree in English.
• Get a degree in anything.
• Graduate high school.

Here is the only thing you need to do to start freelance writing:

• Clients who will pay you

That’s it. Seriously. There’s no big initiation process, no forms to fill out, no need to spend weeks planning.

So… where do you find these clients?

Well, let’s take a look at three smart ways to find freelance writing clients:

1. Upwork (and other marketplace sites)
2. Online job boards
3. Business directories

Now we’ll take a closer look at each of these methods.

An Upwork Profile Lets Freelance Writing Clients Find You

Yeah, I’ve mentioned Upwork before. That’s because it works. It’s an incredible way to start freelance writing online quickly. You can read a lot more about how to write an amazing Upwork profile, how to build your Upwork portfolio, and making sure that you’re doing the right things to attract high paying freelance writing clients.

When you build your Upwork profile, you make it possible for potential clients to see what you have to offer. They can then invite you to apply to specific jobs that match your skills, which saves you lots of marketing time.

Upwork has some membership plans, but you don’t need any of them. You can use the free, basic Upwork membership and get plenty of freelance writing jobs that pay well.

A lot of writers will tell you that Upwork only offers low-paying jobs. That’s simply untrue. I’ve been hired at my full hourly rate of $125/hour many times on Upwork — and there are plenty more well-paid freelance writers who use Upwork all the time.

Upwork does charge a fee — BUT they only charge you a percentage of what you earn from clients you would NOT have met otherwise. And you can adjust your rates to ensure that you are making the money you want to make.

This post won’t go too deeply into using Upwork — because all those linked posts above will tell you everything you need to know. Just remember that you do need to know what to look out for at Upwork and other marketplace sites, and make sure that your profile is all about your clients and what they need — and NOT about you.

Find Freelance Writing Clients Through Online Job Boards

If you want to improve your chances of finding relevant freelance writing jobs that pay well, take a look at some of the popular freelance writing job boards.

Almost everyone loves the ProBlogger job board, and with good reason: you’ll find a handful of high quality freelance blogging jobs here. Companies pay $70 to advertise on ProBlogger for a month. You pay nothing to look at those listings.

Companies that pay to list jobs are typically more serious about paying writers decent rates. You won’t find hundreds of listings offering you the chance to work for exposure. Add ProBlogger to your list of sites to check regularly — you won’t always find freelance writing clients who need a writer with your specific expertise, but when you do, you can apply.

If you can get past the design, Writer’s Weekly provides an in-depth look at a handful of markets each week, and compiles a weekly roundup of current job postings from around the internet. These are jobs you can find in other places, but why not let the Writer’s Week staff put them all in one place for you to quickly skim?

Another popular job board is MediaBistro. Refine your search to quickly skim through the freelance writing jobs posted here, and apply to any that interest you. You won’t find dozens of new posts daily, but you will find interesting jobs with decent pay rates.

Many freelance writers ask about joining paid job boards. These boards are rarely worth the money you spend on them. They are a GREAT source of affiliate income for the writers who promote them and offer you “special discounts” on signing up via their affiliate links. If you’re paying for access to a job board, you need to get some sort of AMAZING benefit. Otherwise, you’re basically paying someone to use Google for you. NOT a great strategy.

There is ONE paid job board that I SOMETIMES recommend to specific freelance writers who are looking for work in specific niches. I DON’T write public posts about it in order to earn affiliate income — I get paid for freelance writing and for teaching moms how to get started in freelance writing. I’m not interested in earning money by recommending products and services that won’t help you make a real living from freelance writing.

Use Business Directories to Find Freelance Writing Clients

Business directories are awesome. Seriously awesome. With these sites, you can type in your niche or the type of business you want to write for and get a list of businesses in that field. You can find local business directories, directories for specific industries, directories that specialize in businesses of different sizes, and so on.

For example, head over to http://www.manta.com/business and you’ll see this:

Enter your niche, and then choose “don’t use a location” to maximize your results. When you type in your niche, manta will start to make suggestions. When I typed in “relationships,” Manta came back with some options for me:

I chose “relationship counseling center” and got hundreds of results. If you wanted to target counseling centers, you could spend some time checking out the various entries. If you chose 20 to look at each day, and set a goal of sending out pitches to 3-5 of those 20 each day, you’d likely win some work within two weeks.

Another business directory is hoovers.com

If you search the “counseling” industry at Hoovers, you’ll be prompted to choose from a list that includes weight reduction services, social assistance, and mental health professionals. You can then run searches for those terms on Hoovers or head back over to Manta to find specific businesses to pitch.

These services have free tiers, and you should be able to get all the information you need without paying for a membership.

You can get super-specific with your business directory searches, which is really awesome, because you can hone in on exactly the kind of client you want to work with. Choose directories that specialize in small businesses, Fortune 5000 companies, publicly traded companies, local businesses, and so on. Pick the business directory you prefer to work with, and use that one to identify clients you want to pitch.

Once You Find Freelance Writing Clients, What's the Next Step?

Now that you've put in the time to find freelance writing clients, how do you get them to hire you? Well, it starts with creating a smart pitch that you can send them. And recently, I held a free workshop on how to get that pitch written and ready to send out.

You can catch a replay of the live workshop!

This is a totally free, hands-on workshop where you'll work on your pitch, following the exact steps described. You'll learn:

• Exactly how to write a pitch letter that you can start sending out to clients IMMEDIATELY so that you can get work.
• How to identify YOUR ideal client, and where to go to FIND that client, so that you know exactly WHERE to send your pitch.
• What you need to know about following up, and how to avoid the mistakes that could cost you LOTS of money.
• How much you should charge for your work, and how to talk confidently about money with clients.

When you sign up for the workshop, you'll get access to a TWO workbooks. You'll get to see plenty of real examples, and you'll discover exactly how to put all the pieces together.

Sign up for the workshop, and kick off your freelance writing career.

Tell me if this sounds familiar. You’ve been thinking about starting a side hustle, or you’re at home with your kids, and you’re looking for a way to make money. Online. From home.

You’re not interested in trying to sell makeup or juice or bags or essential oils to all your friends, because that would involve, like, interacting with people.

You’ve always liked writing, and you’ve seen that it’s totally possible to make money writing on the Internet. I mean, people are publishing these epic blog posts all the time about how much money they made in 3 hours because they did this one tiny thing.

Writing sounds good. So you figure you’ll be a freelance writer.

You start doing your research, and you quickly figure out that you need a website, which is basically the same as a blog, right? So… are you a blogger?

Hang on.

Is there actually a difference between freelance writing and blogging? Are they basically two different ways of saying the same thing? And if they are different things, then which one should you be?

As it turns out, bloggers and freelance writers do have quite a bit in common, but they’re not exactly the same. Let’s take a closer look.

What Bloggers and Freelance Writers Have in Common

Freelance writers and bloggers both write — and they both write with the goal of earning money. That money bit is super-important, because money is a good thing. With money, you can buy food and shelter and iPads and other things.

Blogging is a job, and freelance writing is a job, but they aren’t the kind of J-O-B where you go to an office and have a boss. Instead, they work as independent contractors. This is a fancy way of saying, “You’re on your own, baby!”

As in, you have to find your own work, find the place to do that work, and get the equipment you need to do that work.

You can probably get by with a laptop, an internet connection, and a comfortable place to sit. (The seat is optional. I actually work on a treadmill desk. Really!)

Freelance writers and bloggers also have to handle all the administrative work that goes along with being in business — for example, paying taxes, sending invoices to clients, and then following up to be sure the client actually sends the check.

Broadly speaking, those are the major similarities between bloggers and freelance writers. Now let’s take a look at the differences between the two.

What Is A Blogger?

A blogger is someone who writes online, either for her own blog or for someone else’s. Typically, she writes about one specific topic, which could be absolutely anything: knitting, pet care, food, digital marketing, organizing, science — seriously, anything. Name a topic, no matter how specific, and you can find at least one blog about it.

A blogger is an expert in her niche. Whatever it is that she writes about, she knows that topic as well as she knows which of her children will eat Honey Nut Cheerios and which will ONLY eat fish sticks that have been toasted at precisely 200 degrees for 4.8 minutes and then de-breaded, dipped in ketchup AND milk, and served on the Bob the Builder plate.

My point is, girlfriend knows her stuff.

How Do Bloggers Make Money?

How exactly does writing about knitting or pet car or whatever translate into dollars? For our purposes, let’s consider the blogger who has her own blog, rather than one who writes for someone else’s site. Generally speaking, bloggers create multiple revenue streams — which is a fancy way of saying they bring in money through different sources.

What might those various revenue streams include?

1. Ads. When bloggers hone in on a specific niche, they can attract people who are extremely interested in the content they create. So they draw in traffic that really cares about, say, knitting, which means that companies that make products or offer services for knitters may be interested in advertising on the blog.
2. Sponsored posts. Bloggers might also be asked to write about a specific product or service in a sponsored post. The blogger is paid to write about her experience with the product or service.
3. Selling products and services. Many bloggers also sell their own related products and services — for example, our knitting blogger might offer some of her hand-knit products for sale. She might also offer patters for sale. Or, she might create a course on how to sell hand-knit items on Etsy.
4. Affiliate sales. In addition to selling their own products and services, bloggers might also offer products and services created by other people, in exchange for a commission on each sale. Large sites such as Amazon pay a small commission on items purchased through a blogger’s links, and other bloggers might also have courses, products, and services they want to sell — again, in exchange for a commission.

What Is A Freelance Writer?

A freelance writer is someone who writes for others — companies or individuals — on a per-project basis, for money.

Freelance writers do a lot of different things, depending on their interest and abilities. Some freelance writers write blog posts — for their own blogs, and for other blogs. Some freelance writers specialize in blog posts for businesses.

Some writers focus on articles for print and online magazines, and others write technical manuals and software user guides.

You can find writers in almost any area you can imagine: corporate marketing materials, ebooks, white papers, press releases, and so on.

How Do Freelance Writers Make Money?

The primary difference between freelance writers and bloggers is apparent in how they make money. Like bloggers, freelance writers can have multiple streams of income, but typically, those “streams” come in the form of different clients.

For example, in the past year, I’ve written an ebook for an Australian Agile consultant, technical white papers for a US managed services provider, blog posts for a tech startup, and a software user guide for an app developer. Each client contracted with me for a specific project, and each project was its own, independent income stream. (By the way, I got a lot of these projects by pitching clients on Upwork, which is a super-easy way to get started.)

Which Path Is Right For You?

The best part about building your own business is that you get to make all the decisions. You get to decide if you want to be a freelance writer, a blogger, or both!

But how do you know which path is right for you?

Well, you need to think about how you want to spend your time. Do you want to work with clients, writing the things that they specifically need (those press releases, ebooks, articles, and so on) about the topics they are interested in? If the idea of writing a lot of different kinds of material and learning a lot about different topics appeals to you, then freelance writing could be an excellent choice.

If you know that the ONLY thing you want to write about is knitting, on the other hand, then blogging is probably the route you want to take. If you want to be the one who decides exactly what you’re writing and when you’re writing it, then you’re more suited for blogging than you are for freelance writing.

I Want It All!

Look, the tagline at Successful Freelance Mom is “Because we can have it all.” So if you want to be a blogger AND a freelance writer, I am totally in favor of that decision. Remember, it’s YOUR business, and you get to do WHATEVER YOU WANT.

If you’re doing this in order to make money, however, it’s important to have a clear plan, and to be strategic with your choices.

For example, let’s say that you’re interested in writing for health coaches. It might make sense for you to blog about the issues health coaches face when building a business, getting clients, and so on. And you might offer some related products — templates that health coaches could purchase and personalize, for example.

Or, if you’re interested in writing for tech startups, you could blog about effective workflows, evaluating user experience in app development, and other topics that would be highly relevant to tech startups.

You probably wouldn’t want to blog about localization of apps if your market is new health coaches who work with pregnant women.

For close to 15 years, I worked exclusively as a freelance writer doing the kind of work I mentioned above — ebooks, white papers, user guides, and other materials for businesses, mostly in technical fields. During that time, I had a personal blog that was completely disconnected from my business. I wrote about my kids, particularly about the experience of rearing my special needs son.

My blog and my business were not even remotely related; I never thought of my blog as anything other than an online journal, and it was never designed to make any money. If you want that kind of blog, that’s totally okay — mine was an important part of my life and my mental health for many years.

If you don’t know my story, you might not know that in 2013, I had to shut down my business when my son was diagnosed with leukemia. When I started working again in late 2016, I spent some time thinking about what I wanted to do, and I decided to start working with moms who wanted to get started in freelance writing but didn’t know how.

(That sentence makes it sound like there was a very organized thought process. The reality was a lot of crying on my kitchen floor, but hey! Details!)

Successful Freelance Mom is about supporting moms who are just learning about freelance writing. The content here is designed to support you as you learn about the different types of writing you can do — and get paid for. I don’t use ads on my site, and so far I don’t sell other people’s products for commissions. I do offer my own course. You can build a model just like this.