To have success as a freelance writer, you have to find the right freelance projects and know how to win the contracts for them.

My freelance writing business is largely built around using bidding sites to gain clients, but getting those clients to award me the freelance writing contracts they post is certainly not a straightforward process.

How to win a bid

There are a lot of steps involved in winning a bid, or in negotiating your way into a freelance contract. You have to be able to discern which freelance writing work will provide the best results according to your set criteria, if you are indeed capable of writing freelance as your sole means of income, and above all you have to make sure that you can make money writing online, not just breaking even or worse going in the hole.

Compete without sacrificing your bottom line

In this section of our site, we are going to look at a lot of the dirty details of freelance writing for the Internet. Bidding sites in particular are great for finding freelance writer jobs, but they are very competitive. In one article we take a look at how you can compete against the writers and the writing companies that you will be bidding against, without sacrificing your bottom line.

Evaluate projects to your advantage

It’s also important to understand that you can earn money from freelance writing online, and you can earn GOOD money from it, but you have got to be able to evaluate a project correctly and come up with a proposal that justifies your price. Remember that the key to success when you are using business sites to find freelance projects is in knowing how to work the system, and in this section we will go through the process from start to finish.

Tying it all together

As you read through the information in these articles, keep in mind that everything you write, from your profile to the messages you send to current or potential clients, will be factored in when it comes time to decide whether or not you get those all important freelance projects.

Is an online writing contest the Internet writer’s answer to the writing contests that you can find in trade magazines and in other places in the offline freelance world?

This type of contest, when based on a well known publication, can be of great benefit to the aspiring writer, but the same might not hold true online. In this article I will  outline some of my experiences with online writing contests (all two of them).

First, though, I will make some points about what I think the pros of entering a writing contest online COULD be.

Online writing contest pros

Basically, I think that entering a writing contest online has the same potential benefits as entering a contest for a print trade magazine such as Reader’s Digest. That is to say, if you win, you are probably in not only for some big bucks but you also receive a lot of exposure, and for the freelancer good exposure is everything.

The other advantage (and probably even more so) is to have your piece critiqued by other writers. Now granted, as writers we are all harsh and – let’s face it – competitive people, but every so often there are some good truths to be gleaned from the comments other people make about your stories.

Potential online writing contest cons

Of course, as writers we are also protective when it comes to our work, and this can be a big problem when it comes to publishing our pieces, or handing them to someone else to publish, online.

As I stated above I have entered two different online writing contests. I didn’t go in with many expectations, so I wasn’t exactly disappointed, but they didn’t really help me get anywhere either.

In both, I sent in my pieces and then never heard from the sites again (and I also forgot the URLs for the sites too, and I would caution everyone else to write that down somewhere, in retrospect). Were they good pieces? Well I think one in particular was very good.

On the Internet, content equals success

If you’ve done any kind of writing for the Internet, you have probably heard that content is king (and if you haven’t heard that, you’re in luck, because I have written an article all about that great news for aspiring freelance writers).

Briefly, what this means is that the more pieces a site can put up, the more likely it is to garner attention from the search engines. Better rankings from the search engines means more visitors, more visitors means more appeal, and more appeal means more advertising potential. The more potential, the higher the dollar amounts advertisers are likely to pay a specific site.

So what does this mean for the writer who enters a contest? Well, you might be submitting a piece that will work very well for the site in question, but won’t provide you with any sort of benefit in return. Your work will be generating income for someone else, but you will still be eating Mac and Cheese in your parents’ kitchen.

Really, that is just the paranoid writer in me coming out, and I am sure most of us who write for a living have this inner demon screaming out.

Online Writing Contests - Are they useful?

On the other hand, there are probably a few of you reading this who have had some success when it comes to entering online writing contests. If so, we would really like to hear about it.

Or do you think writing contests are a waste of time?

It seems that a lot of advice encourages writers to pass up writing opportunities. Writers, and particularly those that like to give advice on building a freelance writing career, love to use the word “niche”.

To me, this word is blasphemy and I don’t think following the usual advice about it works very well. In this article I will talk about why I think that niches should be avoided like the plague, particularly for writers just starting out.

The Gospel of Niche

If you think I am exaggerating, pick up any book on freelance writing or go to an advice website; I will bet that one of the most repeated words in the print will be niche. The line is that in order to be successful, you need to find one area that you are really knowledgeable in or you really like writing about, and concentrate just on that.

This was the theory upon which I started out my freelance writing career, but I quickly realized that there was not a lot of opportunities out there for the niches I was interested in, or that the competition was just too crowded. And usually, it was crowded with seasoned freelancers who had starved themselves carving out their own niche.

The Heretic

I had a couple of options. I could indulge in artistic snobbery and decide only to focus on one area like everyone said to, and pad the monthly earnings with money earned at a mill or in a kitchen, or I could go against the niche gospel and take advantage of any writing opportunities I found. I went for door number two.

Instead of bidding on jobs that I felt I had a sound knowledge base about, I would bid on any and all jobs that I could find, as long as they weren’t too boring.

I was honest about my experience, but I found that as long as I bid a bit lower than the experts I could still get jobs. Moreover, I could parlay those jobs into experience, for as I wrote articles on a specific topic my portfolio started to carry a lot more weight, and I had a lot more samples to show to potential clients.

Weddings, real estate, fishing, and Internet marketing

I also found that when it comes to writing on the Internet, there seems to be a few cycles. All of a sudden web site developers will realize there is a dearth of information in an area and will all try to create a killer site on that area.

That’s another reason why you can’t be too narrow and have to take advantage of any writing opportunities that you can if you plan on making a career out of writing for the web; what’s big today won’t be in three months.

My first few jobs were all about weddings, something which was surprising given that I am a very inartistic male whose only wedding experience comes from the fact that I had my own wedding. And yes I did help with that.

Still, what I found was that as long as you can do good research, be it in the form of interviews or even just poking around on the web, great ideas for articles will come to you. I’ve ended up writing dozens of articles on weddings, and never once has a client been dissatisfied.

When wedding season is over and article are in less demand, other seasonal work has presented itself, on areas about as far removed from each other as you can imagine.

By far the most article I have written have been on real estate and Internet marketing, with fishing and other outdoor activities (in which I actually am something of an expert) coming in third; weddings are fourth and there are about 20 other topics I have some experience in.

The big picture: embrace all writing opportunities!

The point here is that if I had taken the advice of many others and only focused on my niche area, I would probably not be making a living freelance writing today. By taking advantage of every opportunity, I was not only able to make money writing, but I was also able to hone my skills and create a very diverse portfolio.

To be sure, there is something to be said for the theory “jack of all trades, master of none”. But we are living in a new age, one where the traditional ideas of the offline magazine and newspaper are going to be supplanted by the free for all that is the Internet.

It’s best that as writers, we also learn to adapt in order to make a living, and that means leaving the Gospel of Niche behind and taking advantage of any writing opportunities!