Selling your writing: focus on just a couple of markets at a time

New to freelance writing? If you’ve yet to make your first sale, I recommend focusing on just a couple of markets. Many new freelancers take a shotgun approach, blasting out queries to any market which looks as if it accepts freelance work.

How to start: research TWO markets
Research two markets for which you want to write.

Here’s how this works. Let’s say you pick two magazines you read. You like the stories, you feel that you could write for these two magazines. You assess how many interviews were done for each feature article, and you can see yourself getting interview subjects for similar articles that you could write.

You read the advertising. Yes, the ads are important. They tell you who the readers are. Your articles must be relevant to those readers. For example, if you’re researching Vogue, you quickly see that the readers are very different from the readers of Woman’s Day. Not only do the ads tell you which topics are likely to succeed at a magazine, they also tell you the slant you should take with your stories.

Read my ebook “Freelance Writing: Marketing And Selling – Learn To Pitch” to get a handle on how to pitch (query) markets.

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