Freelance Writing – Specialize for Profits

What’s your writing specialty? If you don’t yet have one, start developing one as soon as possible. Everyone loves an expert, and experts are paid well for their expertise.

If you’re an established writer, you may already have a speciality without realizing it. Check your archives. Writers tend to write within their comfort zone, and once you’ve researched and written in an area several times you’ll tend to write about that area again.

How to Develop a Specialty

You can develop a specialty from an area you’ve written about before, or you can set out to create a specialty.

Your first step is to choose the topic. Start with a broad area like health, business, self help, or technology. Then narrow it down and focus. When an area becomes your specialty, you’ll be writing about it a lot, so choose an area for which you have an affinity, and in which you have personal experience.

Your next step is to start a blog in the specialty you’ve chosen. A blog gives you rapid expert status. Since a blog is instant publishing; it also acts as a portfolio of your writing in your specialty.

Another big benefit of a blog is that it gives buyers of your writing services a way to contact you and hire you. Magazine and book editors scan blogs looking for writers for projects they’re working on: getting writing jobs without hunting for them is one of the benefits of having a blog.

Let’s see how this “create a specialty” process works.

Jayne’s a writer who’s reasonably established, in that she wrote a book on parenting, and has been selling articles to parenting publications for five years. However Jayne finds it difficult to get writing jobs. She says: “I’m tired of sending endless queries to magazines and newspapers. I seem to send out ten queries for every job I get. I expected to be further ahead in my career – and earning more – at this stage.”

Jayne has a de facto specialty in parenting; her book means that she’s perceived as an expert. However, although she knows that parenting is her specialty, she’s never marketed herself as an expert in the area.

That’s a lesson for you, too: realize that although YOU know that you’re an expert, you need to market yourself as an expert to get results.

I advised Jayne to choose a niche within the huge parenting area to make her own by starting a blog, and then writing article queries and posting them to her blog. Editors and agents use Google. While an article query may be submerged in a slush pile for months and ignored, an article query written as a blog post is online forever, ready to be discovered.

What’s your specialty? Decide on a specialty and create a blog. It’s a simple and effective process, and before you know it, you’ll be recognized as an expert in that area. Buyers of your writing will pay you more, because you are perceived as an expert.

Get the writing success you deserve by taking the first steps into the new world for writers: instant publishing on blogs

Want to build an amazing writing career? You can.

“Writing Success With Blogs by Angela Booth” includes an hour of FREE email coaching with me with purchase; this is a $300 value. I want you to blog with style and confidence, and get the top blog jobs.

Discover what, how, when, where and why you should blog for writing success. Get started blogging, today, and watch your writing career take off.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

This entry was posted in marketing and tagged , , , . Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>