AIW Going Freelance Seminar Session 2: Finding Work in Commercial Writing

(www.inkthinkerblog.com) — Finding Work in Commercial Writing with Shashi Bellamkonda of Network Solutions, Lisa Daniel, and Lester Reingold.

<<< LESTER REINGOLD >>>

“It’s kind of a shock to hear yourself as being a spokesperson for the old school, but I guess that’s me. …I’m the old school, Shashi is the cutting edge, and Lisa is the golden mean.” It’s not a replacement process. You might call it additive. The new methods add to but don’t replace those older methods of finding and keeping work, which is what Lester has been doing since the beginning of his career.

Achieve the right amount of specialization. You want to be able to have enough expertise so you can engender interest and ongoing work from editors in a given field, but at the same time it’s valuable not to close off other opportunities. Specialize, subspecialize, but be open to other possibilities. Have enough specialization to be able to talk to the people you’re writing about and be able to speak their language — jargon, issues that concern the people every day — and you can’t just walk in and know all of those aspects of the field.

Organizations and government agencies all need writers; they all subsist on words.

A quick tribute to serendipity:

• It’s valuable to keep an eye open for other work while doing an assignment. One led to an ongoing interest/obsession. Got started with Air & Space Smithsonian via WIW (AIW’s earlier incarnation). First freelance piece was on aviation for Washington Monthly. Spoke to the A&S editor after a WIW panel, sent her a query, and got a rejection along with “I really like your work,” and ended up giving an assignment to cover an assignment on a time capsule at Langely.
• Complied a database of time capsules: dedications, old ones that they know where they are, old ones that they can’t find them… A few years later the millennium approached and a lot of time capsules were being dedicated and startd writing about them: op-ed for USA Today, feature article for American Heritage Magazine, NPR commentary for Morning Edition, Washington Post full-page feature, book proposal (which was subsequently sidetracked.
• It’s not just what happens to you; you make your own luck. Lester feels fortunate for coming up with the idea, but then he put in the work to make it go somewhere.

<<< LISA DANIEL >>>

Two main points: always doing a great job and keeping in mind ideas and opportunities you can use later. Lisa has a background in journalism and a list of more than 2,000 published articles. Started getting work by spinning off from staff jobs as a writer — snagged gigs with former employers and their competing publications. DC is the capital of associations and every association has a magazine, so there is ton of freelance work here for writers.

Realized that if she was going to make a living at it, she had to do more than just journalism, to make a good living as a writer. Commercial work was the answer, and it’s not journalism, literature, or creative writing, but

the kind of work done for the purpose of making money for an organization, whether a nonprofit, a company, or a government agency; writing that they will pay you to do to improve their bottom line.

Copywriting – marketing copy for websites and print materials, press releases, PR plans, advertorials for newspapers, web content, newsletters, and particularly in DC white papers and reports for corporations, government contractors, and government agencies. It’s not creative writing, but there is a lot of creativity to it, and business people can be really impressed with it because they haven’t been using writers.

• One specialty as a reporter was covering the military, so the reputation and background fed into military-focused white papers or work with a military audience.

Who are potential customers? Any organizaiton with internal or external publications: website, reports, brochures. Can be through Communications or Marketing Department. Nonprofits, community groups.

How to get started? First, get your own portfolio in order: having clips ready in PDF form, putting them on a website (doesn’t have to be great, but needs to be clear and accessible), keeping your resume updated, having business cards, updating your contact list, getting on writers’ e-mail lists and job lists (AIW, SPJ, Media Bistro, Communicators Job of the Week)

• Sometimes if you respond to a staff job opening as a freelancer, they will fill those jobs with freelance instead of employee, either long term or until they find a permanent person.

Known what your goals are so you can create a strategy. How much money do you need to make? How much time do you need to set aside for your personal projects? Know what you’re working with so you can target the right projects and customers.

Built work 90% through networking and word of mouth. Don’t burn bridges, stay in touch with people you worked for in years past, use the people you know in a field to find organizations that need writers. Networking is really key.

“Most work has come from doing a good job adn someone passes my name on to somebody else. I didn’t necessarily know the next person or the next company and i was referred that way. The thing I have heard people say over and over and over in large organizations is that they won’t hire a person that somebody in senior management doesn’t know, so you really need to make those personal contacts with people because they won’t take a chance on somebody they don’t know.”

<<< SHASHI BELLAMKONDA >>>

Social networks are a comparatively new field that has been around only 2-3 years. Freelancers are already savvy networkers, but you may want to turn your offline networking skills into online communications.

What’s in it for me? Connecting with your customers, monitoring your online reputation, developing “google juice,” and turning Facebook (and other network) friends into new customers. (“Facebook is no longer about throwing sheep at each other. More than 50% of Facebook users are over 35.”)

Build your brand online with cheaper alternatives. Create evangelism, opportunities for awareness and word of mouth. Social media is not about marketing; it’s about talking to friends and connecting to other people and saying, “What are you as a human being?”

Social networking mantra: listen, participate, contribute. Look for opportunities to connect with people, like a way to start writing your own samples such as CNN’s iReport. Comment, join the networks, be active.

Set up Google Alerts to find out who’s talking about you, what are they saying, and where are they saying it. (Do it for your kids, too, to see what they’re doing online.)

LinkedIn is not just about putting up your profile, but it also gives you a link on Google. Join the conversation by answering questions at places like LinkedIn, Yahoo! Answers, etc.

Social media gives you an opportunities to tell your story, and everyone does have a story. Create videos, talk about your employees or your clients, share exciting events and news.

Engagement = conversation. Comments, reviews, newsletters — talk to your audience.

Become a niche ninja, and educate your audience instead of selling to them. “How many people in here have bought a product just because a friend or even a kid recommended it to them?” (Almost the whole room raises their hands.)

Register your name and your brand as a domain name. Secure your online brand. Participate in Twitter, Facebook, other ways to get in front of your audience. Take advantage of press release distribution services like PR.com, PRlog.com, i-newswire.com, etc. Each press release you send out gives you another link in Google. Even Flickr can use used as a marketing tool.

• Take a photo of a magazine where you writing appears and post it with the story of how you got the assignment.

.Docstoc, SlideShare, and Scribd are document sharing services you can use to promote information products, like a five-part course on how to get magazine assignments, or how to use social marketing. Create more opportunities to find customers and develop credibility.

Digg and other social bookmarking sites are like a million editors who are all picking the best articles to put them on the front page. But don’t submit only your work — make sure that you’re not submitting your own work more than 1 in every 6 articles you submit or rank.

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