Freelance Technical Writing
If you have the right skills, it may be easier than you think to get started as a freelance technical writer.
If you're a freelancer/contract tech writer, you need to promote yourself. Think of yourself as a store with exactly one product, namely your time. You can only sell that product to one customer at a time. What you need to do is make sure each sale is a good one, and that you sell as much of your time as possible, because no one pays you for down time if you're independent.
Passive Marketing
Creating a web site
Stores hang up signs, and some walk-in business comes their way. For a tech writer, the equivalents include creating a web site as a sort of online resume. You can use this as something for potential clients to look at once you've established contact in some other way. Invite them to see your web site, and they will get an impression, hopefully good, of both your experience and your writing and design abilities.
Posting your resume on job sites
You should also post your resume on relevant tech writing job sites. Recruiters who need to fill a job req search these regularly, scanning for keywords to match their requirements. Update these online versions of your resume regularly; some writers find that making regular updates to their resumes can bring them to the top of the listings returned in the recruiters' searches sorted by update date.
Business cards
Get some inexpensive business cards - they really don't cost much - with your contact info, including your web site address. Carry a few around wherever you go, because it happens that you meet people who ask what you do. Give them a card, and business can sometimes result, even in unexpected ways.
Active Marketing
You've got to go beyond the passive steps if you want to build up a business. Marketing means figuring out who your target market is, what services you will offer that market, and the way to get to that market. If you're a one-person shop, as most writers are, it's not that complex.
Identifying your market
Say you've been working in the financial services industry, and know the difference between Series 7 and the World Series. Now you've decided to set up shop on your own. There's nothing wrong with taking on a customer from the automobile manufacturing industry and branching out, but this is not your natural market. Your natural market is companies in financial services in your area. (Yes, you can get telecommuting work, but that's much harder.) So, make a list of the financial companies in your area. That's your market.
Defining your services to the market
Now figure out what services you're going to offer this market. Let's say you want to focus on meeting this industry's constant need to update registered representatives with new product and regulatory information.
Contacting the market
The last step in this simple three-step process is to identify the people in the companies you've identified who can buy your services. How can you do this? Here are some ideas:
- Network with other local writers at your STC chapter meeting. Perhaps one of the members will know the writing manager - or one of them, if it's a large company. These networking contacts may be able to give you useful grapevine information, too, about what it's like to work at that company.
- Do an Internet search for terms like "documentation," "publications," and the company name. If they make a product that you can access, the documentation team contact info might be listed in the product.
- Call the main number for the company and ask to speak with the documentation manager. When you reach him or her, you've got about 10 seconds to make your pitch, so consider carefully what you want to say. In that amount of time, the manager will decide whether you are worth more time, and indeed, that should be the goal of the call: establishing a channel for you to make your real pitch. If you happen to know that the customer is desperately seeking someone just like you, you can be direct. But in most cases, what you need to do is ask the manager if you can send a brochure and resume. Remember, you're interrupting whatever they were doing before, so now is not the time to talk. Send in the information, and the next time you call to follow up, you're practically old friends.
- Once you establish experience in your market, as each contract begins to draw to its natural end, you can reasonably market both inside that same company and outside. Say you just did a project for the company's intranet team. When it's almost done, seek out other possible customers in the company. Perhaps there's a training team, a marketing communications team, a technical publications team, etc. You can absolutely ask your direct customer to help in this search - provided that your work has been good!