What Is a Freelance Content Writer?

What is a freelance content writer? A freelance content writer is someone who specializes in the production of online material such as blog posts, website copy, and social media content. The goal of a content writer is to inform, educate, or entertain their readers.

Like other types of freelance writers, content writers need certain foundational skills to succeed – excellent writing, communication, and time management skills, to name a few. However, several additional skills are essential for content writers in particular. In this post, we’ll cover: 

• What a freelance content writer is and the type of writing they do.
• The day-to-day tasks and responsibilities of a freelance content writer.
• How to become a freelance content writer.

Read on to discover all you need to know to launch your new content writing career!

What Is a Freelance Content Writer?

A freelance content writer is a specialist writer who produces written material for online platforms. While some content writers choose to focus on a particular niche, many are able to turn their hand to several different types of content, including:

• Blog posts and articles
• Website copy (e.g., landing pages, product descriptions)
• Social media content
• Email campaigns and newsletters
• Technical writing
• Business reports
• Ebooks 
• Whitepapers 
• Press releases

As we mentioned above, content writing is all about educating, informing, and engaging readers. Unlike copywriters, content writers don’t usually produce direct sales pitches. Their focus is on helping businesses develop their brand voice, provide their target audience with genuine value, and build positive, lasting relationships with existing and potential customers.

Some freelance content writers write about a variety of subjects, whereas others specialize in areas where they already have industry knowledge. Here are just a few examples of industries a freelance content writer might specialize in: 

• Food writing 
• Sports writing
• Travel writing
• Legal writing
• Financial writing
• Health and wellness writing

A freelance content writer is self-employed, so they’re not on a business’s payroll. This means they are responsible for marketing their services, finding their own clients, and managing their own finances. 

Now let’s take a more detailed look at the role and responsibilities of a freelance content writer.

What Does a Freelance Content Writer Do?

The mission of the UK public service broadcaster, the BBC, is to inform, educate, and entertain. That’s a great mantra for a freelance content writer to keep in mind!

Content writers use their talents to help clients engage with their target audience and achieve their marketing goals. Typically, those goals will be things like:

• Increasing brand awareness
• Boosting website traffic
• Building trust with their audience 
• Encouraging customer loyalty 
• Positioning themselves as industry experts

While their exact responsibilities may vary from client to client, there are several day-to-day tasks that will be similar every time. 

Here’s what you can expect to do as a freelance content writer:

Liaise with Clients

This is where your verbal communication skills, as well as written, are important. You’ll need to liaise with your client throughout the project to establish their requirements and ensure you meet their needs. This starts with creating a content brief, which sets out the key details, such as the objective of the content, the required format, and the deadline. You’ll also need to discuss any revisions needed, manage expectations around potential scope creep, and provide a clear, professional invoice at the end of the project.

Collaborate with Other Professionals

Even though you’re a freelancer, you’re still part of the client’s team for the duration of the project. So, you’ll likely need to communicate with other team members like marketing staff, designers, other writers and editors, finance staff, and so on.

Conduct Thorough Research

To write an engaging piece of content, you need to know your stuff. Research is a vital part of content writing, allowing you to write quickly without sacrificing quality. Thorough research includes:

• Planning your content (e.g., subject matter, format, target audience) 
• Identifying credible sources of information
• Fact-checking information
• Making clear notes and managing references (plagiarism is a no-no!)
• Conducting keyword research (to optimize your content for search engines)

If your content is up-to-date and factually accurate, you’re much more likely to engage your readers – and establish yourself (and your client) as trustworthy voices.

Follow a Style Guide

A style guide is a list of instructions and notes that tell you the client’s preferences for spelling, punctuation, grammar, tone of voice, and more. Some businesses produce their own style guide; others follow widely-available published examples like The Associated Press Stylebook or The Chicago Manual of Style. Whichever style guide your client uses, you must follow it to ensure consistency.

Adhere to Brand Voice and Tone

Consistency is the name of the game again here. A content writer’s work must adhere to their client’s voice and tone:

• Brand voice is the way a business expresses itself, or its distinct personality. It should be consistent across all the brand’s marketing materials. A content writer therefore needs to be familiar with the tone, style, word choice, and vocabulary the business typically uses. 
• Tone is about the attitude conveyed by a piece of writing. For example, the degree of formality, passion or enthusiasm, or humor. Brand voice is a constant, whereas tone is adaptable. Therefore, a content writer must be able to identify the most appropriate tone for each piece of writing.

Write Content That Fulfills the Client’s Brief

Once you’ve established what your client wants, understood their brand voice and style, and done your research, it’s time to get writing. This is where a freelance content writer’s creative juices can really start to flow!

Optimize Content for Search Results Rankings

This one’s a real biggie. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a huge part of a freelance content writer’s everyday work, so it pays to know your way around it. Content writing is about helping a business or blogger connect with existing and potential customers. To do that, your work needs to hit the dizzy heights of the search result rankings. And that happens when you know how to optimize your content. 

Whether you’re writing a website landing page, a press release, or a blog post, SEO techniques are crucial for successful engagement.

Here are a few of the most important ways to write content for good SEO.

Use relevant keywords. The easiest way to find relevant keywords is to use a keyword research tool. 

• Incorporate your keywords naturally, and avoid keyword stuffing.
• Focus on readability. Vary your sentence length, keep paragraphs short, and avoid unnecessary jargon. 
• Include internal and external links to help the search engine crawlers (also called spiders or robots) understand and index your client’s site or blog.
• Ensure your headings are relevant, are well-distributed throughout the text, and incorporate your keywords. As a rough guide, try to avoid blocks of text longer than 300 words. 
• Follow Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines (the framework Google uses to judge the quality of a piece of content).

Respond to Feedback

Once you’ve presented your content to your client, you may need to spend time editing or redrafting it. This is a normal part of the content creation process. Sometimes, a client’s brief doesn’t reflect exactly what they want. We’ve all had that, “I don’t quite know what I want, but I’ll know it when I see it” feeling. So, if your first draft doesn’t quite hit the spot, a few tweaks will see it the way the client wants it.

Proofread

Proofreading your work will always be a critical task at the end of every piece of content you write. Your reputation as a content writer will be enhanced if you always produce well-written, accurately spelled, and grammatically correct work. Learning to proofread is a key skill for a content writer. It’s much more than just knowing your comma from your semicolon, so make it part of every job you do. Need some pointers? Take a look at our blog post on How to Proofread Your Own Writing.

How to Become a Freelance Content Writer

There are six key steps to becoming a freelance content writer.

1. Research content writing as a career, and make sure you understand the skills needed to succeed. Fill any skill gaps by taking a freelance writing course or workshop, learning from books and online material, or even by finding a freelance mentor.
2. Decide whether you want to become a generalist content writer, or focus on a niche. If you want to choose a writing niche, consider your experience, your current knowledge base, and what you enjoy learning about. 
3. Look at online content with a more critical eye. What makes a great piece of content? Now you know a little about what goes into producing it, you can start to think about how you’d write those pieces. 
4. Gain experience. You could do this by writing your own blog, taking on pro bono work (e.g., for a charity), or writing on spec. Once you’ve collected some examples of your work, you can create a portfolio to show potential clients.
5. Produce a resume showing your skills, experience, and qualifications. And proofread it! Twice! If you don’t have much writing experience yet, don’t panic. Think about transferable skills you’ve gained in other roles, and how they could be relevant here. 
6. Get your first few clients. Online marketplaces, job boards, and networking on platforms like LinkedIn are all great ways to find clients.

Start Your Freelance Content Writing Journey with Knowadays

We hope you’ve found this post useful. If you’re ready to kickstart a new career as a freelance content writer, take a look at our course, Becoming A Freelance Writer. It teaches you all you need to know in easy-to-tackle modules, and you can even sign up for a couple of free lessons!

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