Successful writers share one common trait—they market themselves using very easy-to-implement tactics. Yet even as demand for writers is skyrocketing, many freelancers would rather spend their time walking the dog or washing the dishes.

“What we’ve got here is a major disconnect. Never before in the history of words has the demand for freelance writers been so high. Yet I constantly hear from copywriters, journalists, technical writers and copyeditors that ‘marketing’ is a four-letter word,” says Michael A. Stelzner, one of America’s top-paid freelance writers.

There’s plenty of work for the taking. According to a recent Junta42 study, 6 in 10 businesses are spending more for content production. The need for case studies, ebooks, newsletters, articles, websites, white papers and press releases is growing at an unprecedented rate.

I was talking to a new freelance writer recently about getting started in freelancing. One of their questions to me was about which services they should promote the most. In their case they wanted to offer both Web content and Web copywriting services. On the surface, there seemed to be three solutions:

1. Promote the one you enjoy doing the most.
2. Promote the one that pays the most per project.
3. Promote them both equally.

They understood they would be working with two different target markets (and that’s a great start — a lot of new writers don’t get that in the beginning). In cases like that, promoting them both equally from Day 1 might not be the best option. It could lead to the writer spreading themselves too thin. After all, at that point you need to start building a reputation around the service(s) you’re offering, and it’s easier to do that when you narrow your focus.

Here’s what I suggested:

Okay. So you’ve figured out that you would like to write. Unfortunately, so have about eight gazillion other people on this planet. Therefore, you have to stand out from the crowd. You have to sparkle. How do you do this? Simple. It all starts with “The Big Idea.”  The first secret you must learn in this funny business is that you don’t actually have to write the whole article/story/editorial/etc. to get a job. In fact, only bright green novices attempt to write the whole thing before selling it. What you do need, however, is the IDEA for the great story. You will use this great idea to convince editors to pay you exorbitant amounts of money via a proposal letter (called a “query letter.” But you’ll learn about that in a minute.)

So, where will you find this Big Idea? Well, you’ve heard that wise old adage, “write what you know.” That’s a wonderful mantra for finding your jumping-off point. You don’t need to stick to “what you know” for the specific focus of your story, but tap into your already huge vat of knowledge to find the story’s basis. This is how you will become an expert. Experts are in demand. People with “stories” aren’t. What you have to do is sneak your stories into your areas of expertise. Example: let’s say your hobbies and interests include fishing, watching talk shows, and traveling. Good! You are a potential expert in those areas. Jot these things down. Now comes the fun part: brainstorming.

The biggest mistake you can make in pitching your story is being too general. Never, ever send a letter to the editor suggesting “an article about fishing.” Not even “an article about fishing in Florida.” This vagueness is not appropriate for short writing. In general, you will be expected to write somewhere between 800 and 2000 words on your topic. You couldn’t possibly tell us “all about fishing” in 2000 words. What you could do, however, is give us “a comparison of twelve different lures used to catch sailfish.” Or “the pros and cons of joining a fishing club.” Or even “how the moon can tell you if it’ll be a good fishing day.”

Over the past couple of weeks we’ve been learning about How to Become a Freelance Writer.

There are a lot of elements to consider when going into freelancing, such as how to price yourself, and even deciding whether or not to become a freelance writer.

Now that you have your portfolio setup and your prices in mind, we’re going to talk about how to promote your freelance writing business to gain repeat clients that pay the price you want them to pay.

Promotion is the hardest part of any freelance business. In your career, there will be many “one-time” clients, and as a freelancer, you might be wondering how to keep the money and work rolling in to stay afloat. Luckily, there are a couple of tried-and-true methods for bringing in repeat customers, and I’m going to discuss them in depth!

A few years ago, I worked for a specialist Africa news publishing house and encountered for the first time in my journalistic career the phenomenon of publishing expert articles written by non-journalists. The idea of making a publication the centerpiece of a number of a number of readers that had an interest in knowing what their competitors were thinking, doing and who they were talking to was quite new to me. But it was an interesting experience, which set the scene for developments I later witnessed in an online environment.

For once, I was not trying my hardest at finding stories, angles and wrangling myself in godknows what positions to get to the hot stuff . here were people offering news that was by dint of them volunteering it in the knowledge that their competitors were doing the same, way hotter than anything I as an outsider could have begun to report.

Creating this platform and taking a step back by more or less editing only, changed the idea of journalism from being objective news reporting, to letting everyone run as much riot as they liked, in fact encouraging the weirdest of views to be published uneditorialised.

It’s not news that the news industry is changing rapidly, and the traditional newspaper and magazine industry is in a whole mess of trouble.

Newspapers are losing readers at an alarming rate to online reading — and readers are reading not only newspapers, but blogs and many other types of sites.

Newspapers are trying to find a model for making money online, but they’re not learning fast enough, not adapting fast enough. Online ads can’t support them, because now the monopoly for publishing news and commentary has been broken, and advertising has been spread out among thousands and thousands of sites.

How can the newspaper industry adapt? Well, they’ll either have to figure that out quickly, or they’ll die.

As a former journalist and editor at a Gannett-owned newspaper, I have some thoughts — things I’ve learned from my career as a blogger at Zen Habits.

1. Smaller is better. Newspapers can’t survive on online ads not because it’s an impossible model for publishing — I do it at Zen Habits and many other blogs and smaller news sites do it. They can’t survive on online ads because they’re too huge. Not only do they have a newsroom of journalists and editors, but they have copy editors, layout editors, graphic artists, photographers, managing editors and more. And that’s just the newsroom — one small part of a newspaper company. There’s also advertising, production (the presses and so on), circulation (the delivery of newspapers), accounting, the IT department, human resources, and overall management (the publisher, president, vice president, staff, etc.).