Freelance Writing for Nonprofits

I attended the Land Trust Alliance’s national conference last week in Denver. My husband was speaking and I didn’t want to pass up Rocky Mountain hiking, so I decided to tag along and reserved a table-top display in the exhibit area.

This was the first time I had ever marketed my services at a trade show. It’s too early to tell if it was a success or not, but here are a few things I learned.

People like useful freebies. I gave away pens with my website on them. Of all of the information that I had on the table, people picked up more pens than anything else.

Appeal to the broadest audience possible. I created a free tip sheet about easy ways to market land trusts online. About half the people who took a pen took the tip sheet. My guess is that it was too specific. Something more general like how to create a quick and dirty marketing plan probably would have been more widely appealing than specifically focusing on online marketing.

Location, location, location. I decided to attend this event rather late in the game, and so my tabletop was not in the main flow of traffic. Decide early enough in advance that you will attend, so that you can reserve the best locations on the trade show floor.

Make display items visible from several feet away. Lots of people want to see what you have without having to talk to you. Make sure everything is either hanging on the display or is otherwise standing up. Information flat on the table can’t be seen by attendees unless they are standing right next to it.

Be there in the middle of the conference program. People straggled in the first day. Everyone was there the second day. People straggled out the last day. I’d say 90% of my contact with people came on that middle day.

Put on your outgoing, friendly face. Lots of people cruising the hall won’t initiate a conversation with you, but they will stop and chat if you are really friendly and ask them questions about themselves.

I offered a drawing of free e-courses, e-books, and wine to get business cards and will also add those people to my email newsletter list. I also offered free consulting sessions on-site to get a better sense for what people need. Both produced lots of contacts that I can use to prospect new clients this fall (if I have time).

Have you used trade show marketing for your freelance business? How did it go?

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I’ve found that 99% of my new clients come to me via either (1) word of mouth from other clients or friends or (2) through my websites or e-newsletters. They either find me through people we both know or through a web search that connects us online.

Early in my career, I listed my freelance writing business on several different directory sites. For example, many writing associations offer directories of members and some nonprofit associations offer directories of service providers. But as far as I could tell, these listings didn’t do much to generate work.

Have you found directories like these useful in bringing clients to you? If so, which directories or associations do you like best?

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I get a lot of inquiries from freelance writers who are interested in working with me. I often do have enough work to subcontract some of it out, but I need more than just a good writer or editor who understands the nonprofit landscape. What I really need is a good writer or editor who gets nonprofits and who can also work in Dreamweaver, PageMaker and/or InDesign.

While I still do a lot of writing and editing in Word, many of my clients ask me to move the document along in the process and get it ready for online or print publication. If a good editor or proofreader has the design program that the document is in (or will be shortly), it is that much easier for me to work with them. I’d much prefer that the proofreader go ahead and correct any problems she catches on a webpage within the HTML file, rather than point them out to me on a hard copy, leaving me to type in the corrections.

Expand your skills and your software options and you will likely expand your writing/editing clientele.

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Being self-employed means you often have to take responsibility for tasks outside your areas of expertise. You become an accidental computer technician, bookkeeper, advertising executive, and, if you have a website, search engine optimization expert. It can all be very overwhelming.

To make at least one of these jobs — online marketing — a bit more manageable, here are seven extremely easy ways that writers can market themselves online.

Comment on blogs. Most bloggers accept comments on their posts. Read blogs related to writing or your areas of expertise and submit comments on the posts. In most cases, a link to your website or blog will be included with your comment. You can search for blogs at technorati.com. For nonprofit blogs, see the Nonprofit Blog Exchange.

Join e-discussion lists. Participate in email discussion lists (sometimes called listserves) to become well-known as an active and knowledgeable writer in your area of specialty. Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups are good places to start. For nonprofit lists, also check out N-TEN’s Affinity Groups.

Spend time on your website page titles. Page titles are used heavily by search engines to determine the relevance of your site. Spend some time making sure they are full of keywords, not just your website name.

Use search engine friendly URLs. Search engines also look at the actual names of your files in your website. Place keywords in your file names to improve their rankings. For example, nonprofit-writer.htm is a better file name than aboutme.htm.

Create an email signature. Every email you send, especially those to e-discussion lists with archives online, should include an email signature with your contact information and a bit of information about the kind of writing you do.

Keep family and friends in the loop. Word-of-mouth referrals are a big source of work for most successful freelance writers, so when you communicate with friends and family via email, be sure to give them an update on the work you are doing and the kind of work you’d like more of. Just about everyone has been involved with a nonprofit for some reason at some point in their lives, so you never know where that next referral could come from.

Recycle your articles. Take something you’ve already written and repurpose it as a marketing piece by submitting it to an online article directory like EzineArticles.com. People can download and use your article for free, but they must include your author information which will naturally include a link to your website.

I’m offering more online marketing tips like these in “25 Easy and Low-Cost Ways for Writers to Market Themselves Online,” which is a free download when you claim a keyword at 500Writers.com.

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I’ve started a fun new directory of writers at www.500writers.com. It’s based on the wildly successful site by Joel Comm, 500words.com. I figured writers deserved to have some “word cloud” fun too!

Here’s how it works: There are only 500 words/phrases on the site, including writing genres, topics, and locations. Only one writer can claim each word, which is then linked to the writer’s website. Find the keyword that describes you or your writing, and make it yours before someone else does. If you don’t see your ideal word in the cloud already, you can suggest a new one.

I’ll be placing paid ads for the directory on search engines, as well as taking advantage of other marketing tools, so the directory should take off quickly. By claiming your keyword now, you get the search optimization benefits of the link and a shot at all the traffic I’ll be buying. Word clouds pique curiosity, so you are likely to get visitors who would have never found your site otherwise.

I’m also offering a free download for writers who claim words: 25 Easy and Low-Cost Ways for Writers to Market Themselves Online.

Once the 500 words have been claimed, that’s it. No more will be added. Check it out today!

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