I started my career picking at the scraps of the online writing world. Yes, I willingly submitted articles to micropay sites, and yes I had an account with sites like TextBroker (it didn’t exist yet, but others like it did). I worked for pennies, and while I don’t recommend it to anyone who can avoid it, I learned quite a bit in those early days.
Namely, there are no writing tasks I cannot perform. Today, I still get clients who contact me about website content and then ask if I can write blog posts.
Of course I can, but in the mind of most clients, these services are very different. I’ve made a career and now a business out of offering as wide a swath of services as possible, and in many cases, without those supplemental or add-on services, I wouldn’t have been able to pay my bills. Here are seven of the add-ons that work best for writing clients:
- Monthly Blogging – If you write blog posts, offer to do it on a monthly basis. Make it as hands-off as possible for your clients so they can reap the benefits without having to supply the information.
- Social Media Posting – Posting to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, or Google+ on a daily basis is very easy if you schedule in advance with services like HootSuite. Offer these services to clients who want to use these tools but don’t have time to keep up.
- WordPress Management – Take your blogging services to the next level by managing WordPress installations. You don’t need to know much in the way of technical information to handle WordPress. Just how to install plugins, check comments, update security patches, etc. Spending a weekend reading a book on WordPress is well worth the time spent.
- Ghostwriting – Ghostwriting involves capturing the voice and personality of your client and committing it to page. There is no byline, but often the pay is higher and clients will keep coming back for reliable writing.
- Keyword Research and Integration – Most of the articles you will write online have at least some degree of keyword integration. Go to the next level and offer the initial keyword research and optimization as part of your services.
- Design & Development – While you probably can’t do these things yourself, you can outsource. And even if you don’t feel like outsourcing, you can partner with someone to whom you send referrals in exchange for referrals to your services.
- Content Distribution – You write a lot of content, and there is always the risk that your clients don’t have time to distribute it either. So why not offer distribution services – uploads to directories, press release distribution, guest post distribution, etc.
If you can add only one or two of these services to what you offer clients on a regular basis, you will see an increase in your income. Don’t be afraid to mention, even offhandedly to your clients that “by the way, I can also…”
You’d be surprised how often they need those other services, and either assume you don’t offer them or simply don’t think about it at all.
What add-on services do you offer and how have they helped you grow your freelance writing business?