Would You Like Your Competition To Help You Find New Work?

Whether you’re an aspiring or seasoned writer, you will struggle to find new clients at various points in your career.

Writers face fierce competition as the market of freelance writers widens and publications fold.

And in an economy struggling to recover, companies often cut their freelancers first and redistribute writing needs in-house. The need to diversify and find new clients is crucial if you want to stay a working writer.

Most writers start looking for new clients in the same place — magazines and newspaper racks in the community. It’s also easy enough to do a few Google searches to find companies in your area who might need a copywriter. But then what? Where do you look next?

When I moved back from New York City to my hometown in Atlanta, I didn’t know what the market was like, or where to start looking for new writing work. I still had some clients in New York, but I wanted to break into regional writing.

I searched Google for “Atlanta magazines” and “Atlanta publications” and came up with a few ideas, but I wasn’t really satisfied.

I knew there must be other resources out there. Frustrated by the lack of search results, I wondered who other Atlanta freelancer writers were writing for.

That’s when it dawned on me. If I could see what my competition was up to, I could find outlets faster and easier than if I were to go it alone.

The Benefits Of Studying Your Competition

When you take a thorough look at what your competition is doing, you reap the benefits of their success and hard work. Instead of spending hours hunting down new markets and leads, you have a wealth of insight in a tidy portfolio.

Studying your competition shows you:

• Which clients are already open to freelance writers
• Which markets (you might never have heard of them) are publishing
• What ideas the publication wants
• What fees clients potentially pay freelancers

In essence, learning from your competition is like having your own writer’s guide, complete with client ideas, potential testimonials and rates.

But it takes a little practice to study your competition and learn to apply it to your own work.

How to Study Your Competition for Success

1. Google the terms “freelance writer” or “copywriter” with whatever city or town you live in. For example, I started my search with “Atlanta freelance writer”. You can also perform searches like “music freelance writer” or “freelance real estate copywriter” to find writers specializing in your preferred niche.

2. Read your competition’s bio. If this particular freelance writer has 30 years of experience working with Fortune 500 companies, and you focus on micro-business content for consumer magazines, move on. You already know their client list isn’t going to suit your needs. You need to find someone who is in your niche, or in a niche you want to occupy.

3. Check your competition’s portfolio and skim through their roster of clients. This is a great way not only to find new clients, but also to figure out how big your market is. You might want to write exclusively about tennis, but may realize that all your competition works for the same three publications. With so few markets to choose from, it’s time branch out into other sports or industries.

4. Read through a few of your competitor’s clips to get an idea of what the client looks for. Many of the ideas I gleaned from my competition aren’t just about new publications, but also about new markets. I never thought about writing case studies until I found several writers specializing in this niche, and realized there was a paying market for it in my field.

5. Search for testimonials to see exactly why a client loved your competitor’s work. Every writer wants to get inside an editor or client’s head to deliver the best work possible. Testimonials can shed light on everything: how the editor loved your competitor’s ultra fast-turn around, professionalism, ease to work with, wit or fresh ideas.

6. Review your competition’s list of services. Writers often moonlight as editors, fact-checkers or marketing consultants. Look at what publications or materials your competition edits to get new client ideas. But this step also reveals new types of services that you could charge for, like social media consulting, for instance.

Save Yourself Valuable Time

Studying the competition saved me an enormous amount of time in hunting down new publications. Within a half hour, I had a list of dozens of markets I could tap into immediately.

Based on my competition’s success, I already knew these clients hired freelance writers, the types of articles or material they needed, and why they liked my competition’s work. In some cases, my competition even listed their rates, giving me an idea of what these clients were willing to pay.

One publication I found through a competitor’s portfolio gave me an assignment the same day I contacted them.

Thanks to my competition, I knew this specific publication published service journalism pieces with a light and friendly tone. With this in mind, I crafted a query letter with a similar tone and outlined how I would approach an article on major healthcare providers in my city.

This wasn’t the topic my competition had written about for the publication, but I still had enough information to figure out that they might be interested in it.

Get a Leg-Up On Your Competition

Studying your competition is a tool to inspire new ideas for the market you’re trying to enter. If you know your competition inside out, you can figure out how to do a better job than them.

If you can see what your competition is writing about, you can analyze their work and find ways in which you would do it better.

Let’s say your competition wrote an article for a pregnancy magazine about relocating during your second trimester. The article quoted doctors, but not women who went through the experience.

You can come up with a like-minded article, such as changing jobs while pregnant, and pitch your idea, offering both expert and personal sources you’d like to quote.

Now think of other ways to add to the article — maybe a sidebar, with steps on how to make the move easier.

Respect Your Craft

While studying your competition offers valuable insight into new markets, you should tread carefully.

Learning from your competition should always be approached ethically. It won’t do you any favors to copy your competitor’s exact ideas and re-pitch to the same clients.

Approaching the same clients with the same ideas but with a rate discount to undercut your competition only shows you’re unprofessional.

Or, worse, it shows you’re a disingenuous writer with a poor work ethic.Your potential client might also assume you can’t be trusted with sensitive company information or sources.

Look to your competition’s success as motivation to propel your career forward, but respect your competition, yourself and your craft by diligently developing your own ideas and voice.

The road to writing success isn’t always a bumpy one; sometimes the path is well worn by your competitors paving the way for you.

How have you benefited from your competition? Or has someone benefited from studying you? Share your experiences and ideas in the comments below!

About the author: 

Susan Finch is a freelance writer with an eclectic background across guidebooks, web copy, magazine articles, iPhone apps, and TV promos just to name a few. She helps writers build successful freelance careers at WordGlam.com.

Image: Studying the Competition courtesy of Bigstockphoto.com

Would You Like To Have It All?

Recently I decided to reduce my writing schedule from 20 hours per week to one and a half days per week.

The reason? So that I can spend more time homeschooling our 4-year-old. He’s at an awesome age, and I want to spend as much time with him as possible!

My first thought was, “I predict my income will go down by half, but I think we can make it work.”

I set about signing up for coupon sites and asking my husband if he might be able to get hired full-time at the company where he freelances. I was always the main breadwinner of the family, but I expected that would change.

But then I thought: Why do I always have to choose either /or: Either have time OR have money?

Soon after, I read in the newsletter of Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick:

Multitrack your options.

[...] Always try to think AND not OR. Can you avoid choosing among your options and try several at once?

For instance, if you’re deciding whether to invest time in Spanish lessons or ballroom dancing classes, do both for a while until one of them ‘wins’.

Or, rather than hire one employee out of three candidates, could you give all three a 2-week consulting project so that you can compare their work on a real-world assignment?

Wanting more than OR, I set up a meeting with a life coach for writers, who showed me ways to keep up my income while working fewer hours.

I’ve been on my new schedule since March 1 — and that month I invoiced $6,288.07.

As a freelancer, are you stuck deciding between two options when it might be better to try both? Here’s what I mean:

Work Less OR Make More → Work Less AND Make More

I read an inspiring article in the current issue of Yoga Journal about the yoga of work, and the author pointed out that we need to let go of the results of our work.

Don’t fixate on the gigs, the kudos, your name in the bylines. When we let go of the results, we let go of energy-draining desperation and stress. This gives us the energy to focus intently on our writing.

That’s when we get this great combination of productivity and ease — and that’s what makes it possible for us to work less while actually earning more.

Copywriting OR Magazine Writing → Copywriting AND Magazine Writing

One of the top questions I get from new writers is whether they should choose copywriting or magazine writing.

Copywriting pays more, but magazine writing is more fun, right? And you certainly can’t do both, can you? Because maybe magazine editors won’t trust you if they know you do copywriting?

Not so. I started out my career doing copywriting and magazine writing, and even wrote an article about it way back when I worked for Writer’s Digest.

I interviewed editors for their input on the question, and the upshot was that as long as you keep the two separate and are absolutely sure not to use your copywriting clients as sources in your editorial writing, you’re fine.

The bonus to doing both? You get the money and the fun. You also avoid the burnout that comes from doing the same thing day after day.

Stay At Home with the Kids OR Make a Living Writing → Stay At Home with the Kids AND Make a Living Writing

Believe it or not, lots of people make a living writing while staying at home with their young kids. It takes supreme organization and sometimes you need to call in support, but it can be done.

A friend of mine told me that you’re never more productive than when you have kids. That’s because you know you have only two hours while Junior naps, and if you don’t get that query or web copy done before he wakes up, you’ll never get it done.

You’ve heard the expression that a task expands to fill the available time? That’s what we’re talking about here. If you have less time, the assignment takes less time.

I arranged things so I can continue earning a living writing while homeschooling our son. I homeschool — by which I mean go on day trips, attend homeschooling co-ops, and do experiments — on Monday, Tuesday, half of Wednesday, and Friday.

On Thursday and the other half of Wednesday, and in whatever other hours I can steal — like if my hubby takes the kiddo for a hike — I work. If I absolutely have to take a phone call on a day I’m not working, I schedule it for 9 am or 5 pm so it doesn’t interrupt the day.

And if I’m swamped with work, my mom is happy to take over childcare duties for the day.

It’s flexible, and it works. It can work for you too, if you consider all your options and set up the support you need.

9-5 Job OR Writer → 9-5 Job AND Writer

The same goes for those of you with 9-5 jobs who dream of writing on the side. If you want it to work, you can make it work.

Have an hour for a break? That’s when you’re in your car doing an interview by cell phone. Want to watch Project Runway? Tivo it and write instead.

In her book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, author Laura Vanderkam stresses that we all have the same 168 hours per week — and even if we work 40 hour per week and sleep 8 hours a night, we still have 88 hours left.

Time-use studies show that we don’t do as much housework, cooking, or childcare as we think we do, so realistically, most of us can fit in a thriving writing career around the edges.

Work OR Freedom → Work AND Freedom

So many of us dream of retiring or becoming independently wealthy so we can finally have time to travel the world, relax, and take care of ourselves.

Guess what? You don’t have to wait until you’re 65 to live a life of freedom. Thanks to technology, you can now freelance from anywhere, as evidenced by the many people who freelance while on round-the-world boat trips, extended trips overseas, and more.

And as for finding the time to take care of yourself — you don’t find time, you make it.

You don’t need to wait until retirement to do that, and the flexible schedule of freelancing makes it possible for you to fit in exercise, nature hikes, journaling, healthy cooking, and other forms of self care.

For example, in the past couple of months my family has gone on road trips to New England, Atlanta and Wisconsin. I checked email and responded to questions in the Freelance Writers Den via cell phone, and even conducted a webinar from my hotel room in Madison.

I had an e-course starting while I was on the road, so I set up the first lesson email before our trip using Boomerang for Gmail.

I also make it a point to get frequent massages, do yoga, and meditate — all those things we know we should do, if only we had the time.

Again, I don’t wait until time magically appears in my schedule — I arrange my writing schedule to make the time. Now that’s what I call work AND freedom! And you can have it too.

As a writer, you really can have AND instead of OR. Have you ever decided to try out multiple options in your career? Do you have any advice for other writers who want to do it? Let me know in the comments below!

About the author:

Linda Formichelli runs the Renegade Writer blog and is developing a premium e-course called Write Your Way Out of the Rat Race. For more information and to get free copies of two e-books for writers plus access to exclusive content and contests, subscribe to the Renegade Writer email list today.

Image: Freelance Writers CAN Have It All courtesy of Bigstockphoto.com