Here Is My Secret Recipe for Getting $250/Article Writing Clients

I’m not going to lie — I haven’t been the best example of freelance writing success. You see all those other great writers online show you screenshots of their $10,000/month income statements when they’ve only been freelancing for six months or a year. Good for them, but if you’re like me, then you’ve probably hadn’t seen such high success yet.

February 6th, 2022, will be my four-year freelance anniversary, and I started crossing the $2,000/month line only seven months ago. This year, I finally started seeing the results of 3 years of failing and starting over again. I don’t know whether that makes me a bad freelance writer or an average one, but either way, I’ve worked out a formula for getting good-paying clients that I wanted to share with you today.

A Warning

Call me naive or silly if you want, but only in the last few months have I realized that most of the writing business advice is bullshit. Do you want to know why it is? It has nothing to do with other writers lying to you.

Recently my best friend sent me a TikTok video of this girl who teaches other people how to make money online. Her advice was to go on Upwork and apply to 10 jobs every day until you find ten clients that are willing to pay $1,000 per month, and voila — you have yourself a $10,000 month as a freelancer.

Listen, I don’t think that’s bad advice. However, every freelancer’s journey is so personal and different that it’s hard to sell one surefire way to make money. Maybe for one person going to Upwork and finding 10 $1,000/month clients will work. For another writer, it might not work because the timing was off, the economy was in a different state, or the moon was in the wrong phase.

So, while I’m sharing the formula that worked for me and continues to work for me to this day, I can’t stress enough that even if you follow my advice to the T, your outcome might be completely different.

With the warning out of the way, we can jump into the juicy stuff:

A Recipe for a $250/article client

What you will need

Internet connection (duh, obviously. It’s not as if we can send an owl with a handwritten letter to prospective clients.)

Professional email (Gmail will suffice, as long as it’s not [email protected])

Email finder (I recommend either Hunter or Norbert)

Note app or notebook if you prefer to write notes on paper

3–6 hours of your time

A pinch of common sense

Step by step instructions

Step 1: Make a list of prospective clients in your niche

You don’t have to target only one niche. However, it will be easier to tackle this process if you can group clients into groups so that you don’t need to re-write the cold pitch every single time. If you’re not new to cold pitching game, then you’ll probably have a list on hand already.

If you are new, though, don’t worry. Finding perspective clients is super easy. First, go to Google and search for “[your niche] brands/companies”:

Screenshot by author

There will be tons of articles you can go through to pick out businesses you might want to work with. Note them all down in a Google Docs spreadsheet or on a notepad.

Step 2: Find contacts

It’s time you put your detective skills to use. First, go to LinkedIn and find the businesses on your list there. I always like to follow business pages to keep in touch and stay on top of things. But if you’re not using LinkedIn, you can skip this step.

The person you want to find ideally is the one responsible for content. If you picked large businesses, the chances are that there will be a dedicated person who is either a Content Manager or Head of Content. With smaller businesses, find someone in Marketing — either Marketing Manager or Head of Marketing. If you can’t find anyone in marketing, go for the CEO or Co-Founder directly.

Once you have their name, use the email finder tools to find their emails and note that information either in your spreadsheet or notes.

Step 3: Go through client’s blogs and make a list of blog post pitches

This is going to be the step that’s going to be the hardest. It’s going to hurt. You’re going to curse yourself, your mother, your cousin, and the universe itself. But it must be done.

This step is crucial because you’ll want to show the client that you’re familiar with their business. That you know who they are and what they do and what they need. If you’re a beginner with no testimonials, portfolio, and credibility, then this is your chance to show the client that you know how to do your job despite the lack of experience.

I personally go for three pitches per client. First, I look through their blog. Second, I perform some keyword searches on their website and Google. This is important because sometimes articles don’t appear when you’re searching in their build-in website search. And you don’t want to be pitching already existing articles to the client.

Then, I write a few ideas I think would go well with their blog. Don’t bother writing 500-word essays for your pitches. Keep it short and sweet, and to the point. I’d say two to three sentence pitches are more than enough. It’s also a good practice to get your point across quickly, which is always useful for a writer.

Step 4: Craft the pitch and press “send “

Once you have the pitches for the client’s blog, you only need to craft the pitch and click send. There are tons of pitch templates available online, and every writer will tell you that theirs is the best and works every time. I don’t know if mine is great. But it got me my clients, so it does something, for sure.

Of course, I’m going to share it with you:

Screenshot by author

I find that this cold pitch hits three major important points:

Who am I

What can I do for them

Why they should care

You’ll probably want to tweak yours as you go because every writer is different, and you might have a different set of skills or experiences. Because I only offer blog post writing services to the sexual wellness industry, my pitch template is fairly straightforward.

Also, when emailing each client, I go over my portfolio pieces and make sure that I pick three that suit their blog the best. I look at the tone of voice, topics, and structure and find pieces from my backlog that correspond the best.

Step 5: Follow up

People are busy. People have their inboxes full of other freelance writers’ pitches. They might read your email and forget to reply. Because of that, you need to gently nudge them if they don’t reply. Now, the keyword here is gently. Don’t go emailing the client every day, asking if they’ve looked over your email already.

Most advice tells you to follow up twice. Once after seven days. And then again after another seven days. I personally only follow up once, after a week or so. In my experience, those who are interested will reply after the first follow-up, and those who are not will simply ignore you or reply with a polite “no.”

Results

So, what’s the end result you should get if you follow my secret recipe? Hopefully, a roster of long-term $250/article clients who you love to work with. That’s the freelance dream at the end of the day, isn’t it?

I know that a lot of freelancers despise cold pitching. They’d rather go ask their friends for referrals or simply focus on building their personal brand so that clients find them. If you didn’t know, I’m a fan of cold pitching over other methods, so I use this recipe myself, and it works.