Are you tired of competing with umpty-million writers for those low-paying jobs on Craigslist?

Is your belly getting flabbier thanks to all those hours in front of the computer?

There’s a way to solve both of these problems at once.

You can get in a nice workout while you find quality clients.

Warning: You will need to get up from your computer and leave your house.

But if you’re willing to do that, you could come home with some great client leads or even a gig by the end of today.

What is this marketing method? I call it –

Prospecting by walking around

This marketing method is as low-tech as it gets.

It involves reaching out to businesses at their workplace. This allows you to find busy, successful companies with pent-up demand for freelancers but no time to look for help.

By turning up in person, you show you’re interested in learning about their business. You’re also serious about finding new clients — serious enough to get off your duff and come out and meet them. Not many writers do that, so you stand out right away.

Bring a small notebook for writing down business names. Wear good walking shoes. Bring your business cards. And you’re ready to go.

Step one: Choose a place to walk around that has a lot of businesses. Good places for a prospecting walk include:

• A business, technology, or industrial park
• An office tower (take the stairs)
• Your town’s main shopping street
• The mall (most rent a proportion of their stalls to local businesses)
• The strip malls around the mall

Your chosen target should have many businesses in an area that you could walk around within an hour or two.

My personal favorite is industrial parks. These are often chock-full of low-glamour wholesale, manufacturing, or import-export businesses.

Nobody ever pitches them. This means they are wide open for you to talk up your writing services.

Step two: Park your car, get out, and walk around. Note the business names. Skip the big national brands (this isn’t the way to pitch them) and focus on regional or local companies.

Step three: If you don’t want to approach these business owners cold, take your list of names home after your walk and do some Internet research. Identify companies with stale websites. Scan for recent news announcements about the companies. Learn a bit about their business. Identify areas where they could add to their marketing materials.

Then, return to your walk site for another stroll to talk to business owners.

Or, if you want to just go for it, proceed straight to:

Step four: Knock on the door, or just walk in if it’s a retail shop. Introduce yourself. Be sure to smile and be friendly.

Your script might go like this:

Retail store:

Hi, are you the owner or the manager? I love this store! I’ve shopped here before (if you have).

I saw your (newsletter/website/flier/whatever)…I’m a freelance writer. I’m wondering if you have any writing needs? Do you send out marketing emails to customers, for instance?

May I leave you my business card and get yours? I’ll follow up and send you some samples.

Industrial park:

Hi, I’m looking for the owner or manager? I was in the area visiting (company next door to this one), and saw your nameplate on the door.

I wanted to stick my head in because from your name it sounded like you have a business in (sector), which is a specialty of mine. I’m a freelance writer.

I’m wondering if you have any writing needs?

May I leave you my business card and get yours? I’ll follow up and send you some samples.

Work your way through all the businesses in your chosen locale. You’ll go home having burned some calories — and with a nice stack of leads to follow up on.

You can repeat this method at a new location, whenever you need new clients and want to burn some calories.

How do you get new clients? Leave a comment and share your strategy.

P.S. Want more tips on how to find great freelance writing clients? Then get in the Den. Doors close Thursday.

If I told you there was a way to get free online ads in front of your best target prospects that lasted nearly forever, would you believe me?

Well, there is.

This free-ad scene is a little bit hidden and takes a bit of searching to find the right spot.

But if you can uncover the right place for your niche and know how to get your ad in, you can advertise yourself to your exact target client without charge, for years.

What is this piece of magic?

Let me introduce you to the joys of online resource guides.

Most professional organizations and associations — for lawyers, dentists, naturopaths, accountants, you name it — have an organization website.

On this website, they often have a page of resources for members that help them run their business. A list of web designers, CPAs who specialize in their industry, marketing consultants…and freelance writers.

The trick is sleuthing out where good resource guides for your target market are hiding.

The challenge is that every organization likes to call these pages a different thing.

For instance, for advertising my Freelance Writers Den community, the Writers Market online would be a great place. They have a Paid Services page — many pages, actually — that lists professional service providers such as writing coaches, lawyers, and editors.

You’ll have to scout around to see where you might find a resource directory for the sort of clients you want. If you really get lucky, you may get a chance to list in one where you are the only freelance writer in the directory. Win!

The best thing about resource directories

What could be better than the fact that they’re free? My experience is, they are rarely updated or reviewed.

That means once you’re in, you often stay in for simply ages. Professionals in your niche who’re looking for a freelance writer just keep finding you on their association’s resource page.

Beautiful, huh?

In some cases, the association would like you to make a special offer to their members in exchange for being listed.

In other cases, these type of listings are paid. Even so, it may be worth it to get in front of a hand-picked audience of well-heeled professionals.

Not every association creates these, but if you can find one, reach out and ask if you can be listed. They may want to vet your credentials or get some referrals, they may not.

But you could jump through a hoop or two and offer a half-hour free consult or 10 percent off a first job for exposure like this and it would be well worth it.

If you’ve tried things online such as Facebook ads — which I have — you know you can spend a lot quickly, and not necessarily get a result.

I’d much prefer to be parked on a resource page for years that my top-dollar prospects might browse, at little or no charge.

Where can prospects find you online? Leave a comment and let us know how you advertise your services.

Next on Marketing 101: How to get clients just by writing your own blog. Subscribe to catch all the upcoming installments of this 21-part series.

It’s one of the toughest questions for new writers: What should I charge?

“What’s the going rate?” writers ask me, hoping there is a pat answer that will let them know if they’re being ripped off.

But there is no going rate, for anything in freelancing. There’s only what you’re willing to take and what the market will bear. Where those meet, you have a gig.

What really matters is your hourly rate. Time is your most precious resource, so when you’re pricing a job you want to figure as best you can how long it will take you to do the gig. The multiply by your hourly rate to get your bid. The hourly rate you need will depend on your own circumstances — how high expenses are, how many available work hours you have, and what you consider appropriate.

As you gain experience, keep raising that hourly rate. That’s really it in a nutshell.

To help you start setting your rates, here are seven questions I ask to help me decide if a writing gig is worth taking:

1. How bad do you need this gig? If you have open time in your schedule, it can be better to fill it with any sort of paid writing rather than simply having downtime. Getting fully booked is key to raising your rates in the long run, as once you’re fully booked you can start to be choosier about which gigs you take. If it’s a particularly interesting assignment or a high-profile client, it might even be worth doing a small free assignment from them, to get a valuable clip that could help you move up.
2. Will this client recommend you? If rates are low, you need to know if this client is the type who would talk you up to other editors or marketing managers. I know writers who will only do pro bono works for clients who are guaranteed referrals.
3. Does this client have more work for you? You have to do a lot less marketing when your clients have ongoing work for you, month after month. Since I enjoy writing more than marketing, I’ve been known to discount my rates a bit for clients who have steady work, while one-off projects go at my top rates.
4. How pleasant do they seem? The longer I do this, the more I value clients with a nice personality — they’re easygoing, fun to talk to, clear about what they want, and seem to love my first drafts. The more of a pain a client is, the more you should charge.
5. How complicated is the work? This is one of the most important factors. An offer of $50 a blog post might sound okay, but if it turns out the client wants 1,000-word blog posts with multiple interviews for each one, it’ll be disastrous on an hourly-rate basis.
6. How sophisticated is the topic? Writing about pets for an audience with a 6th grade education is going to be easier than writing for an audience of retirement-plan managers. The more you’ll have to research an industry you don’t know well, the longer it will take, and the more you need to charge.
7. What payment terms will they agree to? This one took me a while to catch onto, but if a client doesn’t pay for four months or more, they need to pay top rates. They’re basically using you as a short-term lender and running their business with what is rightfully your money. I hate that. You also often end up wasting time having to chase down these slow-payers, so you have to figure that into your bid. Folks that pay me the day I put in an invoice, on the other hand, deserve a discount.

How do you decide what to charge? Leave a comment let us know.

Cash register: ctechs – stock.xchng

One of the best ways to earn more as a freelance writer is to develop niche expertise.

Assignments get easier and easier to do, as you learn where the good sources and statistics are for that niche topic. Developing story ideas gets easier too — as sources catch on that you write a lot on their subject, they start tipping you off about breaking news and emerging trends.

You learn more and more about your niche. Eventually, you find you’re irreplaceable for clients in this niche. Invaluable. Your rates go up and up.

Sounds great, yes?

There’s only one big question to answer:

How do you find your niche?

I’m getting this question a lot lately in Freelance Writers Den:

I can’t decide whether I want my writing niche to be A or B.

As soon as I figure that out, I’m going to get started.

Bad news — you will never discover your freelance writing niche by endlessly pondering what topic you should choose as your specialty area.

There is a proven way to do it, though. I know because it worked for me.

How I found my writing niche

One of my first-ever gigs was freelancing for one section of a newspaper, the real estate section. So I wrote a lot about real estate. I found I liked it. The more I did it, the more different aspects of it interested me — how real estate is financed, for instance.

I noticed there were good-paying clients in this niche — real-estate companies, real-estate trade publications. As time went on, I kept growing my knowledge of real estate so I could get more assignments.

My other early gig was writing about community news for an alternative paper. While I found it interesting, it didn’t seem like there was a lot of money in that. And it was pretty straightforward stuff that anybody could report. As the years went on, I pitched fewer of these types of stories.

Later, I was a beat reporter for a business weekly. I got assigned loads of beats — higher education, arts and entertainment, retail, restaurant, franchising, nonprofits, and more. I wrote a lot on each of these topics.

As time went on, I found I enjoyed some of these topics more than others. I noticed everybody and anybody seemed to want to write about arts and entertainment, so I drifted away from that topic.

As my knowledge got more sophisticated, my articles in these areas got more attention. That gave me more credibility as an expert in my topic.

Since I’m a former legal secretary, I loved the lawsuits. Other reporters didn’t want to read those long legal filings, so I became the go-to person to cover business bankruptcies. I learned to read businesses’ SEC filings and charities’ tax forms, too. Soon, I was an indispensable reporter for stories that required document-based reporting.

I was able to build a stable of great-paying freelance clients who craved this expertise. They were easy to land because I had clips to show them that were about their exact topic. These clients were thrilled to get me at any price, because they found it hard to get anyone who understood their industry.

To sum up:

1. I wrote a lot on many different topics, which helped me improve my writing.
2. As I wrote, I learned which topics I liked.
3. Of the topics I liked, I observed which niches paid well, and wrote more on those.
4. I kept developing more sophisticated expertise in my chosen fields.
5. Good-paying clients became fairly easy to land.

What types of niches pay well

I often hear from writers who despair of finding a good-paying niche because they don’t know about financial services, or technology, or healthcare.

Two things about that: When I started, I didn’t know anything about them, either. You can learn as you go, if you have an interest in an area.

And contrary to popular belief, those aren’t the only good-paying niches around.

Anything technical will do. For instance, I recently met a writer whose passionate hobby is jewelry-making. You think there are a lot of writers who know the technical aspects and emerging trends in metalsmithing?

Manufacturers who use that method and need their products described would probably love to meet that writer. Ditto for trade publications for jewelry-makers and other industries that employ metalsmithing.

The myth of the single niche

My story illustrates another point: You do not need or even want to specialize in one, single niche. If your one industry goes in the tank, then you’ve got nothing.

It’s better to carve out several different specialized writing niches where you can claim expertise. At this point, I have many different areas I write on frequently, including legal, tax, insurance, business-finance, real estate, and jobs & careers.

Want to know your best niches? Start writing, and let them find you. You’ll see what you enjoy writing about.

Analyze where you’re seeing the best pay, and keep writing on those topics. The marketplace will point you to your best-paying writing niches.

What are your writing niches? Leave a comment and tell us how you developed your expertise.

P.S. To learn more about lucrative writing niches, see the Great Writing Niches e-course in Freelance Writers Den.