From freelancing to job searching, here are 5 top pieces of expert advice from 2023
Q&As to help navigate career and side hustle next steps
Revisit some top advice from 2023 with these five Q&As with a six-figure freelancer, career and leadership coach and more journalists charting paths through the publishing industry and other small businesses.
For more thoughtful answers from each respondent, read the full stories in the archive.
You’ve been freelancing full time for 18 years. At a high level, how has your approach to finding clients and pitching evolved over time?
Pitching is the least effective marketing tool in my toolbox. That’s because it requires a lot of time and work to audition for an assignment. Some editors expect you to write most of the piece just to be considered. That doesn’t mean they’ll assign a story, let alone reply to your email.
Instead, I focus my marketing efforts on continuing to build my own network, so I’m the first name on someone’s mind when they need a writer, or I’m the name they give to a colleague who asks if they know of any good writers. I also send letters of introduction (LOIs) to potential clients, which are an emailed version of cold calls.
Through both of these tactics, I find clients who give me work that doesn’t require any pitching, or at most, informal, two-sentence ideas. Even when I wrote The New York Times running newsletter, I didn’t pitch. I just sent my editor a quick email asking if my topic was OK (and she only said no once or twice). That doesn’t mean I don’t pitch, because I still write for big name publications where it’s how they operate, but most of my assignments come from clients where I’m not constantly asking for work. They’re assigning work to me.