Where do you start your search for online writing gigs?

So what can we do?

Well I’ve mentioned the first method in previous blog posts – and that is to promote yourself via a blog like this one.  If you have your own blog or website, you’ll get clients contacting you directly asking you if you could write for them.  That’s a whole lot better than having to constantly search for work yourself.

But is there anything else you can do? After all if you have only just got started in the world of online writing, you won’t have hundreds of clients all clamouring for you to start working for them straightaway.  Soon maybe, but not immediately!  So what do you do then?

Here’s a method I’ve started to use that has brought some interesting results.

Go to your main search engine of choice – it’ll work with any search engine you choose – and think about some keywords that a client looking for writers would type in their job request.  For example, if you have been to many of the freelance bidding sites you’ll know that people often say “I’m looking to hire a writer”, or “SEO writers needed” or something similar.  Make a list of all the similar search terms to this that you can think of.

Obviously you can vary these depending on the kind of work you want to get.  If you type in “writers wanted” you’ll get all kinds of potential results.  Typing in “bloggers wanted” will clearly only reveal the top ranked blogging jobs in the search results.

What you are doing here is trying to find the kind of writing jobs you want in a different way.  Instead of going to one writing website and looking through all the jobs they have, before repeating the process with the next website, you’re trying to find the jobs first – before you visit the website.  See the difference?

You’ll get more accurate results if you make sure your search terms are inserted in quote marks too.  This means you will only get “SEO writers” in your results, rather than any results which feature the words “SEO” and “writers” in any order.  This could return results that aren’t relevant to what you want.

I should stress that you won’t find suitable jobs every single time you do this.  Just as not every website you visit has good writing jobs on it every time, performing this search won’t always pay off either.  But you will find websites you never found before, that could potentially bring you writing work in the future.  It’s simply a different way of finding work that could pay dividends.

Give it a try and let me know how you get on.  And if you have any other ways of finding good writing gigs, feel free to share with my readers!