If you are an above-average writer, you can make a decent living writing articles for clients you find online. There is great demand for online content nowadays. Over 2 million blog posts are published every day.

With such a high amount of content being churned out every day, writers who know how to market themselves will always be in demand.

To make money as an article writer, you will need to specialize in a few areas so you are able to write authoritative pieces in the shortest amount of time possible. There is a learning curve to every niche. Once you have a niche down, you can write very good articles without having to do any research.

Niche Down

The easiest topics to write about are the topics you are already familiar with. The most important thing is that you niche down to a few areas. The highest paid writers are not jacks of all trades. They select a few niches and completely master them.

As a writer, you can create newsletters, write press releases, write blog posts, venture into copywriting, or create scripts for video content. The path you choose will be entirely up to you and should be informed by your innate talents and skills.

Put Your Eggs in One Basket

There are several platforms to find clients on the web today. The fastest place you can find clients is online job boards such as Freelancer and UpWork. Many new writers make the mistake of creating accounts on several job boards.

In doing so, they spread themselves thin and are unable to break through the ceiling in any of these job boards. If you are just starting out, you need to concentrate your efforts on one job board until you gain momentum.

Pitching Clients

Since job boards have a consistent stream of already qualified prospective clients, all you have to do is send proposals to projects that interest you.

On sending a few proposals, you will quickly realize that on average, 5 to 10 people send proposals to the jobs you bid on. Don’t be discouraged by the competition.

Many of the people bidding for jobs have no idea how to stand out. Since you want to stand out and you want the prospective client to hire you without second thought, show that you can help them solve their problem. Don’t tell them, show them.

Your job as an article writer, if you want to have a consistent stream of clients, is not to write but to solve problems. This is probably the most important mindshift you can have right now.

Retaining Clients

One very important thing freelance writers often forget is that it is easier to get new assignments from your former clients than people you’ve never worked with before. For this reason, you need to look at yourself as a customer relationship manager. The fewer clients you deal with, the smoother your freelancing career will be.