Nomadic Times contributor, Indiana Lee, shares her tips for helping writers to create an effective freelance writing portfolio.

Writing and Marketing your Portfolio

There are two sides to the freelance writing game. On the one hand, you need to be a good writer. That’s just common sense. If you can’t write for beans, you might as well close up shop now. If you’re researching how to make a freelancing writing portfolio, though, chances are you’ve already got the writing side of things down pat.

However, there’s another, often overlooked side to the freelancing game: business savvy.

If you can’t market yourself, you’re as good as cooked. When it comes to writers, in particular, a huge element of your marketing collateral is your portfolio. While you can brag all day long on a resume about your education, accomplishments, and skillset, it’s your portfolio that truly allows you to shine.

With that in mind, here are a few tips to help your freelancing portfolio truly reflect why you are the best candidate for each and every job you apply to.

Creating a New Writing Portfolio

If you’re starting from scratch, it’s important to have a good idea of what a well-structured portfolio looks like. Ideally, you should host your portfolio online. You can easily set up a blog on a site like WordPress, Medium, or Wix.

Once you have your site, you can create a portfolio page where you can host links to live, published pieces and upload docs and pdfs with sample clips. From there, all you need to do is copy the link to your portfolio and share it on an application.

Choosing Your Writing Portfolio Clips

At this point, it’s important that you resist the temptation to flood your portfolio with any and every piece of writing you can find.

You may be a brand new writer busily creating unpublished samples, also called “spec clips,” or you may be gathering already published work. Either way, it’s important that you populate your portfolio with highly-quality items that will speak to your target audience (more on the latter in the next section).

As far as high-quality written work goes, you’re going to want to look for paid work or guest posts that you’ve already written (or write up entirely new samples) that cover the following bases:

• Samples that are well-researched and have knowledgeable citations.
• Samples that vary in structure, from articles to sales pages, web copy, emails, social media posts, and so on.
• Samples that include live links and keyword-focused text.
• Samples that have immaculate grammar and punctuation.
• Samples that include quality, compelling calls to action.

These elements will provide a broad variety of quality samples that will demonstrate to a hiring manager the diversity of your writing abilities.

Understanding Your Target Audience

While it may be tempting to upload that article you really liked that you wrote about chicken coops, if you’re attempting to find work in a niche like finance or cryptocurrency, chances are a sample on homesteading isn’t going to do you much good. Sure, it may show important elements of your writing style, but it won’t do much else.

When selecting or creating samples, it’s always important to keep your target audience in mind. Who will be reading over your portfolio? What will they be looking for? Make sure to let these considerations factor into your choice of samples.

Varying your Voice and Style

Another element that should be represented in your portfolio is your ability to vary your voice and style of writing to meet the needs of different editors’ expectations. If you write in a universal voice regardless of the publication, it may severely limit the number of companies willing to hire you.

In short, use your portfolio to upload clips that show your ability to write from different perspectives, tones, and styles.

Creating and Effective Freelance Writing Portfolio

There are many elements that go into a good freelance writer’s portfolio. To briefly summarize the ones discussed here, you’ll want to consider:

1. Hosting your portfolio online.
2. Choosing samples that cater to your audience.
3. Including high-quality, error-free samples.
4. Demonstrating your ability to vary your voice and style.

If you can address all of these points within your freelance writing portfolio, you’ll have a much better chance of cutting through the white noise and catching a hiring manager’s eye.

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Each article provides a concise list of prompts from A to Z, which provides your travel writing the TLC it needs. We cycle through all letters in the alphabet in turn, and provide links to additional resources and examples of how to implements each tip.

See the grid at the bottom of this post to view other letters in the series.