Freelance writers must actively seek work on a regular basis. Even when fully employed, many experienced freelancers recommend spending an hour a day on your marketing efforts. Here are some great places to look for writing jobs online.
Writing Jobs Online – Job Listings
The World Wide You – Jobs for Writers
David Weedmark hosts a wonderful resource which aggregates the Craigslist writing/editing job listings for 28 major cities in Canada and the US. This list updates six times daily and saves you the time it would take to visit all the individual city sites. If you only have a few minutes to spend, this page is a fantastic one stop shop for writing jobs online.
Be sure to read David Weedmark’s cautions about writing scams before seeking jobs on Craigslist.
I like to check the Boston Craigslist site daily to see writing jobs listed in the gigs section because these do not make it onto The World Wide You page.
When I have the time to dig deeply, I have on occasion found online writing jobs under the job listings for marketing/pr/ad, tv/film/video, and web/info design and under the gigs listings for computer and creative.
From the Boston page, I can also check the nearby cl listings for some of the smaller towns and regions that are not aggregated on David Weedmark’s site. These smaller markets do not receive as many listings, so usually I will only check them once a week. You can see these nearby cl markets on the right side of the page of any city page you visit.
The Freelance Writing Jobs Network
This site pulls job listings from many different sites and is updated each weekday. These listings have the added benefit of a human posting them, eliminating the worst spam. Of course, no one can guarantee writing jobs online for you, so you always have to be careful.
Email Alerts for Writing Jobs Online
You can set up Google alerts to notify you when a keyword phrase is posted to a website. Once you set up an alert you will get a list of links each day in your email. Experiment with phrasing to find the keywords (maybe financial blogger or freelance writer New York) potential clients are using to find writers like you.
Indeed is a job search engine that allows you to search by keyword and location. Once you search you can ask Indeed to email future results for your search.
Writing Jobs in Online Forums
I have listed a couple of forums I visit below, but there are many, many options and you may have to shop around a bit to find the crowd you enjoy. If you do not find a good fit with either of these two, try searching writing forums or webmaster forums to find others where you feel comfortable. Remember you don’t need to fit in everywhere, just in that one place that leads to paying gigs.
If you specialize in a particular niche, you may also connect with potential clients by visiting forums for your niche and establishing yourself as an authority.
This forum is dedicated to internet marketing. Here you can connect with webmasters and marketers offering writing jobs online. Tread carefully. There are some touchy folks in this forum and debates can quickly escalate.
This forum serves work at home mothers and features an active WAHMs Who Write thread. Many writers of all levels of experience share their insights, job leads, and, most importantly, warnings about scams that masquerade as writing jobs. I would check here first if I were trying to figure out whether a new client was on the up and up.
Find a system that works for you.
Build your job search into your daily tasks so that you are not left hanging when you complete current projects. These resources can help you keep working steadily by connecting you with writing jobs online.
If you are new here and find this information useful, please subscribe to the RSS or email feed so you will continue to receive writing tips and inspiration.
Perfect timing Tammi
Really need to step it up and keep up with all the latest offerings in terms of writing especially since I’m transitioning to full time freelancing. Digging through the web has its merits but that’s valuable time going to waste – these aggregation services will come in handy.
Murlu´s last [type] ..What Do We Get For A Fiverr A-ny-ting You Want
Hi Murray,
I’m glad it helps. Hopefully it’s a different mix than the standard bidding boards or content mills.
Cheers!
Tammi
Pingback: Writing Jobs Online | Write More. Write Fast. Write Now. « Blogging and SEO
I am a regular user of Indeed. It is really a great search engine for jobs available. But I came to know about many new websites to search writing jobs with the help of this blog. The list of websites will be great help for me because there were times when I was free and had no projects. But now i will surely check all the above websites for new projects.
I have been using Google Alerts to track online writing jobs in Seattle.Google Alerts are an easy, no cost way for you to put the impressive Google search engines to work combing the internet for a particular term or phrase. Google will let you know about new items in the top search results for the category you are interested in.It works well for Jobs tracking for a freelancer like me. Even Indeed is a great search engine for jobs.
Indeed seems to be a good search engine. I tried it out now and it gave a list of related jobs to the keyword I searched for. Very effective “indeed”.
@Murlu : I agree with you on wasting the time on the internet but I think it is worth to waste a little time rather than doing nothing for ourselves.