Working as a freelance writer means writing for your clients, not for yourself. As I said in my post You Can Write But Can You Deliver?, writing for others can be boring, but is essential unless you are at the very pinnacle of the freelance writing profession.

But in order to get those clients, you need to promote yourself first. I wrote yesterday about how I began my freelance writing career in a small way, by submitting letters, stories and articles to the editors of popular magazines. The stories and articles always contained an ‘introduction’ about me and a short resume of my writing work.

This still is one way of promoting yourself as a freelance writer. But another way many writers advertise is via a blog or website.

Websites are essentially static. The majority of the freelance writers’ websites I have seen contain a small number of pages. The main page usually contains a picture of the writer plus a short personal resume. There are links to other pages such as contact details and a page outlining the author’s ‘freelance writing credentials’: books and articles published; writer’s associations they belong to; and any other contributions they are making in the writing field.

But the majority of successful freelance writers who promote their business via the internet also have a blog, either linked to from their website, or providing the main focus of their online work.

Blogs are dynamic. SEO ‘experts’ tell us that the search engines love dynamic, constantly updated written content, which is why most successful freelance writers use blogs as a source of promotion.

I would argue that this isn’t always the case. A well optimized website could in some ways do the same job. However, this would take a great deal of time and dedication to link building, including producing copious original articles to post to article directories, rather than to the writer’s own site. In light of this, many freelance writers chose to take what they think is the easy route to promotion and post those articles to a blog.

Of course, the best form of internet promotion for a freelance writer, or anyone else wanting to make a living on the internet, would be to use all of these methods, along with many other ways of encouraging traffic, organic and socially led.

The interesting part about being a freelance writer who promotes their business on the internet, is that, unlike many other sites and blogs which require search engine traffic as their main source of income, a freelance writer’s blog can benefit from social bookmarking as well as being high in the serps. Because being a freelance writer on the internet is all about building a reputation for yourself and your writing skills.

Which is all very well if you can write day after day in an engaging manner. Although at least, unlike writing for a client, on your personal freelance writing blog you have a much wider range of subjects you can write about.

The problem here is, because you are promoting yourself as a freelance writer, you have to communicate well and demonstrate your ability to produce good, effective written copy at all times.

The average blog writer can get away with poor grammar, typos and other mistakes, which can present barriers to communication, but do not necessarily prevent their readers enjoying their posts. However, someone wishing to demonstrate their skills as a freelance writer can hardly post a blog entry filled with errors. They will have to check and double check their every word.

There is also the quandry that a freelance writer wishing to gain clients, will have to take care how they present themselves and what they write about.

For example, a writer wishing to be employed to create content for a soda company, can hardly write a post arguing that soda is bad for your health. Likewise, a writer with a strong political stance could lose future copywriting work if a prospective client felt the views expressed were liable, by association, to effect sales of their product.

So setting up your freelance writing blog to demonstrate your marvelous ability to produce good, unique written content isn’t quite the easy prospect it may appear to be at first.

And if, perhaps, you are thinking that this is a cry from the heart, about posting entries to Writing-Resource and having to watch my every word… Well, it isn’t really. I have other blogs where I write about my feelings and even my rants.

But on a freelance writing blog I try to watch my typos and my political stance.

Sad, but true…