Want to earn a real living as a freelance writer? A new site aims to help you do just that. In fact, some of their writers are earning over $50k a year. They pay a minimum of $100 for an article, and the average is over $250 an article.
Plus, if you are looking for a great place to set up an online portfolio that makes access to your articles quick and easy then look no further than Contently.com. Contently hosts your articles for free and makes it a simple task for those looking to hire freelance writers to get in touch with you. Because your samples are already available, the only thing left is to offer you the job!
Getting Started
When you buzz over to Contently the site looks pretty basic. You can sign up quickly and it’s free. After you sign up you will need to fill out your profile and set up your portfolio. This process has been greatly streamlined and is done in a step-by-step manner that makes it easy for even a novice computer user to complete.
From your Dashboard opening page, there is a link at the top of the screen to your profile. After you click on that you will be able to begin setting up your profile and move on to your portfolio.
Please keep in mind that this is a comprehensive portfolio and will take a bit of time to complete. You want to do a good job here because you can use this portfolio when applying for writing jobs on other sites. Not only can you link to the entire portfolio but you can also link to individual articles. The portfolio can be set up a little at a time so don’t feel rushed.
Creating Your Portfolio
One interesting and very cool feature is the ability to search for and automatically add article clips from other writing sites to your portfolio. For example, if you are a longtime writer on Yahoo! you can enter your Yahoo! information and Contently will pick up all of your articles from that site. Then you can add them to your profile with the click of the ‘add’ button. You choose which articles to add.
If you are completely new and have no published articles, you can add them from your computer individually. This is especially good for both brand new writers and for those who have work that has been published in print magazines and newspapers but is not available online.
After you have listed your articles, you can choose the best of them to be ‘featured’ or given more prominence than the rest. This makes for a very nice front-page layout of your best samples. It’s also good to have several different topics, formats and such featured. This gives a client a good idea of your writing range. There is no limit to the number of clips you can have in your portfolio and this is a very good site for storing all of them for easy retrieval. You never know when that article you wrote about sitting on a sawhorse is going to come in handy!
Standard profile information is required and you have the option of choosing whether or not to make your portfolio public or private. A public portfolio is highly recommended so that those searching for a writer can find you. However if you are just looking to use the portfolio features and not seeking onsite writing, you can choose to make your portfolio private.
There is a place to upload a photo and this is always a good idea. Your photo makes your profile more professional and people generally like to see a photo of the person that they are hiring. It makes the relationship seem more real to them. A viable alternative is to use a business logo.