How Should You Build Your Writing Portfolio? We Explain Here
It’s advantageous to have a portfolio of your work as a freelance writer so that potential clients can look at it and learn about your speciality. You should think about the writing you want to produce before beginning to work on your portfolio.
If you don’t have a track record of producing content for publishing companies in the past, large corporate organisations rarely give you the chance to find a job as a writer. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if there was a well-known website that allowed authors to post original stuff and share it with thousands of readers worldwide?
Imagine how much better it would be if you could include links to your website, LinkedIn profile page, personal marketing resources, and previous work on a website that published content online and had thousands of readers each month.
When someone looks at your portfolio, they should be able to tell whether you’re a copywriter, a ghost-writer, a writer of literature, or a journalist. Your specialty is one of the first things you should think about when developing your portfolio, and knowing what it is can help you choose your content and the layout.
Following these steps will enable you to build a writing portfolio that will make you stand out to readers and possible employers.
Decide on a Portfolio Host
The majority of creatives today must have an online portfolio in the virtual realm. These free websites to display your portfolio of freelance writing might be of interest to you.
Choose Your Niche
If you’re having trouble deciding what kind of writing to concentrate on, it might be a good idea to go back on your earlier work and see which pieces generated the greatest impact, reaction, and audience. Clarify what kinds of content you can produce if you wish to concentrate on ghost-writing. This can be anything from holistic health care to real estate, gardening, or another field in which you’ve written before.
Do you enjoy producing sales pages and other types of marketing text, such as landing sites, newsletters, and email campaigns? If you’re a literary writer, what kind of literature do you produce? You can concentrate on any genre, whether it be fantasy, horror, or romance. If you’re a journalist, what sort of news do you cover? Do you cover financial or political news, rumours involving famous people, or current events? There are countless options.
Write An Author Biography
Your bio’s information should adhere to the website’s formatting and style. The components you ought to think about include are:
- where you were born and raised.
- where you now call home.
- your writing experience in academic settings, if any.
- notable publications of yours.
- whatever honours and prizes you’ve received.
- the topics or themes you address.
In addition to highlighting more of your writing, social media connections are OK to incorporate. When building your website for the portfolio, you can decide whether to put the bio on a “about” page or make it the main page.
Choosing Your Best Work
You can analyse your completed work and select the best material that suits that specialisation once you’ve chosen the niche on which you want to concentrate your efforts. You can mention the job that previous clients have given you positive feedback for.
Your prospective clients want proof that you can create well-written material regarding the subject matter you claim to be your area of expertise. Verifying the conditions of the work you’ve written may be useful to ascertain whether you can upload the complete piece as a part of your portfolio or whether you must give links.
Divide Your Work Up Into Sections
By utilising precise descriptors, you can categorise the work you want to put in your portfolio by specialty or article type. When you group your projects according to their type or specialisation, categorising your work makes it simpler for prospective clients to locate samples of the job they’re looking to engage you for. White papers, blog entries, and landing page text are a few examples of categories.
Make Sure It’s Simple To Find Your Contact Information
Potential clients must find it simple to contact you through your web portfolio. Finding your phone number or email address shouldn’t be difficult, whether they want to thank you for an article you produced or want to talk to you about a business opportunity.
A great method to broaden your online profile is to interact with as many people as you can. You can either submit your email address or utilise a contact form on your website. Whether they are using a phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop computer, the information must be accessible and visible.
Reviewing the work that other writers have produced for themselves before you start constructing your portfolio may be helpful. Regardless of how long you’ve been writing, you might also want to look at the blogs that every freelance writer should read to find some inspiration.