Extra Skills Worth Picking Up As A Freelance Writer
While nothing’s required, these extra bits of knowledge could be worth adding to your resume
If you’re working as a freelance writer, then you probably already know that there’s lots of opportunity in writing.
But in the hotly competitive writing market, even niching down and accruing great clips sometimes isn’t enough to guarantee a steady stream of work.
When it comes to picking up extra skills, there are two lines of thinking among freelancers.
One is that specialization is the key to success. Focus on one thing — writing — and do it superlatively well.
The other is that the more extra skills you can bring to the table, the more potential value you can provide to clients.
If you buy into the latter reasoning, then you can narrow the skills gap between freelancers and (much more expensive) marketing agencies.
While I’m wont to make such a trite recommendation, I think that the key is probably finding a happy medium somewhere between the two.
Don’t fall into the trap of being a jack of all trades (and master of none). Equally, it’s sensible to develop a couple of complementary skillsets to writing to make yourself that little bit more attractive to potential clients.
Of course, it’s logical to pick up skills that complement writing. Here are some of the common choices among freelance writers.
Wordpress (Or Another CMS)
Wordpress is the content management system (CMS) that powers almost 40% of the internet and is the predominant CMS in use among clients who operate online blogs, including those created for content marketing purposes.
Love it or hate it (personally I love it) it’s extremely widely used among clients. If you’re a full-time freelance writer, then there’s a high chance that at least one of your clients uses Wordpress to put your writing onto the internet in an organized and convenient manner.
For that reason, I think that every freelance writer should have at least a basic familiarity with how to use Wordpress. You don’t need advanced skills like hand-editing themes. But the basics are so easy to master — they can be learned in an afternoon — that it’s a pity not to have them in your back pocket.
Want an easy way to learn?
Why not build your own portfolio website on Wordpress as a hands-on project. If you’re offering Wordpress formatting to your clients, then most freelancers — including I — would argue that you should charge an add-on for the service.
HTML, CSS, PHP
While freelance writers don’t need to be web developers equally, in this day and age, a little coding knowledge goes a very long way in terms of making yourself useful — particularly if you’re working in a high-tech environment.
HTML is the markup used to render the most basic static web-pages. CSS is the language that adds styling to it. PHP is a scripting language used in web development. It’s used throughout Wordpress themes to pull in dynamic content saved in a database.
You don’t (strictly speaking) need to know any of these things. But a smidgen of know-how can go a very long way when your client needs help tweaking that theme.
Inbound and content marketing (including content strategy)
The majority of writing work that can be accessed on the internet these days is in content marketing.
In order to write content marketing on behalf of your clients, it really helps if you have a broader understanding of the tactics that your writing is contributing to.
Content marketing is a form of inbound marketing — the idea is that, through writing engaging topics and making them discover-able, companies can attract audiences to them rather than go out finding them through disrupting them (outbound marketing — think cold calling).
If you want to learn the rudiments of content marketing and content strategy then there are plenty of great books, podcasts, videos, and courses (check out Hubspot Academy’s) that can walk you through the basics and more.
Even if you’re a freelance journalist thinking about opening a side hustle as a freelance content marketer, it would be a great idea to go through one of the certification programmes.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Closely allied with the above is search engine optimization (SEO).
Most of us aren’t hired to create content because our clients feel like seeing words written on their websites.
Rather, our content exists to help draw leads down marketing and sales funnels and convert them into customers. A key part of this process is getting leads onto our websites — and blogs — in the first place. Organic discoverability, via search engines, is a key part of that process.
As a freelance writer, it’s helpful to understand:
- Core SEO concepts. These come in handy when drafting SEO-optimized copy.
- Keyword research
If you know or learn enough about SEO that you can offer things like SEO planning and keyword research as an add-on service, then you should certainly be charging more for these extra value-adds.
Videography, Photography, Audio Production
These, of course, are all very separate skills — both from one another and from content writing.
Nevertheless, content marketing is becoming increasingly diversified in terms of the formats that it leverages to reach its target audiences.
If you’re writing intro scripts for a podcast, for instance, then it’s very helpful to know the basic elements that go into getting a podcast on the internet.
Likewise for videography and photography. If you get good enough, you can even develop your own stock library and start using your own images in your writing!
To make a full-time living as a writer, excellent writing and editing skills are a prerequisite. But these days, it’s helpful to go beyond that in demonstrating your potential value to leads. These are some of the skills that those thinking about upselling clients to scale their income could consider tapping.
