Freelance 101:
Chronicles for the Self-Employed

by Leanne Rollins, Membership Manager

Selling your skills

Getting back to the basics of just plain old writing has been cathartic for me. Throughout the past year and a half, I’ve buried myself in the foundations of technical writing. After managing a team for years, I truly forgot how much I love to write.

Strangely enough, this sole focus on writing recently made me realize just how much Technical Writers have to offer an organization. Our skills extend far beyond good grammar and sentence structure. But I’m sure you know that. However, your current or even prospective client may not know that. How then, do you truly build an awareness of your skill set? If you’re a freelancer, you have the opportunity to provide a whole lot more than your writing skills to a client: project management, information-gathering, usability analysis, task analysis, workflow assessment, process improvement, and the list goes on.

For many people, playing up their skill set and ‘bragging’ about themselves is a very difficult thing to do. We’re taught as kids to be humble (well, most of us anyway), and it’s really hard to break from that mold and take a good look at all we have to offer, then SELL IT.

What are your ‘value-added’ services?

But if you freelance, you absolutely must take stock of the ‘value-added’ skills you can offer your clients. Your clients know you can write—that’s the primary reason to hire you. But like any business, money is made in the ‘extras’. Look at a video store, for example. Their primary business is renting and selling movies, but they also offer an unholy horde of junk food—and the markup on those goods is where they easily make extra money. The same is true of many software companies. They not only sell the software itself, the companies also sell service contracts and peripheral products that pad their margins very nicely.

There’s absolutely no reason freelance writers can’t do the same. You want to make more money, don’t you? I thought so. Me too. When a client approaches me to do some work, I try to think beyond the basic writing that they are asking for. When I prepare a proposal, I pull out my menu of additional services, and create a separate section of the proposal that lists other services that I could provide to the client.

You may not see the benefit immediately

Not all clients take me up on the ‘other services’, at least not right away. Sometimes it’s due to budget, and sometimes it’s because the client just isn’t sold on the value of those services. But a few times, I’ve had a client come back to me and say, “Didn’t I read somewhere that you also have experience in training, editing, workflow assessment?” In fact, that happened just this week. Last year I prepared an Administration Guide for a client, and that client just came back to me looking for some software usability assessment. In reality, he read about my experience performing usability assessment in my original proposal.

Some clients may not know precisely what they need. In fact, the majority of my clients have an idea of what they are looking for, but the door is wide open for me to make suggestions based on my experience. I take stock of the client’s situation, the current problems (related to the documentation usually), and pull together a proposal that can solve those problems. The core problems are rarely solved simply through good writing.

Take another current client, for example. This client was receiving feedback on their documentation that wasn’t exactly complimentary. Despite this, I was initially hired only to prepare an update to the existing documentation for an upcoming interim release. After getting my hands dirty, I quickly realized that the problem could not be solved through writing alone. I put together a proposal that required my project management and process management skills—and it was immediately accepted.

For another client, I prepared a User Guide last summer, but included a section in the proposal detailing my editing skills. At the time, the client accepted only the writing proposal. But in January, I got a call asking about my availability to do some intermittent editing for them. I accepted!

What services can you sell?

The first step is to make a list of your services. The hard part is to assign a rate to each service. Your rate will depend entirely upon your level of experience, so take some time to really think about billing for these services.

Here’s a brief list to get you started:

• Editing (grammatical)
• Proofing (style, substantial, technical)
• Process management (how to improve the flow of information throughout the company to ultimately appear in the product or service documentation)
• Training (materials to accompany instructor-led training or online training)
• Usability analysis (Can users accomplish their goals just by using the product documentation? If not, why not?)
• Task analysis (What tasks does a user need to perform to accomplish their goals? In what order? What is their expected outcome?)
• Project management (For a large documentation suite, establish the list of tasks that are required to complete the project, then manage the day-to-day activity of writers involved in the project. This usually works well for clients who subcontract many portions of a project to off-site contract writers)

I’m certain that you possess many more unique skills that you could offer to a client. It’s up to you figure out the best way to sell your writing and your ‘value-added’ skills to your clients. It may be verbally or within your proposals. Make sure the client realizes that your services extend beyond writing, and just watch your bottom line soar!

About Leanne Rollins

Leanne recently became a self-employed contractor, escaping management roles for the first time in years. This newfound freedom has allowed Leanne to take on extra-curricular activities such as a more active role in the STC. When not writing or playing with her kids, Leanne enjoys running and soccer.