5 Types Of Articles Every Freelance Writer Needs In Their Portfolio

As a creative professional your portfolio is even more important than your resume. Your resume is just your biographical facts. Your portfolio shows potential clients that you can write the content they need. But, to convince clients that you know what you’re doing your portfolio needs to be more than just some random examples of writing.

Not A Typical Portfolio

When people think about putting together a portfolio they usually think about creating a type of scrapbook of things they’ve written before, similar to something a parent would create of a child’s school projects. That’s not a professional creative portfolio.

A portfolio like that may work for a visual creative professional like a graphic designer but it’s not going to work for a writer. Potential clients do not care about a poem you wrote in college or something you wrote for a class five years ago or a letter to the editor you’re particularly proud of.

The “Work For Hire” Problem

Professional writers who write content for a living need to have a focused portfolio to prove their skills as writers and to solve one of the biggest problems of freelancing: work for hire means no provable ownership of content.

When you write content for a client the rights to that work transfer to the client upon payment. They can publish that content under any name they choose. So, when potential clients want to see your work, you can’t use work that you’ve written for hire. You don’t own the rights and it won’t be under your name.

It’s not realistic to write custom samples for every potential client, and no one should work for free. Your portfolio is how you prove that you have the skills to write a variety of different types of content. That’s why your portfolio needs to be focused and organized. Your portfolio should showcase different types of content that are relevant to clients.

You may love writing fiction, or poetry, or graphic novels, but unless that’s what you’re selling to clients they shouldn’t be in your professional portfolio. A good portfolio should contain these five types of content:

A Persuasive Piece

The most common type of content that you’ll be hired to write are persuasive articles. Businesses need persuasive articles that offer value to readers but also encourage them to book a service, buy a product, or support that business in some kind of way.

You can write interesting, compelling, and persuasive content for any business without actually having used the product or service that you’re writing about. For the purpose of your portfolio pick out any product or service that interests you and image you’re writing a piece of content for that business.

When you’re writing a persuasive portfolio sample keep in mind these best practices for writing persuasive web content:

· Think About Your Audience

When you are writing your persuasive portfolio piece keep in mind that your audience is people who are looking to solve a problem. The business is offering a service or product to solve that problem. Frame all of the content in terms of solving that problem.

· Always Use AIDA

The AIDA structure is a persuasive article structure that should be used no matter how long your piece is. AIDA stands for: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. That’s how your article needs to broken down. The first section should grab the reader’s attention.

The next should pique their interest with facts about the product or service. The third should create desire to get the product or service by describing in detail how it will solve their problem. And the last section should be a call to action that convinces them to get the product or service.

· KISS

Keep It Simple, Stupid. The four most important words for freelance content writers. Keep your sentences short. Use clear language. And make sure that the content is easy to skim so that people read all the way to the end. When you write persuasive web content you should be writing to an audience at about an 8th grade level. Keep that in mind.

· Use Emotion Words

Using emotion words will trigger a sympathetic response in the reader and make them more likely to have a favorable opinion of that product or service or be more open to trying it. With a little empathy for the problem that is being solved it’s not hard to find emotion words to sprinkle into the content that don’t sound overly dramatic or out of place.

· Be Honest And Authentic

People today are savvy consumers. They hate a hard sell, and they are turned off by grand proclamations about the effectiveness of a product or service. The call to action section of the piece should be honest, authentic, and promise nothing more than the product or service may help the reader solve that particular problem. Readers respond to honesty and authenticity not inflated promises of effectiveness.

The best persuasive content isn’t long. 500–800 words is all you need for a good persuasive writing sample in your portfolio.

A Research Piece

Writing good research pieces is necessary if you plan on working for clients in fields like law, medicine, finance, or tech where getting the details right is essential. These industries typically pay writers more, but that’s because more work is expected.

Writing a research piece for your portfolio shows that you can work on more in-depth topics and that you have the research skills to create interesting, accurate, fact-checked content.

For businesses in fields that require a lot of research having writers that they can trust to fact-check their own work and use only reliable sources is essential. So, these gigs can be high-paying and long-term, both things that freelance writers don’t get very often.

When you’re writing a research article for your portfolio it’s ok to pick out something that’s easy to research. A research portfolio piece isn’t about the difficulty of the topic, it’s about the quality of the sources.

When you’re writing the piece choose one clear topic that you’re writing about and look for the best quality sources you can find. Never use sites like Wikipedia. Use academic sources or trusted sites.

Always cite your work. There are many different types of citations you can use, but for a portfolio piece you can use a tried-and-true citation method like MLA or APA.

The biggest thing to watch out for when writing a research piece for your portfolio is to keep the language simple, the sentences short, and the format similar to other articles.

Don’t use a lot of jargon or use complex sentences. The goal is to take concepts and turn them into easy to understand, well- researched, and cited facts.

Researched content is typically longer than other types of content, so your portfolio research piece should be at least 1000 words but no more than 1200. Don’t forget to list your sources.

An Optimized Piece

Some clients will not care about search engine optimization for their content, but others will prioritize optimization over everything else. That’s why your portfolio should include a fully search engine optimized article.

To write an effective article that shows you know the basics of search engine optimization pick a topic in a niche that is typically crowded, like home repair, real estate, fashion, or parenting.

Do keyword research and screenshot your process of finding common and long-tailed keywords. Then write the article using SEO best practices like breaking up the content into lots of short sections, using appropriate headers, and including the keyword the right number of times for the length of the piece.

Highlight the keyword in the finished article so potential clients will see it. At the bottom of the piece include the screenshots and explain in words your process. This will show that you understand SEO and can write optimized content.

An optimized piece for your portfolio doesn’t have to be long to be effective. 500–800 words is a great length for an SEO portfolio piece.

A Personality Piece

The personality piece in your portfolio is where you can inject a little fun and individuality into your portfolio. It’s important to show off your personality, sense of humor, and your intelligence for potential clients because those things do matter when clients are choosing a freelancer.

They don’t matter as much as they would if the client was hiring you for a permanent role, but one-off projects can become long term contracts if the client likes your personality and the way you write.

To write a polished and appropriate personality piece for your portfolio pick a topic that represents one of your hobbies or interests. Maybe write a review of a TV show that you love, or a how-to piece describing the steps in making pottery.

Whatever the topic is that you choose keep it appropriate for business and don’t reveal too many personal details. Don’t overshare, this isn’t Facebook. Remember to stick to the basic principles of content writing: keep is simple, keep it skimmable, and make sure it doesn’t have any errors. Your personality piece should be no more than 1000 words.

A Landing Page/Service Description

The last type of content that should be in every freelance writer’s portfolio is a landing page or service description. These utilitarian pages are needed by every business, and most businesses need a series of them. There’s endless work for writers who can craft interesting, informative, and optimized landing pages and service descriptions.

And this type of content is harder to create than you might think. What kind of landing page would you write for a dentist that isn’t the same as the landing pages that a million other dentists have? Or a fence installation company? If you can write that content, you have a lot of work available to you.

To showcase your landing page or service description writing skills you can either write content for a fictional business or take the existing landing page or service descriptions for a business and rewrite them your way.

If you choose to rewrite existing content, make sure to show the existing content next to your rewritten content to highlight the differences between them. A landing page should be no more than around 800 words, and a service description should be between 300–500 for the purpose of a portfolio piece.

Formatting Your Portfolio

Once your portfolio is done, what should you do with it? It’s a really good idea to use a portfolio website or your own website to host your digital portfolio.

Most clients these days prefer if you give them a link to your portfolio instead of attaching documents. But if you’re going to attach a portfolio to upload with your resume make sure that your portfolio is in a .pdf format.

A Work In Progress

Your portfolio is supposed to represent you as a creative professional and showcase your ability to write the content that businesses need today. You should update your portfolio pieces on a regular basis to reflect the improvement in your writing and industry changes.

Content writing, and creative work in general, is dynamic and always changing. Make sure your portfolio isn’t hurting your ability to work by keeping it updated.