Is Cold Emailing to Get Freelance Clients Making You Feel Like The Biggest Loser?
Here’s my suggestion for a better way to find clients
The toughest part of being a freelance writer is often finding clients or markets. For many freelancers, especially writers, looking for clients is a continual cycle.
If you want to get paid for your writing, cold emailing is one way to go about it. But cold emailing sucks and the payoff — a paying client — is so random.
You spend hours gathering contact info and send out email after email with your best pitch. In some cases you send out 10, 20, even 40 a week. In return you get….nothing but crickets.
With cold emailing, there’s no way to control whether a potential client responds or even opens your email. Many times, you don’t even know if they are looking for writers right now. Or if they even pay writers.
Completely cold emailing is kind of like trying to hit a moving pinata while blindfolded.
You know there’s candy in a pinata somewhere. So you swing in the darkness and hope you are swinging in the right direction.
But even if you swing in the right direction, you still have to hit hard enough AND in the right area to break open the pinata.
When you’re blindfolded, sometimes you swing hard but in the wrong direction. The same is true for cold emailing. You may swing hard (great pitch) but in the wrong direction (wrong market or client).
But take hope my fellow writers. There is a better way than cold emailing.
When everything lines up and you get it all right, a pinata scatters your sweet reward on the ground at your feet. The goodness is yours for the taking (unless one of your friends is faster and greedier of course).
Here’s How to Defrost Those Leads
Kiss cold emailing goodbye.
I’m about to show you how to rig the odds in your favor. Yep.
If you change just a few things about your process, you can significantly boost the odds of getting a positive response to the emails you send out.
The first thing is to only submit your writing to places or markets that you KNOW want writers in your specialty topics. If you’re freelancing in an area other than writing, you can do the same thing. Now you’re facing that pinata and the blindfold is off. It’s right there in front of you.
When you submit only to markets you KNOW ARE PAYING writers, your odds get even better. No more moving pinata.
It’s time to change the odds.
These 5 Markets Want to Pay You to Write
- Atlanta Parent Magazine
Want to write about topics of interest to parents? There are tons of parenting markets out there who are not only looking for writers, they are willing to pay too!
2. Reader’s Digest
Got a joke, cartoon, or something else you think would be perfect in Reader’s Digest? The guidelines below will tell you exactly how to submit your work and get paid to boot!
3. My Itchy Travel Feet
Is writing about travel adventures your jam? My Itchy Travel Feet is looking for writers to write about adventures for boomers, couples, and a host of other subgroups of travelers. Check out the guidelines below for a list of themes and destinations their readers are interested in.
4. Gray’s Sporting Journal
Are you an outdoors writer? Want to write about hunting or fishing? Got a tall tale or campfire story you want to share? A poem? The guidelines below will clue you in on exactly who to send your story to as well as the types of stories they want.
5. Ceoworld Magazine
If writing about business, luxury vacations, leadership, or higher education is more your style, CEOWorld Magazine might be a good fit. The guidelines below will tell you more about their audience and what kinds of topics they are interest in.
In case none of these 5 markets get you facing that pinata, I’ve include a bonus aggregate site below you can explore for more suggestions.
Bonus Resource
Who Pays Writers is a crowd-sourced database of companies, magazines, and websites that are paying writers. In most cases, you can find out pay rates, and other details, directly from writers who have worked with these markets in the past.
What you do now is up to you. If you’ve been sending cold emails daily, I suggest you replace them with some of these more targeted markets.
Face the pinata.
Then swing (pitch) hard and wait for the goodies to fall.
Good luck.
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Meg Stewart has been freelancing for nearly two decades. She’s a multi-passionate skill hoarder and the intersection of freelance writing, technology, and teaching is her sweet spot. Freelance Filter was founded to help writers get paid and help solopreneurs do business better. Meg and her family, (along with two dogs, two cats, and two leopard geckos), live in Northeast Ohio.