Writing can help you to unleash your inner creative self. Either you choose a career as a creative writer, technical writer, or any kind of writing career, you will always need to come into contact with your creative side to stay ahead of the game. After all, any kind of writing requires you to plan and imagine the possible direction in which your writing will go.
With writing, you can also reach and help many people. As a writer, your task often helps people understand step-by-step to do something through procedure writing or how-to article. You can also help people to understand concepts, things, or events through an explanatory article.
With that being said, getting a career as a writer is also a viable option these days. You can easily find openings on freelance websites, such as UpWork, for a writer position. Freelance job postings also increased by 605.000 last year, and it is expected to keep rising.
Due to its popularity, however, starting your career as a freelance writer can often be challenging. The number of creative workers is one-third of the number of freelancers, and freelance writers are the second largest number of creative workers. This means that there are lots of competitions that you will face to get into the market.
But, that does not mean you can’t start a career as a writer. Today, you can find many guides or training to help you start or grow your career as a freelance writer. You can easily find many guides that help you choose which freelance websites to choose and many people agree that one of the best ways to start your freelance career is by looking for jobs on freelance websites.
However, you can always step up your game with a writer website. Freelancing means that you need to market yourself, brand yourself. One of the best ways to do this is by creating your own writer website. You can easily share your portfolio, testimonials from clients, achievements, or even make some additional money from your writer website.
Fortunately, creating a website has never been so easy as today. You can find website builders that can help you to create freelance writer websites. You can even find that offer to help you to build it for free. But, when it comes to levelling up your career, a free website is limited in terms of options and benefits that you can get from it. Using a paid website builder might sound like a waste of money when you can find one that can help you for free, but you need to consider the features and help that you can get for your website. Investing in a paid website builder is always a good idea. Strikingly is the best choice when it comes to building a website easily and at an affordable price. With Strikingly, you can easily optimize your website and help your writer website look stunning and easier to find.
Are you ready to write your way into the writing industry? Follow these simple steps to have your writer website.
- Decide Your Niche
Writing is such a huge industry. You can find many types of writing and sometimes types within a type. To name common ones, there are content writing, copywriting, technical writing. There are also academic or legal writing that often needs certification or specialization.
To set your foot in such a huge industry, you need to decide your niche. A niche is a particular thing in a market that you decide to focus on. For example, you can focus on legal writing. To help you decide on a niche, you can always look for a list of popular and profitable writing niches.
You need to understand that the bigger the niche, the bigger the competition. It means that you will find a larger barrier to break, and once you break it, you still need to compete with lots of writers. However, this also means that you can expect to make a living from writing alone once you succeed in establishing yourself in a big niche market.
To get more ideas about a niche, you can also learn from other freelance writers. Find their freelance writer websites and study what kind of niche they are working on. Look at their writers portfolios examples to get more ideas about what is working in the niche market. Make sure to be specific when you are looking for an example to help you learn better. For example, if you want to be a copywriter, then you need to look for copywriter websites.
- Establish a Brand
Once you have found your niche, you will find that many writers are doing the same as you. How do you make yourself stand out? The answer is a brand.
What is a brand?
In this case, a brand is your identity as a writer. What kind of writer are you? Maybe you are an academic writer who has a mission to make science accessible to all, or maybe a content writer with a sense of dark humor, and so on.
How do you make a brand?
Your brand as a writer often comes from your professional experience. You might be a doctor, lawyer, or marketing staff who has lots of experience and knowledge to share. But what if you are not? You can create a brand from your interest. You might be interested in computer, science, or botany even though you are not a professional who works in either field. Learn more about yourself and find stories that you can tell people about yourself.
- Plan Your Website
Before making your writer website, you need to plan it. You already have a niche and a brand, but those two are not the only things you will put on your website. You also need visuals to make your writer website more stunning.
Visual elements of your website include several things. You often need pictures of yourself. You can also opt to use stock photos on your website. Just make sure to check whether those pictures are allowed to be used on your website or not. Another crucial visual element is the layout of your writer website. You need to structure your website well so that visitors can navigate it easily. Colour is also a crucial element of your website. A good colour scheme can help you to create a brand.
To help you prepare all of this, you can always find another writer's website. Learn how they structure their website and what kind of visual elements they use.
- Choose a Template
With Strikingly, you can easily create your writer website by using stunning, ready-to-use templates. You can find many templates and browse them based on categories. You can also find writers websites examples created by other Strikingly users.
Image taken from Strikingly website
All Strikingly templates are easily modified and optimized according to your need. Visit our help center to find guides on how to build and edit your writer website.
Once you have found the template that you want, it is time to build your writer website.
- Add About Section
Image taken from Strikingly users’ website
To have a good writer’s website, you need to be effective. It means that you need to market yourself immediately once a visitor comes to your website. To do this, you need to put an about section at the top of your page.
But what is an about section?
As the name implies, it is the section where you tell your stories or identity as a writer. You can combine images and texts to create a strong and effective section. You can create it easily by using the text or any sections provided by Strikingly.
There are many ways you can build an about section. One can provide their resume on about section and list their achievement. There is also a tone to consider when you write the about section. Make sure to align everything according to the brand or image that you want to create. If possible, find other freelance writer website examples and look at the way they write about themselves.
Once you have introduced yourself, it is time to introduce your work. With Strikingly, you can easily showcase your works on your website. Strikingly has a dedicated portfolio section that you can add to your writer’s website.
Managing a portfolio page can often be hard, especially if you are new to the market. To make it easier, you can always look for other writer portfolio website examples and study how they build and manage their portfolio page.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
Let us take a look at one of the creative writing portfolio examples you can find in Strikingly. Gini is a historical fiction writer. She has written a couple of great novels, which she features on her writer’s website. She provides visuals from her novels, a blurb, and review links outside of her website. She also features several testimonials on her website to further establish her credibility as a trusted creative writer. Gini’s website provides good portfolio page examples that you can apply to your website, especially if your niche is creative writing.
- Add Contact Section
Your website’s visitors know who you are, they love your work, now they want to reach you for a job. You need to make sure that visitors can reach you easily from your website. You can add your email, phone number, and link your social media to your website.
Image taken from Strikingly user’s website
With Strikingly, you can also further engage contacts that you already have. You have visitors to subscribe to your newsletter, which you can use to inform them about your current work, updates about your website, or maybe your new rates. Strikingly allows you to send from a hundred up to 2.000 newsletters each month.
Image taken from Strikingly product
Now you know how you can create your writer website easily. There are several things you need to prepare before you create your website. You need to decide on the niche that you want to focus on. Then, you need to create a brand to help you stand out from the crowd. After that, you need to plan your website’s visual layout, color scheme, and pictures that you will put on your website. Once you have everything you need, you can choose a Strikingly template and start building your website. Introduce yourself and your work from the very beginning. Once you have a visitor that likes your profile and your work, you need to make sure that they can reach you easily with a nicely designed contact section.
Having a website can help you to level up your writing career. With a website, you can easily inform your customers about your services and your works. You need to update your website regularly to maintain your credibility.
Are you ready to level up your writing career? Start your branding today with Strikingly!
