How to Become a Professional Writer? (Expert Tips)
Are you looking to venture into writing as a profession? In recent times, electronic media has opened the world of writing for many! The publishing industry is vast, and you can build a meaningful career. This article will show you how to become a professional writer – tips for beginners.
There are different types of writing, like
- Business Writing
- Professional Writing
- Creative Writing
- Writing a Book or Novel
- Writing Blog Posts
And in this article, we will briefly see how to become a professional writer?
How to Become a Professional Writer? (Our Top Tips)
If you want to become a professional writer, we have got nine tips.
Total Time: 7 days
Set Scary Objectives
The most significant blunder you can make in pursuing a career in writing (or any other profession) is to set safe objectives.
Objectives you’re OK with that you know are entirely attainable. But why do we consider this an enormous mistake? Because pursuing a professional writing career is not a smooth journey!
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If you desire to be a professional author/writer, you’ll have to set daunting goals, goals that will challenge you to use your energy, time, and skills effectively. Then, after that, you’ll have to go for those goals with all that you have.
This is how you can stand out amongst other aspiring writers:
Take out a new notebook. Record the initial 1 – 3 steps you have to take to march towards a career in writing. Then, choose how soon you would like to accomplish these steps. Finally, make a point to challenge yourself.
Come up with a Plan of Action
The primary purpose of having scary goals/objectives is to push yourself, test your limit, and work extremely hard. This is the best way of improving your writing skills and composing abilities to make strides.
Even though you seek to pursue several set goals, you should also remember to develop a rational, actionable plan to achieve them.
Make Writing a Priority
If you want to join the professional writers class, you will have to make writing a priority. Your heart should be in it 100%. Unfortunately, most people come up with excuses like “writing should only be about art” or “I don’t think I could write each day.”
Here’s the thing: if your dream is to become a professional writer, you have to make the hard choice of putting aside some of life’s pleasures and putting writing first.
You can indulge in other hobbies once in a while (since you can’t write 24/7). However, most days of the week should be dedicated to writing. How can you go about this?
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Evaluate your daily routine schedule. At what point is time being wasted? Can you organize your life in a way that more time is spared for writing?
Begin Research
Most of the questions asked by people with finished articles are “How do I get published?”, “How do I find an agent?”. If you are one of them, then it’s high time that you begin researching.
You can employ various methods to find agents and publishing firms that are great for your content.
However, the following is our most favored method:
Start by compiling a list of articles related to yours, keeping in mind your content’s age, market, and genre. Once you have a list of about 20 articles, conduct further research. Research these articles on the web (a basic Google hunt will do), and search particularly for information on which publishing firms published each article and which agents represented their writers.
After compiling your list, start to look up every agent and publishing firm and remove any poor matches off your list until you find the ideal subjects to question.
Start Building Your Author Platform
If you want to become a professional writer, you have to start building your author platform immediately.
An author platform is simply your association with an engaged audience. This is, however, not represented in the number of social media followers you have or the number of page views on your site. Instead, it’s about the quality of that audience and page views.
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It’s about discovering readers who admire you and your work and building a relationship with them afterward.
Building your platform will be a continuous process. It may seem overwhelming, but we guarantee that it’s a worthwhile task. When you publish articles, use Grammarly.
Reset Your Mindset
In this writing field, there are several categories of writers: those writers who think they’ll be good enough to get their work published, those who can’t comprehend why they’re not yet published, and those who are confident that their work will eventually be published.
If you are in the 3rd category of confident writers, keep up the spirit.
However, if you are battling with self-doubt or you think that you’ve learned all there is about writing, there’s one thing you should be familiar with: both of these attitudes aren’t beneficial.
They will end you before you even start. Why? Because there’s always room for further improvement.
Be Serious
Each occupation has its ups and downs. However, once in a while, you’ll see your beloved authors retweeting love messages from their fans and think their life is rosy.
That’s always not the situation, and you have to know this before you choose to embark on the journey towards becoming a professional writer.
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Get Your Work out There
The best thing you can do that will benefit your writing career is getting your work out there. If you check the internet, so many peoples and organizations are seeking writers.
For example, if you concentrate on WordPress tutorial writing, go to Google and search for WordPress + write for us.
It will bring all the websites that accept new authors. You can contact them, publish your work. This way, you can build your portfolio, get training. It is a good move for most beginners.
All you need to do is, use the right target keyword while searching for blogs that accept new authors. For example, above, we searched for WordPress topics. If you are into CSS topics, search like CSS + write for us.
Like this, modify your target audience, and you are good to go. For your information, we do accept guest authors here on BlogHeist. For that, you need to check out our guest blogging guidelines.
If you are looking for good websites to publish your content, check this out:
Maintain a Proper Work-Life Balance
Working as a full-time writer is challenging. You need to give proper attention to your work and life at the same time. You can use any time-tracking apps or tools to increase your work productivity. Limiting time-wasting apps is an excellent way to concentrate on your work, be more productive.
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Supply:
- Nil
Tools:
- Nil
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Conclusion
The exceptions in this field are the writers whose debut articles receive massive attention. However, in almost every other case, writers must publish several articles their readers love before their work is recognized.
This is why completing your most recent work is the best thing to do for your writing career. The sooner it’s published, the sooner you can build a bigger audience and the sooner you’ll draw nearer to the professional writing career you desire.
Making it in this business of professional writing isn’t an impossible task. All you need to do is to put in that extra effort, and you’ll be able to realize your dream.
Note: This is a guest post by Christina Battons. You can also contribute good blog posts to BlogHeist after checking these guidelines.
Have you found this article helpful? Please consider sharing this with your friends and fellow bloggers on social media if you do. Also, check out our marketing archives for more marketing tutorials.
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Kelly Cooper says
Thank you so much for the tips Christina. These tips are motivating me to become a professional writer. I hope many writers would find this useful. Keep it up.
Nirmal Kumar says
Your welcome, Kelly 🙂
Kiya kittu says
There are so many freelance opportunities available for writers nowadays. So, it is a good platform if you are looking for a self-employed profession online.
Nirmal Kumar says
That’s true. With more and more freelance platforms available nowadays, we have the opportunity to choose freelance writing as a profession.
Rishita Das says
Starting a professional writing career is easy. But, if you want to suceed it is so hard. One should not take it granted with the success that they might find in the initial stage. The initial stage will be enthusiatic, but as days go by you might even start to feel the frustration. You will start to overlook your writing, and your skills may be drop.
The challenge remains throughout career. Only if you have a real desire you will succeed out of this professional writing.
Nirmal Kumar says
That’s true Rishita. Everyone will feel frustrated at their career at some point in time. You might even think of quitting. But, you need to know that there are many people who never know how close they were to success. They lost their opportunities because of their ignorance.
So, I would suggest you take a small break and continue with your best focus.
Matthew Nelson says
Everything you have shared so far is very useful and informative Christina. Thanks.
Nirmal Kumar says
Your welcome, Matthew 🙂
Siya says
What are the best places one get Freelance opportunities as a Writer? Do we have to pay anything to registration? Please share more info.
Nirmal Kumar says
Hey Siya,
You can refer to this article:
https://www.thewriterfinder.com/post/freelance-websites
Abdul Rahman says
Initially, it has been a tough journey for me in writing so far. Somehow I have sailed through that. Now, I have enough got enough experience and came through all these struggles and I am proud of myself.
Nirmal Kumar says
Sorry to hear that Abdul. But tough lessons at the beginning will teach you more. Keep learning! 🙂
Mary Echols says
I have a fear of publishing this content. I think what others would feel. Do professional writers feel it? How do they overcome such fears? I wanna hear from professionals their experience in writing.
Nirmal Kumar says
Hey Mary,
Professional writers do have that fear while publishing content. But they believe in their writing and continuously keep improving it. That’s how they overcome this fear.