As a writer, you may be itching to break into the freelance world, but be lacking important and necessary items - like a website, a sales page, or basic technical knowledge. If this is your situation - don’t despair! Consider using the power of barter to help you meet your basic internet marketing needs.

Spend time on any IM forum, and you’ll see posts on a daily basis - technically savvy individuals looking for one thing - content! Amazingly, you have the skills needed to provide them with what they need. Consider offering to trade your skills for theirs, and see what happens!

I speak from experience (and a complete lack of technical no-how!) My entire website
was built for me for free, in exchange for some proofreading, copywriting, and ESL help. I was able to exchange some content for updates to it, and got the header on my blog installed for some writing, as well.

I’m also getting ready to launch a huge new membership site - Bum Marketing in a Box. I’ll be providing weekly content, in a membership format. The membership was designed on….guess what…a barter basis! I’d never be where I am today if it wasn’t for the wonderful barter economy that the IM world has to offer. Put it to good use for you, today!

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A copywriter has several avenues open to him or her for the purpose of finding copywriting assignments, but the most popular ones are job boards and job bidding sites. This does not exempt the copywriter from seeking jobs on a local level, but with so options available on the Internet, it’s easier to do your marketing that way instead of going into the local areas and placing expensive advertisements that won’t draw in nearly as many potential clients.

Most of the job boards on the Internet are free to register, but many of them require a paid membership in order to bid on the jobs or see the entire posting. For the copywriter who is just starting out and has little or no cash for advertising, this can be difficult to handle. That leaves the option of having to divert funds from another source in order to join job boards that require payment.

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There is a large variance even within the industry standard for copywriting. When setting rates, you have to look at several different factors including amount of work to complete the project, size of the project, your experience, and the budget of the client.

It’s possible to make up to $100 an hour copywriting, but that doesn’t mean that all of your projects can justify that kind of income. You will need to look at each project as a separate entity, and not as an entirety. You are not going to charge the same price for a 500-word web content article as you do for a complete advertising package.

Another you have to consider when setting rates is whether you are going to be doing the work yourself or outsourcing it. If you are doing to hire other writers to assist with the job, that will have a bearing on your rate, especially if you are going to pay your writers a fair rate.

If this is a client who is going to provide a large amount of work, you might be expected to develop a bulk rate based upon that. This sometimes becomes more difficult because you want to accommodate your client’s needs and continue to pay your writers a fair rate for their work as well.

When you quote a price for a client you have to take into consideration how much work is involved to complete the project. A complete advertising package is going to take more time, and you want to price it accordingly.

You may be willing to negotiate within reason, but sometimes you will find a client who is trying to get by as cheaply as possible, so you want to make sure that you don’t undercut your costs in order to provide for an unreasonable client.

Allow yourself to have the last word, even if it means that you may have to decline some projects because the client’s budget and yours just don’t seem to see eye to eye. Remember, if you take on a client who wants cheap rates, and you take on another project that pays more, you are going to put the lower paying project on the back burner to finish the one that pays more.

In order to avoid that, stay away from projects that fall too far beneath your minimum rates. If you stand your ground, the clients will soon learn how much you will go and will adjust their budgets accordingly.

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