Elizabeth Hanes 0:08
Welcome to The RN2writer Show where we help nurses and other clinicians become freelance writers. I'm your host, Elizabeth Hanes, I'm a nurse and former six figure freelance writer. And today I coach people like you on techniques and strategies that can help you thrive in your writing career too. Before we get started, don't forget to expand the description box on YouTube for a list of all the resources we're going to mention in this episode. Today, we're talking about subscription job lists. If you've been freelancing for even a nanosecond, you likely have already encountered these. They're email newsletters that contain lists of gigs for freelance writers. What could be easier, right? These list publishers make them sound very alluring. they market them with copy that says something like your exclusive access to writing jobs, or 50 new writing jobs delivered to your inbox every day, or daily roundup of the best paying writing gigs. Who wouldn't want that? Right? I mean, how simple is that just enter your email, maybe pay a small fee, and boom, there's just jobs coming to your inbox every single day. When you're starting out in your career, you might see these ads and think, Oh, brilliant, for just a few bucks a month, I can get leads sent straight to my inbox. That's so much easier than doing my own legwork to prospect for clients and send ello eyes or create query letters. I'm so excited to have discovered this. And believe me, I don't blame you if that's your reaction to these types of subscriptions. It was my reaction to when I was starting out. And that gives you an indication of how long these types of services have been operating because I've been doing this for decades. But there's a reason we don't teach nurses in our get paid well to write program how to find and subscribe to these newsletters. It's because they're not only poor value in terms of the money you spend on them, but they divert your attention away from the real money making opportunities that come from doing your own prospecting for clients. Let's start with why these newsletters are a waste of time. First, these newsletters generally are not focused on healthcare writing, you might be receiving 10 or 20 or 50 leads per day to your inbox. But only a fraction of those, if any, might be health writing opportunities. Second, you'll be competing with dozens scores, or possibly hundreds of other writers, other subscribers to the newsletter, who are competing for those same gigs. This competitive aspect of these newsletters has the same effect on writing rates as the Freelancer platforms like Upwork. They put downward pressure on wages, basically, the cheapest writer is often going to win the gig. Third, despite the sales hype on the publishers website, these generally are not good paying gigs. In fact, I have seen many of these lists recently, because people are students and my colleagues forward them to me, asking for my take on them. And I have only ever seen one gig, one gig that paid relatively decently in all my years of looking at these. And that was for a major online magazine that accepts queries all the time. You don't need a paid subscription to learn about that or to send a query. Heck, you've probably read that website yourself, at least occasionally already. It just didn't occur to you that you could send a query to them. The reason you won't find many well paid gigs in these newsletters is simple. The best most lucrative gigs rarely get announced publicly. Let me explain this a little more fully. Most nurses are used to finding and applying for jobs. In our industry, we call these w two positions. Most w two positions are advertised. So you simply hunt for them online and apply for them. But That's not how the freelance writing industry generally works. The way it works in our industry goes more like this. A healthcare company or marketing agency decides it needs to bring on a contract writer to help the marketing department keep up with the organizational demand for content. The marketing director or some other person at the company begins searching for a freelance writer, they might use Google or LinkedIn or some other approach. If they happen to land on your website, they might reach out to you or they might reach out through LinkedIn. But what's not happening here is any advertisement being placed for a freelance writer. Instead, if you happen to send an LOI at this moment in time, then you have a good chance of receiving a response. And this is also why we tell writers in our programs, timing is a huge factor in whether your loi actually lands. So you should not take non responses to your loi is personally, it's much more likely whoever you sent it to simply doesn't need a writer right now, they may need one down the line. Now back to subscription newsletters. That's not to say that freelance gigs are never advertised. I mean, you can tell that's not true by visiting LinkedIn jobs or indeed.com, or journalism jobs.com. Obviously, some freelance opportunities are advertised. But in my experience, these aren't necessarily the best ones. In my experience, the best freelance opportunities almost always remain hidden in the background. And your job as a freelance writer is to ferret them out. This speaks to my original point that subscription newsletters containing writing gigs are a waste of time and a distraction. From uncovering the real well paid writing jobs. I'm referring to a concept you need to know here as a business owner, it's called opportunity cost. I'd love to explain what this means. opportunity cost is a finance term Investopedia defines opportunity cost this way. It's the potential benefits that an individual investor or business misses out on when choosing one alternative over another. In other words, whenever you choose to work with one client, there's a potential better paying client you're missing out on working with because you're working with your existing client. That's fine. There's nothing wrong with that. It's just something to be aware of. But when you choose to troll listings of low paying gigs, and you choose to spend time competing with other writers for mediocre writing jobs, then you're paying a very high opportunity cost. Because you're choosing an alternative with almost zero financial benefit over an alternative with a high potential upside. Many, many freelancers make this mistake, don't let it be you. So I've just told you a lot of what not to do to find clients. Now let me give you three excellent ways to find good clients and develop a relationship with them. Number one, network with prospective clients on LinkedIn. So many writers only connect with other writers on LinkedIn. And that's a poor strategy to me because other writers are not your target market. Focus on connecting with people who could actually hire you number to use tools like Google and the LinkedIn X ray tool to help you find prospects in your chosen niche. In other words, if your niche is surgery like mine used to be, then use Google to find ambulatory surgical centers, plastic surgeon, surgical device manufacturers, service providers and other types of companies. And then figure out whom to target by looking up the company's job titles using the LinkedIn X ray tool.
Number three, invest in an email finding app like hunter.io. These apps represent a file are better financial investment for your business than a subscription to a writing gig newsletter? Use the email finding app to help you send a personalized loi is to the prospects you identified using the first two steps. Well, I hope this discussion of writing gigs, subscriptions opportunity costs, and how to find potential clients has been useful to you. To recap, don't bother to subscribe to writing gig newsletters. The opportunity cost of doing so is too high. Instead use tried and true prospecting methods. Sure they require more effort on your part, but they yield far higher dividends in the end. Thank you for joining me on this episode of The RN2writer Show. Don't forget to click the subscribe button on YouTube so you never miss an episode. And as I said, we have links to everything mentioned in the podcast, all of our resources there in the show notes which are in the description box on YouTube, or you can find them on Spotify and Apple podcasts. I'm your host Elizabeth Hanes, and until next time, keep pitching
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