As a freelance writer or editor, you can broaden your business in two ways with new services: niching into other writing/editing services, or stepping out into other freelance niches like marketing, video or audio work, or administrative work.
But how do you know if it’s the right time or fit for you? Throughout my freelance career, I have pivoted into other freelance services and niched down into other freelance writing options, too. Here’s what to keep in mind.
Taking on Other Kinds of Editing/Writing Work
This is perhaps the easiest pivot, since you already have a track record of delivering in the writing and editing space. You have a better handle on pricing and can also bring over the lessons learned from your existing business (AKA how not to work with nightmare clients, which contract provisions protect you, how to set deadlines.)
For example, if you’ve been largely focused on academic editing services, you could continue to do those or dial that work down to shift over into business editing or fiction manuscript editing. Although the projects will look somewhat different, you aren’t making a huge change. It might be difficult to land those first few clients in your new service area if you’ve done a lot of work “branding” yourself as the academic writing expert.
When to consider making this kind of change:
- You’re feeling too much “sameness” in your work (if you look at one more academic journal article, you’ll lose your mind.) New service offerings, even if you’re not pivoting into them full-time, can help add variety.
- You’re getting bored with your work and feel you’ve taken your current service offering as far as you could take it (After 11 years of writing personal injury law blogs, not a single thing about it was challenging for me anymore.)
- You don’t want to learn something entirely new, but you do desire a little bit of change
Taking on Entirely New Work
It’s a much bigger change if you’re going to start offering book cover design either instead of or in addition to your current editing workload. That’s not to say it can’t be done. In fact, some writers and editors love zooming out to the big picture to make themselves more of a one-stop shop. With this, however, comes thinking about how you’re going to market yourself differently and whether you need new work samples. If you’re not as familiar with the standards, pricing, client types, and deadlines in this new service area, allocate more time to get up to speed. It can be a bit clunky especially when everything feels so smooth in your existing editing and writing business just due to your experience in that field.
For example, after years of content writing, I shifted over to offer Amazon Ads for published book authors for a time. It was a big change even though I was familiar with publishing in general. I was talking to an entirely new group of potential clients and did not have all the kinks worked out yet. More on that later as I walk you through how to approach a test run of a new service area.
Here’s when to consider making a shift like this:
- You’re increasingly bored or frustrated with your existing service offering and want to see if you can retire it or dial it down to 20% or less of your total work. Trying out this new service area helps you see whether that’s possible in terms of income and whether you like it enough to do more of it.
- You feel stagnant and want to continue growing or you want to protect yourself from risks, downturns, influence of AI, etc that you’re worried about with your current service offering.
- Your clients keep asking you if you offer service XYZ and you’re saying no, meaning you’re losing the opportunity to do more work with clients you like. An editor who also loves cover design could be a killer combination! ]
Managing a Test Run
A new service offering, even one similar to your existing work, is not always a good fit. Therefore, don’t put the cart before the horse and invest in a total rebrand. I’m really glad I didn’t do this with my Amazon Ads offering, because I ended up phasing it out after just 4 months. The great thing about trying something new is that you’re not obligated to stick with it so long as you don’t promise people it’s your new focus.
Instead, here is how to approach that:
- Set up a test run of a few months or a handful of projects. Ideally, this will come from your existing clients or people who already know, like, and trust you. Bonus: these projects can be your first work samples and/or testimonials if they go well!
- Offering special pricing for these first few projects with clear boundaries and endcaps. For example, with my Amazon Ads offering, I made it clear I was trying this out and only signed 3-month contracts with a few people I already liked who had asked me to run ads for them. This gives people an incentive to try you out while not locking you in to some big project/long timeline in case you end up hating what you’re doing. This also prevents you from long-term underpricing since you only make a promise of special pricing for this limited period.
- Set a deadline for when you’ll decide if this is working. I chose 4 months because during that time I’d be able to work on several projects.
- Do not build a website, pay for a new logo, spend all your time on LinkedIn, etc. making it seem as though this is your “new thing” until then. If you need to pick up a few of these test run clients, you can market this as a special opportunity ex: “I have openings for up to 3 clients with my new service.”
- If you hate it, conclude your contracts and exit the service. No harm done: you learned something new. And now you can try another service offering if you want!
I stopped offering 1:1 Amazon Ads because I just didn’t enjoy it; the clients wanted too much in terms in reporting, the results were randomly effective or not, and I did not like the back and forth emails on the daily. So I just wrapped it up and put that behind me.
Keep these tips in mind as you think about whether offering a new service makes sense for you.