Work From Home – Writing Your First Freelance Article

Hemingway posing for a dust jacket photo by Lloyd Arnold for the first edition of "For Whom the Bell Tolls", at the Sun Valley Lodge, Idaho, late 1939.

The most intimidating thing for me getting started with working from home by freelance writing was writing my first article! If you’re like me, you’ve always thought of magazine, newspaper, and web authors as these mystical beings who taught High School English before they graduated and went on to write professionally for a living. These people do exist, but with the amount of freelance work available in today’s economy are the exception rather than the rule for freelance authors. As you get more involved with freelance writing, you’ll run into authors from all ages, countries, etc and should not get intimidated!

Work from Home – Planning Your First Freelance Article

Unless you are already a prolific author, I recommend creating an outline of the article first. For the majority of on-line writing that you will do, the target length of the work is going to be between 350 and 500 words with an average of 400 (think a page and a bit single spaced). When you make the article outline, you need to already have an overall topic, or topic sentence that the article is going to cover. You will then have one or many points which help you tell the reader what the article is going to cover. Sub-bullets of these points will help fill in the “Who, what, when, where, and why” of your topic. Now, this doesn’t mean that you will have five paragraphs in the article, but rather, heps you think about what reader’s are going to care about when reading your work! Two good rules of thumb to remember when writing for the web are:

1 – Length is Death on the Web. Exceed 450 words on an article at your own risk!

2 – Get to the Point! Internet Readers have short attention spans!

Work From Home – Outlining Your First Freelance Article

So, an example topic for an article that I might write is: “20XX NCAA Football Season Preview.” I put a double X in the topic since the year really isn’t important for demonstrating an article outline. Within the outline, we are going to have an Introduction where you will talk about the overall topic for 75-100 words before we get into sub-paragraphs to support the topic. Whenever I write a preview article for a sports season, tournament, or awards function (such as the Oscars, Screen Actor Guild Awards, etc), I always like to include a sub-header for both the outline and the article to highlight who may win, or who is favored to win. An example outline for this topic would look something like:

Article Outline – “20XX NCAA Football Season Preview”

Sub Title  – “Florida, Oklahoma, USC Front-Runners for BCS Championship”

I. Introduction

II. Florida Gators

III. Oklahoma Sooners

IV. USC Trojans

V. Conclusion

You may want to jot notes in each sub-paragraph on the highlights or topics that you want to cover within the paragraph. Based on this outline, I would expect my article to be between 4-500 words. This style may not be the perfect way for you to plan out your first article, but can help serve as a guide for you to decide the best way which works for you to outline your writing topics.

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