That’s a load of garbage.

If you’re really cut out to be a freelance Web writer (where portfolios come more into play than full-time employment), you’re going to spend time building credentials and properly targeting your market long before you actually start offering services. When you finally get to that point, there’s no good reason for you to not already have at least a handful of portfolio pieces showcasing your Web writing abilities within your niche or specialty form of writing.

Is Non-Paying Work Ever OK?

Am I saying you should never do non-paying work, when building your portfolio (or after)? No. What I am saying is that you should never take on a non-paying freelance Web writing gig solely for portfolio pieces. It should be paying you in other ways – and I mean more than saying “well this person might give me a referral.”

Why doesn’t it matter that the person receiving the free content might refer you to others? Because people do ask what their friends or colleagues paid, and if you’re going to charge $25 per article, but they know you did a piece for their friend for free, you’ve now set yourself up to be low-balled in your referral base – not smart.

When is a non-paying gig worthwhile? When you’re getting more out of it than you’re losing by not charging. That might be a marketing benefit, exposure, or some kind of contribution to your image. We’ll look more at that below with specific ways to build a writing portfolio with no paid experience under your belt.

Ways to Build Portfolio Pieces with No Experience

• Blogs and Content Sites – If your specialty is Web content writing in the personal finance niche, an excellent way to start building a portfolio is to launch your own blog on personal finance. This not only lets you showcase your best work (you can send a link to the blog or specific articles to prospective clients), but can also serve as an income stream through advertising (and I’ll tell you from experience that if you keep working at it, your blogs can earn you decent money).
• Article Marketing – This is one of those situations where it’s not a bad idea to write for free. The key is getting the most marketing value out of your articles written for this purpose. For example, many writers submit articles to large article directories. I’d suggest against it. They lend little credibility. Instead, send free articles to niche article sites or even to blogs in your specialty area that may accept them as a guest post. For example, if I want to get more exposure in a specific business niche, I may write a free article for Work.com because they carry more credibility with a built-in business audience than article directories do. Again, you can link prospective clients to these articles. Since most are non-exclusive though, if you do go with an article directory instead of targeted options, I would suggest forgetting the link, and instead publishing it directly to your own portfolio site.
• Write for Non-Profits – This is one other area where I’d say it’s OK to write for free (or simply at a discount) early on. What does this offer you that free articles for a profit-based client can’t? It’s an image-builder. Non-profit involvement is often a good PR move. And let’s face it – what looks better? A reference from a branch of a large and respectable non-profit agency, or a reference from a random webmaster no one has heard of, wanting free or $5.00 articles? Take a wild guess. If it doesn’t lend something to your credibility or image, don’t do it for free.
• Write Mock Pieces – This is my least favorite option for portfolio-building if you have no actual experience. To put it simply, you create a “fake” piece. This doesn’t really work for articles (there’s no such thing as a “fake” article really). It works well for marketing copy and similar things though. For example, if you plan to write business plans, you may want to write a fake one for a non-existent company similar to those in your target market. The benefit here is that you can later use them as a template to speed up the process on future projects, and you’ll have more creative freedom. In addition to using mock pieces when you’re new, they can work well if you can’t share full actual samples (again using the business plan as an example – clients won’t want you sharing their private business and financial data enclosed in them with other prospective clients).

Using the Sale to Build Your Portfolio

Here’s something else to consider – run a sale. This can work when you’re new, or more experienced. Let’s cover sales for the new, inexperienced writers here.

The key is this: Don’t go around saying something like, “since I’m new, I’m going to write articles for a while at $5.00 per article, and then raise my rates later.”

Instead, try something like this (again based on relatively low rates for easy example purposes): “My regular rate is $20.00 per 500-word article. I’m currently offering a 50% discount on first orders from new clients only.”

Why is the second route better, using the numbers in the examples?

1. You’re not emphasizing your “fault” (in this case that you’re new) – you’re going to let the quality or your credentials in the niche or specialty speak for themselves.
2. You’re putting a limit on the low rates up front (only first orders, and only for new clients).
3. People like discounts. Saving $10.00 on an article can be even more attractive than paying only $5.00 for one if you “sell it” well with your marketing copy in your sales announcement.
4. You’re not immediately starting off by trying to compete with lower-tier writers (once you start feeling like you have to compete with them, you may always view them as your competition – they’re not). What’s worse is that trying to compete with them, even temporarily, can permanently put you in the same league as those lower-quality writers in the eyes of your target clients. Once you create a certain image with buyers, it can be very difficult to break out of it.
5. You’re letting prospective clients know up front that you place a certain value on your work (your regular rates). This helps to ensure that you’ll attract clients willing to pay those rates if they continue with you past that first order.
6. If you’ve taken the time to properly set your writing rates to begin with (again to get those regular fees), you’ll know how many lower-rate clients you can afford to take on and still get by. Most Web writers who simply start off very low because they’re told they should don’t honestly know what they need to begin with – they’re trying to market solely on price rather than running a responsible business (and that’s what being a freelance Web writer essentially is).

Start Building Your Portfolio

Now that you have a few ideas to get you started on portfolio pieces, get to work on building a portfolio that will attract clients, increase your credibility, and demonstrate what you feel your writing is really worth.

I’d love to see how other writers are keeping their portfolios online (for those with public portfolios). If you would like to leave a link to yours, please feel free to do so in the comments. You can see an example of the simple portfolio format I use at ProBusinessWriter.com.

Here are two of the most common, or easiest, ways you can have both a professional “static” site and a blog on the same domain name:

Blog as Add-On

If you already run a static site (think basic HTML or CSS sites edited offline, where you upload changes whenever you make them), you probably can’t add a blog directly to the site.

Instead, you would install a blog platform as an add-on. You would generally do this either as a sub-domain (where the blog could be found at http://blog.yoursite.com) or as a folder (http://yoursite.com/blog).

In this case, you would set up the blog just like you would set it up on the main domain name, just uploading the files to an empty folder instead of on the root domain.

The perk is that you don’t have to alter your primary, existing professional site (other than to add a link to your blog). The downside of this strategy is that, unless you’re a designer or you hire one, you’ll have a hard time getting the blog to match your site’s design seamlessly.

Adaptable Blog Platform

My preferred method for running a combined blog / professional site is to actually use a highly customizable blog platform (like WordPress).

You can create “page” or “posts”–pages being like a static site and posts displaying in blog format chronologically.

WordPress is great for this, because you can set any “page” as your homepage, making it look like a static site. You can also alter where your page list and blog category links appear, making the navigation appear more like a static site as well, with a link to the main blog page.

The downsides to this method are that you’ll need to move your site’s copy to the blog platform (if you have an existing static site), and the page / post format can take a bit of getting used to if you aren’t already familiar with WordPress.

My old professional site is an example of this method (it’s outdated and not currently used, so excuse anything out of sorts – it’ll eventually be turned into a portal for my products and services). In this rough example, the About page was simply saved as the homepage.

As you’ll see, like with a static site, there are then navigation links to things like my old services and portfolio (although they’re redirected to my new site now). Then there are blog category links for the company blog (which are now redirected to this blog). What does still work there is the link in the upper right corner, which featured the latest blog post on the blog tied to the site. As you can see, this method allows you to feature your blog posts sitewide in ways that would be more difficult on a static site with attached blog. When you click that link, you’ll also see that the blog posts are able to use the identical design of the static site.

You don’t need a special WordPress theme to do this–any theme will do. Just format your homepage, service page, portfolio, etc. any way you like using the HTML editor for greater flexibility, set your “page” links to a prominent place in your navigation (using widgets if available to make it easier), and go into your blog settings and choose a page for your homepage. If you’re familiar with WordPress already, that’s all there really is to it!

Are you already running both a professional site and a blog? Did you use one of these methods or something else? Let us know what the experience was like for you, and share a link to let us see how you’ve integrated them both together.