Writing and translation
Nobody is buying words. They are buying the thing the words are supposed to do, and per-word pricing hides that from both of you.
Copywriters, content writers, technical writers, editors, translators and localisers.
What a client checks before reading a word you wrote
- A published sample in the subject they care about, not a general one
- Whether you have written for their audience before, which is different from their industry
- Whether your own profile is well written, which is the only free sample you always give
- How fast you turn around a first draft
Published work with a byline where you have it, and a named brief where you do not. A ghostwritten piece you cannot claim becomes a description of the audience, the goal and the result.
Per-word is the trap in this category. It rewards length and punishes editing, which are the opposite of what a client actually wants. Quote the piece, not the word count.
The symptoms here
You are quoting per word
Every job comes down to a rate per thousand words.
You are paid more for writing badly and less for cutting, which is where the value is.
Your samples are general
A folder of unrelated pieces across six industries.
A client in one industry cannot tell whether you can write for theirs.
Your own profile is thin
The overview is three sentences and none of them are interesting.
It is the only writing sample every client sees, and it is arguing against you.
Before
Hello! I am an experienced content writer with 5 years of experience writing SEO-optimized blog posts, articles, and web copy across many industries. I deliver high-quality, engaging content on time, every time.
After
You want posts that rank for compliance terms but read like they were written by someone who has actually sat through an audit. Those two things pull against each other, and the usual failure is keyword-stuffed copy that a practitioner stops reading in the first paragraph. I would start with the three questions your buyers ask before they buy.
Writing has the most applicants and the widest spread between the bottom and the top of the market of anything on the platform. Both of those facts have the same cause: writing is easy to attempt and hard to evaluate quickly.
Which means the entire game is making yourself easy to evaluate.
Your profile is a sample, whether you meant it or not
Every client who looks at you reads something you wrote before they read anything you sent them. In no other category is the profile doing double duty like this, and in no other category is it so often three flat sentences about being passionate and detail-oriented.
Write the overview as though it is the sample, because it is. If it is not the best short piece of writing on your profile, something has gone wrong.
Samples in the subject, not samples in general
A client hiring for fintech does not want to see your travel piece. They are not assessing whether you can write, they are assessing whether you can write about the thing they sell without embarrassing them.
- Published, with a byline, where you have it. The byline does a lot of work on its own.
- Ghostwritten becomes a description: who it was for, what it had to achieve, what happened.
- No relevant sample? Write one. Two hours on a real piece for the industry you want beats a year of applying with the wrong folder.
Per-word pricing pays you to pad
It rewards length, punishes cutting and makes the client's actual goal invisible to both of you. Quote the piece with a stated audience and purpose instead, and get faster without getting poorer.
Translation is a different sale
Translation buyers are worried about one thing more than accuracy: whether the result reads as though it was written by a native speaker in the target market, rather than converted. Say which direction you work in, which market, and what you will not take on. A translator who names a limit reads as someone who knows where the limits are.
What writers ask
It helps once you have work to put on it, and it is not urgent. A well-written profile with three relevant published samples does more, sooner, than an empty portfolio site.
Decide your position and put it on the profile. Clients who want editing and direction of AI drafts are a real and growing market, and clients who want original human writing will pay more for the clarity. Being vague about it costs you both.
Write two speculative pieces for the exact audience you want and treat them as portfolio. Say plainly that they were written as samples. An honest sample outperforms an empty portfolio by a very wide margin.
Not quite your line of work?
Find out what your profile is costing you
Seven questions, no account. You get a score, the three gaps costing you the most, and what to do about each one.