Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Specializing

It's funny how I'm always coming to different realizations while preparing to write blog posts. It seems like every day at freelancing I'm exposed to some revelation I feel the need to expound about on my blog. The latest has to do with those online ads I'm always scouring and firing off replies to in the hopes of bringing in more work. Periodically, the daily posts will be related to health care or something similar. I noticed yesterday that I seem to gravitate to those particular posts.

Now this isn't really that remarkable since I spent most of my professional writing career writing for a pharmacy association. Except that one of the reasons I left my job to become a freelancer (albeit one of the less urgent ones) was that I was tired of writing about pharmacy all the time and I wanted to write about something different for a change. So that begs the question, why I am still looking for healthcare writing gigs? The answer is probably that I feel confident in my ability to write on those topics and I feel I can demonstrate that to the potential client with my clips.

Opportunities to write about many different topics abound. The insurance industry, technology and education are just a few I see daily. In spite of this, I usually reply only to ads that are very general or ads that are related to health care in some way. The one exception is when I replied to an ad for an online cycling publication, Pedal Pushers, which just yesterday published my first article for their site. I guess that should tell me something.

I'm curious as to how my fellow freelancers choose topics. Do you gravitate to writing for certain industries. How did you choose them or did they choose you?

1 comment:

Lesley said...

Hi Andrea! I've enjoyed browsing your blog. We have a lot in common - I've been freelancing for the past 9 years. I'll look forward to following your success and maybe bouncing some ideas back and forth from time to time.