9 Stand Out Services You Can Offer Your Freelance Writing Clients (That Actually Sell)

As a new freelance writer you’re trying to find the best way to get new clients and serve the ones you have.

You feel like there are 4 million other writers trying to get the same job. 

You’ve got questions like:

• How do I stand out?
• What do I NEED to offer clients?
• How can I get clients and make good money?

It’s overwhelming.  

Take a deep breath.  This does feel hard.  You’re NOT crazy.  

But it doesn’t have to be as hard as you’ve convinced yourself it is.  (We all do this in the beginning. You’re 100% normal, I promise!). 

When you get caught up in your mind clutter, It’s easy to forget the best part about freelance writing as a career.  

YOU get to make the rules of your own business.  You can offer whatever service you want as long as clients need the kind of help you’re offering.  You can decide you don’t want to do something you don’t enjoy. 

This is the beauty of this incredible freelance writing opportunity.

In this post, I’ll be sharing some services I offered in my first year or two of freelance writing.  I was testing everything, learning and trying to find the intersection between services I enjoyed and the ones clients would pay good money for.  

Here are 9 newbie friendly services you can add onto your freelance writing service to built trust and land more clients. 

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If you liked this post, you might also like:

• Best Freelance Writer Course? Write Your Way to 1K by Elna Cain Course Review (Should You Buy It?)
• Want More Freeland Writing Clients: Here’s How to Do What Your Competition Won’t
• SEMrush- A Review for the Not-So-Teach-Savvy User

*This post contains affiliate links, but I only promote what I believe in.  I pay my own money for any courses OR I’ve personally reviewed them. I only recommend products and courses that I can confidently say I would pay for again if I had to start over or that I currently use.

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1. Create a Content Plan

If you’re writing any kind of content like social media, blog, or email content, a logical extension to your writing is to offer a content strategy. 

When I started offering email marketing services, I created a content plan as an add-on.  I eventually started offering content plans as a one-off service consultation.  

You could offer this as a package where you gather information from the client via questionnaires or a Zoom call, work on it, then present a document.  Or you can do a working session where you help guide the client throughout the call.  

Do whatever works for you and your clients. 

When I offered this to my existing clients, I would fill in as much as I could ahead of time and book a 90 minute session to plan out the next 12 weeks of their content.  

They loved it and eventually just wanted me to take over content planning completely. 

You could offer it as an add-on to your package, selling one month at a time, or as a one-off service where you create a month, a quarter, 6 months, or even a year of custom content planning.  

Coming up with content ideas is frustrating for many businesses.  This is a great way to add value and start becoming a strategist.

2. SEO Research

Once you get the hang of SEO, anyone with a blog or even just a website will want to pick your brain for ideas and strategies.

Here are some ways you could add this to your services:

1. You can add this service to your content writing package as an add-on for existing customers
2. Build it into your package so every client can get access
3. OR add it as a one-off service  

At one time, I was even customizing and selling SEO reports as a stand alone add-on. 

There are a lot of businesses who write their own content and just want a little SEO boost without having to become an expert.

You could:

• Offer reports
• Create your own custom guide
• Create content plans based on current SEO trends in their niche    

This is the perfect add-on for your blog content writing. 

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If you’re new to blogging and want to know how to get lots of traffic for you or your clients, you can check out this Ready, Set, Blog for Traffic course here. 

(Or find my review here to see if it’s right for you.)

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3. SEO Optimization

On-page SEO optimization of old and new posts for a blog can be a gamechanger for the blog owner.  

When I started as a freelance writer, I wrote mainly blog posts.  As an add-on, I offered SEO optimization of old posts for my existing customers.

I would take the blog post they had written, run it through a program like SEMrush (or a new one I like called RanqIQ created by the Blog Millionaire, Brandon Gaille) and optimize their on-page SEO.

As the algorithm has changed, many blogs have old content that needs to be updated to add things like:

• Alt text 
• Related keywords 
• More of the keyword it ranked for naturally
• And more…

The bigger the blog, the better the results you’ll get from optimizing old content. 

Many clients would see a boost almost immediately. This service became an easy sell and offered recurring income for me. 

The more you can get SEO results for clients, the more you can charge for your expertise. 

“Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first.” 

– Wendy Piersall

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New to SEO?  Check out SEMrush by clicking here. They have free courses and certifications you can use to learn SEO and put on your resume. When I started, I took a few of their free courses to learn what I needed to know.

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4. Content Repurposing

In my opinion, this service is a no brainer, ESPECIALLY if you’re a new writer. 

Any content a business currently has can be repurposed into something else. 

You can turn a podcast into:

• Social posts
• Blog posts
• Video scripts
• A book
• An audiobook script

Convert a blog post or collection of posts into:

• A book
• Endless social media posts
• Guides
• Ebooks
• A workbook or planner (depending on the blog)

You are only limited by your imagination when repurposing content. 

In my first year as a freelance writer, I did some subcontracting work for a writer who repurposed podcasts into books.  

I listened to podcasts and wrote out the best bits into chapters, it was that simple. 

She charged a premium for this service because she knew how to put together a book.  She also had non-stop repeat business.  

Imagine for a moment you’re a podcaster.  

You want more traffic to your podcast, but you’re already really busy, you’re NOT a writer, and you have no time to learn what needs to go into putting a blog on your site. 

You get a personalized, custom pitch in your inbox (clearly this freelancer, put time into getting to know your podcast) from someone who repurposes podcasts into blog posts.  

If you have the budget, this is a no brainer.  Add on that this person also understands SEO (you don’t have to, but this would be a good add on). 

You can imagine completing this process for someone who mainly uses social media but wants a blog, or has a YouTube channel and needs social media content. 

Can you see how beneficial this service is to your clients.  

Pro tip: You can even use an AI to transcribe the episodes into words, then edit into whatever format they want. 

[Sidebar: I adore ^^ this guy [Levar Burton].  Finding a GIF related to content with one of my fave Star Trek characters makes me love adding GIFs to content… Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.]

5. Email Automation

If you’re writing emails for your clients, you could make yourself a one-stop shop so they can’t imagine going anywhere else.  

If your client is mainly operating by themselves and they don’t have a team helping them (or maybe their team is not so tech savvy), they will be relieved if you can offer email automation. 

When I landed my first email client, I quickly realized that my emails would likely not be sent on time because she wasn’t comfortable with Convertkit yet.  

Luckily, Convertkit help center and youtube videos are structured like an online course.  

It didn’t take me long to learn how to:

• Automate the welcome sequence I wrote for her
• Add automated delivery emails for any of her opt ins
• Create a custom template 
• And more…

I eventually stopped offering this service because I wanted to focus 100% on being a high value conversion copywriter.  But remember… your job is to make your client’s life EASIER. 

If you are new to freelance writing and want to add email to your service, understanding the commonly used platforms like Convertkit, Mailchimp, and Activecampaign will put you ahead of your competition. 

In a study I found on Venturebeat, they found that…

“Eighty percent of marketing automation users saw their number of leads increase, and 77 percent saw the number of conversions increase.”
– Andrew Jones, VB Analyst

6. Spotting Opportunities and Creating Digital Products

If you’re writing blog content or social media content for your clients, you’ve already gained a pretty good understanding of the work they do. 

Can you brainstorm a digital product they can sell based on their content?  

Things like:

• An ebook 
• Worksheets that go along with the content or program they offer
• Checklists

Not only can you recommend a digital product they can now sell, but you can also recommend an opt-in freebie or promotional piece so they can more subscribers into their email list (this is commonly called a lead magnet). 

Along your freelance writing journey, you get to decide if you’re going to be:

1. A writer who just takes instruction

OR

2. A strategist who adds value 

Pro tip: Strategists who add value make significantly more money.  The more money you can help your clients make, the more money you’ll make. 

7. Pinterest Marketing Or Preparing Your Content for Pinterest

Pinterest is like a visual search engine. Similar to how Google, but with images.  

Many companies who use blogs as a marketing tool use Pinterest to increase their traffic. 

If you’re already writing blog posts for your clients, you could easily add Pinterest marketing as an add on service to create value for your clients. 

When I was a newbie freelance writer, I was primarily writing blog posts and working for bloggers.

I learned quickly if I understood how to finish off a post with all the bells and whistles needed to make every post easily shareable, my work was more valuable to my clients. 

This included using free Canva design software to create a feature image and a pinterest image.  

You could add Pinterest marketing or even just add an image to your package that’s the right dimensions for Pinterest.  

You could take it a step further. 

Learn how to do all the Pinterest marketing for your clients.  

A lot of bloggers and businesses use Tailwind.  Understanding how it works could help you offer Pinterest marketing to your services. 

According to Pinterest, 70% of users say Pinterest is their go-to place to discover new ideas, products, or services they can trust.

8. Turning Critical Data Into Strategy 

Many businesses neglect their data. 

It’s not their fault.  

They are busy (which is a good thing for you). 

When I began offering email marketing, I also offered a monthly or quarterly analysis of data like open rates, click rates, and discovering what topics the subscribers engaged with most. 

This helped me learn to become a strategist because it helped me:

1. Know if my emails were working
2. Discover what worked on specific audiences (subject lines, calls to action, etc)
3. Reveal potential digital products or services my clients could offer

This service isn’t exclusive to email. 

You could offer:

• Google analytics reviews
• Hot jar heat mapping of any pages they want info on (it shows the behavior of traffic on a page)
• Social media analytics (engagement, comments, likes, etc…)

Clients are too busy to conduct these analytic reviews themselves.  This is a valuable add-on to help clients get more traffic, more content ideas, provide better services, and new offers. 

In fact, I used this strategy to help one of my clients identify a new product.  We had a lot of engagement with a specific topic in her emails and none of her competition was offering free or paid solutions. 

She whipped up a valuable email opt-in to give away for free with a robust digital download as an upsell and added an entirely new income stream to her business.  

^^ When you learn how to help your clients make money, you can charge more for your services. 

“The goal is to turn data into information and information into insight.” 

– Carly Fiorina, former chief executive officer, Hewlett Packard.

9. Voice of Customer Research

Voice of customer research is when you interview or survey clients or customers to find out more about their problems and experiences.  

If you can’t interview or survey clients, you can also search for messages in social groups, forums, and anywhere your ideal audience is hanging out (this is called message mining). 

When I transitioned into conversion copywriting, I spotted an opportunity to offer research to companies as well as other copywriters.   

If you ever decide to transition into conversion copy (skilled in sales strategy along with your writing), you’ll stop writing copy.  Instead, you’ll start building effective, high-converting sales strategy using voice of customer research.

^^This is when you transition from a copywriter to a conversion copywriter. You can make a lot more money as a conversion strategist than you can a content writer.

I started offering this service to my copywriter friends.  They loved it and it landed me repeat business.  

This is a service that almost every copywriter wants to outsource as they grow.  It’s a good opportunity to hone your skills, get your hands dirty in all kinds of different niches, and truly understand the value of research. 

As a conversion copywriter, this service was already part of my package. But agencies don’t typically do their own voice of customer research.  

Some do, but many businesses and agencies rely on guessing what the clients need based on what they tell them when writing copy.  

You can add a lot of value by doing even very basic voice of customer research as a package and turning it into a message recommendation report. [You can get free training on how to create a message recommendation report at Copyhackers].

Solve Client Problems to Make More Money AND Stand Out Among Your Competitors

When you first start freelance writing or copywriting, it feels really hard to stand out.  

Solving your client’s biggest problems and making their lives easier is the QUICKEST way to make a name for yourself and land bigger clients on repeat. 

Turn your focus away from the money you can make and instead focus your magnifying glass on what problems your clients need you to solve.  

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New freelance writer who feels a little lost, confused, and like you don’t know what to do first (or next, or next after that?).  I felt the same way when I started.  I read free content until I was blue in the face but still felt lost.  

That’s when I discovered Write Your Way to Your First 1K.  

I discovered everything I needed to go from NO clients to a regular income within a few months.  The course was amazing, and I’m still in the private Facebook group today. 

>>> Learn How to Get Paid Well to Write 

*This is an affiliate link, but I only promote what I believe in.  I paid my own money for this course and have reaped the benefits since day 1. I highly recommend it to every new freelance writer struggling to get started. 

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