Hey, ProWriter!

Christmas is right around the corner. 🎅🎄🎶

And while we freelancers are famously hermit-like, if you have the opportunity to attend a Christmas party thrown by one of your clients, know that we are with you in spirit, by the punch bowl, wondering what is wrong with everyone.

Before we crack on today, a few notes about the upcoming schedule.

Next week, we’ll have a regular issue. The two weeks after that, we might share a hopeful holiday wish or funny viral video, but expect the content to be light.

After that, the week of January 8, we’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming.

In this, the penultimate 2023 edition:

• These are the marketing trends every writer should be watching 📈

• Which AI writes better content? ChatGPT or Bard? 🤖

• This week’s influencer is your unofficial career coach 🏅

• Why you should dare to be bad in your writing 🤢

• A few gigs to help round the year out 🖊️

Let’s ride!

- Dave and Dusten

#ProWriterTips 💡

The 3 most important marketing trends writers should always be watching

This week’s tip is inspired by a question from freelance writer Dana Cass.

She asks, “what kinds of marketing trends should freelance writers be following?”

Here’s Dana:

“I view myself as more of a capital-W writer. I’m good with words and messaging, but I don’t know much about what I’ll loosely call the ‘hackier’ side of content. I’ve found a decent amount of work that caters to my skills, but am I missing out by not trying to learn more about the other side of the coin?”

Longtime listeners can probably tell why this question pops for us.

While a writer’s main selling point is “capital-W writing” as Dana puts it, the closer you get to the content marketing side of the industry (where more $$$ is), the more a writer needs to know about, well… content marketing.

Writers who develop knowledge and skills related to marketing, branding, and sales are more competitive. It’s an advantage, and one that connects you to higher-paying opportunities. Period.

But what industry trends do you need to keep your finger on to get there?

Ultimately, it depends on what kind of writing you want to niche into, and where your services fall in the sales funnel (we touched a bit on this last week).

But for a good generalist view of marketing trends, we think that every writer should be paying attention to the following (at minimum):

1. Search trends. As long as search engines like Google play a central role in marketing, writers need to stay in touch with new updates and best practices about what’s working. Again, you don’t need to become an SEO expert. But what you don’t want is outdated SEO know-how or, worse, blackhat hacks. Generalist SEO knowledge is huge for credibility.

2. User trends. Where are people finding content online? How do they interact with it? Instagram is a big spot for B2C ads. Facebook is huge for communities and its marketplace. Newsletters are great for building subscribers. But it won’t always be this way. There will always be new trends, new platforms, and marketers trying to figure out where the eyeballs are moving and how to put effective marketing messages (i.e., the stuff you write) in front of them.

3. Content trends. Every marketer has an opinion on what’s going to be hot in the coming year. Keep in touch with those conversations. Maybe data and original reporting will be big in 2024. Maybe it’ll be perspective and original thought leadership in 2025. It’ll be something else after that. This one is tough to get your arms around. But keep track of what marketers are saying they want, and what they think is going to work in the coming weeks/months/years. They may not have a crystal ball, but if nothing else, it’ll influence what they hire you to do for them.

If you’re having trouble figuring out what voices to listen to, keep an eye on our growing 100 content people to follow list. Each is vetted by us, is highly active on LinkedIn, and touches on these topics regularly.

If you have any questions, please reply to this email and ask! We read every reply, and if we see an interesting question, we’ll answer it in a future newsletter (let us know if you want a shoutout as well).

Thanks again to Dana for this week’s question!

Want to check out all of our Writer Tips for free?

📺🎙️A word from our sponsor📲🤑

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ProWriter isn’t just a newsletter. It’s an entire resource for helping freelance writers launch their writing careers.

When you become a ProWriter member, you get:

✔️ A free portfolio to highlight your hard-earned skills and experience

✔️ Workshops, courses, and other resources to improve your skills

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Eye on AI 🤖

In this section, we bring you the top stories about AI that affect creatives. Mostly so you can stay informed, but also (hopefully) worry less.

Today’s robopocalypse headlines 🤖💀

• The big news is Google’s Gemini, an AI model that represents a “big leap” compared to everything else on the market. Looks like the main applications are for developers and market researchers. Read Google’s announcement here.

• Amazon’s Q launch is off to a rocky start. The chatbot is apparently hallucinating like crazy and leaking tons of confidential data. Read more here.

• Nobody who fired Sam Altman is willing to explain why. But… why? Read more at Futurism.

• Interesting story from AdAge: While everyone is worried about AI replacing their jobs, one agency is using it to replace… customers? Pereira O’Dell has built a platform that creates AI-generated customer personas for market research. How’s that for a collective “huh”? Read more here.

• Neil Patel did a big rundown comparing content from ChatGPT to Google’s Bard. While he found that both were pretty close in terms of uniqueness (Bard with a slight advantage), humans reading the content preferred Bard by a lot. Also, most people polled couldn’t tell if the articles were AI or human-created. Worth a read, check it out here.

100 content people you should be following 🤝

We made a big list of the most successful and influential voices in marketing.

The main thing they have in common? They post free content advice that will make you a better writer.

This week, here’s who we think you should follow + connect with on LinkedIn: 

#89 Kiran Shahid

Kiran is a freelance writer who specializes in B2B SaaS copywriting. She has worked with name-brand clients like Sprout Social and Hubspot.

We’ll admit to just the teensiest bit of bias here — while we’ve never worked with Kiran, we’ve been friendly with her on LinkedIn, where she is very active.

Why you should follow her

• With 5 years in the game, Kiran is right at that sweet spot everyone reading this should shoot for: She’s carved her niche, and has big names in her portfolio. From here, the sky is the limit. She is a template for building a successful writing career in 2024 and beyond.

• She provides tons of relevant insights on navigating client relationships. It’s tough, early on, to know what you need and what you’re allowed to ask your client for. Kiran knows the boundaries in and out; just as much as she’s a solid freelance writer, she’s a handy career coach as well.

We look up to Kiran around here, and think you’ll get a lot from giving her a follow.

👉 Connect with Kiran on LinkedIn

Makes you think 🤔

Why you should dare to be bad

Dusten here.

I want to leave you this week with some perspective.

Joe Pulizzi (an upcoming 100 content people to follow entry if you want a head start) shared an observation in a recent edition of his excellent Orangeletter that I want to pass along.

He attended an event where author Kevin J. Anderson shared 11 productivity tips for writers. One stuck out, both for Joe and for us:

Dare to be bad.

Writer’s block and general insecurity about the quality of our work are problems we all face in our careers. How do you fix them?

According to Richardson, you fix them by pushing through them.

Go ahead and suck, he says.

Here’s why, in Joe’s words:

If you’re feeling stuck this week, go ahead and push through anyway, people.

Maybe it will suck. But once it’s out, at least you have something to work with.

You can read more of Joe’s takeaways from the event here.

Take care, folks.

Top Freelance Writing Jobs 💼 

1. Marketri is looking for a B2B content writer on a contract basis. Up to $65/h. Apply here.

2. Insight Global seeks a technical writer at $40/h. Apply here.

3. Cannon Digital Marketing is looking for a freelance SEO copywriter. See details and get in touch here.

4. Stimulate is looking for an email copywriter. $30-$50/h. Apply here.

5. Interested in climate tech and science writing? Climate Tech Marketing LLC is looking for a freelance writer and social media coordinator. Apply here.

6. LaunchMob is looking for a writer to assist with 4-5 sales assets. $1500 for the entire project, make sure to apply by tomorrow. Do so here.

7. Digital marketing agency Findable is looking for content writers. Pays around $180-$380 per assignment.

8. Health writers — Bezzy is looking for freelancers. More of an entry-level role around $0.10 CPW. Apply here.

9. If you have experience in the beauty niche, 24|seven Talent is looking for freelance writers for a short-term project (with the possibility to extend). Pays $40-$46/h, apply here.

Don’t forget — all the jobs we post here are remote and we privilege gigs with transparent pay.

A handful come from our personal networks and aren’t on any jobs boards… yet. So get on ‘em.

What’s on your 🧠?

Here’s your weekly reminder that if you’re one of our 5,000 subscribers, you can reply directly to this email.

That’s because we want to hear from you!

• We want your feedback, so we can make this newsletter better

• We want your questions, so we can create relevant content for you

• We want to build relationships, so reply with whatever is on your mind

Send us compliments, concerns, complaints, questions, story ideas, memes, whatever you got.

Thanks for reading, ProWriters!

Let’s have a great week.

Dave & Dusten

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Until next week, see you on Twitter and LinkedIn.