Five Reasons to Write for Content Sites

If your aspiration is to be a full-time freelance writer, one thing you'll need to do every day is write. In the absence of assigned work or accepted queries, places like Wizzley and Squidoo can be a great outlet for your writing. If you sign up with a site that has writing challenges, accept them, even if it means writing about things you know nothing about.  

Writing a lot every day is the best way to build up your skills so that no freelance deadline will scare you.

If you're a freelancer writer, or run another business, inbound links to your own website are valuable. If you can build pages on content sites that are engaging and interesting enough to get ranked in search engines, your own content can drive traffic back to your business site, not to mention increase your search engine rankings on Bing and Google.

Freelancers just starting out don't have a large portfolio of work available to show prospective clients, but you can show them high ranking pages on content sites. The pages on these sites tend to be attractive and professional-looking, and can be linked from your own site, or turned into PDFs that you can post to your own portfolio area of your site.  

Either way, having content published in places other than your own blog or website looks more impressive than self-published and hosted articles.

As a freelance writer, you will primarily be writing about things that interest your clients, not necessarily what's of interest to you.

You can use writing sites to explore topics that tickle your fancy or appeal to your curiosity, whether or not you have a paying client on the other end.

Sometimes just being able to write about something that strikes you at the moment - and knowing you have a place to publish it - is enough to get you back on track with your other writing, where an unscratched itch can distract you for days.

If you have an idea for a book-length project that you are wondering whether or not to pursue, writing an article on a content site is a way to gauge the interest in the subject. If you can generate likes and other social media markers fairly quickly, you might have a viable project.

You can use the success of your articles to interest a book publisher, or use the information to make the decision to self-publish.

Once your book is available for sale online, you can edit your article and use it to promote your book as well!