Working as a freelance technical writer is a great career move for people looking for legitimate work at home jobs.
If you have experience in a technical topic and are good at making this understandable to less technical people then this could be worth considering.
As a technical writer you will probably consult with people working with software, computer systems, engineering, architecture or science.
Much of the technical writing you will do will be intended for an online audience and there are a few tools you can use to make the work you present to clients stand out.
Writing Keyword Optimized Web Copy
You will make a great impression on your clients if you can write keyword optimized web copy that will help potential customers to find their sites.
Some great keyword research tools for the freelance technical writer include:
- the SEO Book Keyword Suggestion Tool,
- Keyword Discovery,
- SEM Rush,
- the Google Adwords Keyword Tool, and
- the Wordtracker tool.
All of these work in much the same way. You type in a keyword that interests you and can see at a glance how much advertiser or search demand there is for that keyword and what related keywords exist.
This helps you use those keywords in the copy you write for your clients and could help them achieve a higher search engine ranking. Don’t stuff your copy with keywords though, as search engines will penalize the site.
Use tools such as Live Keyword Analysis or Textalyser to keep your keyword count at below 2 per cent of the total word count.
Note: There are premium (paid) versions of many of these keyword tools. However, the Site Build It! hosting and marketing package includes excellent keyword research tools called “Brainstorm It!
Some of the research is drawn from Wordtracker. For more information about the tools and resources included in SBI!, check out Compare SiteSell..
Use Images To Illustrate The Content
Technical writers can also score brownie points with clients by finding low-cost or free images that they can use to illustrate their content.
There are several resources you can use or highlight to your clients. Pixabay and Unsplash.com are a good sources of free high quality images.
Other sites to consider include:
Compfight(a Flickr search engine where you can specify Creative Commons images),Morguefile(where most photos can be used free of charge and without attribution),FreePixels(which has great background images but a smaller range than other sites), andStock.xchang(another stock photography site).
These are useful resources for the freelance technical writer.
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