The Best and the Worst Ways to Join a Community of Freelance Writers

Freelance writers tend to be highly competitive with one another. Specially when a newcomer comes onto the scene, seemingly challenging the status quo that has existed much to the comfort of the senior writers in the field. There is a tendency for the senior writers in an online writing community to be distrustful of newcomers and try to edge them out of the place because of it. Some of these seasoned writers do not take kindly to new comers who have fresh ideas about how to approach freelance writing. This makes it difficult for the newbie freelance writer to win the trust of the already existing community members. That is not to say that the newbie will always be the outside though.

There are few things a newbie freelance writer can do to help immerse into the community and gain a large sense of acceptance among its members.

1. Introduce yourself as a friend, not a foe.

The writing communities tend to be tight knit, without room for strangers or additional members. That does not mean that a new member cannot carve a niche out for him or herself upon arrival though. Try to convince the old-timers that though you are new to the fold, you will not come after their regular clients nor steal away any clients that may show interest in their services. This might work in your favor if you can do convince them of your honesty through your actions.

2. Refer to the original members as elders and seek their advice as a newcomer to the field.

One that writers love the most is having their ego boosted by the acknowledgement that comes from the newcomers. Stroking egos will result in some condescending situations which you, as the newcomer will have to accept as a part of the immersion process. Bowing to their superiority while informing them of your own background should help to thaw the ice.

3. Share your wealth of research orders.

As freelance writers, everyone is out to make an income. However, some writers might have regular clients or a sizeable number of orders that could be shared with others. Be benevolent. Shop some of your orders around within the community and offer to share profits with anybody who takes the job. This will help you create bridges with the other writers and show them that you are not the bad guy they thought you to be after all.

4. Find out which members of the community have specific skills and keep them in mind.

Sometimes freelance writers have specializations such as CAD, AI programming, software development, and data analysis. These are jobs that eat up a large amount of a student's time, so these projects are often outsourced to completion. Should you have these types of orders come your way, don't forget to put the potential client on hold while you contact one of the community members who might be able to complete the job. With any luck, you'll be scoring additional brownie points through this process.

Remember that being combative as the newcomer to the community will not get you anywhere. You need these people to help you get started, so antagonizing them is not the recommended way to go. However, that does not mean that you should accept getting bulled. Learn how to protect yourself from those negative types and keep plodding along. Only one of two things can happen anyway. Either some of the community members ignore your existence and you bond with the other members whom you develop a professional relationship with or the community accepts your presence and they allow you to become one of the many positive and contributing members of the community. Here's the hope that the latter is what develops as a relationship for all the newbies in a freelance writing community.

Most of this is palpably absurd. The only metric used to determine one's worth is the contribution to the forum itself, the length of stay, and the absence of complaints. I came here in 2013 and was not attacked, molested, or in any way disparaged simply because I did not try to spew garbage and offer advice when I had none to give. Most new members do just that and then wonder why we laugh at them. As for sharing orders, you should move to a less competitive industry since you clearly have issues with the concept of competition. I share orders with several writers, but only and only when I cannot help the student or when I am completely booked. Why on earth would I give work to anyone other than for those reasons is beyond me.

@Kind_Writer
Virtually everything in your post is incorrect, and I'm not saying this even slightly because I expect to be acknowledged as an "elder" or have my ego "stroked" or to "bully" you. Ironically, your post actually does the one thing that really annoys the legit writers who have been members of this forum for many years, and it's not really any different from what you'd find at just about any online forum community: namely, join a forum and immediately start dispensing your "advice," all of which happens to be either somewhat wrong or totally wrong and indicates to us that you don't have any experience in this field.


You can't really "steal" anybody else's regular clients, simply because once clients find a good writer, they don't usually continue looking for writers on the forum. Most of them come here to find a writer for the first time or to find a better writer after the first service provider they tried failed to provide good work. Many of them never even bother registering or posting after registering; they just read posts and ads and contact writers.


This might have been true about one person who used to post here a lot, but it's not the case with the rest of us. If you just contribute to forum discussions in a meaningful way without dispensing bad advice, especially if you're as new to this industry as you are to the forum, nobody will have any problem with you. Don't try to make a big splash by posting 10 or 15 times in an transparently obvious attempt to reach the PM threshold and don't start bumping decade-old threads in that process and responding to OPs whose question or comment is a decade old as though anybody's been waiting around for your response since 2008.


If an established writer has any overflow, the last thing any of us would do would be to trust someone we don't know with a project. On the other end of the spectrum, if you're a fledgling writer, you don't have any projects to "share" with any other writer.


Nobody is interested in helping you get started because we're direct competitors for the same clients. However, most of us will interact with you very civilly and even provide advice about tangential matters that help you at no direct expense to us (as I just did in another thread in response to a new writer who asked about how to handle "vanishing" clients who owe money for delivered projects). Most of us will not help you learn how to find clients here, because we're direct competitors for their business; but that doesn't mean we'll be rude to you or consider you to be an enemy.

If you're a new writer who wants to be welcomed by veteran writers here, don't pretend that you have much more experience in this field than you really do; and ask questions instead of presuming to offer "advice" that you're not qualified to provide and that makes it very obvious to those of us who are that you really have no idea what you're talking about and that you're trying to pretend to be more experienced than you really are. That's not even a unique feature to this industry or this forum, either: go to practically any online forum, and whether it's about health, or law, or medicine, or physical fitness, or classic cars, or sports, or aviation, you'll find the exact same interpersonal dynamics between the most experienced members of those forums and its newest members. Ask questions and you'll almost always get good answers from the veterans; but come in dispensing your advice (especially bad advice that highlights your total lack of any experience in the field), and you'll get a very different kind of welcome from the veterans of any online forum community, including this one.

Thanks for proving my point :) Veteran writers = dinosaurs; close to extinction in the new tech era. Old-fashioned ideas and lack of creativity will no longer get students excellent A+ grades.

There have been dozens of geniuses like yourself over the years to come here or other forums and claim they are the best, they know everything, and that we the veterans are obsolete. And yet, here we are and the geniuses are nowhere to be found. Good luck to you.

So you prefer not to complete an order at all rather than give other freelancers a chance? Not kind, that's for sure. Being on a forum is not equal to making money.

You should read my post again. Most writers exchange orders, but they don't do that randomly, or because we are kind of heart. I will never even take an order that I know I can't complete, let alone leave it unfinished. As for sharing, I always recommend another writer or a company when I can't manage the order myself. However, what I don't do is recommend random newbies I know nothing about.

If you know you cannot complete an order and know your buddy cannot do it either, you leave the customer empty-handed? Recommendation doesn't mean that the order would be successfully completed; you risk your reputation if the recommended writer fails. Most of them do. It's better to post the order somewhere in public or here, then your position is neutral.


I specialize in highly-specialized science and programming orders. You do not not, so it's not a competition.

If I know I cannot take an order with confidence, I tell the client that. If I refer the client to someone else, it's at the client's request and with the obvious understanding that the only thing I can possibly vouch for is that the other writer (or company) is a legitimate service provider and not some scammer.


I have no way of knowing how well someone else is going to do on a project that I can't do and its neither my business nor my responsibility. I provide the referral strictly as a courtesy to help the client get the project done; the rest is between that client and that writer. Anybody to whom I'd ever refer any work is someone who would be equally honest about his confidence level with the project.

How do you define that? Is a writer who takes an order but doesn't have credentials or know-how to complete it a scammer? Or not. Your reply suggests that she is not. What only matters to you is that he is your buddy, right. Not too honest if you ask me. It's no better than posting a job in public for a random writer to look into it.

Based on this statement alone I can conclude that you have very limited experience in this industry. Posting the essay online with the client details would invariably result in one of two outcomes: a) the client would be swamped with fraudulent offers from scammers or b) the client would be approached by intermediaries who would charge incessant amounts only to refer the project to another writer. Very few offers would come from legitimate writers, since most of those who are legitimate already have their schedule full and don't generally go out and seek orders posted on forums such as this (although this is not always the case). In short, the client would end up in the hands of scammers, the very thing this forum is meant to fight against.


No, I can not say that legitimate writers are buddies. Sure, I have a few friends who also happen to work in this industry, but ultimately the only thing that matters is reliability and name. I know for a fact that any client I refer to the writers I have on my list will be served properly, and that is the only reason why I refer clients to them. All the better if it happens to be one of my buddies, but its not the defining factor.

Hillary is the most qualified to become president. But it's meaningless. Some scammers can actually write essay for free and then the students may get some traction in return. My neighbor recommended a lawn moving service, but they turned out to be scam. I'd be better off trying a random company or contractor that walks by. Any way, it was an interesting discussion, food for thought. Dinner time too :)

Again, after so many years in this industry, legit writers tend to know who is and is not legit. That's not an opinion, it's a fact. Just as it is a fact that Hillary is not the president, to use your failed comparison. It may be an opinion to you because you don't understand or want to understand how this business works, but I have seen so many clients crying over their failed education at the hands of scammers that I tend to err on the side of caution. My list of legitimate writers and companies is very, very short, and it will remain so whether you agree with it or not. Give it a couple of years, and you'll realize that what we're saying is the only viable option, just as I realized it after I got a few hundred orders under my belt.

@Kind_Writer
You don't even seem to be reading responses because you're just looking to instigate an argument and manufacturing ridiculous excuses to refer to someone you know nothing about as being "not too honest."


How do I define who is a legitimate service provider? By the fact, for one example, that it's someone whose requests I used to see regularly when we wrote for the same essay company and whose contributions to this forum I've read for years and whose work and comments from previous clients I've seen.


Obviously a writer who accepts a project outside of his abilities is dishonest. Did you not read or understand my prior post? I specifically said that "anybody to whom I'd ever refer any work is someone who would be equally honest about his confidence level with the project" and that obviously includes being honest about not being able to take a project outside his areas.

If you actually believe that posting a project publicly for random writers is safer than a referral from a writer someone already trusts and that makes sense to you, that's your business. I make no money from projects referred to others and have no reason for doing it other than to help a client out. It's strictly a courtesy for the client's benefit, not mine. It would be easier for me to just say "Sorry, I can't do it and can't help you find another writer."


Trust me that nobody here is asking you anything. FYI, I don't have any "buddies" who write for a living. Any other writer I know to be legit is someone I know only as a writer, either from when we were writing for the same company or from this forum.

Those who are full-time writers are not likely to share their customers or orders. This is how we make our living. For those who rely solely on academic writing work, it is seasonal. That means those writers have to be frugal during the busy seasons so there is sufficient income to live on during the slow seasons.

If I get too busy to handle the orders coming in (rare), I reach out to someone I already know and trust. I imagine the majority of members here concur.

Exactly.

People have to bear in mind this at all times. Serious full-time academic writers would evade disappointing their clients, especially because they rely heavily on returning clients at all times. It is critical to build trust along the way.

There is no sense in pretending. Everyone in the freelance writing community are, as Paris Hilton once put it, frenemies. They are superficially friends, but enemies when it comes to vested interests. The friendships are actually networks. Networks that ensure that a writer who does not have the background, capacity, or capability to write a specific order, manage to keep a hold of the order and make money from it. Even if only a percentage as part of an intricate referral system. That's not to say that such a set-up is bad. Since everyone involved benefits from it, there is nothing wrong with it.

However, asking a new member to to bow to senior members of the forum just because they got here first is incorrect. Respect begets respect. Nobody comes here looking for trouble. The so-called seniors are the ones who normally start picking on the newcomers who are just minding their own business.

In my opinion, it is best to simply ignore one another provided nobody steps into the territory of another writer by trying to poach his clients. Build your own market. The seniors already have a reliable list of regular clients. Simply ask the student if he already has contact with a writer at this forum and how long the professional relationship has been in place. Based on the length of time, a new writer may or may not decide to take on the student. This business is a free-market and the rules of the free market should apply to a certain degree.