In the past a month, I spent much time in developing the field of writing projects on Elance. It means that we must face a wide range of projects content when getting on with writing, as well as a big challenge. But I believe it will be a new area where CCJK could penetrate and obtain lots of benefits. I just would like to share a few experiences and a case towards writing projects I’ve got in tough so far.
Generally, there are more than 20 kinds of writing projects we usually meet, including copywriting, sales writing, newsletters, content writing, article writing, technical writing, ghost writing, creative writing, etc. Not only would clients’ needs contain many distinctive writing types, but also cover many different subjects.
Therefore, the requirement to our resources is very high, such as variety and writing level. Most of individual writers are only competent to one or several types of writing. As a company, we must establish and expand our strong writing talent pool to cope with every kind of writing projects.
Which is different with translation, the main workload of writing projects would focus on the stage before a project starts formally. Because the variation on the writing job is so large, many clients prefer to make a very clear communication with the actual writers, as well as get to know the ideas from us detailedly at the earlier stage rather than just put down the project to us and receive it later.
As we know, it is almost impossible to permit clients to get in touch with our resources. Thus, we not only must undertake the connection between clients and resources, but also before finding the related resource, we have already confronted clients’ trail in order to make them believe we are qualified. Commonly, we are very limited towards those contents of trail.
It is reasonable that clients want to make things clear and get more confidences before handing us over the job. So mostly, it would be a long time to communicate with clients before the project really starts. We have to contribute the time and cost of test. What about the risk? I bet you know that, the possibility of failing to obtain the project.
Here is an example I met:
Project: Copywriting for a student accommodation of UK.
Job description: Look for a copywriter to create high-quality content for her website.
Writer’s responsibility:
- Develop content themes based on the direction and creative brief provided by our team
- Write creative copy including headlines, tag lines, positioning statements and feature copy for articles, web content, emails, training materials, direct marketing materials and more
- Ad-hoc writing projects as they arise
Writer’s qualification:
- Previous experience in creative writing, literature, journalism, or copywriting
- Excellent writing, grammar, spelling and formatting
- Expertise in web copy, SEO, and online (email) marketing a plus
- An exceptional portfolio that demonstrates an ability to create compelling copy for a wide variety of brands, audiences and industries
At the first time I talked to this client, I tried to understand the actual direction and brief they have and the style of a copywriting they want so that I can target a related resource to implement the job.
During the communication, the client always would like to test our level of profession and qualification about copywriting. That is a big challenge to our adjustment to changing circumstances. Further, this client requires us to come up with some effective ideas for developing their student accommodation business immediately.
We could be awareness of that the client might give up us if we make any wrong in the answer. Obviously, we were not the only one candidates they have. Fortunately, the client was satisfied with my idea at that time.
In the later several days, we found a writer and sent him the information about the project and what the client wanted. The writers gave us three drafts finally and I passed them to the client. After all, writing is a very creative stuff, and everyone has different thoughts in minds. The client still had some different views with the drafts. Apparently, a long negotiation is still proceeding.
Conclusively, the potential of writing field will be not less than translation. Developing and implementing writing projects increasingly will be an important and profitable task to CCJK in the next few years.
Certainly, the way will be full of difficulties and challenges. To grow the new business, establishing a specialized writing project team and a strong writing talent pool is quite necessary, as well as our confidences and persistence.