Upselling: How to Add Revenue to Your Freelance Writing Work

So much of this season, we've been talking about pivots and finding ways to be creative when things are tricky with freelance writing, so it only makes sense for us to talk about upselling as well. Why? That's a way for you to either diversify your revenue stream or earn more as a freelance writer.  

If you've got the bandwidth to create some new resources or offer some new services, we're going to talk about this today. But so much of doing that and making it viable is knowing how to position it and how to sell it to clients. I think this is why we want to tackle this from the upselling perspective: if you've already got a client who's booking work with you, how do you maximize your possible revenue with them?

How can you increase the value of your services to your customers? Upselling is one way to do that. So, Emma, have you experimented with upselling the clients you already have? 

Yeah. When I think about upselling, it's really about add-ons or additional services you can offer that would be really valuable to a client, that are a natural extension of what you do.

So when it comes to case studies, one thing I've been offering and working on with clients is, well, two things come to mind. One is I helped a client who really wanted case studies but wasn't sure where his customers were or what they were thinking about the product, and didn't know where to start or who to ask for a case study. He was the founder of a relatively small business, and it didn't have a huge number of customers. Because of that, he didn’t have an objective view of their appetite for participating. 

I suggested running a survey for him. We sent out a survey to everybody, and we asked them all these questions. And from it, we might get some testimonials because we had sort of room for that baked into the survey. But we'll also have an understanding of who would be a good fit for a case study. 

We even had a box in the survey that said, “Yes, I would be willing to participate in a customer story.” So this founder was super excited about this. I sold him the survey consulting services. I built the survey for them. I helped him draft the template emails that he was going to send to all of the customers. Then, we analyzed the survey results together. I did a presentation on the results and my recommendations for the customers that we should ask to do case studies, and then we did.

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Another example is: I'm working with a client right now. They went through a round of layoffs, and they just don't have the same bandwidth that they did to do their whole case study program. And to be honest, even when they had more people, it was kind of a mess. They didn't have a good process. They weren't, and the sources for the material were kind of all over the place.

One thing that I have suggested to them is that I help them create a case study process. So, I talk to everybody on your team. We understand who is interacting with the customers. We build a spreadsheet or project management tool where all this customer information lives. 

I've done consulting around that, but not as much as what I've pitched them. Sometimes, we can think of an upsell as, like, is there a way, if somebody's not ready to work with you, that you can upsell them on something that makes them ready? Another example I've heard of people doing content audits as a lead-in offering.

And I think, again, relevant to this season, these are services beyond just the standard freelance writing approach of: I’m waiting for a brief. I'm gonna write the thing for you. It gives you an opportunity to be more strategic about providing something really valuable for them. 

So I'd like to switch this to you and hear a little bit about how you think about upselling and what add-ons you've offered.

A lot of my upselling has been validating the high rates that I already charge. So there are many things I build in that are a form of upselling, and these are things like post-publish, doing the outreach to sources, and letting them know, like, hey, this piece is live. If you wanna share it, here's the link. We appreciate your help chiming in for this, blah blah blah.

So it's a little bit of PR work in a way. It's helping with that piece, conducting interviews. I have had to add those on as an extra fee just because they can be tricky to schedule and can run long. So, conducting interviews with an internal subject matter expert has been a big one, especially for the software companies that I work with.

A lot of the time, they want me to write about something fairly technical associated with their product, and so I do need to get hands-on with someone who knows a lot about that specific piece of the puzzle. But then I've also heard of other freelancers having a lot of success offering packages around refreshing content. So, updating for SEO, taking those pieces and making them go from 2024 to 2025, and updating the content, making sure everything's relevant. No businesses that are references have gone out of business. So, a bit of fact checking in a way, but same thing for repackaging.

Another is taking podcasts and turning them into narrative-style blog posts. That was something I did for a while. I had to sunset it because the margins were so low, and again, it was a big ask for me with the selling piece. I didn't enjoy it, and it was further fracturing the work that I was already doing. I had to think and be really honest about if it was realistic for me to continue devoting energy to that, and it just wasn't.

There are other things here too. Things like brainstorming on pitches for people who are trying to get earned media. So that would be spotlights in places like publications or podcasts. A lot of people have PR agencies that they work with, but some smaller teams, they really just want somebody who knows what those audiences and demographics are looking for to kinda brainstorm with and, like, how do we write a good pitch, and what do you think of this pitch we have?

Content strategy is always a huge piece of the puzzle. Again, not one that I enjoy, but that's a huge upsell if you can develop the strategy and then execute the work.

One of the things that has come up over and over again is that sometimes, whether it's a PR agency who has a lot of really green new hires who don't exactly know how the pitching process works or how to write a good outreach email to a journalist that they've never worked with before, I've been hired a couple of times to do private training sessions for these new people and basically teach them the best practices of, like, how to write a strong pitch and what are the what's the etiquette of reaching out to a journalist and how many times should you follow-up and just kind of navigating the ins and outs for the people who are new at this. 

And I think that that's something that's really interesting for freelance writers to think about because if there is something that they if there's an external skill set that the people at the company that's hiring you really could benefit from, I think that's a super easy upsell of, like, here's what I'm already doing. Here's what I already know. If you'd like me to teach this to your marketing department or your customer support team, Here's what I can offer, a one hour training where I'll walk you through x, y, and z.

Here's why you need this. You know, make it a very easy to understand type of proposition, and I found pretty good success with that. So it's in a way, you're being an influencer, but with your existing clients, you don't have to use social media to promote it to the world or to your newsletter list.

They want me to come in and teach that either in person or over Zoom over three weeks. So, the education piece has been a nice little extra burst of income for me, which has been great. 

You have to put on your journalism hat in a way and think about what I can do that would enrich what I'm already doing and would be really helpful to my clients. And sometimes you're not gonna know the answers to those questions until you ask and say, like, hey. Is there anything I can do to offload from your internal team that would make life easier? Is there anything you're struggling with that I could assist with? Be proactive and ask those questions. And a lot of the time, people will come back and say, oh my god. We need so much help with SEO work or updating old content. 

It would be so great if we could give you a batch of 10 a month, and you could go through and do those. So often, the answer is is right there. They're so ready to tell you what the thing is. 

Be well resourced. Be able to solve problems. That's so much of what we talked about on this podcast is be resourceful and be willing to proactively address problems and points of friction that your clients have. That's a really good way for you to get a super strong reputation as a freelance writer and to earn more money.