4 Places to Publish to Quickly Build Your Online Writing Portfolio
In my role as an editor, I often work with writers who are just starting to build their online portfolio. Often times, these individuals have a personal blog (but some don’t). And most of them have goals of writing for larger publications and being paid for their work (always a good thing).
These novice writers often ask the same question:
How do I even begin to pitch myself to big publications and editors if I don’t have anything published online?
This is a great question and, often times, is one that keeps writers from making those initial pitches. Luckily for writers today, there are several places where you can start publishing right away, without even having to pitch story ideas.
Why is this good? Because it allows you – as a new writer – to build an online portfolio, which you can then use when you’re ready to pitch original content to editors of larger publications.
If you’re new and want to get pieces published quickly and establish a portfolio, here are four great places to start.
BlogHer – This online community shares authentic content and strives to build conversations for parents and writers. What’s great about BlogHer is its audience is huge, and they allow writers to set up a blog directly on the site where you can publish original or previously published content from your own blog. Setting up a profile is easy, and then you simply chose what to publish and the articles are fed into the appropriate content areas.
Red Tricycle Spoke – Red Tricycle reaches 8 million parents every month across email, web and social platforms. The Spoke Contributor Network is a platform that shines a light on its community’s unique parenting stories and perspectives. You do not need to pitch story ideas. Simply sign up as a contributor and then submit content. Many contributor articles are also promoted on Red Tricycle social media channels as well. If you want to write in the parenting space, this is a great site to publish original and previously published content, and gain visibility.
Medium – Many writers chose to set up a blog on Medium and begin publishing immediately. You can also republish your original work on Medium to gain more visibility from the site’s thousands of readers. One of the advantages of Medium is it’s a great home for nearly any type of content. Where you’ll find more female and parenting heavy posts on BlogHer or Red Tricycle, Medium’s content ranges from current events to writing tip to pop culture. Content lives on your Medium profile page, and you’re able to see statistics about how many reads and what links within your posts are clicked.
LinkedIn Pulse – This is the publishing arm of LinkedIn, which provides much of content you see on LinkedIn’s homepage feed. Publishing blog posts on LinkedIn is great because the social network helps do the promotion for you. For example, I published a blog post on LinkedIn entitled “How Writing, Pitching and Publishing Will Grow Your Business.” Once the post was published, LinkedIn added it to its homepage content and it was then shown to everyone I am connected with on the site. It’s also now part of LinkedIn’s powerful SEO capabilities (meaning if people search the Internet for that topic, being on LinkedIn will bump it up to the top of the search results). The article may also appear in an email newsletter that includes content in your subject area. All your posts live on your profile page as well.
Starting an online portfolio is a must for today’s writer. Start building your portfolio today by publishing on any of these websites that welcome your creative content.
