I Did One Of Those Things A Freelance Writer Should Never Have Done
Author: Marsha Maung
Written the wrong article. And with a looming deadline too. Nothing could be worse. Things are bad. This could be the end of everything. I am going to have to burn a few midnight oils for this mistake.
Nah. Don’t have to. You see, here I am writing this article for myself after all. Want to know how it was done? Repurposing the article, of course! This is a learned art that one can only make use of through experience. You know, come to think of it, even if you don’t have the experience of writing tons and tons of articles every day, you can do it if you put your mind to it because it is nothing miraculous. You don’t need to know Karate to know how to whack this out.
Here’s what repurposing an article mean. It means saving the article from going completely into the waste bin, that’s what. As mentioned, I wrote the wrong article…two, in fact (yes, yes, as stupid as it sounds) and I need to save both. Here’s what needs to be done. I need to either find a new twist to it and fit it into a new genre or save some, lose some, add more. You know what you have written in your article, so you are in the best position to decide what stays so, give the article a quick scan and see what you can save from the whole thing and still present it to your client without having to rewrite the entire piece.
Admittedly, you probably can’t keep everything in there if it is a completely different topic altogether, so, you compile the information you need to ‘thrash’ and save it for later use. You can expand that into another article for another client later on. Then scan the web for new information that you can insert to ‘fill in the blanks’ for the current article. Find them and write them.
Most of the time, we write multiple articles for the same client so you must have written a fair amount in the past for this client. Re-use the previous information for this article and write it in a new way.
Switch on your torch lights and look inside your head to see if you have further information that you can INSTANTLY add from a previous article that you have written for another client too If you have it, add a few words in there. One of the biggest tool for a freelance writer is to know how to find multiple angles to write about the same thing. If you’re writing about wine bar, can you write it from a kid’s point of view (not the kids drinking but the how to make wine bars kid-friendly)? Can you write it from the wine maker’s point of view? Can you write it from a collector’s point of view? There are so many ways to write on one topic.
This, fellow writers, is called repurposing (I call it rescuing for very obvious reasons – for me, at least) the article so that you can maximize your income writing on the same topic. For some of us, it comes in handy when we stupidly write the wrong topic for the wrong client looking at the wrong deadline.
If you have anything to add to this, please comment. I am sure I could use another few tricks up my sleeves. We, freelance writers, are a pretty friendly bunch of people, aren’t we?
