How to Find a Freelance Financial Writer

Whether you’re looking for a writer for your trading platform, financial planning business, fintech startup or wealth management firm, finding a writer with actual finance knowledge can be difficult. These days, anyone can pose as an expert with plenty of surface level content available on YouTube, social media and on millions of slapped together blogs.

The fact is, this is fine if you’re looking for surface level content. If, however, you want a freelance writer who can provide actual genuine insight into the financial world, it’s not going to cut the mustard. Even more importantly, you need a writer who can draw parallels between the issues, problems and trends in the world of finance and the products and services that your business offers.

In this article, we’ll explain what to look for if you want to hire a great freelance financial writer.

Define What You Need

If you’re looking to hire a freelance writer, the first thing you need to do is get really clear on what you actually want them to do. This might seem obvious, but if you’ve not done it before it can be easy to skip over the details.

Say for example you want to hire someone to write articles or blog posts for your website. Are these so you can drive traffic from Google, or do you want shareable content that has the chance to go viral on social media? How long do you want the posts to be? Do you have pillar content you want the articles to link to? What is the call to action?

You might not know the answer to all these questions, and that's ok. A simple way to break it down is to think about what you are aiming to get people to do when they come to your site. This can start to unravel the question a bit, and it’s where a good freelance copywriter should be able to work with you to narrow down your needs even further.

Reach Out to Your Network

Marketing is the lifeblood of business, and getting it right is money very well spent. It’s a big industry, and you might be surprised how many people in your network can connect you to great copywriters. It can be a bit of a secret society, where clients sometimes don’t want to give up their best resources in case they get too busy! With that said, a word of mouth referral is one of the best ways to find a freelance writer.

This is the same with most industries, but it's particularly relevant if you’re looking for someone with specific experience or knowledge, like finance and investing. The best way to go about this is to leverage social media. The best social network for this kind of thing would be LinkedIn for most people, but if you work in certain sectors like tech, Twitter could also be a good idea.

A simple post asking your network to tag their recommendation for writers is all it takes. Often the people tagged will get in touch with you, and you’ll automatically have a list of potential candidates that’s been curated by people you are connected with.

Freelance Platforms

If you’ve not had any luck with your network, you can try the platforms that are specifically designed for hiring freelancers of all types. Upwork and Fiverr are the biggest and most well known, and they allow you to connect with freelance writers from all over the world.

Each platform works slightly differently, so it depends if you want to browse freelancers who are offering their services as packages (Fiverr), or if you want to put up your job and have freelance writers bid for it (Upwork).

It costs money to use these platforms, and the quality can be hit or miss, but you can definitely find high quality freelance writers on there. Be prepared to get a lot of crap applications from freelance writers who are very underqualified for the work, but there are also very highly qualified writers on there as well.

Advertise on a Job Board

Pretty self explanatory this one. Job boards aren’t just for permanent positions. You can definitely use them to advertise for a freelance writing job, particularly if this is going to be an ongoing contract. Make sure you specify clearly what you’re hiring the person for, to try and limit the number of unsuitable applications you get.

But be prepared, just like Upwork you are going to get a lot of unsuitable applications. A lot. Some will just spam you with CV’s, some will struggle to write the most basic cover letter (ironic for a writing job!) and some might be straight up weird. Within all of that though, you might find someone who is a great fit. You can try regular job platforms like Indeed, Monster or LinkedIn Jobs, or specific writing boards like ProBlogger.

Interview and Choose From Your Short List

So regardless of which method you’ve used, you should hopefully have a shortlist of writers to start speaking with. At this stage, it becomes really important to get an understanding of their background, technical knowledge and experience writing the kind of content you’re looking for.

They should have a portfolio or a website of some sort they can show you, to give you an idea of the quality of their work and their writing style. If it’s relevant, it can also be worth finding out their background outside of writing. If you’re looking for a financial freelance writer, things like finance or economics degrees or experience working in the finance industry can be a huge advantage in creating great writing for your business.

It’s also really important to look at other aspects of their personality and communication style, to make sure they are going to be great to work with. After all, there’s no point having the most experienced person in the world if they take forever to get back to you and are rude and difficult to get along with. Hopefully this will be the start of a successful partnership, and a positive relationship always yields better results.

Wrapping up

Of course, you could always save yourself the time and just hire us! If you want to discuss the type of writing you’re looking for and how we might be able to help, just get in touch. We’re happy to have a chat with you about what you’re looking for, and give you our thoughts on the best way to approach the content you want to create. If you want to cast the net wider, this article should have given you some great places to kick start your search.