If you are competing in the freelance market, you will need to know the basics of a professional project proposal. No matter where you find yourself, you have to carry your business presentation in a very high manner. You cannot afford to drop your professionalism just because everyone else around you is wasting their efforts.

GetAFreelancer.com

For instance, I view GetAFreelancer.com as a site where you get to cut your teeth in the professional freelance market. There aren’t that many “Professional” writers bidding for projects and you get to see how terrible amateurs write their proposals. But, GetAFreelancer.com is where you can learn the building blocks and build your resume.

You’ll see plenty of jobs that require one hundred articles a day that are completely error free and can pass copyscape.com. They pay about a dollar fifty an article and they won’t pay at all if you don’t meet the deadline. But, there are also some pretty decent writing jobs where you can work with great clients and build your resume with legitimate work. Then, you’ll be ready for a step higher.

Guru.com

Guru.com is a site where you have to know what you are doing. You won’t get awarded a project unless you really impress the potential client and that means several things. You have to write your proposal error free. You have to be very expressive and explosive with your words. Plus, you have to price yourself exactly right. A potential client doesn’t mind paying a higher price if you are worth it. But if you are a great writer and you underbid others, then you will be getting most jobs.

You’ll find screenplay and novel projects. Sometimes, you’ll be required to travel and all expenses will be paid if you negotiate properly. I’ve been on trips to San Francisco, California USA and I’ve written books for therapeutic clinics in New Jersey USA. At this time, I have a proposal submitted for a book deal that would take me to Beijing, China. Now, that’s worth putting my best foot forward to get.

The Mark of Excellence

Once you’ve built your resume rather impressively and made a few key contacts, then you’re stepping into another level entirely. The kind of ghostwriting experiences where you get calls from the representatives of presidents, CEOs and retired athletes. They don’t have time to write their own books and don’t really care to engage themselves into that kind of activity, but they want a book with their name on it and you were the one they chose. I’m still working on getting there.

If you think about it, you’ve just been given several good examples why your proposals should always be professional. First of all, even when you are submitting a project proposal to a potential client who simply wants a brochure, you have no idea where that relationship can lead. If you do a great job, you might get ongoing work. You might also get referrals from that one client. Of course, one day you might get a call from the right-hand man of a business mogul based out of Tokyo who heard of you.

So, let’s cover what it takes to put a professional project proposal together! We’ll see you next post.

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I once sat in agony as I read through a pile of project proposals. I was looking for my competition because I wanted the project that bad. I was willing to look for the one or two people I was going to have to beat to get it. When I found them, I was going to write my proposal so that it out-shined the others in all ways.

The humor of it all is that those proposals I was reading through didn’t reflect on me at all. They reflected on the other people who were trying to get my project. I should have been grateful that they were awful. But, I was still in agony because of what I was reading.

These are no lie, no punches pulled examples of the proposals I fished through:

“lets talk in detail.company profile attached.”

No, I’m not kidding. This proposal took all of five seconds to write…errors included. The first letter isn’t capitalized. A space doesn’t exist between the first and second sentence. And that just gets me started.

This project was for a bid of about two thousand to three thousand dollars for a month worth of work. If it were a five dollar job, I could understand. But even then, if you want the job put your back into it.

Doing a project proposal is about providing a potential client with enough information to make a decision about you. If I can’t get more than two sentences out of you in your proposal and then they have errors in them on top of it all, you’ve made your statement loud and clear. I don’t want you to do my work.

Another example:

“i can do it plz check ur pmb You can expect professional work from me”

One of my other blog posts actually addresses the issue found here. In addition to the issues raised in the previous example, this proposal confuses formal from informal online dialog. A chat room or a friendly instant message can have “i,” “plz,” and “ur” in it. That’s not a problem because your audience expects you to get with the program, use slang and save yourself time.

But, a potential client doesn’t want to see that you get confused between informal and formal communication. Using informal expressions in your project proposal makes the statement that such errors will also be found in the document they want you to write.

So, how do you put together a professional proposal? Well, let’s go ahead and take a look at that in my next post. We’ll start by showing you why it’s important to write professional proposals.

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See how I did that? Drew you right into my conversation didn’t I? That’s one way you begin a conversation with your intended audience.

No, I’m not giving away confidential secrets of the government. I’m not about ready to divulge the ancient secrets of a sacred society that lives among us as quiet and beneficial members. I don’t want to let you know the meaning of life just yet. It is merely a suggestion for the way you communicate a message to your intended audience. But nonetheless, I drew you into my conversation when I wrapped up Part I of Beginning a Conversation with Your Intended Audience published December 5, 2007.

When you read that blog entry published earlier, you instantly thought, “Shucks, I have to wait to get the beat.” You may not have said it quite that way, but I’m paraphrasing your thoughts for you. Yes, you resumed with the rest of your day. You haven’t been sitting still waiting patiently for Part II. It didn’t ruin your day or anything like that at all. But, it did make you curious.

You returned today to get the secret. And even though I told you that I have no secret to tell you, it still subconsciously nagged at you because it aroused your curiosity. If there’s no secret, then you want to know what is it that you haven’t learned yet or may have forgotten a long time ago. And if you haven’t been paying attention, you missed it once again.

When you stir up someone’s curiosity, you draw them into your conversation. You know something your readers don’t. Even if they do know what you are about to tell them, you know the answer to the question and the answer is nagging at them. That implies that you raised a question.

Raising a question is definitely a great way to begin a conversation. But, and this brings you back to a very important point I made in Part I, you have to know your intended audience. You have to be able to strike a chord with them. You have to raise a concern that would get them interested in what you have to say.

If your intended audience is an artist, then raise a question that would really get the attention of artists. But, keep it real! An artist will not join the conversation if you raise a question about something base and unchallenging. Some questions just don’t stir enough interest. But if you can tap into the heartbeat of the artist community, you can turn a question into a group activity.

In order to really raise a good question, stir up some controversy. The artistic world is full of controversy, so that’s a bit easy. But if you want to communicate a message in a rather non-controversial field, you have to create the controversy for yourself. So, are you making things up for yourself? Not really.

What you are doing is looking at the issues, finding an angle and giving your readers something to really chew on so that they get your message entirely. In fact, this is so easy that I don’t think there is a field in which someone wants to write that they can’t find some controversial topic.

Let’s give this theory a try! Let me give you some examples to start. In the field of carpentry, is there a best hammer? Could that issue raise some controversy? In the field of bubble gum, is there any that won’t rot your teeth? Could that issue raise some controversy?

Task: Find the most boring or non-controversial topic and explore any angle that can raise controversy. In other words, you are trying to find a field that has no controversy whatsoever. I’m sure someone if not I will come up with a controversial topic in any field.

Method: Blog comments.

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Try to begin a conversation with your intended audience. This isn’t a trick. It’s a way of thinking. When you write, you are intending to communicate a message to someone. But, some writers either forget that basic premise or they just never knew it in the first place.

A beginning writer or one who will never be any good forgets about the audience. Sometimes, they don’t even have an intended message. When writing’s sole purpose is to communicate a message to a certain audience, it astounds me that those two things can slip from a writer’s mind while… “writing.” But, it happens.

A great writer or one who intends to get better at it will actually consider audience and message first. Yes, the message is obviously most important. But, considering the audience offers the guidelines you will need in order to write effectively. The intended audience can be teenagers, women, minorities, the middle class, the rich or any other category you can imagine.

If you read any magazine, you will easily figure out who the intended audience is supposed to be. Without trying to offend anyone, here are a few examples. People is basically for homebodies who like gossip, Time is for the socially aware in about the mid-age range, YM is obviously for young girls (it is right in the name) and Cosmopolitan is for women. Notice how I mentioned who the intended audience is “supposed” to be? Anyone can read Cosmo, but it’s going to be written for the female population.

When you write, think of yourself as someone who is pulling an audience to you and attempting to tell them something very important. Yes, there are writers who write only for the purpose of hearing themselves talk basically. But, think of yourself as an authority on something. You are an authority on the message you intend to communicate.

No, that doesn’t make you the smartest person in the world. Being the “authority” doesn’t have to be some burdensome, all-empowering position. You have a message and that in itself is enough to give you some authority. You have some insight on a topic. You know how to do something. Your message could be as simple as how to bake a pie, but you are the expert at the moment and your purpose is to inform your readers your best practices in baking a pie.

What brings your writing to life is if you can engage your audience and this is where you begin a conversation with your readers. This isn’t a trick, I said it before. But, it is important. It’s a set of techniques. It’s not a secret or it’s not intended to be a secret, but the fact is that many writers don’t know how to engage an audience and draw them into your conversation.

Now that I have your attention…now that I have you expecting to learn a secret…this is to be continued…

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A feature is something identifiable with a product or service e.g. the new Mondeo has alloy wheels as standard; KPMG provides international tax consultancy services; ERH is a man. Alloy wheels, international tax consultancy and man are all features.

By themselves they mean absolutely sod all!

Benefits are the result of product/service features applied to a potential buyer to solve a problem or satisfy a need they have.

So:

“The new Mondeo has alloy wheels as standard which means that you get a great, racy looking car without the additional cost for optional extras. “

The benefit here is two-fold: a “great, racy looking car” and no “additional cost”.

Hang on a minute!

“I hate alloy wheels and I don’t want a car that says “I’m a boy racer!” - these aren’t benefits!”

You must remember that to be classified as a benefit, the feature must be applied to solve a problem or satisfy a need of the actual customer.

What has this got to do with writing?

Writing persuasively requires you to know your reader and assess what makes them tick. Writing is a distant communication medium; we can be distant geographically or in time so we have no opportunity to develop any empathy as a result of face-to-face connection with our readers. Developing empathy is crucial to delivering persuasive content and commissions so taking the time with your research to understand the potential market/readership will allow you to start making some objective, educated guesses as to what features are likely to be of benefit to them en masse.

KPMG was, maybe still is, a world leading provider of accountancy services and I would expect anyone looking for their services to be the type of business person who reads the Economist or the Financial Times. Simply put, they will be rich, looking to make more money or employed in a decision making capacity by a company that is rich and looking to save and make money.

So:

“KPMG provides a global tax consultancy service which means that you can access state of the art tax saving vehicles developed by our experienced team to protect your bottom line and reduce your global tax burden.”

Now tell me - would Sir Alan Sugar be interested in saving tax and protecting his company profits?

or

Do you think Sir Alan Sugar is interested just for the sake of it that KPMG has a tax practice?

Always sell the benefits!

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