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I wanted to get some financial writing clients a few years ago, but didn’t have any financial clips. I sent out email after email, but kept hearing crickets. Then one day I was updating my resume and I realized that I actually had financial writing experience, but it was in the form of a full-time job as a technical writer for a well-known accounting firm. I felt like an idiot. I quickly revamped my letter of introduction to highlight my experience writing about financial topics for four years at a full-time job and quickly began receiving assignments for financial writing.

I learned two lessons that day. 1. With content marketing writing, it is essential to highlight your experience in the industry. 2. Think about all of the different ways that you have gained expertise on a topic, such as hobbies and past jobs, and not just think about topics you have written about.

Many writers do the same thing and think only in terms of topics that they have written about and forget to consider knowledge obtained at a full-time job. In my experience, brands are willing to hire people who worked in their industry as content marketing writers, even if they don’t have the specific clips on the topic. Yes, it is much easier to land the jobs with the experience AND the clips, but if you can land just one job in the niche then the clips will follow.

My challenge to you today is to take 10 minutes and do the following:

1. Pull out your resume. Look carefully at each job and consider what experience you learned that could be translated to a niche. Did you work as a customer support representative at a software company? Maybe you were a paralegal for 10 years before going to journalism school? Or perhaps you owned a business or worked as a manager at a fast food restaurant? All of these experiences taught you knowledge that you can translate into a niche and use to land content marketing writing jobs.
2. Think about the jobs that you didn’t put on your resume. Did you work part-time in an insurance office during college? Or worked retail throughout high school and college? Although these jobs may not hold as much weight as a professional position with potential clients, they can still be used to position your expertise.
3. Determine which of these jobs can translate into a marketing niche. The next step is to write a targeted Letter of Introduction highlighting your employment in the field and then identify potential clients in the industry.

Have you used expertise gained in full-time employment to land content marketing jobs? Share any strategies that have worked will for you below in the comments.