Before we get into intense marketing, let’s do a bit of housekeeping. If you want new-to-you editors to hire you, you need to impress them with your previous work. If you want to impress them with your previous work, you need to showcase it.

This works in two ways: online and offline.

Your online portfolio can be as complicated or as simple as you want it to be. If you have hundreds of clips, you could simply create a website, divide it into sections—fitness, technology, women’s issues, whatever—and showcase those clips on each of those sections. You could also simply put all of them together, like I have done on my own site. Whenever something new is published, you put it on your main page. This works better once you have big-name clients though, but don’t discount the potential of posting your highest quality work in smaller publications.

Some things to note:

1. Put your best work on top, even if it’s relatively old (no older than six months to a year though). Highlight your biggest publications, your specialties. Those are the things you want a hiring editor to see first.

2. Be professional. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a sense of humor or a little fun. It’s your website. Get creative with it.

3. Don’t post pictures of your cat or your wedding or your kids. Unless you’re doing so in a professional capacity. You can certainly do that on your blog though.

4. Make it easy to navigate. Don’t make an editor search too hard.

For an offline portfolio, I use a simple binder. I put my clips in plastic sheets, file them in the binder and that’s it. No need to be fancy. I used to get my work laminated, but find that’s just over-doing it. If you keep it simple, the focus is on your work, not the packaging.

Get your portfolio in order over the weekend. Next week, we’ll get our marketing efforts into gear.