Buy business cards. There are lots of promotional items you can buy for yourself, but there is something about having personalized business cards which make you feel like more of a professional. You may not run into many occasions when you can actually whip out a business card and hand it to a prospective employer, but you really never know. In the beginning, your business cards are there to help you feel like more of a professional, and can serve as motivation. As a bonus, you'll have something to drop into those bowls at restaurants which are designed for businesspeople to put their business cards in to win a free lunch. If a free lunch is all that comes from your business cards, you're still ahead. Consider advertising. Depending on what kind of writing you do, you may be justified in purchasing some advertising. Companies and home-based business owners often look to hire freelance copywriters on a contractual basis to work on one or two projects, so you never know if having a nice ad in the local telephone directory will pay off. If you look in your local telephone directory you will probably notice that the listing of advertised writers is not too terribly long…not when compared to plumbers and computer repair shops anyhow, so you may be one of only a few listed writers available. There are plenty of other ways to advertise your services and you should take some time to look into them and see if they are worth your time and money. Sometimes it won't make much sense to spend the money for advertising. For example, if you want to write sonnets professionally then a full-page spread in the telephone directory probably won't result in enough work to pay for the advertising because there really aren't that many people combing through the telephone directory in search of composers of sonnets. If, on the other hand, you specialize in writing website content then you may actually get a few calls from people developing websites who are in need of original content.