It's great to have a formal prospecting system in place. But sometimes the best opportunities come to us through unconventional means.

In this episode of The High-Income Business Writing podcast you'll hear from Angus Stocking, a successful business writer who specializes in the infrastructure industry.

Angus has had great success landing good-paying writing clients using low-cost "guerilla-style" methods.

The notes that follow are a basic, unedited summary of our interview. You can listen to the show using the audio player below. And you can also subscribe to this podcast series in iTunes.

Over the past few years, LinkedIn has evolved into one of the most important social media platforms. The site boasts more than 225 million users as of this recording.

Even though much of the conversation about LinkedIn revolves around drumming up business leads or new jobs, there's an opportunity for business writers that's not often discussed: writing profiles for LinkedIn members.

Who in the world would pay a writer to write their profile? Turns out that many business professionals do! Not only do they pay handsome fees for this work, but it can also become a great way to build trust and land additional projects.

To learn more about this opportunity, I interviewed Victoria Ipri. Victoria started as a copywriter in 2006, and her business has evolved over the years into Ipri International, a Linkedin training consultancy providing telephone coaching and on-site group training.

What follows are some notes summarizing the information in this week's show. You can listen to the show using the audio player below. And you can also subscribe to this podcast series in iTunes.

One of the biggest factors that holds back new and aspiring freelance writers is the idea that they have to find their niche before they launch.

This "niche quest" tends to do more damage than good. It creates confusion, stalls progress and kills momentum.

Don't get me wrong. Having a niche or a specific target market is a good idea. But it's not a prerequisite for launching your commercial writing business.

In this episode I give you a simple framework and a series of questions to determine if you should define a niche ... how to find one that makes sense ... and what to do if you can't come up with anything viable.

Blog posts, articles, white papers, case studies, marketing collateral.

These are some of the most common pieces business writers come across. The bread-and-butter projects that pay the bills.

But occasionally you may come across a project that's so massive, it requires a different set of skills to execute. Your writing chops alone won't save you.

My friend and colleague Denise Kiernan knows this firsthand. Not only has she written dozens of books and large-format pieces, she recently finished the largest and most complex writing project of her career: The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II Touchstone/Simon & Shuster), now a New York Times bestseller.

(Side note: This week marks the 68th anniversary of the world's first atomic bomb attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.)

To tell this true story of the women who helped build the first atomic bomb, Denise spent years conducing intense research all across the U.S., doing live interviews, writing and rewriting. It was the kind of assignment that required flawless project management, excellent organization skills ... and unshakable faith in a story that had to be told.

I recently sat down with Denise to learn more about how she approached this massive project. She shared some excellent tips, insights and advice that apply to ANY writer facing a large-scale project.