A freelancer’s career path is rarely a straight line. Many people begin freelancing almost by mistake — maybe they were asked to write an article for a trade journal, or just placed a bid on an Elance project to make some extra money. Other freelancers get frustrated with their jobs and want to try something different. They end up loving the experience enough to stick with it.

If your career has been anything like mine, there’s a good chance you started out by focusing on a few niche projects where you felt you were something of an expert. But as time passes it’s easy to feel as if there’s a whole lot of lucrative projects on the market that you’re ignoring. Maybe you identify a demand for press release writing, but you’re not comfortable selling press releases. You need to learn more.

The best place to start is by researching online. Google the topic, and read all about it, especially the how-to articles. When you feel it’s time for meatier material, try stopping by the library or bookstore and getting into some books on the subject. Check out as many examples of effective press releases as you can, trying to figure out what made them work and what techniques are being used that you don’t yet use yourself.

After enough research and, of course, practice, you’ve got yourself a new service to offer clients, and more money at the end of the day.

Of course, this method works, but I think there is a better way. We’ve all heard the phrase “the best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else.” Why not apply that concept to our own careers? If you want to learn about press release writing, write an article or ebook on the subject. By doing this, your research has a well defined goal: publication. The writing and editing process will test your grasp of the concepts you learn; the details that you are unclear on demand to be defined. If you’re a good researcher you’ll discover things that many professionals in the field haven’t picked up on yet (that’s not to say reading is a substitute for experience). Turn your research and practice into someone else’s education, and you will gain a deeper understanding of the topic, and as a result, a greater mastery of the process.

Approaching learning this way provides several advantages:

1. A Deeper Understanding of the Subject Matter. The research you do will uncover the latest thinking and best practices in the field. You may suddenly find that you know more about the topic than many of the so-called experts out there, experts who have been following a tried and true method for several years without variation or innovation, while you are up to date on all of the latest research and methodologies.

2. Secondary Knowledge. While researching the topic, you might uncover a new resource or source for future article ideas. And when you distribute the completed document, you’ll likely learn about SEO, sales letters, and do-it-yourself publishing.

3. Tangible Evidence of Your Knowledge. When complete, you have a document that shows just how much you know about the topic. Do you know anything about press releases? Of course you do! You wrote the book on them.

4. Revenue Generation. You can use the evidence of your competency to generate income. You could distribute copies or clips of your article to sites around the web to generate traffic to your own website, or offer the ebook for sale. You can sell the article to a magazine, or perhaps the end result of all your research is so detailed that it becomes a book. Finally, you can simply post the article on your website as part of your portfolio. With the right keyword choices and some SEO, you could become one of the top ranked search results for that topic, driving potential customers to your door.

If you decide to try this method of learning, one note of caution: it’s easy to become caught up in theory, but you must make sure that the finished product is a detailed, practical guide. This is because, ultimately, the article you create will be the framework that you will apply to your own work. Avoid vagueness and theoretical discussions. Your goal is to learn to accomplish that which you are writing about.

Ryan Holota is a freelance writer and future author of “How To Understand Your Wife”, “How To Retire At 35”, and “How to Become A Feature Writer On Freelanceswitch.com”. His home on the web can be found here.