Showing my monthly income totals has brought many questions from readers. After all, there are many people out there who hope to succeed in the world of freelance writing; and I don’t blame them. This is a great way to make a solid income from the comfort of your own home.
Of course, a lot of the emails I receive are alike. In other words, readers seem to want to know the same things about my freelance writing career.
Here are three of the most common questions that I am asked on a regular basis.
1. How did you decide to get started with a career in freelance writing?
This is a tough question to say the least. I had been working in sales and marketing for a couple of years, and pretty much got tired of making money for the company. After saving up a few months worth of living expenses, I finally decided to take the plunge. Remember, it is going to be scary moving from a steady paycheck to an unsure situation. But the reward that follows the risk can be huge!
2. What are some of the biggest mistakes you made early in your career?
For me, there are two things that come to mind. First off, I burnt myself out trying to work too many hours a day. Yes, you need to work hard in order to get your freelance writing career up and running, but you have to draw the line somewhere. I was working 14 hour days without any breaks most of the time. In time, this led to complete and total burn out.
The second mistake that comes to mind was not following up with clients after the first project. I was of the thinking that if a client needed more work they would ask. While this was true in some cases, I am sure that I missed out on some jobs because I did not follow up in a timely manner.
3. How long did it take you to start making big money?
I earned $52 my first month as a full-time freelance writer. As you can imagine, this was a bit scary. But from there, things started to pick up. The next month I made over $800, and by month three I had eclipsed $2,000. Shortly thereafter I was earning a consistent $3,000 income, which was more than enough to cover my bills at the time. From there, I worked hard to increase my income until it reached at least $4,500 per month. For me, this is a solid income, and one that allows me to live comfortably. Of course, there are those big months when I take home close to $10,000; those are the months that I live for!
If you have any other questions, feel free to leave a comment or send an email.
Even though it is nice to have repeat visitors, gaining search engine traffic is really the only way to increase overall performance. Not only can search engines help to increase traffic, but when this happens, you will also begin to see an increase in earnings. The question is: how do you increase search engine traffic?
For me, this is not an easy question to answer. I do not know much about search engine optimization, or what the engines are looking for. But by reading other blogs and forums, I have picked up some basic knowledge here and there.
Finally, this month I am starting to see an increase in the amount of traffic that is being sent to this blog from the different search engines. Just as I was getting frustrated with finding a way to increase my visitors, the search engines decided to do much of the work for me.
Unfortunately, I have no idea how I did this? I assume I am starting to get more organic traffic because this blog is growing, inbound links are increasing, and the quality of the content is above average. Outside of that, I have not made any changes that would positively affect the traffic that I receive from search engines.
I am at the point where writing good content is my main concern. In my opinion, if I keep this up, I am sure to see an increase in readership as the months go by. For now, I am glad to see my organic traffic on the rise. I can only hope that this trend will continue as I add more and more content.Â
Running a one man show of any type means that you have to wear more than one hat. As a freelance writer, my main job is to write pretty much whatever my clients want; and I really love this part of the job. But of course, another hat that I have to wear is that of a collection agency. After all, there is no point in doing work if I am not going to get paid for it. Sure, I love writing, but I need to pay the bills as well.
Collecting freelance writing payments is sometimes easy and sometimes difficult. For instance, the majority of my clients are great about either paying me at the same time each month, or whenever I send them an invoice. But for all the good freelance writing clients, there are those that slack off in this area. I will send them an invoice, and two weeks later the money is still waiting to be collected.
Here are three tips that I follow when collecting payments from clients who like to slack off.
1. Always send an invoice when you send the completed work. This will not only show that the job is done, but hopefully, it will also remind the client that they need to send your money. Your invoice does not have to be complex. I include my contact information and the clients, as well as details on the job and how much money is due. Once you have a sample invoice to use, it will only take you a few minutes to fill in the appropriate fields with the updated information.
2. I usually give a client five business days before I remind them about paying the invoice. Of course, this is based largely on my past experiences with the client. If it is a business client, many of them only cut checks at the first of the month. In a situation like this I simply wait seven to ten days into the month before checking in.
3. Unfortunately, there are going to be clients who never want to pay. The first client that I ever had still owes me $500! Once I began to make more money I told them that I was moving on, but would be glad to complete the current project. Of course, I sent the final work and that was the last I heard from them. The moral of this story is that you should not let one bad seed spoil all your clients. There are some people who are into scamming others. Sure, it is nice to avoid them, but this is not always possible. If you get scammed, figure out what you could have done differently, and then use this information as you move on.
Collecting freelance writing payments can be a pain in the neck. But when the money starts to roll in, it is always nice to watch it add up!  Â
