In terms of income and advancing my career, 2007 was quite good to me. Of course, there is always room for improvement. Even though my freelance writing income was solid and steady for all 12 months of this year, I am hoping to take things to the next level in 2008. I plan on doing this in three ways:
1. Although I am happy with the progression of freelance writing career, I want to turn things up a bit. I plan on doing this by sending out at least 3-5 query letters per week. To go along with, I am also going to contact several businesses every week to attempt to sell my services. Simply put, the more contacts I make the more income I will earn.
2. I love writing, but am also interested in breaking into other areas of business as well. To get this started, I will be doing business under a new name effective January 1, 2008. I decided to start my own company as a way of expanding my offerings, and of course to keep things legal and safe.
3. Forming partnerships is a great way to increase business. I have done this extensively during the past few months of 2007, and plan on continuing this well into next year. By setting up partnerships I will be able to obtain new work without always having to do all of the marketing on my own.
At this time, there is nothing I would change about my freelance writing career. But with that being said, I want to expand into other ventures, increase my monthly income, and begin to move my new business forward.
What goals have you set for 2008? If you have yet to do this, get started right away. In my opinion, having goals will help you to stay on track from day one the new year!
Over the past few weeks I have been asked several times why I never moved forward with making my “new design†live. While I have mentioned a few of the issues in past posts, I wanted to get into more depth as to help everybody else avoid the problems that I had to deal with.
First things first, let’s take a close look at why I decided to keep the current design for the time being.
1. The new design was not compatible with Internet Explorer. Although a lot of people are switching to Firefox, this is not the case across the board. Obviously, if you cannot view the blog properly with IE, it is a huge problem.
2. The search button and RSS button were not working as they should. While this is probably a simple fix, for somebody like myself with no technical skills, it would have taken quite some time.
3. Perhaps most importantly, it was not widget compatible. During my initial consultation with the designer this was the detail that I stressed the most. For me, it is essential to be able to drag widgets and quickly add information to the sidebar when necessary.
Why didn’t you tell your designer what you needed? Well, this exactly what I did after noticing the problems the day that I made the site live. The designer was accommodating at first, and even left a comment on a post stating:
“we’re the designers for Chris’ new website design and we’re working on the new design edits for IE issues. We’ll have them all complete tomorrow afternoon/evening.â€
Thinking that everything would be fixed within a day at the most, I was not worried. Well, after a week or so of no contact, it was obvious that the designer decided to move on without taking care of the changes. Even when I would hear from him stating that the problems would get fixed, there would be several days of nothing to follow.
In my opinion, I made two mistakes during the hiring of this designer:
1. I paid for the entire job upfront. This was understandable because as a freelancer, I know that getting payment upfront is a good idea with new clients. But with that being said, sending 50 percent would have been a better idea.
2. I never asked for past work samples or references. Simply put, this is a huge mistake. When a new client approaches me they always ask for samples, and I am more than happy to provide them. This way, they can get an idea of my style and expertise. It is amazing that I didn’t do this, but sometimes a lapse in judgment occurs even when you are trying to avoid mistakes.
So what next? For now, I am going to stick with the current design. It may be one that others are using, but at the same time the blog is growing steadily. Last month was my biggest in terms of traffic and income, and RSS readership is nearing 100. With that being said, at the start of the new year I will be paying for a new design once again. The next time around I will follow my own advice so that I do not end up spending money with nothing to show for it!
I have received several emails and comments regarding my recent post, Three Quick Tips for Aspiring Online Content Writers. Many people seem to agree with every point that I touched on, whereas others are picking on this sentence: “In fact, with my first online content job I was paid $1 per 500 words; that is just about as bad as it gets. Over time this changed, but starting at the bottom is part of the process.â€
I wanted to clarify my stance on that point. First off, I can understand why some people would not want to work for low rates. When I started out, it was quite disappointing that my first job paid so low. But with that being said, I still believe that there is nothing wrong with this if you are simply trying to gain some experience. Even though that job was one of the worst I ever had, it also taught me the most about the freelance writing industry. And that is something that I would not trade in for anything else.
The experience of working for low pay and learning how to move up the ladder was essential to my current success. Does this mean that you should work for pennies if you do not have to? Absolutely not. But the bottom line is that some aspiring writers give up prematurely on their career because they think that it is wrong to work for lower rates. If I would have followed that advice, I would have never boosted my freelance writing income to such a high level.
Those who are against writing for low rates have an excellent point; it is simply one that I do not agree with. I am positive that every beginning freelance writer would love to write for local newspapers and publications. But the post that I made was geared more towards those who want to get involved with online writing.
My advice is quite simple: start your freelance writing career getting paid as much as you can, but make sure that you start. The biggest mistake that you could make would be to hold out month after month hoping for higher rates. By getting involved with the freelance writing industry, no matter the pay, you will find that moving forward is much easier.Â
