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10 Mistakes That Will Completely Blow Your Freelance Career

October 10, 2017 By FiveFigureSarah

Are you shaking in your ankle boots about starting a freelance writing business?

You’re right to be afraid.

As good as it can be (and I’ve found it to be very good), freelance writing can go badly quickly and for a lot of different reasons. But in my personal experience and my research about freelance writers, I’ve come to find that what most people are afraid of — getting paid — is not what usually sinks the ship. Successful freelancing is made up of tiny wins and tiny mistakes that collectively make your business blow or grow.

Before you make these mistakes yourself, let me save you a few minutes (and a few tears and a few thousand dollars). Here are the top 10 mistakes that will stop your freelance career before it starts:

1. Trying to work every day

Blow: Much like freelance income comes in seasons throughout the year, writing comes in seasons throughout the week, not throughout the day. If you try to finish your deadlines the day they’re due, you’re going to end up sitting at your desk frustrated and blocked.

Grow: Try to finish deadlines 2-3 days in advance. Leave enough room in your week that you can have a bum day or two where the writing doesn’t flow and still come out on top.

(Pro tip: this is also how sick days and vacations work as a freelancer).

2. Not delivering on a deadline

Blow: If you’re flippant about due dates, you won’t be successful as a freelancer. Even if you’re working with the most chill customer in the world, eventually your lack of punctuality and reliability will translate into a lack of income.

Grow: When it comes to deadlines, give them and meet them always. If you ever won’t meet a deadline, communicate it days in advance. If you ever don’t meet a deadline, apologize profusely and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Be a stickler for deadlines. Even if you’re working with the most chill customer in the world, eventually your lack of punctuality and reliability will translate into a lack of income.

3. Getting on the phone with anyone who asks

Blow: I wince when I see someone offer a free 15-minute consultation with whoever wants one. Don’t you respect your time? Don’t you have things to do? If you give away your time like that, you won’t have enough time or mental energy for paying work.

Grow: Before you get on the phone with a.n.y.b.o.d.y. ask them what they want and what kind of budget they have. You don’t have to be rude or awkward, just hit them back with something like, “I’d love to chat! To make sure there’s a good fit here, I’d love to hear more about the project and what kind of budget you’ve set aside for it. If it makes sense to meet, we can schedule a call for early next week!”

Not only does this protect your time, but it also positions you as a professional in high demand.

4. Hiding from the phone

Blow: My favorite way to make money is to get an assignment by email, nail it, and send my invoice. What’s not to love, right? But the reality is that phone-only freelancing often turns into a fight for the lowest price.

Grow: I may or may not be Internet-famous for my fear of the client phone call, but there’s no denying the fact the phone is just not optional sometimes. Getting on the horn is a powerful way to build relationships with your client, and it allows you to be a consultant and a strategist instead of just a writer bot. Be very careful and particular with who you spend time with on the phone, but do get on it from time to time.

5. Working for free

Blow: Everyone seems to think it’s normal to work for free to “prove you can do it.” That’s obscenely incorrect. If someone wants you to write for free and they plan to use your sample, it’s a scam, and you should run away screaming. The only conditions under which it is acceptable to work for free are as follows:

You don’t need any money ever
You don’t think you’re good at writing
You hate yourself
It’s a nonprofit you love and you don’t need any money

Grow: If you have absolutely no experience, write for yourself for free. Make up an assignment (perhaps for a big, beautiful brand you love) and complete it and post it to your portfolio. Don’t let someone else decide the terms for the work you do unless they’re paying for it.

If you have absolutely no experience, write for yourself for free. Don’t let someone else decide the terms for the work you do unless they’re paying for it.

6. Charging hourly

Blow: When I sent my first invoice, I was absolutely overjoyed to transcribe an interview and write a blog post for $35 an hour, making a total of about $114.

That’s amazing — especially for my first freelance job — but if I kept that up, I would have had to work 2.86 hours for every $100 I earned. If I had to do that now, I’d be working hundreds of hours every month instead of tens of hours every month.

Grow: There’s just no way to stay in the game or make a full-time income working part time if you charge hourly. Project rates are the way to go, 100%.

7. Using a Gmail address forever

Blow: Gmail. Or Hotmail, or iCloud, or anything that’s not customized. Nothing says rookie like sending an invoice from “SammyFinkle87@gmail.com.”

Grow: If you want people to take your writing seriously, eventually you will need to pony up for a real email address and URL like YourName dot com. Whether or not your clients want to see it (and they do) it will go a long way towards giving you some self-respect.

(Pro tip: Ditto for an invoice processing software. I’ve used FreshBooks since day 1, but you should find and use whatever software you jive with.)

8. Going it alone

Blow: If you’re like me, avoiding people is right behind making more money and working from home on the list of things that attract you to the freelance life. But going it alone has a way of making the lows of freelancing even lower.

Grow: Forget the office life sentence that you’re stuck with whoever’s in the cubicle next to you. When you work online, you make your own rules. Find people who’s blogs you love and send them an email. Follow someone really funny on Twitter and get to know them.

Whether you hire them or just follow their blog, go out of your way to find peers to bounce ideas off of and mentors to look up to. You won’t progress without them.

9. Working with a baby nearby

(Now that I’m a mom, I get to have an opinion on this!)

Blow: Trying to concentrate on paying work with a baby nearby almost drove me insane. At any given nap time, I could have had 3 hours to work…. or 20 minutes. That kind of irrational schedule-shifting made it really hard to concentrate or write good pitch emails (or remember what I did or had to do from day to day).

Grow: Coincidentally, when I started having a nanny come by 4 hours a day 3 hours a week, my income skyrocketed and my sense of inner calm (almost) returned. There’s no substitute for focus. My son’s nanny is the best $600 we spend a month.

(Pro tip: Plenty of moms work from home without a nanny. That may not be you, though, so don’t set yourself up to bomb at freelancing just because you can’t fit it in during naps.)

10. Writing for everyone

Blow: If you can help “anyone” write “anything,” then you’re riding the unnerving carousel horse of Freelance Death. Well-paying writing is a speciality and an acquired skill, not something you’ve “been doing since you were three” or “that your mom totally knew you’d be good at one day.”

Grow: Niche. Niche, niche. Not right away, but within a year or two of writing, you need to niche or you can kiss high-paying work goodbye. And stop saying what an early start you got as a writer unless you’re explaining why you write to your grandmother.

Now for the comments

What are you most afraid of when it comes to starting a freelance writing business? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see if I can’t allay your fears.

10 Pros Give Final Answers to Your Toughest Freelance Writer Questions

September 7, 2015 By FiveFigureSarah

Whether you’re just dipping your toes into the freelance writer world or you’ve established yourself with set of regular clients, you will always find yourself learning new things and that means that you will always have questions. It’s just a fact of life. However, another fact of life is that you have access to the Internet and an entire world of expert professionals who answer questions online for free.

Enter: this post, where you can tap into the insight of 10 writing pros as they give final answers to the toughest freelance writer questions out there.

The answer might not be perfect for your situation — and there may even be other answers — but based on the reputation and experience of these established writers and my own experience replacing my full-time income as a writer, their answers are definitely worth thinking about. And if you disagree, you should definitely voice your perspective in the comments below.

1. How much should I charge? Do I charge by the hour or by the project?

If you need to make ends meet after a layoff or you want to feel out what it’s like to run your own freelance writing business, figure out your bottom line and build an hourly around that. Men With Pens writing expert James Chartrand insists that the minimum hourly rate freelance writers should charge is $50.

This may seem high — especially if you’re transitioning from a salaried position — but it’s known as a loaded rate and it allows you to take care of all the things an employer would usually do for you (retirement benefits, days off, healthcare, etc). Linda Formichelli goes into this concept in depth in her fantastic post here.

However, when the time comes that you want to make a lot of money writing, experts all over the place recommend you switch to project rates. The master of billing, Mike McDerment of Freshbooks, can get you started with the why and the how behind this idea in his eBook “Breaking the Time Barrier.”

To elaborate on what McDerment shares in the eBook, it’s all about value. If you write something that helps a company earn $10,000 (an ad or a press release, say), do you think it’s fair to be paid $50 for one hour of your time?

If you write something that helps a company earn $10,000 (an ad or a press release, say), do you think it’s fair to be paid $50 for one hour of your time?

Charging by project allows you to tap into the long-term value of what you do. Charging by project also means you don’t have to waste time tracking time, and you can make more money when you work quickly (instead of less). The ultimate reward is that you’re the one who benefits when you get better at what you do…. not someone who is paying you hourly.

2. Should I write for free?

Alexis Grant, a very successful journalist turned marketing and publishing consultant, says “Definitely.” She is emphatic that writing for free scores much-needed boosts in visibility and networking, and that writers should focus on self-branded eBooks and courses instead of getting paid to write.

But just to make things difficult, let’s get another specialist to weigh in: Joshua Foust of JoshuaFoust.com (and the New York Times, for that matter) says “No.” While Foust has written for free or for exposure in the past, he doesn’t think it’s worth it overall and he recommends writers fight to get paid for the work they do.

The answer lies somewhere in the middle, but the point is that you need to carefully evaluate every opportunity and make sure there’s some benefit to you, whether that’s link-building, list-building, or exposure.

If you’re taking on so much free work that you can’t pay your bills, there’s a deeper problem you need to address.

If you’re taking on so much free work that you can’t pay your bills, there’s a deeper problem you need to address. Either you need to expand your offerings to monetize these opportunities or you need to realize your target market isn’t buying and find a new one.

3. How do I budget an irregular income?

Carrie from Careful Cents is here to the rescue with detailed tips for making an irregular income work. She encourages you to focus on creating a few versions of your budget (for lean months and heavy months) and getting your habits in check.

As a personal finance writer, I can offer my own two cents here, too: save enough money to make your income regular. It will take a little time and patience (and sacrifice), but once you set up a bare bones minimum budget, do what you need to do to store up two or three times that in a savings account.

Do what you need to do to store up two or three times your minimum monthly income in a savings account.

That way — as you wait on net 30 invoices and checks in the mail — you can make sure you have a “regular” pay check when you need it.

4. How do I connect with better paying clients?

High-earning writers skip the content mills and $10-per-post blogs to hunt for high-paying clients. But sometimes it seems like they’re few and far between.

Have you ever stopped to consider that it’s not about where you’re looking… it’s about what you’re putting out there? The problem might be that you aren’t ready for high-paying clients.

The first thing you should do is go to the library or hop onto Amazon for client-getting expert Michael Port’s book, Book Yourself Solid. In this book, he lays out the concept of how to build your freelance service business in a way that attracts red carpet clients, He walks you through the things you need to think about and do to create an environment where the clients you want meet you and say, “Yes, please!”.

Once your business is ready for business, so to speak, that’s when you can start taking action toward finding well-paying clients. Start by reviewing your typical writing job boards like Problogger, Blogging Pro, and Morning Coffee Newsletter once per week, but be on the lookout for warning signs that indicate a low-paying or disrespectful job:

The listing requests a resume (There are some exceptions, but often this indicates a “Hire and Fire” attitude that won’t pay well)
The listing has weird requirements (“In exactly 45 words, tell us why you’re a good writer” or “We’ll have you take five writing tests before we consider hiring you”)
The listing shares low payment terms (If they share straight-out that they don’t pay well, don’t waste your time thinking you can talk them up)

Carol Tice recommends you invest time in networking on social media accounts (she shares how here) and Lisa Rowan shares ten truly insightful ways to find clients on The Write Life here.

Once you land a client that pays well, your work isn’t over.

Once you land a client that pays well, your work isn’t over. The final, ultimate step is to do amazing work for this client… and then ask for referrals. Since like attracts like, your clients have friends, family, and business partners who might need your services and who likely are willing to pay the same rates if not more. Tap into your network of happy customers to dig up opportunities with like-minded people.

5. How do I tell a client bad news? (I’m raising my prices, I’m charging a rush fee, etc)

If you stay in business for any period of time, you will eventually have to deliver some bad news. It might be really bad news, like “I missed a deadline” (which means you need to follow these steps from Careful Cents). Or it could be kind of good bad news, like “I am raising my rates” (which Marie Forleo and Ramit Sethi cover in this video). Or it might be sanity (and business) saving bad news like “I’m now charging a rush rate” (which Millo.co can help you establish in this post).

If you stay in business for any period of time, you will eventually have to deliver some bad news.

But the theme that all of this expert advice has in common can stand on its own to help you address any situation that comes along: it’s not about the bad news you deliver, it’s about how you deliver it.

It’s not about the bad news you deliver, it’s about how you deliver it.

When you communicate bad news, your tone and style is the most important part. If you deliver the news with consideration, outrageous honesty, and a long-term implementation period, you can alleviate almost any tense situation.

Here’s an example of part of an email I sent to a client to announce a raise in my rates:

…I also wanted to give you notice of a change in my rates for blog posts. To keep up with the demand for blog posts, I have raised my rates to $125 per post for the kind of high-quality posts we’ve been writing.

That’s quite a jump, I know, but it’s because I’ve maintained the same rate for almost two years now! To make up for the sudden change, I wanted to provide a good pad of time: this rate change won’t go into effect until July 1st of this year and you’re welcome to pre-pay as many posts as you plan to need through the rest of the year at the current rate.

Are These Your Final Answers?

Now, it’s your turn! Are these the final answers to these questions, or do you have another opinion? And if you have another tough question, be sure to leave it in the comments below!