Fortunately these three types of writers don’t have to exist separately, and there is much to learn from all three – especially if you find yourself dissatisfied at times with your own area of the freelance writing business.

Writers as Artists

There is a great deal of glamour in the image of the writer holed up in the cottage by the sea for months on end banging out a novel on an old fashioned typewriter. Hollywood loves these writers for their sheer romantic imagery. The problem with that image, however, is that very few writers are getting paid to sit in rented cottages writing books on spec. Hence, a bit of practicality is in order.

By all means get a cabin by the sea – why not? Freelance writers can live anywhere there’s an internet connection. And pound away on the typewriter until your fingers bleed, although a laptop might be more practical in the long-run. But live the starving artist lifestyle to protect your artistic integrity? Only if you’re into Ramen noodles. Taking the artistry down a notch, at least a few days a week, and you can ease into better business practices and earn a bit more to sustain yourself until that novel is finished.

Writers as Businesspeople

The writer who recognizes a craft and then markets it can turn a fair profit. The better your business skills, the better your writing business will be. There are many writers today who can bring in business and turn out finished products, but it all gets a bit dry sometimes. When you realized you’re forcing yourself to write about dog food and you’d rather stick pin in your eye than write another word, take a step back.

Learn from those that love the craft and turn what you do into an art form as well as a business model. Write prose or poetry. Start a blog just for the sake of writing about things you love and enjoy. You can monetize it later. Or don’t monetize it at all and just enjoy journaling online to get some of the demons out. Write something pretty just because it’s, well, pretty!

Writing as a Hobby

Hobbyist writers are the best of the breed. They don’t have to earn a living and they don’t have to craft a tome worthy of the classics. They can just write about cooking shrimp or local politics to make their hearts feel super happy, to borrow a phrase from a rather annoying show my kids watch on occasion. If we were to all focus on writing more about what makes us feel good, the simple pleasure of the hobby can blend with the artistry or words to make us enough money to satisfy the capitalist in us all. It’s a potent mixture, but one spicy enough to make writing fun every day – or almost every day, which is good enough for me.

This post first appeared on GoingFreelance.com

I’ve secretly know it for years, but apparently others are catching on. I’m absolutely amazing! Okay, seriously now, I was mentioned in Allena’s recent post on her About.com blog. It was very nice of her to throw some love this way, and I absolutely appreciate it.

Where is this rock star writing of mine? Don’t worry – it’s not this post. It’s a recent post I made on Jenn’s blog AllFreelanceWriting.com.

Don’t believe me? See for yourself:  Freelance Writing Blogs: Cream of the Crop Posts.

Write a Business Plan

Simply stated, a business plan is a blueprint of what you’re offering and how you’re going to do it. A true business plan is usually presented to others, but yours can be more casual. The purpose here is to organize your thoughts and present yourself properly when it’s time to launch the business. The business plan is just that – planning. When creating your plan, consider:

- What you’re going to sell.

- How you’re going to sell it.

- How your services will be priced.

- How you’re going to find clients and an audience.

- Where you’re going to get funding to develop any necessary initial marketing.

- The name and brand of your service.

In your plan, you should determine specifics and they should be measurable. If you say, “I want to write for the web and make money,” you’re starting without focus. If your plan is more specific, “I will create PLR article packs and sell them for $20 in the education niche,” you can create and then measure that goal accordingly.

Create Your Brand

You might be writing to raise a few hundred a month for extras around the house, but to be taken seriously you’ll need a true brand online. That means a full internet presence – website, blog, personality, avatar and logo. Blogs are simple to start, and registering a domain and getting Wordpress installed is simple enough. Remember to use your best skills and put a professional face on your site. It’s telling others how well you know the marketplace and why they should hire you to write for them.

Build a Community and Network

Being successful online is more than a simple thread on a forum or two. If you’re answering advertisements for penny articles, you’re likely selling yourself short. Take charge of your own career by focusing on your network and community rather than individual articles or gigs. By gaining reputation in your field and in the niches you choose to work in, you’ll be gaining traction for the long-term rather than an endless series of cheap articles written for random clients.

Over time, it is your network and professional reputation that lead to additional assignments and referrals. Every thing you do online and ever post you make it part of your professional image. You’re running a business staked on your personal integrity and reputation, and protecting and advancing that career is very easily a full-time job. But it’s hopefully one that you enjoy and find successful.

This post first appeared on GoingFreelance.com

Work’s Not Fun Anymore

There are elements of every job that can drag us down, but freelancing is usually a choice and we opt to freelance because we like it. But when the job isn’t fun anymore and you feel more stressed than productive, it’s time to cut back and take a few days off. Rearrange your schedule, put a vacation auto-reply up and take forty-eight hours (or longer!)  to be with your family, play with the dog, finish projects around the house or get out of town to clear your head. When you sit back down at the computer, you’ll be refreshed, hopefully better rested and ready to go.

Your Work Is Suffering

Being overdrawn and taxed isn’t good for you or your work (or your bank account.) What’s worse is you often don’t realize how poor your quality has become while you’re overdoing it. Pulling an all-nighter to get a project in before the deadline or because you’re “in the zone” can be productive to a degree, but the materials you’re creating are likely not up to your usual standards no matter how wonderful you thought they were at the time. When you start finding typos, wrong information and sloppy work, it’s time to slow down. Most mistakes happen when you’re tired or you’re rushed. If you’re both, you’re looking at trouble. For a freelancer, being sloppy can mean time-intensive revisions or a lost client,

You’re Too Busy

Only you know what’s too busy, but if you’re starting to see clues that you’re pushed past the limits of what’s reasonable, scale back. There is a steeper curve at the beginning of every new business as you get things started up and market your initial services, but once you’re in a groove, you probably don’t need to be working twelve hour days and neglecting your health, hobbies or family. If you’re too busy to do the things you like to do outside of the office, you need a break. At the minimum try a modified schedule to give yourself more work-life balance.

You’re Frustrated with Your Future

There comes a time for many freelancers when they realize they want a change. You might be happy churning out articles or sales letters every day, but we all need variety in our life. If you’re stuck in a rut and frustrated by your lack of available time to try anything new or even think about what sort of new avenues you’d like to pursue, consider taking a day out of the week to build up a new product line or service offering while keeping your current business going. Take a break for a day or an hour a day if that’s all you can spare to investigate where you want to go and what you want to do next. It keeps momentum in your career which is essential for moving forward in any business.

This post first appeared on GoingFreelance.com

What’s Your Business Plan?

Too often, online freelancers take the leap into full-time work before they fully realize what they are doing. They realize they’ve made enough to live on for a few months and decide they can make even more staying home and writing or designing full-time. So they quit. In a simple world, this plan has merit. But this is not a simple world.

Working online is dynamic and ever changing. You must have a plan for the next few months, the next few years and the next few decades. How are you going to proceed from here and where do you want to end up? What’s your retirement plan? Fill in the blanks in between here and then until you can see where you’re headed and what it will take to get there.

Do You Have the Right Contacts?

What sort of freelance work are you doing? Are you writing haphazard articles for clients as they appear in various webmaster forums? Unfortunately these clients come and go for the most part. If you don’t have a well developed collection of clients in all walks of life, your basis is not covered for future and steady work. Likewise, you need to know others in the industry to network professionally if you plan to make freelancing your new career. Who you know in a freelance sense is almost more important than what you do.

How Much Do You Have in Savings?

The current economy has made it abundantly clear just how dangerous it can be to live from one paycheck to the next. Stashing a bit in savings is fine for the occasional emergency repair while you still have a steady paycheck. However, you should have a minimum of three months income in savings to cover your bills should you lose your salaried job. As a freelancer, you need even more.

The internet marketplace goes up and down dramatically. While this can take a hit on your earnings, the real risk is from life itself. Should you break your hand while an employee the company will be all but required to make accommodations. If you break your hand as a freelancer, you’ll be out the higher insurance costs for medical care and be limited in your productivity if you happen to need that hand to type or design. There are no safety nets in freelancing – you create your own.

Have You Considered Tax Implications?

Many freelance writers don’t initially realize the full tax implications of their new part-time career. The money you make as a freelancer is part of your income and must be declared on your tax return. Unless you’ve been putting 20 percent of those funds aside for the tax man, you’ll wind up with a bit of a surprise come April 15.

As a freelancer, you’ll need to be even more prepared. Learn about the benefits of different tax structures and how to file quarterly and set up withholding on your own freelance income to be sure you can pay your taxes on time. Your freelance earnings will be taxed at a higher rate because you’re self employed and must pay your own social security. Include all of those variables in your current freelance income and you might realize your earnings aren’t as comfortable as you thought they were.

What’s Plan B?

The corporate world isn’t always kind to freelancers seeking to return to the corporate world, especially if you aren’t freelancing in a field that translates directly back to the office job. If freelancing becomes problematic or you simply can’t handle the stress of the variable income, you need to have a Plan B.

Will you beg for your old job back? Look for one in the field you’ve been freelancing? Go back to school so that your resume is a bit fresher? Leaving the corporate world with connections will give you some lifelines should you need them down the road. Be sure to continue cultivating those relationships and develop marketable skills.

This post first appeared on GoingFreelance.com

You might be selling a service instead of widgets, and you might be marketing yourself on a single forum in a single thread instead of billboards and landing pages, but you’re most certainly a business. The current statistics show that a new business has about a 50/50 shot of making it – are you working to stay in the right 50%?

Starting a Business for the Wrong Reason
There are all kinds of freelance businesses and many freelancers take on a very part-time role initially to get a few extra dollars. However, if you don’t love what you’re doing, the initial interest fades and you’re working considerably more time than you ever wanted to in a position you don’t really like, and you might not be able to figure out how to back out of the commitments gracefully.

If you’re working for a few dollars here and there, there is certainly nothing wrong with that, especially in today’s economy. But starting a full-fledged freelance business in a field you don’t like doing things you’d rather not is setting yourself up for failure.

Failure to Plan and Drive the Business Forward
A business must grow and thrive to be successful in the long-term. If you slap your name on a post offering a basic service, you’ll likely find takers. However you might become embroiled in small projects leaving you no time to build up your business or even finish the website or blog you meant to create a few months ago to give yourself more credibility.

Failure to treat your business like a business is the most crucial mistake freelancers make. It doesn’t matter if you’re in school or just working part-time, you should be handling yourself and your future professionally and always thinking of what you want to do next.

The most common mistake that falls under a failure to plan is the large numbers of freelancers that enter the market, take on huge numbers of poorly paid projects, burn out and then disappear – often without being able to complete the projects they promised. This is simply bad business all around – you can always push out deadlines and plan into the future to accommodate new work.

Lack of Marking and Management Knowledge
You can be the best designer or writer in the world, but if you can’t sell yourself to others, nobody will ever know. Selling yourself and managing your business are two of the most critical elements of success. Not only do you need an initial push to find clients, but you’ll need to continue marketing on a regular basis looking for new projects and growing with new exposure.

If you fail to prepare for your own version of the future and continue to seek out new projects and clients, you’ll fail to grow as a business and become stagnant or fail over time.

This article was first released on GoingFreelance.com

I recently bought a new (old) truck. How did I do it? I found it online, I researched the competition online and I arranged the sale online. I did go and see it in person before cementing the deal, but I don’t trust a car dealer who doesn’t have a good web presence, plus dealing online cuts down on the drama of the pushy sales.

I shop almost exclusively online. There are so many different brands now available through the internet, I can get everything from Zara clothing and H&M clothing to toddler clothing and shoes without having to leave my trusty old (new) computer. Plus, little men don’t have to accompany me to the store and they always seem to have my size.

I buy houses online when I feel the need to work with real estate, which is about once every seven years. When I last when house shopping, if the house didn’t show up well online, I wasn’t interested. I didn’t want to deal with someone who couldn’t at least post good pictures on a real estate website.

I bank online and have for years. I remember when you had to actually pay for online bill pay and when everyone thought it would be the end of us all, or maybe that was Y2K, but regardless, if a company isn’t online, I don’t trust them and I’m not interested in working with them – for me a website equates trust.

While I think online marketers and workers have a serious head start in shopping and living online, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the world catches up. The beauty of that is there are so many lovely companies who need help getting online and so many lovely potential customers who need help finding their way around the internet we’ll all be just fine so long as we stay on top of the curve business-wise.

Am I angry and elitist? Nope. I’m a bitch. In Texas, that’s almost a good thing.

Okay, that’s not really all there is to it, although I am rather proud every time someone calls me a bitch – I figure it means they are somehow threatened by me, why else resort to crude names?

But in regard to the original message, being elitist and angry, at least in my humble opinion, tends to be counterproductive. In fact, I work very hard to not get angry about much of anything, least of all someone else’s business or thoughts. In my other role teaching alternative high schoolers, being angry is the same as giving students something of a show and is a huge waste of energy and resources. Fortunately, I have the right personality to avoid that sort of thing regardless.

As far as being elitist, I will absolutely own that one. I don’t know many people who can do what I do – and I don’t just mean cranking out some written materials. That being said, I have a great deal of respect for people who are dedicated to a chosen field or practice and have a lot to show for it. I love a good web designer as much as I love a good kindergarten teacher. Personally I couldn’t do either very well and am 100% okay with that.

I also love writers who crank out cheap articles. The articles have a purpose for a lot of people and the writers have their own reason for charging those rates. They aren’t helping or hurting me in any way as I offer a very different service. Granted the disillusioned writer is another story, but there is a lot of help out there and most know what they should do after a time but can’t bring themselves to do it.

I’ve had clients very frankly tell me they have “worker bees” on one level cranking out that sort of low cost thing while giving me something else entirely to work on at a much higher level. As a businesswoman, I understand that and encourage it. I don’t really want to write 150 articles on colon cleansing anyhow.

As far as talking down to people who don’t operate at the same level I do, I’m afraid it happens quite a bit. I know the value of what I do and I reach out to help others when I can, but as my post on Jenn’s blog next week will actually describe in some detail, I’m not a touchy-feely kind of girl. My purpose is not to make other writers feel good about themselves necessarily or try and train the populace to do what I do. I’m running a business that does not specialize in career counseling.

One comment in the thread struck a chord regarding a work-at-home mom earning a full-time living with a content mill. I’m not in a position to say if it’s best for that mom or any other, but I can say that for someone who is not a competent marketer and is just easing into the industry looking for a way to supplement her income that was likely just annihilated by staying home for the first time, it might be a great option. Or it might be a horrible one. I really just don’t know.

I make my personal elitist position an easy one.

I make the bold assumption that everyone else knows their own abilities and preferences far better than I ever would.

Will I provide information to get to the next level? Sure.

Will I give tips and tricks of the trade? Absolutely.

Will I tell someone what to do with their career and choices? Eh, probably not. I already get paid to do that with surly teens and have my own kids to deal with. I’m just not that interested in what others want to write or how much they charge for it. I trust them to take care of their own business to the best of their abilities.

I guess I am rather bitchy after all. Go figure.

Optimize Your Own Site
If you have a site or blog project of your own, why not learn a bit of SEO to work your site into a higher spot in the search engine rankings? Granted, there are some pretty big sites out there for the main writing keywords, but if you specialize in a particular area or do some writing work offline, you can likely rank for your location easily with some attention on content, keyword placement and inbound links.

Work with SEO Consultants
If you’re going to partner with an online worker in a professional sense, I’d opt for an SEO consultant. Companies spend thousands of dollars with their consultants as they work to build a brand and increase their own rankings online. As part of that, the SEO consultants are almost always looking for optimized and quality site content, press releases, distribution work, ghost written materials to place for links and any number of special projects. Because the bigger names in SEO are paid so dearly by clients and know the value of certain forms of written materials, they don’t balk at engaging the services of a writer who knows what she is doing in the area of SEO.

Start Reading
You don’t have to buy any books to learn about SEO. The online resources are endless. Subscribe to feeds and newsletters from firms and individuals who know what they are doing and start reading threads in the forums other than just those you find in the content or copywriting section. There is a wealth of knowledge shared publically on the subject and the more you know, the better you can apply SEO in your own business – and that doesn’t mean writing penny-word gibberish articles, although there seems to be an inexhaustible need for those if that’s what rocks your world.

What do I need from a writer?

Needs vary between sites and between projects. You might have two or three writers helping you with a single site at a given time. Usually the more specialized the service you’re seeking, the more you should budget for that portion of the project. For example, if you need a professional press release or marketing materials, you’ll need to find someone who really knows what they are doing and should plan to pay accordingly. If you’re thinking about 200 articles on health supplements to spin and distribute, you can get a real bargain from just about anyone with a functioning keyboard.

What does this writer specialize in?

It’s rare to find a writer who can do everything you might possibly need for a project. That copywriter who makes killer sales pages might not want to touch a white papers project and the article writer who can prepare bulk articles on toe jam likely hasn’t a clue about how to convert a sale. Some writers offer more varied services than others, but generally speaking, if you stick with a professional who knows her industry and skill inside and out, you’ll get far better results and wind up saving money in the long run on revisions and brand redevelopment.

Will this writer provide the level of service I need?

A major shortcoming of certain tiers of writers is that they aren’t business people. Making $5 an article for regurgitated “research” isn’t a sign that a writer knows the industry and can help you identify your target market. Don’t count on materials tailored to your niche.

It’s simple.

If you know you need the basics, stick with a basic writer – there are plenty to choose from. If you know you need guidance and true professionalism, opt for the professionals. You’ll definitely notice a difference.