Work-Life Balance

For most working parents, a work-life balance means staying at work long enough to get the job done and then coming home to be with family and take care of the home. For freelancers who work in the midst of their family, there is a decided overlap that can be difficult to work with at times. In an office you can focus on work while on work time, but at home, unless you arrange an alternative childcare situation, you have to create your own work time – sometimes forcibly carving it out of time you’d rather spend elsewhere.

Life as a Freelancing Parent

The parent of small children is run ragged from the early morning wake-up call until the blessedly early bedtimes these little ones need at the end of the day. It is those early bedtimes that make freelancing possible in many cases. Baby goes to bed, and mom goes to work. If you’re lucky enough to enjoy naptime during the day, you might pick-up another hour or two of work time as well. Freelancing parents are up early, up late, and driven during those few quite daytime hours to make the job fit in an already full lifestyle.

Freelancing and Childcare

Many freelancing parents grow tired of burning the candle from both ends and opt for a part-time childcare arrangement. A mother’s helper might come for a few hours in the morning to give mom (or dad) a break from the childcare routine and time to work interrupted. A part-time daycare provider or babysitter is another popular option to buy some time for work during the day. But for many freelancing purists, sending children out when they could be at home the way the parent originally intentioned is hard to come to grips with.

Freelancing parents should have the best of both worlds. They should be able to work from the comfort of home and have ample time with their children. The trouble for most parents, especially those with young children, is that between working and fulfilling the endless needs and wants of small children, there isn’t time for anything else including housework, hobbies or even “me” time.

Working Arrangements

To make freelancing fit with raising children and trying to keep a semblance of a normal life, you’ll need to make sacrifices of some kind. Your house will likely not be perfectly clean or even in a state resembling clean. Those comfortable sweats might make take on a more permanent place in your wardrobe and the few salvaged hours for television or phone conversations might be performed as double duty – slinging laundry while watching three weeks worth of your favorite shows in a single sitting.

Your spouse will play a huge role in how well you cope with the insane schedule of working from home and successfully raising your children. Let your partner pick up some of the slack and make clear distinctions of household duties to be sure that all of the biggest jobs get covered every week in one way or anther.

Finally, when you earn a rare moment when everything went well, sit back with those warm babies in your lap and be grateful that you have the option to be home, even if you’re working harder than anyone outside of your situation could ever imagine.

This post first appeared on GoingFreelance.com

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

And it’s no wonder you don’t hear much about them. Mothers are a busy breed. They don’t spend much time patting themselves on the back and doing write-ups in the local paper for their clever idea to raise a few hundred a month during nap times.

Granted if the news that mothers are the largest group of entrepreneurs surprises you, you’re simply not paying attention to the moms around you. This is by far the best group for starting and running a business, especially one on the side.

Mothers Have a Mission
There are few mothers that loll about with those mythical bon-bons and soap operas. Most mothers have a mission throughout the day, week, year and decade and the idea of writing a statement about it is laughable. Women are used to making the impossible become possible and usually just before the school bus arrives. Creating a business? No problem.

Mothers Have Patience
Generally speaking it is the mothers who stay up nights with a fussy baby. It’s the mothers who wait patiently for those first steps. Or for the hiccupping sobs to end to figure out what the toddler really wants from her. Mothers might not like it, but infinite patience is built into the job, and they know after years of diapers and nights of last-minute school projects, that rewards do not simply arrive on your doorstep.

Mothers Are Workers
Only the select few mothers with a staff around the clock don’t wake up and fall asleep every day exhausted. Parenting is hard work and there are no set hours. Parents, mothers in particular, don’t get to end each day of raising children with punching a time clock or the satisfaction of a job well done. It’s work, it’s rewarding, but it’s most certainly still a real job to be a mother. Adding a few extra projects to the day is more the norm than the exception.

Mothers Are Networking Pros
Not only are mothers one of the most common entrepreneurs, they are also one of the most populous groups online collaborating, seeking ideas, sharing suggestions and networking. The natural network of most mothers, both online and off, is huge. As any successful entrepreneur will tell you, who you know is as important as what you do.

Mothers Multitask
Not a day goes by in the life of a mother when there aren’t multiple demands for her time and her energy. Each day starts with an overwhelming to-do list and it ends the same way, but in between mothers are a whirlwind of activity, much of which is overlapping. Dealing with the complexities of creating and managing a business on top of another career or full-time parenting is just another thing on a mother’s to-do list.

Mothers Know How to Dream Realistically
As a young person just starting out in a field of work, the dreams are huge and often unrealistic. He’s going to be rich. He’s going to have fancy cars and big houses in just a few months of starting up a business. Moms put those sorts of dreams on hold years ago.

They now dream of comfort and financial independence. They want fun things for their families and a safe place to come home to at the end of the day. Fancy cars might come in time, but the biggest dream most mothers have is earning just a little bit more to make more dreams come true for their children. And huge numbers of mothers are achieving this dream every day.

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.