Would You Work for a Content Provider Company?

Before I continue with this post, I want to clarify that when I am talking about content provider companies, I mean those that pay a half-decent rate, not $1.00 for 500 words. I’ve worked for content providers, and I think there are some positive aspects to working for them.

• Steady Work

Since their business is providing content for site owners, these companies can probably supply you with work on a regular basis. You don’t need to find the work – the company looks after that aspect of it.

• Exposure to Several Topics

When you are just starting out or you don’t have a specific niche that you write about, why not become a generalist? Working for a content provider means that you have the opportunity to write about a variety of topics, all of which you can add to your resume under “experience.” Not a bad thing at all.

• Opportunity to Get Experience in New Areas

The content providers I have worked for were responsible for giving me the chance to write my first autoresponder series, e-book, sales letter, squeeze pages, and product descriptions. All of these were good experiences and are services that I can offer to clients, if need be.

• Regular Pay

A content provider company will pay you on a regular schedule, whether they have been paid by their client or not. You know when and how much you are going to be paid when you accept an assignment.

The drawback to working for a content provider company is that you would make more money if you found the clients yourself. Not everyone is willing or able to be continuously pitching new clients, negotiating fees, and dealing with receivables they don’t get paid promptly. The freelance writing world should be big enough to include this type of working relationship as a viable option for writers.

What do you think? Would you work for a content provider if the pay was something you could live with, or are writers better off finding their clients on their own?

The “Bread and Butter” Client

There are some clients you can usually count on to keep you supplied with a steady stream of work. I call them “bread and butter” clients.

The work can vary, depending on what the client has available, and if you develop good relationships with a few of them, you can avoid a lot of the “feast or famine” times that seem to be a part of so many freelance writer’s lives.

The Trade Off

I have a few bread and butter clients that I’ve been working with for awhile now, and the arrangment works out pretty well. I know that I can probably get a certain amount of work from them each month, and hopefully I can fill in gaps in my schedule with other project work. I find that being hired for a specific project only tends to pay a bit better, but the work flow varies.

The trade off comes in the form of choosing steady work at a slightly lower rate of pay versus the uncertainty of project work that pays better. I like to have a combination of the two,and I don’t have a problem with taking on something that will keep me working on a regular basis.

If you could choose the kinds of clients that you would prefer to work with, would you stick to the bread and butter variety, or do you want to go after more lucrative projects that may be harder to land? Or does having a mix of both kinds make more sense to you?

4 Reasons You Should Consider “Small” Jobs

When you are looking for freelance writing work, are there some gigs that you pass on either applying for or accepting because they are too small? This may be a mistake, and here’s my take on why they are worth considering:

1. They can be completed relatively quickly.

You may not have time to commit to (another) large project right now, but taking on a smaller one means that you can get the work done and get paid quickly.

Read more

Are You Passionate About Your Writing Career?

To be a freelance writer, you need to have good writing skills. That’s a given. You also need to be able to follow instructions carefully so that you clients get what they want. Having good communication skills helps you to develop good working relationships. All of these are skills that you can develop and improve on over time, but there is still a piece to the puzzle that is missing….we talk a lot about being “cool” like it’s something we should be striving for, but I wonder why we don’t value being passionate about what we do.

Read more

Power Suits Not Included

by Ellen Goldstein

In Lisa Sonora Beam’s book The Creative Entrepreneur (Quarry Books, 2008), she presents the following journal prompt “Who is in my business advisory circle?” For the beginner freelance writer or editor, this can be a potentially traumatizing question. However, it doesn’t have to be. You don’t need an army of smart-phone-using, business-suited colleagues to have a business advisory circle (although for a few hours it might be nice); just a few people, some of whom you may already know, to give you advice about running a business.

Mine your friends and family.

Just as you have certain friends you talk to about relationships, you should have certain people with whom you can talk about your business. Even if none of your friends are freelance writers, they may still have experience with invoicing, paying taxes, researching lawyers, etc. Did you have a friend from elementary school who outsold everyone in Girl Scout cookies? Is she the marketing manager of some corporation? Call her up, remind her of your Girl Scout days, and ask her for advice.

When I took calculus in college, it was not my computer science friends (you know, the ones who took ordinary differential equations for fun) who helped me pass calculus. It was my French major friend who did not excel at math, but was a little more technical- and number-minded than I am, who got me through. In your advisory search, find someone who is farther along in her career than you, but not so far along that she can’t remember what it is like to be just starting out.

Find a consultant.

Get in touch with other freelancers you know. Offer to take them out for lunch and discuss the nitty gritty details of quarterly tax payments, as well as the more interesting aspects of your field. If you don’t know any freelancers (and even if you do), look into joining freelance and professional unions and associations. With a professional association, such as Editorial Freelance Association, you’ll find meetings, classes, resources, and even job leads. The National Writers Union or the Freelancers Union offer contract assistance and other business advice.

Look beyond traditional business mentoring models and check out local skillshares and barters. Bartering can be either a formal or informal exchange of goods or services, with no money changing hands. Craigslist has a barter section under its “for sale” section. Skillshares are more organized events where people lead workshops to teach other people what they know. Where else can you learn how to write a resume in the morning and fix your bicycle in the afternoon?

Find many consultants.
Maybe your consultant is actually a group. You might have luck finding business support in a group environment, such as a listserv, online forum, or support group. You can usually join a listserv for free, and become a part of valuable discussions, often about the very questions that plague you…or will soon enough. There are listservs for copy editors, science writers, poets, technical writers, and writing teachers, among many others.

Find a freelance support group. Get together with other people who are thinking of taking the freelance plunge or who have been practicing freelancers for years. Meet and discuss your insights, struggles, and coping methods. Set business goals for yourselves and work together to achieve them. Meetings are a great reason to leave the house and hang out with people who can talk shop with you.

And while building community, don’t forget to comment on your favorite blogs or freelance blog networks….

Ellen Goldstein is a freelance editor and poet living in Beverly, Massachusetts.

Don’t Abandon Your Job Search When the Weather Heats Up

I’ve been following a discussion on a message board where freelancers are talking about their plans for the summer and cutting back on their work load. I do think it’s important to take some time so that you can rest and regroup, I don’t think that you should take the summer off as far as looking for freelance writing work is concerned.

Read more

Do You Treat all Your Clients Equally?

I’ve been doing some reading about whether all clients are created equal, and most of what I have found suggests that they should be divided into categories depending on whether they are likely to give you more work and/or referrals. The idea is that you give better service to the clients that you have decided are most worth your while.

Read more

You Have a Full Plate: Do You Keep Looking for Work?

Marketing should be a regular part of your schedule when you’re a freelance writer, but are there times when you should just focus on what you have in front of you? It’s a judgment call, and most people who work freelance know only too well that there can be times when you are so busy that you don’t know how you will ever get everything done and times when you are scrounging around for work. Ideally, you get to a point where you have steady work and you have a certain level of income every month, but that can change very quickly.

Read more

Business Advice for the Business-phobe

Freelance writer Ellen Goldstein wrote today’s post. Enjoy!

Some freelancers derive organizational joy from spread sheets, writing down numbers, and following up on unpaid invoices. Others of us would like to just keep writing/editing/designing, thanks, and let the business take care of itself. The problem is, of course, that business never takes care of itself. As a clear member of the second group, I knew I had to change my ways when I went freelance.

• Embrace the business side of freelancing

You don’t have to love it, but business is like your Great Aunt Matilda, who helped pay for your college education; you owe her at least a peck on the cheek and monthly afternoon teas, listening to her talk about her elderly Pekingese. Just remember what is at stake. If you can’t find a way to deal with your business matters, it’s back to windowless cubicles and two-hour-long meetings about ordering procedures.

• Go to the places that scare you

Jump right in and do one of the scarier business-related things you have to do. You may find that the anticipation is the worse than the experience, and that making that call to the IRS wasn’t that scary after all. Last week, I finally called an accountant to help me take care of a tax issue that had been plaguing me for a while. It was painful, but it is such a relief to not have this issue hanging over my head any longer. It also frees up my brain to work on the rest of my freelance career.

• Do one business-related task a day

It doesn’t have to be big. Check up on an unpaid invoice, research CPAs, or even just take a month’s worth of receipts out of your wallet and put them in your deduction folder. Every little bit that you do will help free up time later to do your writing/editing/designing work. Don’t forget to bribe/reward yourself afterward. It works for the toddlers in your life, doesn’t it?

• Find support

Maybe one of your friends or relatives has experience writing grants or keeping books. Take her out to lunch and pick her brain. Think about hiring a professional, even if you think you can’t afford it. Having a lawyer to write up your contracts shouldn’t keep you from putting food on the table, but it is cheaper than a costly court case. This is the kind of math even business-phobes like myself can do.

• Enable yourself to be organized

It appears we are all chronically unorganized (this is a great relief to me), because there are scads of books (such as Organizing from the Inside Out, Getting Things Done, and It’s Hard to Make a Difference When You Can’t Find Your Keys) and blogs (unclutterer.com and zenhabits.net) that can help you create a system and become more organized. There are many different ways of becoming organized and no right way to do it. Probably the most important factor in becoming organized is being honest with yourself about what systems will actually work for you, rather than what you merely would like to be able to work for you. Now is not the time to be idealistic.

After you set up an organizational system, try the piece-of-paper test. If you can’t find a minor piece of paper—whether it’s an unpaid invoice, a bill from last March, or someone’s business card from a networking event last month—in under ten minutes and without dismantling all or part of your workspace, tweak your system until you can.

The Examined Life

After you have been cautiously facing the business side of your freelance career for a couple of weeks, step back, congratulate yourself. Then ask yourself what you still need to learn. Make a list and think about what practical short-term and long-term steps you can make to strengthening yourself in these items. Take a class. Read some books. Call a professional. Ask your friends. Break larger problems down into manageable steps. Make a schedule in order to follow these steps. Think about your strengths as well—it can be as useful to know what you can do right, as to know what you need to work on.

Examine the work you have done. Usually on Fridays, I sit down and tally the number of hours I worked that week and what I did. I also keep track of where I sent my resumes, who I talked to about expanding my editing empire (as I fondly call it), and any formal or informal professional development I have undergone. Weeks and events have a way of slipping by when they are not recorded. The unexamined freelance life is not worth living, because it is too easy for it to slip away.

Ellen Goldstein is a freelance editor and poet living in Beverly, Massachusetts.

The Broom Method of Building a Business

Have you ever heard the expression that if you put enough pieces of straw together, eventually you will have a broom? That expression has been floating around in my mind recently, and it led me to think about building a successful freelance writing business.

It is possible to build a business by starting off with small jobs first. When you first start working with a new client, they may start off by giving you a single article or a small assignment. This is a chance for both of you to get to know each other. You can turn it in and if you would prefer not to work with that person again, you don’t need to. (You can always say that you are fully booked if the client gets in touch with you again, if you have to.)

Read more

« Previous Page — Next Page »