Giving Freelance Writing Work Away

I was tickled to read one of gracepub's posts where she referred to me as 'giving work away'. I hadn't thought of it like that. It's probably the first time in my freelance writing career that I've been in a position to do that.

Normally, I take on all the jobs and work too hard trying to do them all. But when I got the latest one, I realised I'd have to write 9,000 words a day for the next four months. That's just too much, especially if I still want a husband, a daughter and friends at the end of it. So that's why I posted the opportunity yesterday. I spent a lot of time getting the contract and figured someone else might as well benefit - and someone will.

Freelancing can be precarious and it's tempting to say yes to everything when the work is coming in, but sometimes you have to learn to say no. After all, if you work yourself into the ground, there would be no point in earning any money. So, although it doesn't come naturally, I'm going for balance.

What similar choices have you had to make, if any?

New Ways To Make Money From Blogging

One of the things my blog is about is how to Make Money from freelance writing. One way that works well for me and brings in some nice pocket change is Blogitive. But in order to qualify for the program you have to have a blog that's indexed in the search engines and one that is popular.

There are lots of ways to do this, including submitting your site to directories, burning a feed with Feedburner and doing what you would do anyway - visit people's blogs and comment on them in the hope that they will comment on yours. That part isn't difficult and at $5 a time for writing about a web release, it's a nice little earner, particularly during the slow writing months.

Now they've got a few more programs. One of them is to put news headlines on your blog (which probably wouldn't work here), but the other is more exciting. It's ghost blogging, which I do anyway, so I'm looking forward to the chance to make more money with fewer ads.

Why I'm Happy That I'm Not Finishing My Novel

Everyone's got NaNo on the brain - everyone except me, that is. For about four years, I've had a novel outline languishing in a corner of my desk. It has stared at me reproachfully as I have done other jobs and written other things. I've felt guilty because I feel I haven't stuck to it - or even got started properly, but yet every time I sat down to write it, my brain froze and I couldn't manage more than a few desultory sentences. As you can guess, that has done nothing for my self image, especially since I am a prolific freelance writer and ghostwriter.

So it was because of this that I decided to attend one of the Inspired Author Friday night online workshops. The reason was that writing coach Lori Chance was going to be there, and I figured it would be a great opportunity to finally kickstart that novel writing.

It was an interesting session, in which I got very public therapy for my novel writing malaise. Lori was great, talking me through all the reasons why I might not be getting started with the novel (time pressure, fear of failure, perfectionism) and the qualities I had used in the past to successfully step out of my comfort zone (focus). We talked about ways of getting support with novel writing (courses, critique groups and so on). But the upshot was not what you might think.

At the end of the session I felt exhilarated and liberated because with Lori's help I had finally given myself permission to let that novel go, at least for now, and to concentrate on writing one of my other ideas instead. I have now put some regular writing time in the diary (only once a week, but once I get obsessed, as I will, I'm sure it will be more often) and a friend has offered to set me up with her writing group.

So I want to say a public thank you to Lori. I also want to let you know that you can benefit from her experience for free. Lori's got a site at DestinationWords and a free writing life coaching group on Myspace. Browse around Lori's profile and you'll find a lot of useful and interesting stuff - and some of it can be applied to anyone, not just writers.

Writing And Loving It

Gracepub recently wrote a post called Are You A Writer? and it got me to thinking. Yes, I am a writer, partly because I couldn't imagine doing anything else and partly because that's my job. It's what I do and who I am. However, what I'm doing now is a far cry from what I imagined a writer's life to be when I first had the dream in my teens.

Like many aspiring writers I dreamed of writing the great (fill in the country) novel or becoming a famous poet. Neither of those things has happened yet. Instead, I spend my days writing about mortgages and finance, camping, language teaching and (best of all) working in the movies. I write about a variety of topics, some interesting, some less so, but although fame is still distant, I'm still happy.

That's because even when I complain about a particular writing project - and let's face it, some of them are hard - I still get a kick out of making my living from writing. I would never want to go back to working for someone else or working in an office. This is what I wrote in a comment on gracepub's post:

Writing is a strange profession; if your face isn't on a dustjacket or your byline in a national magazine or newspaper, then many people don't take you seriously as a writer. I guess you have to learn to do without the approbation of your peers and write anyway.

I suppose that's where I am now. I know that one day I'll get around to writing more for myself than for others, but for now I'm enjoying beign able to pay the bills. How do you feel about how your writing career has developed?

The Long Reach Of Article Marketing

Finally, one of these things that I can write about legitimately. Do you know that one of my most read free article marketing articles on EzineArticles has to do with funeral flowers? I'm not making this up, I promise. Here's how it happened. About four years ago my husband got into a new financial venture, selling prepaid funeral plans in the UK market. He had a partner and things went swimmingly for a while. I did a website for them and it seemed to do the trick. It was simple (which was just as well given my skill level) and professional.

A few years later, they wanted to drum up some publicity, so I suggested article marketing. I took the original website content, most of which I had written or edited and (with their permission) turned it into eight articles relating to funerals and funeral plans. One of them is about planning your funeral, including thinking about flowers for saying goodbye, as Dotflowers mentions.

Even though those articles have nothing to do with my main business of freelance writing, ghostwriting and teaching, they're still out there working for me. The reason is that part of the deal was that in the three link resource box, one of the links pointed to my site. Depending on the search engine you use, you can find the article (called 'It's Your Funeral: Why Not Plan It Properly') at least a hundred times. That's a hundred inbound links to my site. OK, so some of them are probably not the best quality, but at least they are there.

My point? Even if you write about something like funeral flowers and even if the article is old, you can still get some benefit for the resources and sites you are promoting.

Freelance Writing Myths

Freelance writers hear a lot of things from their clients - and they shouldn't believe all of them. The things clients tell you, as a writer or ghostwriter, are often designed to get you to provide your best work at the lowest possible price, and to give them something to measure your work against if you don't hit their target.

Freelance Writing Myth 1 - There Is Lots Of Info On ...

Clients always say things like:'There is lots of information out there, so you shouldn't have any trouble with this' and 'I found lots of links on Google'. Clients who do this are often trying to lowball me or have been fooled by the 1 million links on Google. I must admit, when I hear this, I'm often tempted to say unkind things such as: 'if there's so much great info out there, why am I the one that's looking for it?' I don't, though, knowing better than to bite the hand that might feed me.

Because the thing about search engines is that one million web pages does not equal lots of good information, not in a research sense anyway. What you've got instead is the same information one million times - and you're the sap that has to make sense of it. So if you have to research something outside your niche and write more than a hundred articles and make them all sound different, that can be a tall order.

Freelance Writing Niches

Gracepub has been quite vocal about the benefits for freelance writers of finding and staying within your niche. When you do, you have knowledge at your fingertips and you can write fast and earn more money. When you don't, you can end up having wasted your time and be out of pocket. I write about UK finance and I've done this before, in a series on credit cards. All of the articles were different, though much of the information was the same. (By the way, I had a funny experience the other day when I was researching a subject and some of my own ghostwritten material came up). But with other subjects, it's not so easy. If you don't know the subject well enough, you can't always differentiate between the articles.

This happened to me with a project. OK, the client was picky, but he had a point - some of the articles were very samey. And the reason - there wasn't loads of information out there. When I looked into it, there were a few facts repeated ad nauseam. I tried my best, but I just couldn't make the articles different enough and I didn't have enough inside information to make the difference.

So now I've revised some of the articles and I'm playing a waiting game. If the revisions are OK, that's a quarter of the money I want to earn this month taken care of. If not, it's back to the drawing board and looking for another freelance writing job.

Related freelance writing information

It Shouldn't Happen To A Freelance Writer
Rejected? Don't Be Dejected
Five Questions Every Freelance Writer Should Ask

This is the first in an occasional series on freelance writing myths. Feel free to join in on your blog or to let me know of myths you've experienced in your job.

Freelance Writers Need Time Off Too

I am taking a day off today. I have been busy for months, and not just with freelance writing. In the last three months I have completed an international move and done more writing than I ever thought possible. I'm so busy that I have very little time to promote - and promotion is part of what has made me so busy. So why am I taking a day off?

It's simple. Every now and then you need to remind yourself of the reasons why you work at home. My reasons (in no particular order) include being able to set my own schedule, not having to dress up and spending time with my daughter and family. This week I've been particularly busy having done a panic acceptance of too much work the previous week. My daughter has been asking me to play and I promised that if she could be patient (as if!) I would play on Friday afternoon. So that's what I'll do when she gets home from school.

Before she gets home, I'm also going to do some stuff around the house, because we've still got a fair number of boxes everywhere and it's driving me crazy. And maybe I'll also go to the beach and go to my favourite coffee place with my husband. And maybe ... And maybe ...

Days off come so rarely that it's tempting to fill them with stuff. I've always been a hard worker, but I work harder now that I'm at home than I ever did as a lecturer - and that's saying something. The danger of that is that you could burn out, as a good friend warned me. So I'm taking some time to chill before that happens. WAHMs are high risk candidates for burnout because they never have any time off.

Yesterday, I sat at the computer from 8am till about 9pm, with only a couple of short breaks. When I got up my eyes were blurred and my wrists were aching, but I had met my deadlines. I'm only behind on one thing now (here's why) and I'm sure I can catch up over the next week. I've written three articles this morning (1500 words in total, which is just a warm-up) and now this freelance writer is out of here. Time to relax.