How To Reach The Next Rung On The Freelance Writing Ladder

By Dan Smith

I made a post a few weeks ago called ‘It’s Time To Give Something Back To The Freelance Writing Community’ where I invited any freelance writer to ask me a question about freelance writing and business development. I’d then hopefully provide an answer here at Get Paid To Write Online that would help out the writer and anyone else in the same boat .

Of the comments that have been left so far, the one I want to answer first is by Walker, who commented:

The reason I want to answer this first is that it’s a situation that I see so many writers in and although they will naturally develop and see their income increase, without a nudge in the right direction, it could take years.

What I need to say first is that if you’ve taken the leap to become a full time freelance writer, I personally don’t think you need to be measuring your success in a way that means you may have to consider going back to a full time job, unless it’s absolutely necessary.

You’ve made the hardest step and are on the first rung of the ladder — now it’s just a matter of progressing and climbing.

How you progress is down entirely to you as writer and how much drive and determination you have to succeed. However, if you are serious about becoming a writer and are willing to work to achieve your goals, there are just five steps that you have to follow.

1. Client work is your bread and butter

Every single vocation that you can work in has its positive and negative points and for the most part, to be able to carry out the positive points, you have to do the negatives.

With freelance writing, the positives and negatives aren’t as easy to distinguish, as for most writers, writing is writing, irrelevant of how you do it.

However, as we can naturally shy away from the aspects that we tend not to prefer so that we can focus on those that we do, client work is the part that is often classed as the negative aspect.

It does mean that you have to meet deadlines, work to a client’s specification and to a certain extent, act as an employee of the client’s company and as much as you might not think that this is what freelance writing is about, simply put, it is.

No matter whether you’ve been writing for a few weeks or a few years, writing for clients should be something that makes up a lot of your income and gives you at least some structure to what can be a volatile occupation.

Keep your clients happy, always look out for new projects and from thereon you can focus your development — and carry out your preferred aspects — around this structured work.

2. Blog first, monetize second

Possibly the most basic of marketing and sales theories, if you want to sell a product, you need to have people looking at it.

No matter whether you’ve got an item that every single person on earth could benefit from, if people don’t know it exists, you aren’t going to sell it.

And the same goes for monetizing a blog.

I’m a massive believer in that to develop as a writer, you need to be writing regularly and having a blog gives you the perfect way to do so.

Updating it two or three times a week, you’ll not only find your writing voice, but you’ll get into the habit of writing to deadlines, managing your time and finding interesting topics to write about.

However, I also believe that as great as blogs can be as a revenue stream, you shouldn’t spend a substantial amount of time monetizing them until you’re getting a regular stream of visitors.

The reason behind this is simple — if you’re only getting a dozen people visiting your blog every day, it’s almost impossible to judge if any monetizing efforts that you’re doing are being successful and therefore any time you spend tweaking and amending points will just be wasted time.

Wait until you’ve got at least 50 people visiting each day, however and you should start to be able to see which monetizing efforts are working, which aren’t and where you can improve.

3. Look at how much time you actually work

The problem a lot of new writers have when they first go full time is that they fail to manage their time effectively and believe that as they’re online, reading blogs or looking through writing resources, they’re working.

Unfortunately, this isn’t generally classed as working (as you aren’t actually earning) and you can soon become disillusioned when you realize that you’ve ‘worked’ a 70 hour week but have next to no income to show for it.

How you manage your time is up to you, but I recommend you splitting your days up into thirds (albeit not necessarily equal ones) — one third writing for clients, one third sending out queries and applying for projects and one third focused on reading writing resources and becoming involved in discussions.

4. Self-promotion is the only promotion you’re going to get

Something that I failed to realize when I was first starting out as a freelance writer, one of the most important things that you have to understand is that it’s very rare that unless you’re at the top of your game, no one’s going to promote you and it’s going to be down to you to get your name known.

Stop reading blogs and start commenting on them; get your own professional website and let people know what you do; learn a bit of basic SEO; contact other writers to network with them, even if it’s just an e-mail to introduce yourself; find your niche and become an expert in it.

Whether you do all of these, some of these or more than these points is your choice, but you have to remember that no one can get your name out there and known to the level that you need it to be except for you.

5. Find the ground between playing it safe and living dangerously

One of the issues that a lot of writers have is that they’re either too shy and quiet or they’re at the other end of the scale and take far too many risks.

The best place for a writer to be is smack bang in the middle of both.

There’s no doubt you could succeed, with time, by playing it safe and chances are you’d get a lucky break or two if you played it riskier, but you can move things forward faster and minimize your chance of things going awry by not always choosing the easy option, yet never taking a major gamble.

Use increasing your writing rates as an example. The easy option is simply to never increase them with existing clients, whilst the other extreme is to increase them to the level you want to be receiving without any negotiations or consideration for the length of time you’ve spent with the client.

In this scenario, you want to be finding the middle ground of increasing your rates if you honestly think it’s necessary, but taking into account how long you’ve been with that client — you might charge $50 a blog post now, but if you started off charging a certain client $10 a post, it’s highly unlikely that they’re going to be able to meet your new rate and so if you want to continue working with them, you need to meet somewhere in the middle.

There are several points that I haven’t mentioned here and I’ve purposely left these out as I don’t think that they have a distinct effect on climbing the first few rungs of the freelance writing ladder. There’s no doubt aspects like setting the right rate do have an effect on your progression when you’re looking to get halfway up the ladder, but at the bottom, as you’re still finding your footing as a writer, a lot of these aspects — like setting appropriate rates for your writing style, niche and experience — come with time and experience.

If you’re in a scenario similar to Walker, if there’s one thing you take away from this, it’s that you should never give up. You really have carried out the hardest bit by making the decision to write full time — now it’s just a matter of putting every minute you have available towards ensuring that you succeed, something which is entirely possible once you get a nudge in the right direction.

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