How Will You Know You’ve Become A Successful Freelance Writer?

By Dan Smith

There are a lot of great freelance writing blogs out there (including Get Paid To Write Online ;)) and while I don’t get chance to look at all of them every week, I tend to have a day once every week or two where I go through several blogs and see what other freelance writers are saying.

Earlier on today, I came across a post by Allena Tapia from 4th January where she explained that someone had made a comment on a piece she wrote for The Huffington Post, essentially saying that she wasn’t a successful freelance writer because she had time to volunteer at her child’s school.

Now, I don’t know Allena personally, but from what I’ve read about her / from her, I’d say she was a particularly successful freelance writer and I believe our views on success will be similar — if you can make a full-time living from freelance writing while also being able to live the life you want, that would make you pretty successful in my book.

This person who commented on Allena’s piece, although I don’t agree with their comment, obviously doesn’t believe that this is what success is based on and it appears that they believe the more time you’re working throughout the day, the more successful you are.

One of the issues — or benefits, depending on which way you look at it — with freelance writing is that as it is such a varied profession, it’s extremely difficult to pigeon hole people into being successful or unsuccessful.

With other careers, there are often pre-planned routes that lead to a specific point whereby you — and people around you — can assume that you’ve become successful within that career.

And while there are some writing career routes that do have more of a structured path, your standard freelance writing career isn’t one of them.

What also makes measuring success difficult as a freelance writer is that success can come in many different forms and your idea of success can change from one form to another over even a short space of time.

For example, when I first started writing, I remember I had the goal of wanting to earn more from freelance writing than I did from my salaried role and once this was complete, I’d consider myself to be a successful writer.

After achieving this goal, however, my idea of success changed and I wanted to write full-time in place of my salaried role — and now my idea of success has changed once again, as I want to continue to increase my income, but lower my working hours.

There’s no doubt that everyone’s view of what it takes to become a successful freelance writer differs — often widely so — but I would go as far to say that the person who commented on Allena’s post was in the minority when judging success, as I don’t believe there are many people out there who truly believe working all the hours available makes you a successful freelance writer.

Image: tobym (fotopedia)