What One Thing Would You Change In Your Freelance Writing Career To Date?

By Dan Smith

Over the past few weeks, we’ve talked about various freelance writing career related topics, from complacency to rates.

And if you look back right throughout the history of this blog, you’ll see posts that have been written to provide help, advice, direction and an insight into helping you succeed as a freelance writer.

Today, rather than offer up some information on how you can develop in your freelance writing career, I want to throw out a question to you:

If you could go back to any point in your career to date, whether that career spans a decade or a month, what would you change?

In recent weeks, I’ve been thinking a lot about my career. Speaking to people I used to talk to regularly when I first started out and seeing a lot of developments in the last six months in particular, I seem to have had a lot of ‘prompts’ lately to make me question — or at least think about — my career.

Generally speaking, I can’t think of any major point where I think I’ve made a particularly bad decision or a choice where I’ve banged my head on the desk afterwards because of finding out making the opposite choice would have resulted in a different, better outcome.

Saying that, there are few instances where I do wonder what would have happened should I have made a different decision.

For example, one of my first real freelance writing gigs was for a London based SEO agency. I started off producing five articles a month and at the height of our relationship, I was delivering over 50,000 words a month for them.

Last year, their request for work tailored off almost overnight, by about 50% one month on the last and back down to five pieces a month as was the original request when we first started not long after.

I knew that the company had had a restructure internally and they were changing their business focus, but I never questioned it. I was freelance, they had no reason to justify their work requirements.

But honestly, it annoyed me. I was the company’s primary freelance writer, had built up a great relationship with them and it felt as though I was just dropped.

I’m not sure whether asking for an explanation would have actually done anything, but I do wonder whether approaching them would have resulted in an increase in work compared to what I ended up producing for them.

I’m a huge believer in going with your gut instinct and as I said, I can’t think of any moments that stand out in my career to date where I feel I’ve made a wrong decision, only decisions where I sometimes ponder what the alternative outcome would have been.

In your freelance writing career so far, is there any thing you would change if you could or any part you would have done differently?

Image: neatonjr (fotopedia)