By James Patterson
It was February of 2010. I walked in the door and my wife immediately knew something was up.
“I’ve been let go.”
The words rolled off my tongue and didn’t sound real. I had been let go from my corporate writing and public relations job, the first time anything like that had ever happened to me. Looking back, the next few days were a complete blur of trying to get my bearings and figure out what to do next.
Naturally I was worried. The job market is poor now, but back then it was even worse. Compound that by the fact that I live in a town of only about 50,000, meaning communications jobs were even more scarce. I didn’t have the savings or equity built up in my house to just pack up and move to a bigger market (even if I could sell my house, which was a long shot).
I felt stuck.
For years I had wanted to try my hand at freelance writing, but never had the time to do it with my full-time job — or the gumption to quit and just jump into it with both feet. Getting let go gave me the opportunity I was waiting for.
I decided to turn lemons into lemonade.
For the first few months, I wandered aimlessly through the freelancing desert.
I wrote for Demand Studios. A lot.
It was mind-numbing, soul-crushing work, but it paid the bills. But I knew that wasn’t enough to stand on.
In June, I Googled “Idaho freelance writer” on a whim just to see if there were other people like me in my area. I stumbled across the website of Lindsey Woolman, a freelancer in Boise. I emailed her and asked her a few simple questions about how she got started, how she finds clients, etc. She was kind enough to email me back, and recommended the services of a “freelance writing mentor.”
That was my first introduction to Carol Tice, in June of 2010.
“You have to spend money to make money,” was my line of thinking. I hadn’t invested any money into my freelancing “business” up until that point. In fact, I hadn’t treated it like a business at all.
Listen in on my first mentoring call:
Carol: Well, are you doing X to market yourself?
Me: Uh..well..no.
Carol: Well, what about Y? Are you doing that?
Me: Er, no.
Carol: Okay, well surely you’re doing Z, right?
Me: Not exactly.
Over the next two hours, Carol laid out a plan for how I could land new clients and start having a real freelancing business that didn’t involve selling my soul to Demand Studios.
A marketing plan emerges
Here were her suggestions, and what happened as a result of following them:
- Go through my LinkedIn contacts and solicit referrals from people in my network. Result: I was referred to client who has given me nearly $20,000 of work over the last year.
- Try cold calling to break the monotony of sending out emails and not ever getting any responses. Result: After several weeks of call after call and follow-up after follow up, I landed one of the hospitals in my region as a client. I now handle all their writing and social media efforts.
- Contact old colleagues and see if they needed any freelancing help. I called a former co-worker at a marketing firm in Washington, D.C. and simply asked “Could you use any writing help?” Result: That one phone call landed me projects on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned through this whole process, it’s that the age-old principle of the law of the harvest really works. You reap what you sow. If you put out negativity, thoughts of doubt and feelings of worthlessness, that’s what you’re going to get.
But when you put in the work, believe in yourself and your abilities and tell yourself you’re really worth $100 an hour or $1 per word, that’s when things start happening. You should be the only one who can tell you what you’re worth.
James Patterson is a freelance health writer and public relations consultant at OnPoint Writing and Communications. Follow him on Twitter at @jamespatterson3. His past clients include the National Institutes of Health, the President’s Cancer Panel and the National Diabetes Education Program. James has chosen to donate his $50 guest-post fee — it goes to homeless charity Invisible People TV. Want to guest here? See my writers guidelines.
