By Kim Jansen
When I graduated from college, I knew a 9-to-5 position was not for me.
I had dreams of becoming a happy, productive freelance writer – working at my own pace, toting my laptop to my favorite coffee shop, paying my bills with my ideas…
But it turned out that I knew nothing about freelancing.
See, in college, I landed some pretty impressive internships. I thought “My luck will transfer over to post-grad life. I’ll never hurt for work.”
But I was wrong. The only places I knew to look for work were content mills.
Several months and $20 later, I realized the work was painstaking. And frankly not worth it. I had to pick up other jobs. A stint at Macy’s. Teaching music classes. A restaurant position.
All the while, I still tried to freelance, but time kept running away from me. A year flew by, and I’d earned basically nothing from writing.
Getting organized
This year, I gave myself one more chance to get my freelance writing business off the ground before I officially called it quits. And I’ve been succeeding.
How? All it took was a new way of approaching my freelance writing business. Here’s what I do differently now:
- Schedule each working hour. Before I would slack on my to-do list and only complete one task. Now I have an old class schedule sheet I found; I make copies and can fill out every hour from 8am to 9pm during the week, but I only plan one day at a time. This way, I prevent some of that pressure a full week schedule gives me, but I actually complete most of my tasks by being specific.
- Spend time improving my craft. I want to continue delivering impeccable content to my clients, so every morning I spend 30 minutes on free writing, vocabulary and grammar, and sentence structure exercises. I also find that doing this every day clears my brain for the heavier client assignments and makes writing easier overall.
- Avoid content mills and bad websites. It’s easy to get wrapped up in Google searches of “freelance writing jobs” and hunting for opportunities on Craigslist. It never worked for me, so I just started avoiding it altogether. It opened up hours to market myself to jobs that would actually pay well.
- Invest in professional development. Not only am I a member of Freelance Writer’s Den, but I also subscribe to several top-notch experts in the writing industry, and I carve out an hour every day to learn from these experts.
- Stop researching magazines and companies – and start pitching them. Maybe it was fear of rejection, but I used to waste a lot of time trying to find magazines I could pitch. But I never pitched them. Research is still important, but now, armed with the know-how on writing queries, I actually pitch. Sometimes I get nothing, but I wouldn’t ever get anything if I didn’t pitch.
Now that I’ve learned to become a more productive freelancer, I’m seeing growth in my business. I’ve made money through my own blog, had several posts published to use as clips, and done paid projects for a couple of clients, all within weeks of starting these methods.
How do you stay productive? Tell us in the comments below.
Kim Jansen is a freelance writer who loves working with clients in the retail, wedding, small business, and music industries. She blogs about friendship over at Savvywifey.com.
