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How I Became a Productive Freelance Writer – After Failing in Year One

Carol Tice

plan b strategy option alternative planning business symbol black board isolatedBy 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.

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