Ten Things to Do to Achieve Freelance Success

Anyone who plays the ponies knows that in order to boost your odds you need to know and do all you can. Guessing won’t get you the big money. And neither will closing your eyes and pointing to just any horse in the race. So it is with freelancing. To become a success, you have to make it happen. To do so requires you to honestly look at yourself and your business operation for weak areas that need to be improved upon or eliminated.

To get started on the right track, ask yourself the following 10 questions:

    1. Have you learned all you need to know to present yourself in the most professional manner? Look at related areas that might help. Tap any and all sources, including this blog, to learn all you can about the writing business.

    2. Have you kept current with the changes in your industry? What problems do other independent business owners—commercial artists, printers, bookstore owners, consultants, etc.—face every day?

    3. Have you studied your competition as much as possible? By noticing how other writers accomplish what they do, you may be able to pick up some of their techniques to improve  your business practices.

    4. Have you paid attention to current legislation that's bound to affect future business decisions in the industry? To do so you must read online news from Web sites in the industry and subscribe to their E-mail newsletters to be kept up to date, as well as  maintain open lines to important contacts who know about or may be able to influence that legislation (editors, elected officials, influential business persons, etc.).

    5. Have you joined any writing and/or business associations that may offer connections with fellow writers and markets? Have you participated in seminars given by experts in your field?

    6. Have you observed outstanding people in other fields and attempted to discover by what means they leaped forward in their careers?  Did they make bold changes of direction, timely innovations, or conceive creative promotional campaigns? Take time to lunch with friends in other businesses or fellow writers and quiz them intelligently.

    7. Have you set performance goals for yourself and stayed with them? Goals are a great way to motivate yourself.

    8. Have you honestly evaluated the work you've done? Take a hard look at what you’re producing and perhaps seek the opinions of others in the writing field.

    9. Have you trained yourself to troubleshoot problems? Solve problems as they arise rather than put them off until later.

    10: Have you learned to delegate and practiced motivating others to cooperate with you? You can’t do it all by yourself. Try outsourcing some smaller tasks of your business to allow yourself more time to write. When your business reaches a point where you can afford to hire help, and you need it, do so.

You’ll want to return to these pump-priming techniques repeatedly throughout your hopefully long and happy freelance career. You can't afford not to.

So You’ve Finally Been Published, Now What?

I didn’t start out to be a freelance writer. In fact, I had been studying photojournalism and documentary filmmaking. But as much as I tried, I couldn’t get anywhere with either. Frustrated, I read somewhere that if I wrote a story to go with my photos, I’d have a better chance of selling them. So I started doing that.

Enjoying traveling, I set out on a cross country driving and camping tour. This happened the year after I had spent nine weeks traveling to and from and around Alaska, a trip of 38,000 miles. I had planned to be awayfor six weeks and the thought of eating basic food all that time didn’t appeal to me. So I designed a compact “chuck wagon” unit that fit into the back of my Mazda hatchback. This allowed me to stop at any supermarket and stock up as I traveled, then make almost gourmet meals along the way.

Naturally, I took photos of the unit, then researched the history of chuck wagons of the Old West. I wrote an article about the unit and how it had served me well in my travels and sent it off to Popular Mechanics Magazine. To my surprise, they accepted it.

That was the last I heard of it until one night I was browsing in a magazine kiosk at one of the malls in my area. Something told me to pick up a copy of Popular Mechanics and thumb through it. Low and behold, I discovered my article, complete with my photos and construction diagrams. I got paid the following week. That was exactly 365 days after I sent in the article. If I would have been freelancing full time, I would have starved to death by that time.

I was finally published. Hooray!

What I didn’t realize was that it was dumb luck that brought me this far. I hadn’t researched the markets, nor had I thought about what the readers of the magazine might want or what the editor might need. I just thought of myself and sent my piece off like a rocket into the black emptiness of space.

After publishing that first article, nothing much happened. I kept sending out travel destination pieces one after the other and sometimes received polite rejection letters in return. Often, I received nothing.

It wasn’t until five years later that I finally got smart and started writing and marketing my work the right way. I began researching the markets until I found a travel industry magazine that seemed like a good possibility. The editor gave me a tentative assignment to write an article about the state of Guatemalan tourism from a trip I was going to make there. She loved it and the rest, as they say, is history. From then on, I had a steady stream of assignments—sometimes two or three a week. While the magazine didn’t pay a whole lot, it gave me a steady income and lots of clips.

Those clips lead to other assignments from other editors. Soon I began publishing in other travel industry publications and national travel magazines. And while I eventually wrote on other subjects, travel writing was always the maintstay of my work.

Staying Afloat in Today’s Market

With the economy the way it is today, it’s become harder and harder for freelancers, like myself, to stay afloat. The age-old doggie paddle just won’t work anymore. Sure, by kicking your feet you’ll keep your head above water, but little else.

So what can you do to make sure the Big Bad Wolf doesn’t come knocking at your door. The answer is diversify. Regular businesses learned this long ago, so it’s time that you as a writer learn it, too.

Before you cut the cord to a full-time job and seek work as a freelancer, you need to figure out what kind of financial base you have from which to operate your freelance business. Yes, that’s right, I said “business.” Every business has some sort of backup plan for tough times, and you should, too.  Thoroughly do your homework so that you’ll have the confidence to know about the writing markets before you begin.

I started out slowly, writing on Sunday afternoons. Then as I got better and got some assignments, I worked at night after teaching school all day. Soon I was writing as much as I was teaching. But I really didn’t do enough research, so when I did quit teaching, I didn’t have much to fall back on.

I decided that if I was going to do this, I would see work in areas that used the knowledge I had gained from the subjects I wrote about. I began teaching continuing education classes about travel destinations—I was an aspiring travel writer—at a local community college. This led to teaching writing classes. After all, I was both a writer and a good teacher, so why not combine the two.
But I still wasn’t making enough.

I sought out a part-time  job at a travel agency since I did know a lot about travel and world destinations. That gave me a regular paycheck with enough time to continue writing. Eventually, I got a full-time job at a better agency while still writing. But that put me back in the same position I was in as a school teacher with one exception. I had learned a lot about the travel industry working in these agencies and this gave me the knowledge and experience to write for travel trade magazines. Once I started doing that, the assignments kept coming in. By the time I had moved to a third agency, I knew I was in a rut. So one day I quit.

But now I had travel trade assignments and articles published weekly in five local newspapers. Plus I was teaching more continuing education classes in the evenings which left my days free to fulfill my assignments. I was on my way to freelance success.

Today, my company, Bob Brooke Communications, encompasses several different areas. Besides writing articles and books, I also have a fairly packed continuing education course schedule. My interest in photography led me to learn as much as I could about digital photography and now I teach that at several locations several times a year. I have also developed a modest lecture circuit which pays well for the time involved. To get material for lectures, I use the information I gather for articles on various subjects and combined with my photography, turn them into lectures.
But to fill in the voids left when writing markets go astray, I began designing Web sites, mostly for small businesses. I began with my own site, then developed three more informational sites. I’ve designed over 25 sites to date. These I do occasionally, but the pay is good enough to tide me over.

So if you have to seek out other work, make sure it’s related to what you write or that you can learn information that will be useful in your writing. My continuing education courses and lectures are all based on what I write. My technical expertise, which I developed solving my own computer problems and designing my own site over the years, has helped me tremendously in my web design work.

Remember, don’t work at anything that will take away from your writing. Work only at jobs that complement it–if you have to seek outside work at all.