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Your Freelance Career Speed Bumps

If you look online long enough (two minutes), you’ll find ample evidence of why some freelance writers are still struggling with running a successful freelance business. I present Exhibit One here, a writer who, upon attempting to identify the roadblocks to their success: My credentials don’t align with straightforward career trajectories. (They go on to list all the things they’ve done over…

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Client Red Flags Every Freelancer Needs to Know

Photo by Karolina Grabowska I was reading through some old social media posts recently and came across discussion of a job posting that just plain sucked. In fact, I blogged about it not long ago right here. The issue was that the job poster, a household-name publication, was presenting a full-time employee position as a freelance job. Why? Because in doing so, they felt they could dictate your…

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Your Freelance Writing Career: Finding work now, building for the future

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Freelancer asks the question: “How can a new freelancer become popular on freelance job websites?” Writers responded. “Create a strong profile.” “Post your portfolio.” “Get good reviews.” “Become a package designer.” Except for the obvious “Huh?” of that last one, these all seem like fair answers. Notice I didn’t say good answers. I responded like…

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Freelance Game Plan: Your 2024 Freelance Writing Rate

Welcome to the new chapter of your freelance writing career.                     photo by Andrea Piacquadio I don’t care if you’re reading this on January 2nd or October 22nd — every single day of your working life is as good as any to turn the corner on your freelancing. If you want to use the calendar as a jumping-off point, be my guest. Just don’t get stuck in the thinking that it’s the only…

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When a Client Breaches a Freelance Contract

Photo courtesy of Pexels/Pixabay We’ve all had our share of flaky clients. By flaky, I mean clients who: Disappear at payment time Reappear three months later to complain about quality (oddly about the same time you’ve threatened litigation/collection) Change the project parameters after you’ve done the work Revise more than twice (my record is 12 revisions) and get farther from the original…

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Guest Post: Crafting a Freelance Writing Portfolio That Gets You Hired

Sometimes a great idea lands in your email. This guest post is a prime example, in fact. When Jenn Mattern told me to expect a message from Monica Shaw, little did I know that the message would result in this great little post you’re about to read. The back story: Monica runs WritersResidence.com, a site that helps writers build a pretty stellar portfolio. A freelancer herself, Monica gets it.…

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How I Boosted my Freelance Career (and how you can, too)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the freelancer I was and the freelancer I am now. They are two different people, my friends. The old me was a hit-and-miss freelancer. I lost my job suddenly and had two kids to support. So my freelance career back then was pasted together. I’d take whatever gig came, took some that paid garbage, and supplemented my freelancing with short-term temp…

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How to Fail at Freelance Writing

If you’ve been freelancing for a while, you’ve seen a lot. I’d bet you’ve seen something like what Randy Hecht shares with us today. Randy is the moderator of the popular LinkedIn forum LinkEds & Writers, which has a large population of working freelance editors and writers — the site’s target audience. As you might imagine, it draws plenty of people wanting to write, writing for free, or…

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How to Lose $$ with Bad Freelance Marketing (and how to fix it)

Freelancers, are you killing your chances of gaining a client or a network connection? Do you know if you are? Hint: you are if you do anything like this: Writer Jane submitted a thread to a writers’ forum. The moderator, another writer, turned it down because it was promotional, which is against the forum rules. Jane apologized. Shortly after Jane decided to send the moderator a LinkedIn…

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The No-nonsense Freelance Negotiation Tactic

If you wait long enough (five minute usually), the universe will hand you a blog topic. In this case, it was a fellow writer who sent along her own scenario that serves as a reminder to all writers that you can — and should — stand up for your freelance writing business. Here’s the scenario — with names changed: Brenda was negotiating with a new client to start a series of articles for the…

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When is a Freelancer Not a Freelancer?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Looking for writers with a background in digital news reporting to write for us on a freelance basis. We would need 40 hours per week and the hours would be 9-to-5. See anything wrong with that? You should. And your obvious follow-up question to the job poster would be this (and our own Paula Hendrickson, who alerted me to this, posed the same…

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Freelance 'Anti-Niche' Niche Boost

I’m going to say something that’s a little controversial — We’re all niche writers. We’re also all generalists. No matter what you start out writing, you eventually end up with two things happening: You start to write a lot of the same topic or writing form (blog posts, ghosted articles, case studies, etc.) You write on tons of different topics even if it seems to land somewhere familiar Yep,…

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I was on YouTube the other day and I saw a series of videos about the glories of AI and how this “new” technology is going to revolutionize work and the way we live. And of course, the comments were doomsday-style warnings about how it’s going to kill freelancing. Here’s my thought about AI: AI is not the enemy nor is it the panacea. In fact, it’s not even new. Here are examples of AI in your…

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Freelance Rates & Raises

Sometimes you go online and for some reason, you simply don’t expect to see the stupid shit people will say in public let alone the tangle that is their thought processes. I was on a writing forum yesterday when I saw what has to be some of the most absurd thinking I’ve seen in a long time. Maybe these writers are saying one thing and meaning another. Not that that would improve the situation…

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Writers Worth: This Job, Not That Job

You know, someday I hope that the world will sort itself out and that freelancers will shun the crap that is posted on job boards. Alas, that is not happening today. Thanks to Paula Hendrickson, who shared this particularly ridiculous job listing that came to her via a friend. And while this one pays better than $20 an article, the use of AI is front-and-center and yes, concerning. A perfect…

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Freelance, Not Employee: A Quick Guide

If you missed yesterday’s #FreelanceChat, you missed a good discussion on client boundaries. (Head over to Twitter and check it out.) It brought up a serious issue we freelancers have to deal with — how to know when a client is treating you like an employee. It’s certainly happened to me. One of those occasions was about 16 years ago, I had an encounter with a new client that pretty much cemented…

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Freelancing 2023: New Client or Waste of Time?

I love #FreelanceChat on Twitter. The topics are often solid and the discussion gets lively. (Every Thursday at noon ET.) In a recent open-mic chat, someone asked the question: How do you know when that client prospect is not going to hire you? That’s pretty important to know, right? Let’s look at this scenario and you tell me if this was a client who was buying: “Mark” worked for Acme Insurance.…

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