Three Stages Of Your Freelance Writing Career

freelance writing career

While it is possible to become an instant success after writing your first few pieces, chances are its going to take some time for you to hit your stride and gain a steady roster of clients. If your experience is similar to mine, you’ll progress through three distinct phases during your freelance writing career. Here’s an outline of those three stages.

1. I’m making what I can!

This could be defined as your “I’ll Write Anything!” phase.

You need to make money so you take any job available to you even if it means you aren’t really making all that much money at it. We’ve all been there as its tough trying to get a reputation in the business. A large number of job boards and forums have a rating system so if you are willing to undercut your competitors and make very little in order to get those first jobs under your belt and get positive feedback. Continue reading “Three Stages Of Your Freelance Writing Career”

Redefining what I do – I’m an Internet Guy

I always struggle when it comes time to craft a response to the common question “So, what do you do for a living?” In reality I have a number of things on the go at any given time including site development, working with my various customers on a freelance basis, running my copyright enforcement business, working on an upcoming eBook and maintaining my network of affiliate blogs. To answer the question with complete honesty I would probably need a half hour to explain each of the different things that I do but instead I always fall back to an easy and familiar answer.

“I’m a freelance writer.”

There are a number of reasons for this. It’s not because I’m ashamed or embarrassed about the true answer because I’m actually quite proud of what I’ve been able to accomplish. While it was a struggle starting out, things have improved to the point where I’m comfortable in what I’m doing, have been able to hire a couple virtual assistants to help out and working on some new projects that I’m very excited about. Continue reading “Redefining what I do – I’m an Internet Guy”

Stay away from freelance writers offering semi-exclusive content

I was recently talking to a customer about why their gold investment website wasn’t attracting any traffic whatsoever. This wasn’t a matter of only a few visitors trickling in but rather a case where the site had zero traffic. After reviewing the blog posts, I decided to do a quick search to see if he was using duplicate content. As it turns out, I opened up a whole can of worms about this particular project that I thought I would share with readers of the blog as it ended up being a very valuable lesson for both the client and myself. Continue reading “Stay away from freelance writers offering semi-exclusive content”

The Pitfalls Of Freelancing

Over the past few years, I have been actively seeking a living as a freelance writer and webmaster. For the most part I have been successful in making enough money to pay the bills and avoid returning to the workforce during these rather uncertain economic times. During my short freelancing career, I have had a few occasions where I ended up learning some lessons the hard way with dishonest or unreasonable clients. If you’re embarking on a freelance career of your own, here are some pitfalls you may want to look at before accepting work from others. Continue reading “The Pitfalls Of Freelancing”

Does article marketing still work?

Earlier this year I started moving away from article marketing, both to promote my services and on behalf of clients, due to the Google Farmer and Panda updates. When the Farmer update was first implemented I wrote about it and pondered whether or not it had killed the benefits of article marketing. One of the big changes to their algorithms was how they treated sites that they deemed to be “content farms”. Unfortunately for the popular article directories that I regularly submitted to, they were considered a content farm Google and saw their traffic plummet by 30 to 40%. Additionally, the general consensus amongst the SEO community was the valued backlinks from the better directories would now have lesser weight then they once had. Continue reading “Does article marketing still work?”