Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

I may not be the best person on the Internet to give you diet and exercise advice, but I can say this – it definitely helps. I have something of a forced incentive on this one. I have a gluten intolerance which means I cannot eat most junk food and have to cook most of my own meals. At first, this was a big chore. As time went on, I realized that I think much clearer when I am not eating McDonald’s and Doritos every day. Which of course lead to the big revelation (get ready for it)…. a healthy diet helps you think clearer.

Yeah, I know – I should have my own TV show, right? Seriously though, if you haven’t yet, give this a shot, because the effects are even more than I would have imagined. You know that fuzzy headed, cotton-ball feeling you get between your ears when you try to think of a word and it just wont’ come? It turns out that when you get all the vitamins and minerals you need every day and cut out all the processed junk, that feeling almost completely disappears.

So, what do I recommend? I’m not going to give you a diet plan to follow, because I’m not a nutritionist or a doctor. However, I can tell you what I’ve done. First, I eat breakfast bright and early every day. Not just a pop tart on my way out the door – it’s a bowl of fruit, a big glass of water, and some yogurt – occasionally with a bit of gluten free toast for substance. Next, I’m a vegetarian. It wasn’t some super-discovery on my part about how meat is raised (though since I became a vegetarian, I’ve read some horrible stories about farming practices and the hormones in meat and dairy). It was simply how much easier it is to not eat meat, and by proxy most dairy products. Finally, I don’t drink caffeine – at all. The only caffeine I’ve had in the last five years is when I take a red eye flight across the country and need to stay awake for another 12 hours.

The result is that I sleep better, wake up much better, and can think clearly throughout the day – not just when I’ve had my coffee. Now, when you top all that off with a round of exercise every day – at least 30 minutes of stretches and some form of aerobics – the impact on your mental clarity is ridiculous. Plus, it makes you feel good. Your body is pleased that it’s getting what it needs, so when you sit down to write, it hums with energy.

That’s my public service announcement for the day – exercise and proper diet are good for your mind. I know it sounds cliche, but it’s incredibly true. Don’t think of it as something to help you in the future; think of it as a way to boost your productivity right now and start living the dream of being a full time writer. That’s when things really start to kick into gear.

Freelance Lifestyle exercise, freelance writing, good diet, make money online, thinking clearly, writing

When I got started in this business, one of the biggest perks I saw was being able to sit back and relax on the beach with a laptop, because I had the freedom to travel where I wanted and when I wanted.

It’s been a few years since then, and I’ve learned a few things about travel. Yes, it’s possible to go somewhere whenever you want, but even more so than when you have a job you need to plan EVERYTHING out perfectly if you actually want to enjoy your trip.

1. Lost Pay Adds Up

First up, you need to save up money for a trip. When you only go on vacation once every year or two, it’s not a big deal. You have a fund in a jar on top of the fridge and everyone knows you don’t go until it’s full. When you’re a freelancer with itchy feet, you want to get out there as much as possible, but you still need to pay for the trip.

To top things off, you don’t get vacation pay. It seems obvious enough, but too many people neglect his little detail. Sure, you can go away whenever you want, but if you do, you don’t get paid because you’re not working. And if you plan on working while you’re gone, trust me – it’s not going to happen.

2. Juggling Clients During Vacation

Another toughie is figuring out how to juggling existing, ongoing, or new clients while away. I’ve learned, over time, to tell my clients about my vacation at least 1 month before I go away…then I remind them weekly in subtle ways so they don’t forget.

The first trip I took, I spent three hours a day in the hotel room replying to emails and editing documents. The second trip, I forgot my laptop at home and came back to a dozen irate emails. By the third trip, I had a system in place where I worked my butt off for 10 days before I left to get EVERYTHING done early.

However you do it, make sure your clients A) know you’ll be gone and B) have a lot of time to unload whatever they need on you beforehand. If they don’t, it becomes their problem, which 99% of them will recognize.

3. Having Work to Come Back To

Here’s why I don’t try to get everything done before I leave, and actually build the trip into my schedules. It’s because, when you get back you don’t have anything to do. I’ve been in this trap twice before – once after a 2 week trip to New York City in 2008 and last year after I got married.

Both times, I took extended leaves of absence (two weeks and three weeks), having planned ahead to cover the lost time and get everything done early. Unfortunately, when I got back, I had nothing to do – no edits, no projects, no responses from those clients.

They hadn’t moved on – they’d just taken a break themselves and I lost another whole week finding work on Elance. The lesson here is to always bid out in advance of leaving and try to convince your regular clients to have stuff waiting for you when you get back.

Ideally, you’ll eventually have regular monthly projects that you can use to fill these gaps, but for now, a good bit of pre-bidding or even a day or two mid-vacation spent bidding, can help stave off the lost week.

4. Enjoying Your Trip Properly

Enjoying your trip is important. What good is all that travel if you’re miserably thinking of your email the whole time. If you’re traveling with family, it can be even worse as you drag down your spouse and kids with you.

So, instead of worrying constantly, be realistic and set aside at least 1 hour a day to check email, hash out work details and make sure everything is okay. The rest of the day, leave your phone at the hotel. A blinking BlackBerry can be the death of a good vacation and your clients should already know you’re away.

If it’s important, they’ll leave a message and you’ll have your hour at the end of the day to deal with whatever comes up.

5. The Best Time to Get Away

So, with no boundaries on when you travel (unless you have kids), when is the best time to get away? I don’t have any preferred times, but I have been very lucky in offseason traveling. For sure, consider taking a trip in December. It’s the slowest month of the year for most freelancers and offers tons of opportunities for cheap travel if you go in the first two weeks.

September-October and April-May are also great times because of the pre and post seasons discounts at resorts in areas that are still quite nice. Avoid mid-summer travel like the plague if you can get away with it, and keep a close eye on nice weekends in the later winter and early spring.

My wife and I had a fantastic weekend in the Redwoods two years ago in April. No one was there but the weather hit a balmy 75 degrees. Last year we did the same thing in Vancouver, Canada in February. If you can time it right, you can get the entire destination to yourself.

The key to successful travel as a freelancer is to cut out as much of your work life as possible. I made the mistake on this one more than once and it can be extremely frustrating. Do it right, though, and trust me – you’ll have a blast and your friends will be super jealous (which is always fun).

Freelance Lifestyle freelance writing, home business, make money online, traveling, working on the road

I’m taking a break from my “informational” posts and the novel I’m working on because I don’t feel like delving into anything too deep right now. My computer got a virus last night and shredded by files to little pieces. Luckily, when I was bored a few weeks ago, I took the time to back everything up properly and now perform regular backups simply because I often get bored and I might as well keep it up to date. I didn’t lose any files this time around and I was

amused by the fact that it was merely because I was bored – seems like an odd reason for my computer to remain intact, but I’ll take it. 

 

I suppose, that’s what working at home comes down to though. Last month was incredibly boring – I had zero work for about 16 days in a row leading into the week after Christmas and technically I had nothing to do because of it. However, instead of sitting around and playing Halo 3 (which was mighty tempting), I organized my files, backed everything up (saving my computer yesterday in the process), did my taxes, cleaned the house, and performed a half dozen other chores that I never would have done otherwise. It worked out pretty well. It’s all about the self motivation – something that can plague any good freelancer if they get sloppy. 

I wasn’t supposed to be going on about freelancing though, so I’ll leave you with that. I’ll be back tomorrow with another exciting segment in my ongoing web-novel: sounds goofy doesn’t it. Oh well, it’s fun to write.

Freelance Lifestyle being bored at home, computer problems, freelance writing, working at home

If you’ve been working in this business for a while, you know a few things – first of all, you can never count on there being work for any definitive period of time. Freelancers are nervous people. We tend to ebb and flow with the surges of work as best we can. Ideally there is some money set aside for those times – no one wants to be broke in hard times.

Second, we begin to learn when the business gets lean and when it surges. For example, this year December was the slowest month I’ve seen since I started this business. That’s not to say there wasn’t some work out there, but it wasn’t the right kind of work. People were asking for the moon while paying peanuts and while I’m not above scaling back my operations and taking lower paying jobs when the times are tough, no one is going to get my services for $5/article. I did my penance at the bottom of the pile, taking those rates, and there’s no reason to go back to it. 

That said, December was full of Project Managers with no budget left at the end of the year looking for people to write things at a slashed prices. I don’t know what kind of quality they ended up getting for that kind of money, but I’m not guessing all that much. 

Which of course brings me to my point. There are always slow times out there – anytime a holiday rears up (almost any holiday btw), your clients will start ignoring your emails or disappearing for a few days at a time. Toss in the end of the year and you’re going to get low paying jobs in between poor communication and lean work. But, if you know this is going to happen you can plan for it. Most of all though, you need to remain confident that when that time is over, you’ll be able to find work again. It comes back – it almost always come back. Being a freelancer on the Internet is like working for the largest corporation on the planet – there’s always something to do, you just need to keep at it. The work will come to you if you’re there to take it and do the footwork to find it. 

I did my job though – kept from complaining about how slow things have been and even offered a bit of sage advice (if I do say so myself) in the process. Here’s to a prosperous New Year and some new jobs in the not so distant future.

Freelance Lifestyle bad times for writers, freelance writing, getting work online, slow freelancing, writing online for money

I have wanted to be a writer for a while now. Not “since I was a little kid” while, but a good long time nonetheless. Of course, when I had these visions of literary wonder, I was going to be sitting around a massive house with a few hundred words a day to write for a major magazine, newspaper, or novel. Of course, it’s not the same thing as what I’m actually doing – that is being a pen for hire, the guy who does all the dirty work for websites across the globe. 

I’m not complaining about my job of course – being a freelance writer is probably the best job I’ve ever had or will ever have and I don’t plan on stopping any time soon. That said, there ends up being a huge difference between writing because you love it and writing because you have to do it to pay your rent and keep the Simpsons DVDs up to date. 

When I wrote in college, I wrote because I loved it. That’s about all you get out of it when you’re paying thousands of dollars for someone to “teach” you how to produce a short story. Right now, I write because it pays the bills – all sorts of bills by the way; more than I ever thought would be possible. This isn’t a new realization by any means. I have seen the effects of work in action many times before. When I was a kid, there was nothing I wanted more than to ride the lawnmower around the yard – I’ll bet you can guess how that turned out. 

And in the last two years or so, I’ve had plenty of jobs that I thought would be a lot of fun, but the longer I worked on them, the less fun they became. Writing guides for video games? That should be awesome right? Turns out that when you start looking at everything in a game as a sequence in a technical manual, it’s pretty dull. Eating out and writing reviews? Well, it could be fun if A) the food was good everytime or B) you didn’t have to think of new and exciting ways to describe the word “spicy”. 

Again, I’m not complaining. My job is great and if you’re getting into freelance writing, I can guarantee that you’ll be happy with your new lifestyle. But, if you’re getting into it for the love of writing, you’re going to be pretty crestfallen pretty quickly. 

My advice – get a really relaxing, mindless hobby. It helps to balance out how much you use your brain when writing all day and allows you to clear the slate so you can work on private projects – things like short stories or that great american novel. I like to read cheesy fantasy novels and play guitar hero. My brain gets to shut down for an hour or two and I don’t feel like writing more is only another chore when it is really something I dream about doing most every day. 

You’re going to have enough trouble already separating your personal life from your work if you start working freelance – create barriers and good ways to wind down and you can avoid feeling like the writing you do for the love of writing is the same as all that other stuff you scribble out to pay your gas bill.

Freelance Lifestyle freelance writing, Freelancing, make money online, writing career, writing for money

Freelance writing is, by definition, anything but a business. You scavenge for work, pander to your clients, and spend more time worrying about how you’ll pay your bills than actually doing work to pay said bills. That said, if you are moderately successful at all that juggling, it will eventually turn into a business, whether you want it to or not. 

When does that fateful moment occur though – that your long time hobby, and short-time means of feeding yourself grows into something more substantial. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not. First off, the goal is almost always to make more money so that your freelancing career isn’t so hard to maintain. When you manage to pull that off, you’re halfway there anyways. You have the clients, you have the drive, now just comes the fun part – all of the finances and paperwork. 

We’ll skip that part for now though. I don’t much want to relive the terrorizing part where I spent so much of my time this last year, but I will say that eventually it just makes good financial sense to upgrade your resources. It saves time on taxes, helps you find new clients in your area, and makes it much easier to find help with your work when you get a bit behind. 

Keep an eye on things though if you’re looking to keep your freelancing as a side hobby. If you get too good at what you do, it will balloon into something much more in no time.

Freelance Lifestyle freelance writing, Freelancing, make money online

Running a business is a trust game – if someone doesn’t trust you, they sure as heck are not interested in giving you their money for your products or services. Would you go into an electronics store where every item was sold out of box for retail price? Probably not. But, building trust offline is entirely different from doing it online – you don’t have a store front to put a face to your business. You have a website – and websites are notoriously bad at conveying any kind of emotion or human face of your business. That’s why you hear constant reminders to do the little things. Put peoples’ pictures on your site, write a blog in a casual tone and send out personal emails to stay on a friendly tone with people.

It’s all part of the way in which people deal think about what they’re going to buy. So, what does this all have to do with the post title, or freelance writing for that matter? When you start talking about freelancers, you have a very interesting dilemma.

First. freelancers are by nature floaters. They go from project to project building reputation and using that reputation to get bigger, better projects. They don’t have a solid location or image to cling to – they are amorphous – it’s how they survive. 

But, people don’t trust the amorphous. They want stability, experience, and quality all at once. So, how do you convey those qualities without actually opening a store front or plopping down a few thousand dollars on websites, advertising and everything else a good “stable” business needs. 

You start by creating the “image” of a stable business. A few months ago, I worked on a project for a client that needed a book about local search. I create a fake plumber and added his name to Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, Live Local, and a half dozen yellow page and directory sites so I could take snapshots of everything. Of course, you need a phone number to verify those listings and I had to use one I could answer. Suffice it to say that in the three days before I turned all of those accounts off, I received 54 phone calls for my imaginary plumber all based on the illusion of a stable business. People see an address and a profile that appears in multiple locations and they assume you are worth trusting. 

Toss up a Google Maps location, add yourself to local directories, and put as many business references as you can up online and you will get more business – I can almost guarantee that. If someone sees “Joe’s Writing Services” and Google’s the name to find 14 listings in YellowPages, Yahoo! Local, and Citysearch among many others, they assume you’re legit…even though you wrote them all yourself. 

Quality writing doesn’t always get the job done for freelancers in these economic times, so you’ve got to think outside the box – build up your profile across the next in multiple niches and be where your potential clients will look for you.

Freelance Lifestyle business planning, freelance writing, growing business, make money online

I get a lot of questions about what exactly I “do” for a living. The truth is that when someone asks me that question there are a lot of possible answers. I could simply say “I’m a writer” or I could elaborate and explain that I own a freelance copy writing business or that I do articles for the web. Any way you look at it, there isn’t really an all inclusive answer. If I said “freelance writer” people would ask me what kind of freelance writing I do. They would say, “Have I read anything you’ve written?” and of course the immediate answer is no. I write articles for digital products and rework website content for Canadian businesses. If someone had actually read something I had written by chance, I’d probably have more questions for them than they’d have for me.

The other day for example, I was talking to one of my girlfriend’s cousins and she asked me if I was writing anythign interesting. As often happens, I was thrown off by the question. I don’t really think of my work in terms of “interesting” or not. It’s not that it is never interesting. It’s just that most of the time that’s not the important part – the important part is that it will convert to a higher pay:work ratio than the last project. I know it sounds crass, but most freelancers work like this. Even the hoighty toighty magazine and newspaper writers that write for the “love of it” are really just thinking of how much they can get done in a short amount of time and pay their bills. It’s the biggest irony of trying to make money with any form of artistic endeavor (and I know I’m stretching the definition of artistic when I use it to talk about my freelance projects), but it’s the real truth. 

I have a partner in all this jumbled writing stuff that does a much better job of describing what he does than I do. He can tell a funny story about it or describe something ridiculously mundane in a humorous way and make people interested. I can’t even get myself interested half the time. Of course, I am by no means complaining. I love my job. I work the projects I choose, the hours I choose and can take off whenever I feel like it. I work on my couch, watching baseball or at a coffee shop while listening to Radiohead. I get more freedom working alone than I could ever have dreamed of anywhere else, but I do loathe those conversations – what do I do? I write stuff…let’s keep it at that.

Freelance Lifestyle freelance writing, Freelancing, writing for money

If only life could be so good.

Freelance Lifestyle

I haven’t really kept up appearances on the site in recent months – luckily, I actually have a good reason, so I don’t feel overwhelmingly bad about it. I have been quite busy as business had been through the rough, pretty much across the board. Lots of new clients, lots of repeat business, and about a 60% off-Elance rate.

Ideally, all projects come in off of Elance and there are a few good reasons for this. First of all, they are not subject to the hefty 7.75% fee that Elance charges. With the taxes I already pay on my income (including the hefty 15% self-employment tax),  that makes almost 30% of my income almost immediately disappear – not a pretty number, especially when self employed.

Second, it gives me a great deal of freedom in how I develop projects, how I communicate, and what rates I establish. Stand alone projects also seem to have much higher referral rates as people are usually working with you on a more personal basis. Elance is great for meeting people if you need work, but if you can develop a stream of new projects and clients elsewhere, the results are almost infinitely better.

That said, things have been chaotic as I have more than tripled my workload (thanks in part to a second writer being added to the team) and bogged myself down with hours of work each week. It’s a good thing, especially as things start to accelerate much faster. It’s like a exponential function, ramping up slowly at first, and then suddenly taking off. I swear, I had no idea when I first started writing online in November of 2006 that there was such a large market for it. Ironically, when someone says to me, “Really? There’s a market for that?” I look at them like they’re stupid. Honestly though, it’s hard to envision such a massive business opportunity in writing solely for the Internet.

But, there is and a major reason is that in the last three years or so, the Internet has developed into something completely different. For the entirety of the 1990s and the first half of this decade, it was a novelty, a tool that everyone was interested in the technology behind. People would dream big, elaborate dreams of what might be done with the framework it provided. Other people would look at the Internet and see only potential.

Today, only scientists and engineers look at the Internet in those terms. Everyone else looks at it as a part of everyday life. No one sees a website and wonders what amazing things it might offer next – they look at it and wait for the next story to break or for the next band or friend to come along. And that’s where we come in – writing chunks of the billion-word industry that is Internet marketing.

Once I realized that this was the case, I started thinking beyond the simple $5 coffee maker reviews I was so excited to be writing. I started thinking of larger projects, of opportunities outside of the same old spamming techniques and article marketing projects. There’s a lot more going on here than you can see when you login to the Internet.

Even the way I talk to my friends and family about my job reflects my realization. I was embarrassed at first. I went to college thinking I would be writing novels or newspaper articles. But, novels and newspaper articles only make up less than 1% of the text written every day. Everything is about content these days. Images are important online, but they don’t index in search engines, they don’t speak to what people are looking for, they only compliment it. Where print media may be dying (and I was nearly apoplectic thinking I would never find a job because of it), online media is larger than ever and billions of words of text are uploaded every month to sell products, promote people, engage communities, and much more.

When those realizations developed, I knew I could move on to the next level, expanding my work to include much more than those $5 puff pieces on the newest dog collars. It was time to become a cog in the workings of the world’s largest information producing machinery. I understood how it worked; now it was time to start helping it grow and making a living in the process.

And while I can claim I registered my domain name in July and I started contacting writers in November, I didn’t actually build my business until now. I needed the time to see what I could actually achieve. Risks are all fine and good, but I still need to pay my bills. Fast forward to April, 2008, and that’s not an issue anymore – now it’s a matter of stepping up and building a successful business with a wider reach, and doing it in a way no one has done before. I don’t want to be just another copywriting firm that sells cheap words for crappy products. I want to be a piece of the machinery that works to promote the essence of online commerce and socializing.

Enough preaching though – it seems like every time I return to my blog after a long hiatus, I just preach on some deep insight I have discovered that hundreds already uncovered. But, it’s always a good practice to step back and look at what you’ve done as a writer, to see the development and growth in yourself and what you do for a living. Only then can you realistically take stock of your capabilities and look toward your long term goals and how you can get there. I’m at that point and it’s a good place to be.

Freelance Lifestyle