Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

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

Not quite melted, but that Trojan did a number

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

It has been a long couple of months – for a variety of reasons. First, I was offered a job that would have taken me to San Diego for a fairly good opportunity – a steady paycheck, sunny weather, and a nice area to call my home. But, things started to change almost immediately after I accepted the job offer. The work was pouring in, the emails were piling up, and I got well behind.

Fast forward a few weeks and I’m having the most lucrative year of my life and the freelance work is taking off – of course I had no choice but to retroactively turn down the job offer. This means a few different things. First, I’m not buried up to my eyeballs in work. Second, I can actually relax a bit and enjoy what I’ve been able to accomplish in the last few weeks. Finally, I can start throwing my energy into wholeheartedly expanding Seattle Freelance and making it into something special.

With a second writer on hand now who can both keep up with me and complete all of the projects I bring in with relative ease, this is an even more realistic goal – the one I was striving for months ago when I first launched Seattle Freelance. It will be an interesting few weeks as I start building upon my current successes and start looking for opportunities and methods to expand. The growth potential is huge, my ideas are literally overflowing from the files in which I keep them, and I now have the freedom – both financially and temporally – to see them all out. It is an interesting experience, and a fitting homage to the one year anniversary of quitting my last hourly job … hopefully for good.

Freelance Lifestyle freelance career, freelance writing, make money online, writing for money, writing from home

One of the greatest things you can do as a full time freelance writer is to supplement all of your fulltime work for hire projects with work that only gets done in your free time. I’ve mentioned this form of quasi-relaxing a few times in the past, with blog writing and projects like NaNo, but I’ll reiterate it here – you have to make sure you don’t burn out too quickly with all of the random topics flooding your inbox every week – it gets overwhelming.

So, before I even started taking on freelance writing jobs, I started this blog and made sure to take as much time as I could every week to post a few random thoughts, some updates on my work life, and ideas that may or may not amount to anything (usually not).

Fast forward a few months and the blog is still up and running – albeit with some massive gaps in productivity – and I’m trying to make sure I don’t write for work 11 hours a day. It’s some kind of twisted form of balance, but it’s necessary if you want to succeed as a freelance writer.

So, yes – you should start a blog. Start it as soon as possible and don’t feel as though it absolutely needs to be related to your new freelancing career. It can be about anything – in fact it should be about something else, preferably something that allows you to relax a bit and forget about the rounds of work that have been flooding your desk.

Start the blog early – a Blogger account is perfect for getting started – and spend a little bit of time getting acclimated to the atmosphere of blogging. I’ll try to go into more detail later about the various aspects of blogging you can use, such as ways to make money with the blog or how to promote your blog, but when you first start, here are some good tips to build some readership and feel as though you are connecting with people:

Technorati – Sign up for a Technorati account early and start following how well your blog performs in search rankings and how many people favorite it. If you can, sign up for a few other services such as Ice Rocket or a pinging service that will automatically ping your blog across the Internet whenever you post. Blogger actually does this on a basic level now, but you can always supplement your exposure.

Google Tools – Google has a ton of great tools such as Analytics, AdSense, and Webmaster Tools that allow you to keep track of how well your blog is performing. Track your visits, the keywords used to reach your site, and which positions you show up in the search engines at. Even if you decide early that you do not want to do a lot of SEO work to raise your search ranking, these tools can help you get more involved in the writing and promoting process, which pays great dividends later on.

Comments – Comment on other people’s blogs. This is the same as being active in writing your own blog, except now you can get to know your fellow bloggers, write a bit about them, and receive the same treatment in response. It grows your readership and helps you become a better write – plus it’s social.

Generally, try to remember that even as you are writing on your blog, you are helping your freelance writing career. This is a two way street though. If you attach your name to your blog, keep your writing occupationally friendly. That means you should not write anything a potential client will be offended by. If you do attach your name, use your blog as a chance to show off your writing talent. I’ve had dozens of clients choose me over the competition because they found my blog posts interesting after searching for my name.

If you use the blog correctly, you can not only grow your exposure, experience and skills in writing, you can have a bit of fun. Blog early and blog often.

Freelance Lifestyle, Freelancing , blogging, freelance writing