Writing and Stuff by Anthony Chatfield

One thing few freelancers realize is that the second they start writing on the Internet, they become a brand – a business that will eventually draw customers based solely on the name and history of that brand. Every time you gain a new client, you create a potential long term relationship – someone who might come back to you time and again for work. Familiarity in business is a powerful tool and if you can leverage it properly, you can be extremely successful.

But, with popularity come a few issues. You’ll need to setup a business structure, organize your work processes, build a website, and finally start outsourcing extra work you don’t have time to do. This is a big step. It’s the moment you realize that your online venture has grown beyond you, that you need to hire other people to help your vision continue to grow.

It’s a fantastic feeling. But, for a lot of writers, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly when you should make the leap. Too soon and you handcuff your income, but too late and you end up working 60 hours a week and the quality drops off.

So, here are some tips on when to start outsourcing and how to go about it.

Create a Business Plan

Don’t run out and buy resources on business planning. Traditional business plans are long and filled with tons of financial data that you don’t need (yet). You’re not going to the bank for a loan. However, having a simple, personal business plan can help you immensely in understanding what your business needs to survive.

1. Outline Your Personal Financial Needs - How much money do you need to survive, and how much money will you make from an outsourced project? These details are important. You could easily end up getting more work and making less money if you outsource too much.
2. Set Goals for Income on Outsourced Content – Set specific goals for how much money you would like to make from each project. If you want to make at least 25% to cover communication, editing, and research, make that a bottom line. This will help when you start posting projects.
3. Generate Realistic Timelines for Involvement in Projects – Know exactly how much time you want to spend on each project. A lot of the time, freelancers try to save money by hiring lower paid contractors, but end up spending more time on the project with edits and revision cycles. Know how much time you’re willing to spend for your cut of the project and you can better balance what you’re willing to pay.
4. Create Processes for Acquiring, Outsourcing and Editing Work - Have a specific process in mind. Know which sites you want to use (Elance, Odesk, Craigslist, etc) and how you will select winning bidders. Aim early on for long term writers you can use repeatedly.
5. Decide How You Will Communicate Your New Model to Clients – It’s important to provide a layout for all existing clients of the changes you’ll be making. Not only tell them that you’ll be outsourcing, but explain any rate changes, timeline shifts, or new paperwork you’ll require.

These five things should happen before you ever start outsourcing – lest you end up with all these writers you don’t know what to do with.

Your Rates

Nine times out of ten, outsourcing will essentially force you to raise your rates. This is a good thing. If you were making so little that you cannot afford to pay part of that fee to someone else and still maintain quality, it was never enough. Raising your rates will do three things.

1. Ensure You Can Afford Quality Contractors
2. Give You Time to Edit and Polish All Work
3. Provide Security in the Projects You Acquire

One thing to keep in mind here is that you won’t and shouldn’t expect to continue making the same amount of money per project as you were before. You’re not doing the work, after all. But, with the right rates, you should make enough to cover the expenses of finding the contractor, editing their work, and communicating with the client.

Maintaining Communication

The last thing to mention is the lines of communication – not just with your new contractors, but with the clients who hire you. Most clients do not care if you outsource work to contractors, as long as they get the same quality for their money. This is doubly true if you decide to start raising rates. Additionally, it is both professional courtesy and in some cases legally necessary to inform your client that their work may be outsourced. If they are unwilling to agree to these terms, you should be ready to complete the project yourself.

The last thing you want is a client getting upset with you for failing to communicate something simple that they may not otherwise have minded.

Outsourcing is a fantastic tool and essentially the only way you’ll ever be able to effectively grow your business. At a certain point you just won’t be able to do any more work on your own. But, before turning to outside writers, make sure you have a carefully laid out plan in place. It will save you myriad headaches down the line.

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Before I write anything, let me toss a big fat disclaimer at the top here. Don’t quit your job unless you’re ready. This post is for writers who have reached the point where it’s necessary to take a risk and go for that next step. If you’re not at that point, check out one of my other posts about prepping for a career change. Using micropay sites is a good one, as is starting your own blog.

For the rest of you, read on, because I’m sick of seeing fantastic writers torture themselves by working a cruddy day job while their true passion languishes on. Just remember, quitting your job is a big decision. Don’t follow my advice alone – talk to your family first.

1. When You’re Making a Profit

The second you start making a real profit with your writing is the second you need to consider quitting your job. You might be writing 100 articles a week or just 10, but if you’re making enough money to supplement your income, you can likely scale it up to cover your living expenses.

A few things can temper your decision, however. First, if you have a high paying day job and you’re making $5 per article, it might be hard to replace that original income. A rate boost is going to be necessary. Second, if you’re writing 25 hours a week already in your spare time, it might be hard to double that when you quit (writing can be mentally exhausting). Finally, you need to create a steady source of work. Generate an Elance profile and start building your portfolio so you can bid on new projects.

2. Your Job Isn’t Fulfilling

If you’re at a job that eats away at your soul, it may be time for a change. Even if you’re writing is only covering 10% of your income, evaluate the benefits of boosting your writing time and cutting your job. When I switched I cut my day job hours down to 16 a week and started writing 4 days a week. I quickly learned that I could survive on that and so I pushed on. Do some math and see where you stand.

3. You’ve Reached a Wall

If you’ve been enjoying your segue into writing for money but have hit a wall where you cannot do anything more, it may be time for a change. When I quit my job, I was writing short articles for piddling pay. The result was that I didn’t have enough time to focus on larger projects and more serious deadlines. I still had a day job that took priority. So, when I hit that wall, I considered my options and promptly took the leap.

4. You Have Savings on Hand

Quitting a job in this economy is a big move, and one that can quickly backfire if you’re not ready for it. Even if you feel confident that you can make a good living writing, make sure you have money set aside before you make the move. I spent five months prior to quitting setting aside as much cash as I could. It allowed me to underperform for 3 months into my writing career before things finally took hold and I made a real profit.

5. You’re Ready for a Risk

Let’s face it – you’re taking a risk no matter how well prepared you are. You’re shutting the door on traditional work and jumping into the wild west of freelancing – where the work is never steady and the opportunities can be slim. Don’t wait for it to work out perfectly because I can guarantee you it will never happen. No matter how much planning or preparation you do, you’ll eventually need to just go for it.

Writing for a living is a passionate career – one you must have a number of traits to succeed at. You need self motivation, a willingness to change, flexibility in thought, and a big vocabulary. You also need the guts to jump ship and move away from the traditional grind and into the online frontier. Do that and you may just be the next big success story.

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When you’re just getting started as a freelancer, which I know a lot of you are doing, there don’t seem to be many options. You can either work for $0.50 an article on Elance or roll the dice on Craigslist and hope someone accepts your email out of hundreds they’ll get for that single post. It’s a tough road.

I, on the other hand, kind of stumbled into it by working on so-called “micropay” sites like Associated Content and Helium where I generated my own topics, wrote at my own pace and got paid only if the content I wrote was useful to the site. Of course, that was also in 2007 when Associated Content’s stringent guidelines were not quite so hard to get around and you could get the occasional $20 offer for an article.

And to round out the story of my flirt with Micropay, it only lasted the better part of 6 weeks. I got up to about 20 articles a week with Associated Content and promptly realized that Elance was a far better place to test my talents – quickly obtaining a far greater supply of work per month than I would have been physically capable of writing on the Micropays.

So, Does it Work?

I will say yes. It might not be the most exciting thing in the world, but over the course of the first few weeks as a freelancer, you need something to do. You might spend 2+ hours a day carving out a name for yourself on forums, on your blog, or at Elance with bid after bid, but if you don’t actually sit down and write an article or two, you’ll never gain the experience you need to succeed.

It’s hard to be good at this job. You must not only be a good writer, you must be a fast writer – capable of adapting to numerous styles and tones instantly while shifting between dozens of topics. Only practice will give you the skillset needed to succeed.

So, where does that leave us? If you need a jump start to your career and some practice writing content that will help you hone your skills, get on the micropay sites. Until you actually get a real paying job on Elance or Odesk, it’s your best bet for getting some experience, feedback and much needed pay.

Don’t Forget Blogging

Regardless of your decision on micropay, though, don’t forget the value of a good blog. If you haven’t done so yet, get a blog started on Blogger.com or WordPress.com. You may not get a single reader, but the chance to sit down and write something that is dear to you and send it to the world is as good a way to build confidence as any. Just take a look at how many posts on this blog are from 2007 when I first got started. Whether you’re getting paid or not, you have to be writing, so stop reading and start writing.

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So, I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with this site for a while now. I even bought a new domain name (anthonychatfield.com), but I took a look back through the old web stats and it seems like it would be a bit of a waste to move everything over when I have a decent page rank and a whole lot of links (however old they may be). So, I’m going to stick with the good old goofy domain name and see what can be done with it.

Up to now, it’s been a jumble of just about everything you can imagine having to do with me. I’m going to give it a bit of a jump start in the coming weeks, mainly because I’ve been spending so much time lately working on my career and all things writing.

Hopefully I can offer some halfway decent insights about writing, freelancing, and marketing in general. I’ve been doing this job for over three years now and I think it’s about time I started injecting a good bit of advice from my perspective.

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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.

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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.

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Every now and then when you’re a full time writer – and especially when you’ve started your own writing business, things happen that make it to where you have to work entirely too much in any given week. This is just such a week – there are no specific reasons why it happens. Maybe I want to take a vacation soon or maybe I bid on too many projects. Maybe I’m just trying to catch up on bills – whatever the reason, it happens about every month or so for at least one week and while it may be balanced out by those slow weeks, that’s never the first thing on my mind.

There are usually at least two or three days in that particular week where I work from the moment I get up to the moment I go to bed. Those days especially disappoint. I mean, who wants to work that much? I sure as heck don’t. It’s too much, but then again, who gets the option of taking days off at will? Not too many people at this point in life. It’s a great job no matter how you look at it – the only thing you have to remember is that there are always downsides such as the extra time that will get thrown out every now and then when the freelancing week from hell rears its ugly head and plops your butt squarely in a chair or on the couch for hours at a time.

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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.

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It’s no secret that there are seemingly unlimited ways to promote yourself on the Internet these days. Yet, it still manages to surprise me when someone does not use them all to their fullest potential. There are just too many options not to actively seek out and take advantage of them.

Starting with the most basic methods of blog promotion, I frequently tell people that they need to start and operate a blog – it doesn’t matter if it is the simplest, least detailed project you have worked on, you need to have a blog. Start one on Blogger if necessary and start posting every day (I know, I’m one to talk, but it’s a good habit to start). Once you have started your blog, you have unlimited options to reach people. You can start memes, contact other bloggers, start conversations with your commenters, and much more.

Another necessary promotional method is to start and maintain social networking profiles with all of the major sites – Facebook, MySpace (unfortunately), Friendster, etc. These sites offer you something no other option does – a built in audience of millions that you can reach with a single click. You can be sly or you can be explicit, but always remember to present yourself as a well polished person. On these sites, you are not selling things, you are selling yourself.

Which of course brings up the matter of salesmanship. I have had this conversation with a dozen other writers and many of them do not enjoy the idea of “selling” themselves to their clients. But, it is a necessary task and when you think about how things break down, it makes good sense. The Internet is full of people who sell themselves before their services. In fact, the Internet is just a bit too impersonal not to do so. If you try to go faceless and tell people that they can trust you when they don’t know who you are, they will often ignore your suggestions. If you tell them who you are, provide ample opinions and open conversation, and draw them into the fold, they will begin to trust you more outright and you will be much more successful in reaching them.

I won’t go into the details of everything you can do to promote yourself just yet. I may continue with a series of future posts about self-promotion, but there isn’t enough room for them all right now. However, keep one thing in mind: you are your best product. Your mind and your ability to write, design, or program are the things that you are selling. If you can sell yourself, you can pick up any project you find and that’s the key to true success as a freelancer.

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