You’ve completed your best work so far and you wait with bated breath for your client to feel the enthusiasm and respond instantly with a glowing testimonial.
Seconds, minutes, hours, even days pass by as you keep checking your mail and there is no response from the client to the excellent article you wrote.
As a freelance writer, keeping organized is one of the most important lessons you have to learn.
No one is going to stand over you making sure you do your work. If you miss too many deadlines, your clients will drop you.
Establishing your freelance writing career can be a rewarding endeavor, though it doesn’t come without its own set of risks.
Freelancing jobs are typically found online and as you might already know, the internet is filled with scams.
Though not everyone uses freelancing websites such as Upwork to find their jobs, it’s important to know that scammers flock to freelance sites in hopes of being able to take advantage of those seeking employment.
As a fresh freelance writer, you’ll often hear (read) the phrases “pitch a query letter” or “submit an LOI.”
These new terms are usually in the wealth of how to articles out there, and you might come to think that the terms query letter and letter of introduction (that’s what LOI stands for, by the way) are synonymous to each other—even synonymous in the way that you don’t know what they mean.
Just to be clear, these two don’t always mean the same thing.
Imagine this:
You are browsing through a job board when you see this listing:
“I can’t possibly write about traveling to the South of France. That’s not my niche.”
“There’s no point pitching to this online magazine targeting urban foodies. I know nothing about brewing beer at home.”
“I can’t contribute any valuable piece of advice to a website geared towards mothers when I’m not a mother myself.”
If you’ve decided to become a freelance writer, you want to get paid for your efforts.
Unfortunately, too many writers feel, or get told, that they have to pay their dues. That means work for free or churn out five articles per hour for content mills to make ends meet. I remember doing it, and it did me no favors.
The good news is that you don’t have to write for free forever, nor do you need to slave away at content mills.
I’ve recently seen the disaster flick San Andreas starring Dwayne Johnson and had a total blast.
Sure, it has clichés. But it is one fun ride that left me pumped up about my freelance writing career and life in general.
Below are some of the moments in the movie that can teach us a good deal about freelancing:
