Earlier we discusses finding writing jobs with the vast array of job hunting websites out there like Monster.com. Specifically, we discussed finding freelance writing gigs and writing job contracts on CareerBuilder.com. However, finding good writing jobs is not the only thing professional writers need to content with. Filtering out the wrong kinds of writing jobs, or more specifically writing jobs that you have already determined are not right for you, is just as important.

Filtering Writing Job Search Results

The first step in filtering out writing jobs that are a bad fit is determining what kind of writing job you are looking for. There are full-time, on-site, writing jobs. The benefit of these type writing gigs is that they come with benefits like paid sick time, paid vacation, health insurance, and 401(k) plans. The downside is that these are very much not freelance writing. These are straight up corporate jobs with a boss, and required work hours. There is nothing wrong with that, and for many writers the stability and steady paycheck of a "real" job is as liberating as the freedom of choosing your own work and making your own schedule is for other writers.

Contract writing jobs are difficult to generalize about. Some writing contracts are basically temporary full-time positions without benefits. The writer is expected to be in the office and work on-site during regular business hours for a period of weeks or months. Other writing contracts are essentially long-term freelance writing positions. In these cases, the writer may not even get a desk or office on-site other than some temporary work space. Instead, the writer works as a freelance writer from home, but either exclusively for one client, or part-time for one client. Either way, the work is ongoing and provides a steady paycheck, but does not provide benefits.

Interested in the Southwest Airlines credit card reward program?

Most job boards and career websites will also list temporary jobs. These are similar in nature to contract positions except that unlike contracts with a defined term and end date, temporary jobs continue until the writer is no longer needed. In other words, the end of the job is not defined up front.

Finding Freelance Writing Jobs

Unfortunately, the mainstream job listing websites are not really structured for freelancers. As a result, a freelance writer has to search through all the different job listings. Manually filtering out the writing gigs that don’t fit one’s writing business model can be time consuming and frustrating. Many writers give up altogether which provides opportunities for those freelance writers who know how to properly work the main job boards.

The key to being able to find good freelance writing jobs on websites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com and so on is to become adept at using filters. Filters are criteria used for job searching. Again, since these boards are not geared toward freelance writers, one needs to be creative in getting good job searching results out of the available criteria.

Be sure to start by clicking "Advanced Search" or "More Criteria" whenever doing a writing job search. Beware of trying to use the standard filters for temporary, contract, full-time, and part-time positions. Just like job hunters will find these career finder websites difficult to use properly, so will those clients posting the jobs on the job boards. As such, the person looking to hire a freelance writer to work on a project over several months, but not in a full-time or even typical part-time basis, might classify the job listing as contract or temporary, since neither really fits. Or, if there is not an actual contract, and if the human resources person doing the hiring has had bad experiences with "temps" before, they might not choose either putting the project in part-time instead. Finally, a project that may take 40 hours per week or more on an ongoing, but not steady basis, might be listed as a full-time writing job.

Instead, focus on using the Exclusion Criteria fields provided. For example, if you want to search for writing jobs, but not technical writing jobs, then use the advanced search exclusion options to filter out those jobs. Be careful how you do so, however, as you don’t want to accidentally filter out a great copywriting job that requires the ability to understand "the technical details of soap."

Finally, use exclusions to filter out repetitive job posters. Lately, the website Examiner.com has been particularly prolific in not just posting, but in re-posting its writing "jobs". Once you have determined whether or not writing for Examiner.com is right for you, it is annoying to have to scroll through 18 "new" jobs from the company every two or three days. Just add "examiner.com" to one of the block keyword search fields.

Do you have other advanced job search tips for writers? If so, let us know and we’ll share them here or check them out.

Good luck finding your newest writing gig.

One of the toughest things for any professional writer, whether an experienced freelance writer or someone just starting a new freelance writing business, is to find new writing jobs. Even freelancers with a full project pipeline need to keep an eye on the future in order to ensure a steady stream of income from writing lest they find themselves evicted from the comfy work at home office and back into the faux-leather chairs of corporate America’s cubicles.

There are many ways to find freelance writing jobs ranging from using job boards and writing forums dedicated to freelance gigs and writing projects, to cold calling businesses and asking if they have any writing needs. Somewhere in between is using the major job websites like monster.com. (Here is your AP Style question of the day. Web addresses, or URLs, are not capitalized, but business names and trademarks are. According to the AP Stylebook then, should monster.com be capitalized [business name] or not [website address]? – I chose not to capitalize it because I am referencing it as the website and not the business and since this isn’t the Denver Post, I can do what I want.)

Find Writing Jobs CareerBuilder.com

One of the major job hunting websites is Career Builder. Career Builder came out after the success of Monster.com (that time it is the business name) and in many respects is simply an alternative service with approximately the same features. Think Google versus Bing, or HP versus Dell, or Coke versus Pepsi. With each of those examples, there are major differences between the brands and each company targets a different niche or consumer. Likewise, there are real differences between Monster.com and CareerBuilder, not the least of which is pricing for employers. Nevertheless, both sites work on the same model.

The problem with using big job search websites like Monster and CareerBuilder to find writing gigs is that they are not really tuned to the way writers, especially freelance writers, hunt for jobs. Just click on “Job Categories” to see what I mean. See “writer” on there anywhere?

This lack of attention to writing as a career means that writers have to do more than just type the word ‘writer’ into the search box and use the drop down boxes to limit the results. After all, writers can telecommute and work from home, and freelance projects are not always considered “contract” or “temporary”. Limiting a job search for writers by using those fields is a recipe for missing out on good writing gigs. On the other hand, just typing ‘writer’ with no limits is a one-way ticket to frustration.

The best strategy is to monitor the jobs posted for writers on an ongoing basis so that they can be quickly skimmed. A pair of human eyes is always a better algorithm than any computerized filtering. However, in order to not be a time wasting exercise, the once-over has to occur at short enough intervals. Fortunately, CareerBuilder offers email alerts with jobs for you based upon your searches.

For my small business, I set up two email alerts. The first alert email comes daily and limits writer jobs to the 30 miles radius around Denver. That way, I can pounce on local gigs. The second alert comes weekly and has no geographical limit. Obviously, this is a much bigger job list. I skim it ruthlessly to keep successful time management going.

Try setting a local and nation job posting alert for your writing business and see how it works out for you.

P.S. Keep an eye out for an upcoming post about what to do about “pest” employers who repost the same jobs over and over again clogging up your job search.

One of the many things that people are told to consider when evaluating the life of a freelancer or independent contractor versus the life of someone with a good full-time job is the lack of paid vacation and paid sick leave. Typically, however, these factors are blown off by most workers considering quitting the day job to become a freelance writer. Most simply think that in the long run, the difference between having paid sick time works out with the potentially higher pay that comes from working for yourself.

While it can be true that managing a freelance writing business is possible so that things like paid time off are built in, it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Working ahead or catching up on billable hours after taking time off for vacation works out easier for most freelancers. Being able to plan ahead and see the vacation time coming is a big factor, allowing the small business owner to "bank" some revenue or project time.

Sick days, on the other hand, are a lot harder to deal with for the work from home business owner. A single day of illness is generally not too hard to recover from. Everyone has a little slack time unintentionally built into their days that can be removed in a crunch to help make up for an unexpected day off. It may take a few days, or a couple of extra "off-hours" to fill the whole, but it is usually pretty doable. When illness stretches to more than one day, however, things get tougher.

Freelance Writing Down Time

The difference between freelancing and a salary job when it comes to sick leave isn’t just in the paid time off. It is also in the backup that a traditional working environment provides. A copywriting gig due on the 15th is still due on the 15th, even if someone is sick. In an office environment, if you are ill on the 12th and the 13th, someone could still be making calls, answering emails, photocopying materials and the like even while you are out. When you make it back in on the 14th, you’ll be behind, but you won’t necessarily be exactly where you were when you left the office on the 11th.

As a freelancer, there is no backup. The email that came in on the 12th asking you to clarify which of the previous catalogs you needed copies of for samples goes unanswered unless you drag your sniffling, aching, coughing, stuffy head, fever, body back to that home office and find, read, and reply. Otherwise, on the 14th, when you need to really make up some time (you probably also have stuff due on the 16th, 17th, and 18th, after all) you are going to be stuck at a dead-end because you don’t have the samples you need since no one heard back about which ones to send.

Even if you do manage to muddle through, or are mercifully sick over a weekend, there is still the matter of making up any earnings that were missed. If you usually make $1,000 a week and miss two days, that cuts your pay for the week to just $600. That is a significant drop.

With some savings and working some additional hours can help make up the difference, those things work just like a health savings account does. That is, it ONLY works if nothing happens while you are trying to fill it up so that it will be there when you need it. If you get sick early on, you’ll wipe that account out before you can ever start filling it up.

One might considered starting their freelance writing business up when it is Summer time as a hedge against unpaid sick leave. Of course, even then, there are no guarantees. In the end, paid sick time has a real value that should not be discounted.

P.S. If you are wondering, yes, I have been sick (am still sick). Worse, my family has been sick. So, while trying to help out and provide some comfort and downtime for others, I let the business production drop to minimum, which is exactly the opposite of banking hours just in case. That means that I am now brutally behind and in no shape to pull extended hours to make up for it. Those days will come. In the meantime, deadlines are arriving, and my job is, as always, to meet them. I’m not complaining. I love what I do and wouldn’t change it, but I blew off the value of paid sick leave when I made the jump. Not that I would do it differently, but I  most definitely see the value that I once ignored.

Happy Writing, and may you be ever healthy :)

There are a ton of little writing utilities floating around out there that offer "distraction free writing" by offering a full screen word processor with no menu, and minimal functions. The idea is that a big blank screen will eliminate distractions so that you can focus on your writing. As if the problem with Microsoft Word is that with the word processor maximized to full screen and you typing away, that you look up and go, "Ooooh. Mail Merge? Maybe I should try that out!"

Of course, the actual distractions come not from Word itself – by the way, check out the new features in Microsoft Word 2010 – but from all of the other things your computer can be doing for you. It isn’t like WriteMonkey (the one I’m playing around with right now) is going to keep you from firing up MediaMonkey for a little background music and then spending the next hour changing how you catalog your mp3 media collection.

Anyway, if you are in the mood to try and distraction free writing program, you can do a lot worse than WriteMoney. Write Money is a black screen with green lettering which is easier to read than a full white screen with black lettering or some of the other combinations I have seen. It also offers a spell-check built-in which I always think is a plus. Most important of all to a professional freelance writer who has to constantly adjust the tone and length of the content that they writer based on the client, it comes with a word count build. It appears unobtrusively at the top of the screen and, in my professional opinion, creates no distraction whatsoever.

It also has a feature built in where it will make typewriter sounds as you type. You can even choose different kinds of typewriter sounds ranging from old school manual typewriters to old, but more recent, electric typewriter sounds. Unfortunately, as a someone in the freelance writing business, I type fast. Really fast. And, the poor little sound generator in WriteMonkey can’t seem to keep up. I wonder if I would get the keys stuck together if I was using an old typewriter instead of a word processor on a computer?

I’m sure that company wide corporate branding and signage are largely responsible, but the notice at the Starbucks in Cherry Creek North trumpeting how wireless Internet access inside of Starbucks was now accessible for free to everyone is particularly laughable. The Cherry Creek North Business Improvement District, or BID as it is sometimes known, has provided free WiFi Internet access to the entire Cherry Creek North shopping area for several years now. Only the truly naive, or those with an unlimited pre-paid access plan even bothered to connect to the Starbucks WiFi network. However, free Internet access at Starbucks is good news for freelance writers everywhere.

In a way, it seems that Starbucks is finally catching up with the times. After all, other establishments have been offering free, no strings attached, wireless Internet access in their businesses for quite a while now. Local coffee shops, sandwich shops, bookstores, and various other Mom and Pop businesses offer free Internet access for their customers at locations all over town. These day, its actually more uncommon for that type of establishment to NOT offer free wireless. Even places that you wouldn’t expect are getting in on the game. For example, here in Denver, Old Chicago’s restaurants have free Internet so that you can surf the web while drinking your Happy Hour beers and having the best Chicago pizza outside of Illinois.

In reality, however, Starbucks is the reason that we have free Internet WiFi hotspots wherever we go. When Starbucks first debuted nationwide wireless Internet access for its customers, they were the first brand-name nationwide company to do so. In fact, the idea of someone other than a hotel giving people Internet access at all was a bit of a stretch. Internet cafes were just starting to try and make a go here in the United States. Libraries were about the only other places that had public Internet access, free or otherwise. Even then, most access required plugging a CAT5 cable into your network card and an Internet port on the wall. Cellular modems with data access were largely a joke, offering less coverage than Starbucks at pathetic data transfer rate speeds.

If memory serves, when Starbucks first came out with public WiFI Internet, it was offered through T-Mobile. The service was grossly overpriced, costing up to almost $10 per day. Yet, it was available to the public across the country in virtually any town or city with anything resembling a bit of population. In other words, it was the most reliable nationwide Internet access around.

No doubt rolling out such a wireless effort was neither cheap nor easy. Although I never read any particulars, one can assume that there was some sort of joint expenditure or at least hefty discount provided by T-Mobile as the telecom vendor Starbucks used. For all I know, T-Mobile put the Internet into Starbucks for free. Either way, there was almost certainly some sort of exclusive contract between the two companies that gave T-Mobile the right to charge (overcharge) for WIFI in Starbucks long after WiFI hotspots had become cheap and commonplace around the country.

One wonders how long such commoditized versions of wireless Internet public hotspots would have taken to proliferate if not for the trail blazed by the corporate giant. No doubt the hardware installed at Starbucks had to blaze a trail for easy of setup and configurability if anyone with a laptop was going to access it. Indeed, security was sacrificed for this very reason. Not only that, but while one can expect a highly skilled barista to conjure up a perfect triple-shot latte with low foam, it is less reasonable to expect them to troubleshoot and manage a wireless router.

While it may have came anyway, Starbucks and their easily deployable hardware set a public expectation for easy to access public Internet, and in the process made it both acceptable and practical to set up shop with a laptop and a notepad on a coffee shop table for the morning or afternoon. Soon, every no one thought twice about a guy in the corner clicking the keys of his laptop in his portable workspace.

So, here is to you Starbucks. Thank you for your vision and efforts. I have no doubt that my many purchases in your humble shrines to the joy of caffeine have re-paid you for your efforts. Perhaps, my dollars alone have covered the initial rollout. Whatever the case, rest assured, that I will spend the remainder of my freelancing days (and there should be a lot of them) ensuring that you more than recoup your investment.

Otherwise, I’d still be limited to choosing between my home office, the library, or some rent an office company like Bridge. The very thought makes me shutter. I’ll take the wide open window, the friendly bustle, and the people hustling by any day.

Increase The Value of Your Freelance Writing

Freelance writers are, for the most part, not necessarily big fans of "sales." As professional writers we would prefer to crank out powerful new articles and content for our clients rather than "pound the pavement" or make cold calls to would-be clients. Unfortunately, sales is a big part of freelance writing, especially for those just starting a new freelance writing business from scratch.

In an effort to develop sales skills some freelancers turn to sales training seminars or sales training books. Most of these courses offer up the same core knowledge. Some of the best sales training manages to add on some additional sales skills or little sales tricks that can help make the process of selling easier. But, in the end, no matter how much training you take, or how many certifications you get, selling is still selling.

The Freelance Writer Value Proposition

One of the things that many freelance writers struggle with is what exactly is there value proposition as professional freelance writers. The simple idea that a certain professional writer is automatically better at writing any particular assignment than any other possible writer is not only unbecoming, it is not always true.

A value proposition centered around the concept of "high-quality writing" is accurate (hopefully), but also nebulous. High-quality writing is not just about getting the grammar right and making sure there are no spelling errors. It is about text that conveys its intended message in the best possible way. Defining what is high-quality writing is like defining high-quality art, you just know it when you see it. Or, in this case, the client knows it when they see it.

So, what added value can the freelance writer provide clients?

The value of freelance writers often lies in all of those little things that add up to big things. The ability to write for varying audiences, or with a different tone or voice, depending upon the occasion, is one thing freelance writers bring to the table, for example. Again, however, these things are traits of all good freelance writers.

Add Value By Going Beyond Writing

One way for writers to add additional value for their clients is by going above and beyond the writing itself. For clients who use a freelancer’s writing product primarily online, a freelance writer can help increase their overall value to the client by helping to make their quality content more visible. In the online world gaining visibility is done by directing additional readers the right way, and by increasing the value of the content in the eyes of the search engines. Both of these goals can be achieved by linking to your own content.

Consider a writer with a blog writing assignment. The ultimate goal of the client is for that blog to generate traffic for some purpose. While the freelance writer’s job is to create the content for readers, the value of the blog, and the writer’s posts will be increased if the blog attracts a larger number of readers. In fact, it is possible that the decision whether to continue the blog (and the freelancer’s assignment) may be based entirely upon how much quality web traffic the blog can generate. In this case, the freelancer can help both the client and himself by helping to ensure the project is a success.

Many avenues exist for writers to help increase traffic to their own writings. The best way to create extra links is also the most overlooked. Always look for a chance to link previous writings from new articles and posts. This not only builds more links, but it also provides a way for readers to find valuable information that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. Linking from one’s own websites or blogs is another good strategy. Freelancer’s who find themselves with a little free time (Hah!) can create high-level summaries of their articles or their underlying concepts and publish them, with links to the originals, on one of the numerous article directory sites like HubPages or EzineArticles.

Go one step further by building up THOSE links by linking to them from different places. For example, here is my freelance writer profile at HubPages and then my writer’s profile at EzineArticles.

When it comes to freelance writing, few things are as important as coffee. Second on that list is coffee places. Put the two together, and you have a recipe for some power freelancing.

So, it is big news when one of the most ubiquitous coffee shops on the planet introduces a new drink.

Wait. Scratch that.

It is big news when the biggest coffee shop in the world introduces a new drink that is palatable and does not involve the word “frappacino,” which as all serious freelancers know, is Latin for blech!

One sip of anything remotely frappacinoed, and a whole day of freelance writing can be flushed down the drain in the ensuing search for something, anything, that will take that taste and its memory away forever.

Starbucks Introduces New Drink – And You Might Actually Want to Drink It!

Let’s be fair. Starbucks has plenty of coffee variations that are good. If you are new to freelance writing, you might also be new to coffee, although that isn’t always the case. If so, you might have confused various seasonal varieties such as Pumpkin Spice Latte, Gingerbread Latte, and Peppermint Latte, as “new,” when, in fact, these drinks show up every holiday season. Last year’s Salted Carmel Latte was quite good, if overly decadent and sweet, but it failed to arrive this year.

The Starbucks Blog is reporting, there will be a new latte to wet your taste buds with while writing in the cozy confines of your local Starbucks. Of course, economics, and weight management, demand that the freelancer drink primarily regular coffees and not calorie infused milk add-on versions of espresso, but, for that bright sunny day when everything seems just a little bit happier, more productive, and just plain better, a more exotic drink can be in order.

This spring, that alternate drink choice may include (Bum, bum, bum-bum!) Dark Cherry Mocha!

Now, I know what you are thinking. You can always ask the barista to put whatever combination of syrups you want into your java, but the whole point of Starbucks is complete consistency. If you liked it at the downtown Starbucks, you should like it at the Cherry Creek Starbucks too. This isn’t always the case if you have your barista go all rogue on your drinks.

But, with a corporate mandated recipe thoroughly tested across numerous test markets, you can be ensured of an unsurprising meeting with your caffeinated beverage to start (or continue) your freelance writing day.

Seal of US Copyright Office

Ironically, after recently writing about how complicated copyright law is and how many people constantly misunderstand it, an attorney read our freelance writing blog and noticed a copyright error right there at the bottom of every page. We’re no experts, but copyright law for writers fools everyone sometimes, it seems.

The freelance writing business of ArcticLlama has been around for a few years now. Most of the online content we produce for our own website started showing up online in 2008. Naturally, we placed a copyright notice at the bottom of each webpage in the footer. While this is not 100% neccessary for copyright purposes, it is typcially considered goo practice. As you can imagine, the notice read Copyright 2008 ArcticLlama, LLC.

When 2009 started, we updated, the copyright notice. After all, an out of date copyright notice looks unprofessional and gives people the impression that your website or your content is out of date, and that is something we don’t want. However, since our copyright notice was displayed automatically by our WordPress theme every time any webpage or blog post was viewed, we knew that sometimes the intellectual property on that page would be from 2008. Thus, we changed our copyright notice to Copyright 2008 – 2009 ArcticLlama, LLC.

If you are a copyright attorney, or have real world experience with intellectual property law, you already know where this is going. For the rest of you, read on…

This year, with the dawn of 2010, we once again updated our copyright notice. With content on this website now ranging from 2008 to 2010, we figured the best way to adjust our copyright date was to acknowledge the whole date range and our new blog footer contained the copyright notice Copyright 2008 – 2010 ArcticLlama, LLC.

What’s the problem?

As it turns out material is not copyrighted over multiple years, per se. While something may have been first copyrighted in 2008, that fact is immaterial for 2010.

In other words, there is no way to infringe upon the 2008 copyright today. So, the only copyright that matters in the present day is the one currently in force, or in other words, Copyright 2010 ArcticLlama, LLC.

Copyright Multiple Years

If you’re like us, just getting the simple one-liner answer isn’t always enough. To satisfy the curious, intellectual mind, a deeper understanding is required. While we have abandoned any efforts to fully understand copyright law, like many writers, we are also active readers, and we have seen plenty of books with more than one copyright year in them. What gives?

All artistic works are copyright by their creators from the moment of inception. (Technically, it is from the moment of publication, but if anyone else sees it, that becomes a publication, so the point is moot.) There is a frequent misconception that writings or other art must be submitted to the government in order to get a copyright. That is not true.

However, materials CAN be registered with the U.S. Copyright Office. The purpose of this registration is primarily to establish evidence of copyright in the event of an actual copyright dispute. Keep in mind, this is not of any help for anyone purposely infringing on copyrights or ignoring the copyright all together. Website content thieves, for example, are no more or less guilty if the materials they steal have a registered copyright.

What a registered copyright does do is prevent someone else from claiming to be the original author. In other words, registering the copyright for your screenplay doesn’t make you any more protected from theft, but it does keep some big shot Hollywood screenwriter from saying that he wrote the script.

You can see the value by considering that if Susie Homemaker from Smalltown, Kansas writes a script that Sally Superstar later claims to have authored, most courts, and indeed most people, are more likely to believe Superstar in the absence of any other evidence. But, if Superstar claims to have written the script in 1997 and Homemaker produces a registered United States copyright from 1996, Superstar is sunk.

(Typically, this scenario doesn’t happen. Most authors and agents have no need to steal scripts, but if they did, chances are very slim that they would just copy it word for word. Re-writing it, even a little bit, makes it very difficult to win a copyright case.)

Book Publishers Register Copyrights On Everything

Professional book publishing companies register a copyright on every single thing they publish. Ironically, they may have the least to worry about since there would be numerous channels to prove when the published something, not the least of which would be the records of thousands of book sellers, royalty payments, author contracts, and tax records. Even so, nothing is quite as clean as a registered copyright.

Do book publishers need more than one copyright?

Not really, if the material stays the same.

That is the rub, however. Book publishers frequently publish multiple editions, sometimes with changes made to the text, or pictures, or other things. When they do so, that material is still copyrighted under the same rule that covers all artistic works, registered or not, but the originally registered copyright would not necessarily cover material that was substantially altered.

So, whenever a book, or other work, is changed enough, the publisher will register another copyright. Typically, this will be done with the original work included in the new copyright as well. Therefore, the original version of the book is covered under multiple copyrights from multiple years.

Proper Copyright Notice Formatting

Even if material is copyrighted more than once from multiple years, it is still incorrect to notice that fact with a date range. Rather, the year of each registration of copyright should be listed individually. Thus, an item with four different registered copyrights would be noticed like this: Copyright 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010.

For freelance writers and other writers publishing materials online or off, however, it is not necessary to list every year the material has been published. Only the years that a copyright was registered need be listed.

Good writing, everyone!

And, by the way, this article is Copyright 2010 ArcticLlama, LLC

We started the freelance writing blog here at ArcticLlama with the goal of making it easier for freelancers to understand how to succeed as freelance writers and for businesses and clients to have better success working with freelance writers. While we always strive to improve, I think we have done a pretty good job. However, we have also branched out, driven by both comments and emails from readers, and website statistics about the visitors who come here to read about the freelance writing business.

One of the top drivers of readers to this writing website is search engine traffic. This is not surprising since Arctic Llama isn’t exactly a household name and we don’t spend much time advertising, marketing, Twittering, or otherwise promoting this blog. (This is something we look to improve upon in 2010.) However, some of the search terms that drive users here are a bit more unexpected.

We’ve written before about how much freelance writers make per hour, or how much a freelance writer should make. These articles bring in search engine traffic from all manner of keywords, but the one that pops up repeatedly is how much do freelance writers make? I doubt there is much interest in this topic from a purely research perspective, so the assumption must be that people are wondering how much a freelance writer makes because they are potentially interested in doing some freelance writing.

What makes this unexpected is that we don’t really optimize our site around these keyphrases, and there are a lot of much bigger and better known websites that have written on this topic repeatedly. In other words, we aren’t the number one search result for some huge search keyword, and yet, here is this traffic. It boils down to either, a) people are not getting the information they wanted so they keep looking, or b) people are getting a lot of different information and they keep looking for some definitive answer about what freelance writers get paid. We can see this in how many of the searches on the topic also include a word like "average," "usually," or "typical."

How Much A Freelance Writer Earns

In an effort to serve all of our readers to the best of our ability let me provide an answer to the question about how much an average freelance writer earns. First, the short answer (which you won’t like), then the longer answer, which if you are willing to read should help give the answer people are hoping to find.

So, how much money does a freelance writer earn on average?

It depends. (See, I told you, you wouldn’t like it.)

Like the computer Deep Thought suggests in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the problem is that the wrong question is being asked.

There are two main issues with framing the freelance writers earnings question in this manner. The first is that freelance writing income varies widely. There are some exceptions (which we’ll cover in the long answer), but for the most part, unless you are writing consistently for just one or two clients (which is really more of a contractor than a freelancer), the income will vary depending upon the projects and the clients.

To "solve" this problem, some resort to asking how much a freelancer makes per hour on average. This too is problematic in that, even that number varies depending upon circumstances. Furthermore, there is the issue about how to characterize "per hour."

For example, are we talking about the amount billed per hour or the amount made per hour as the result of dividing income over the amount of time worked? Anyone who thinks that the amount of hours a freelance writer works and the amount of hours a writer works are equal is sorely mistaken. (Again, pseudo-contractors being the exception.)

Changing the length of the time interval only helps a little. Freelancing income varies week to week, month to month, and even year to year. A big contract that once provided 80% of writers income comes to an end and there can be an enormous swing in earnings. This is part of what makes having a business plan for freelance writing so important. It is this concept, that finally provides us with a way to answer the question about how much a freelance writer makes. Instead of creating an arbitrary chart or table of freelance writer earnings or agonizing over how accurate the average, whatever that means, is, examining a freelance writing business plan, would provide the insight that people are looking for when they search for information on freelance writing rates.

So, that is what we will be doing here in the next month. The start of the year is a perfect time to review any business plan or strategic objectives. We’ll walk through how a freelance writing business works, where the income comes from, and how cash flow, expenses, contracts, clients, and so on all drive a bottom line that is not easily summed up in a search engine optimized post of 500 words. Along the way, if you are wondering how much a freelance writer earns per year or per month, you’ll get the real answer you are looking for.

Congratulations on starting a work from home business. You’ve avoided the common work at home scams, you’ve set up a professional business structure, and you’ve even gone out an got some good paying clients. Whether its a professional freelance writing business, or something else, take a moment to bask in the glory of your accomplishments and pat yourself on the back. Things are going great, and there is nothing that can go wrong now, right?

Unfortunately, that isn’t the case. As many other freelance business advice writers have pointed out, one of the perils of working from home is implementing proper time management and avoiding interruptions. All too often, however, these articles make it sound as if the only people you need to guard your time against are the inconsiderate and naive people in your life who either don’t understand what working from home means, or who don’t care. If only it were that simple. If we were only talking about your drinking buddy showing up in shorts and a T-shirt asking you to take off for a day at the beach, preventing work day disruptions would be easy. After all, your days of crumpling under peer pressure like wet tissue paper are over. The true difficulties are much harder to resist. As far as your own distractions like television, PlayStation, and goofing off in the sun, hopefully you love being a freelance writer enough to get in plenty of work in the face of those things.

When you have an office job, there are certain barriers that both you, and everyone else in your life, instinctually respect. You have a boss, who requires certain things from you. You have an office that you have to go to and stay at during certain hours. These things are not negotiable under normal circumstances. Sure, you can take vacation days, and sick days off, but everything else is on the no list, no matter how big of a disappointment or imposition that is on other people.

When you work out of a home office, things look a little bit different. The boss, is you, so if you want to cut yourself a little slack, you can, and everyone knows it. While most people will graciously understand that you have to work a certain number of hours in order to succeed as an entrepreneur, they know that when those hours occur can have some flexibility. In other words, while the regular office worker has to work from 8:00 am to 5:00 pm with a 1 hour lunch, and not much flexibility for anything, no matter how important, the freelancer can, theoretically, work from 7:00 am to 11:00 am then from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm and then again from 9:30 pm to 10:30 pm, which adds up to an 8 hour work day.

If you’ve been working for yourself for a while, you are already cringing.

The fact is that not all hours are as productive as other hours. We’re not talking about whether or not you are more productive during the morning, noon, or night, but rather that getting into the flow of a work day or doing certain tasks at the same time every day, or other activities back to back makes them faster, easier, or more beneficial. For example, writing up a transcript of a conference call might be easier to do right after the call when it is still fresh in your mind. Taking off for three hours to run an "important" errand could cause the same task to take double the amount of time. These factors add up all too quickly for freelancers.

Important People, Important Things, Important Business

It should be pretty easy for most people who were strong enough to become entrepreneurs in the first place to tell a friend that you can’t pick them up at the hair salon because you have to work. What is much, much, tougher is to guard your time against people and activities that are just as important, or more important, than your work.

Consider, the freelancer typing away furiously in the home office while the baby screams in the other room because the spouse is busy with the other child. If you were at the office, there would be no question about whether or not you could help, or if it would be appropriate for you to do so, but when you are working at home, things are different. Should you stop for five minutes to help out while things are crazy? If you don’t, will that cause issues later?

What about the freelancer on a tight deadline when the spouse needs to work late, or go in early or switch days?

What about entrepreneurs with a home office taking part in football practice, school plays, running forgotten items to school and so on?

These are the real issues that everyone who works from home must face, and they are difficult to deal with. Often, the answer should be different than if one works at an office. After all, isn’t the whole point of working from home that it is better than being stuck in an office all day where you can’t do any of these things?

How do you choose between what much be put aside for the business and what the business should be placed on temporary hold for? More importantly, how can you and those critically important people in your life understand each other well enough for the choices that are made to be both understood and accepted without hard feelings? The answers aren’t easy.

Fortunately, there are some work from home rules and freelancing time management tips that can make things run more smoothly. We’ll cover those next.