Have you been finding it harder and harder to get the writing done lately?

This happened to me recently.

I felt like a rusty engine slowly grinding to a halt on rails that needed some oiling.

It seemed super-hard to focus on the article or blog post or email I needed to write. I just couldn’t get started.

My head felt fuzzy like it was stuffed with cotton.

Then I took a look around my home office, and all around my house.

Clutter outside, clutter inside

Know what I discovered? A lot of junk. On every available surface.

It’s the 21st Century American curse. Stuff is cheap and readily available, and it tends to pile up like you wouldn’t believe.

After 18 years in my house, the place was a clutter-hole. There wasn’t a cupboard or shelf you could put anything inside of anymore, so things were piling up in plain sight. And this house is loaded with more closets and drawers than you can believe.

In my office, a mile-high stack of about two years of project files sat, waiting for me to discard old files in the filing cabinet and make room for them.

I don’t know about you, but when I’m looking at a world of clutter all around me, I find it hard to focus. The visual clutter clogs my brain up, too. It’s too much stimulation and not enough serenity.

Getting clean and simple

Once I realized what the problem was, I committed to combing through the house to get rid of useless junk and get things put away.

It took a few weeks to get through the bulk of it, but the results have been well worth it, both for my writing productivity and for simply enjoying my home more.

Think you don’t have time to declutter? I hear ya. That’s how the clutter gets there in the first place.

Around my house, we often throw stuff down because we “don’t have time” to figure out where it goes right now. Two years later, it’s still sitting there. Junk was dripping from the tops of bookshelves, piled on the fireplace mantle, shoved under the beds…you name it.

The problem is, all that clutter calls to me. It makes me think I should be picking up around the house instead of writing.

I refuse to blow writing time to do it, so the clutter sits. But I also don’t write. It’s sort of a vicious cycle. And here’s how I escaped…

A busy writer’s de-cluttering guide

I didn’t get any less busy, but I managed to clear vast swaths of junk out of my house. Since getting the place cleaned up, I’m finding it much easier to sit down and get to my writing assignments.

Want to clear the visual clutter to kill the mind-clutter? Here are my tips:

• Do a 1-drawer quickie. On hold on the phone? Waiting for dinner to cook? Pull out one drawer or attack one shelf. Over time, these really add up, and allowed us to rip through most of the kitchen. It now has — gasp! — actual empty shelf space ready for new edibles, and half the counter clutter is gone.
• Get family buy-in. If you don’t live alone, you didn’t make this mess alone. Explain to everyone that we’ve got too much stuff, and their help is needed to cull the collection. (Anyone unwilling to participate will have to live with the decisions others make on what to discard.)
• Go for the worst. I was shocked when my husband went straight for the worst drawer in the house — the one we call “The Drawer of a Thousand Things.” You couldn’t even fully close it anymore, but whaddaya know, it didn’t take very long to clean it out! After that, everything seemed like a breeze.
• Pick a boring day. A dull, rainy day is a perfect time to organize a cleaning party. Warn family members that you’re planning to do some cleaning tasks that day so everyone is prepared.
• Think Container Store. Often, closets seem full but are just poorly organized. My daughter’s closets were a disaster area…so we bought three sets of new organizer drawers. Presto! All her art projects and raw materials are easy to tuck out of sight. Now, she can pick up her own room in 5 minutes flat, a task I used to spend at least a half-hour on twice a week — hello, extra writing time! There are pricey organizer systems out there, but plenty of cheap systems, too — this doesn’t have to cost much.
• Make it fun. We turned on the stereo and listened to music while we cleaned, and rewarded cheerful cleaners with treats such as a movie, DVD rental, or a fresh-baked muffin. There’s also the bonus of finding actually useful items you no longer knew you had.
• Have a splurge. Once you’ve got empty drawer space, treat yourself to something you’ve been wanting. One of my kids replaced three entire bins of ancient, little-used toys with one $30 copy of Wii Sports Resort. Now, he’s got a fun new game and tons of closet space to store his current, grown-up kid projects.
• Donate. Anything useful but outgrown can be donated to any of the many charities that run thrift stores or garage sales. Feel good that you’re helping others by passing on what you can’t use, especially clothing. If you haven’t worn it in a year or two, it should go.
• Don’t forget the computer desktop. If your online desktop is a morass of miscellaneous visible files, get those tucked away into folders and out of sight, so you can focus on your current assignment.
• Get into maintenance mode. Once you’ve got cleaner closets, commit to keeping them that way. Five quick minutes a day to make sure closets are still functional and clutter is stored gives you the reward of a tranquil writing environment. Be pickier about what you decide to purchase and bring in the house, and you can kill more clutter at the source.

When I’m stressed lately, my sister orders me to immediately throw away 10 things that are sitting out. That’s a great quick drill for preventing clutter from creeping back.

What clutters your mind? Leave a comment and tell us how you clear the decks.

by Jason Brick

You know that Fortune 500 companies have marketing plans. As freelance writers, so should we.

A handful of the writers I work with object to the idea of a marketing plan (or marketing, or plans).

The theory is that we artistic types are too spontaneous and creative to be constrained by such a left-brain activity.

But the truth is, the more spontaneous and creative you are, the more you need plans and systems to keep your writing business alive.

If you’re lucky enough to have come to writing from a business background, you already know how to do this. For all the other writers, here are six (reasonably) easy steps to creating a marketing plan to move your writing and your business in the right direction.

1. Run Your Numbers

Open your bookkeeping software or bank statements and find out exactly how much money comes in and how much you spend on business and personal expenses.

If you share your finances with a partner or spouse, you can divvy up expenses for this purpose – or count your partner’s income as one stream for your business and cover all the household costs.

Do this for the three most recent months, so the average will account for any outliers from a big assignment or one-time expense.

2. Set Your Goals

Look over your budget from step one. Where would you spend more money if you had it?

Would you pay off debt more aggressively, establish a vacation fund? How about setting free a few extra bucks for a meal out or some retail therapy?

Create a “goal budget” and find out how much more money you need to make to live that life. Go for a few reasonable changes here, and set a new goal once you achieve them. Aiming too high at first just sets you up for disappointment.

3. Analyze Your Output

Work out how much you make, on average, per assignment and divide the result of step two by that number. If you want an extra $500 a month, and write assignments for an average of $100 each, you need five more assignments per month to reach your goals.

Broken down like that, the new lifestyle you want seems (and is) more attainable. If your prices vary widely, break your output goals into sections. That $500 could come from a single $300 top magazine column and four $50 blog posts.

4. Study Your Marketing

Check your email history and other notes for the past few months and find out how many contacts you make with leads for each assignment you actually get. A “contact” includes any communication you have directly related to getting the gig.

Divide one by the other to figure out your ratio. If you get one gig for every 10 contacts, that’s a 10:1 ratio. Don’t include one-off check-ins with regular clients here. They’ll skew your numbers, and it’s better to estimate low and overperform than estimate high and get a nasty surprise.

It also helps protect you from a bad month if you know how much marketing you need to do to get the clients you need.

5. Establish Your Benchmarks

Time for some math. You can do it!

Take the results of steps three and four, and put them together. If you need six new assignments per month and have a 10:1 contact-to-assignment ratio, you need to make 60 new contacts per month to reach your income goals.

That’s 15 a week, or just three every work day. Make those three contacts a line item in your planner or to-do list.

6. Track Your Progress

This final step has two stages. First, make sure you get those contacts in every day. If you miss on one day, double your efforts until you’re back on quota.

This constant system of prospecting creates a continuous stream of new work. Second, check your numbers at the end of each month to confirm you set the right goals.

It might turn out your ratio was a bit low, and you need 70 contacts in the next month. You might have spruced up your website and only need 30.

No marketing plan is ever complete.

This system not only helps you stay on top of your marketing, but helps fight the temptation to procrastinate by giving you a clear to-do list of promotional tasks.

It really is that simple, no matter how much your buddy with the MBA would like to tell you otherwise. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, though.

Do you have a marketing plan for your freelance business? If so, share how you do it.

Jason Brick is a freelance tramp who covers whatever topics clients will pay him to write about. He speaks about the business of writing and coaches new writers. See more of his articles about the writing business at brickcommajason.com.

Let’s face it — most blogs don’t pay for guest posts. It’s considered a marketing activity by the writer, who gets a link back to their site.

That can be worth it, too. I’ve gotten some amazing connections and clients from blogging on popular sites.

But I believe writers should be paid for their work. And sites that take guest posts still get a piece of writing out of the deal.

So I did a crazy thing…

Back in late 2010, I did something sort of nuts — I decided to start paying for guest posts.

At the time, my audience was pretty small and I was still earning most of my living from freelance writing.

It didn’t make economic sense on the face of it. I just thought it was the right thing to do.

I needed to put my money where my mouth was. I hoped I might inspire (or is that shame?) some other bloggers into paying for posts as well. I also hoped being different from the norm by being a paying writing market might get this little blog some attention.

And it worked

On both fronts, it worked! Make a Living Writing has received loads of attention, subscribers, and traffic from being published in many digests of paying markets. Even better, quite a few sites decided to pay after seeing me do it.

But I’ve neglected a critical last step here — to connect you to those paying markets so you could rake in some cash.

Fixing that now. Here’s my personal list of blogs that pay around $50 a post or more, from my own writers’ guidelines page. They’re listed in the order they began paying for posts, most recent first:

1. Your Online Biz — Thrilled to have inspired Darnell Jackson to top me — he began paying $100 a post in March 2013. Nice job, Darnell.
2. Write Your Revolution — Sarah Russell’s blog joined the ranks of $50-a-post paying markets in February.
3. Be a Freelance Blogger — Sophie Lizard has joined the smart set and now pays $50 a post.
4. The Renegade Writer – Excited to add Freelance Writers Den’s Other Den Mother Linda Formichelli to the list of people who’re taking the high road and paying $50 a post.
5. ReadLearnWrite – Paying $50 a post after seeing my Problogger post about paid guesting in Feb. 2012.
6. David Worrell’s blog, Rock Solid Finance (formerly Your Inside Guy) was the first niche blogger to jump on board my bandwagon and start pay $50 for guests posts back in late 2010. So I think he’s the coolest. You should definitely read his blog.
   
7. Freelance Switch – they pay around $75 per post. So I think they’re cool. And now I even guest blog for them on a regular basis myself. (They are owned by Envato, which has a half-dozen other sites that pay, too.)
8. HouseLogic – This site operated by the National Association of Realtors pays $1 a word — I had an opportunity to interview their editor a while back for an article for The 2013 Writer’s Market. If you’ve got a good twist on a shelter story and strong reporting skills, you know where to go now.
9. One Spoon at a Time — Paul Wolfe was inspired to start paying $50 a post back in Fall 2011. This one was inspired by my announcement…feels good to know I’m helping to create new paid markets for writers.
10. OnText – OK, they only pay $40 a post. But maybe some of you would like to know anyway, I’m betting.
11. Patch – AOL’s Patch.com, as of this writing, often pays $50 and up for short blog-postlike articles.
12. Make a Living Writing — can’t forget to mention my own site! Still proudly paying $50 a post. (Due to overwhelming response, I now only take guest posts from students or grads of Freelance Writers Den or Jon Morrow’s Guest Blogging course.)

Those dozen get you started. Fortunately, a couple other bloggers have been busy compiling more helpful info on blogs that pay, and now there are several other good lists out there — and I’ve collected links to all of them here.

How to find 100+ more paying markets

Two are by Bamidele Onibalusi of the newly renamed Writers in Charge (formerly YoungPrePro), and one is by the abovementioned Sophie Lizard of Be a Freelance Blogger. One older list is from the freelance-training site Matador. The assignments range from blog posts for niche bloggers to fully reported online feature articles for major national magazines’ online sites.

Here are links to those below:

•  Writers in Charge’s original list of 30 paying markets (which really lists 33)
• Sophie Lizard’s 2012 list of 45 Paying Markets (has good deets on the rest of those Envato sites I mentioned above)
• Writers In Charge’s 2013 list of 45 More Markets (which really has 46).
• Matador’s 2010 list of 27 markets feature a wide range of pay rates up to $1 a word+ and Matador is itself a paying market, as Oni notes on one of his lists. Rates may have changed at some markets since this was published, but it’s a nice compendium of higher payers.

I got curious and compared all these lists to see how many listings were unique. Eliminating all the duplication between the lists and counting my 12 above, there are nearly 120 unique paying websites and blogs listed in all. Nice, huh?

I’m thrilled to have helped add a few names to these lists of places that pay. Possibly my finest achievement here on the blog.

Now that you know how many markets pay, I have to ask:

Why not get paid?

As a blogger, you’ve got a choice when you look to guest post. If you’re going to guest post for exposure, I say, why not get paid, too?

I recommend making paying guest markets your top priority. That’s what I’ve done and it’s allowed me to earn quite a lot while also getting attention for my writing and my blog.

And if you have a blog you’re looking to build, consider paying for guest posts. Just a suggestion.

Ever gotten paid for a guest post? If you know more paying markets, please add to my list.

If you’ve been stuck working for peanuts for freelance clients you can’t stand, you’re going to love this.

It’s a way to find better clients by tuning into your own feelings.

The fun thing is, your main guide to additional freelance success can be an emotion you might not associate with business that much. But it’s one we all really enjoy feeling.

Have you guessed what it is?

A few hints:

“Do what you ___ and the money will follow.”

“All you need is ____.”

“God is _____.”

That’s right. Could it be that simple? Yes, it can.

How to love your way to higher rates

I recently encountered the theme of employing love in your business twice in the past few weeks. Which was enough repetition to finally bring it home to me what a road to riches this emotion can be.

First, my pal Linda Formichelli sent me a chapter of entrepreneur and Sufi teacher Mark Silver’s book, Unveiling the Heart of Your Business. The chapter was on how to raise your prices using your heartfelt feelings as your guide.

When you think about a range of prices, sense your level of discomfort. If you tune into it, Silver says, you can discover the point where you feel love and harmony when talking about a price — and that’s where your rates should be.

Forget about market research and what competitors are doing. What feels right at heart? Where you can radiate positivity and love when you say that price? That’s the right price for you.

Try saying your proposed prices aloud and notice what happens with your body. Too low, and you’ll feel uncomfortable. Same with too high.

Open a loving heart to what you deserve to be paid, and you’ll see what to charge.

The formula for freelance love

Next, I headed to SOBCon, where one of the speakers was someone I’ve enjoyed learning from before — leadership expert Steve Farber, author of The Radical Leap Re-Energized.

Steve teaches people how to be bold and fully actualized in their careers.

One of his core sayings was a theme of SOBCon this year. It’s a simple formula for skyrocketing your freelance earnings and your job satisfaction level, too. It goes like this:

“Do what you love in the service of people who love what you do.”

I don’t know any better way to describe how to end up making a great living as a freelance writer doing projects you’re thrilled to write.

This formula has two sides. First, you need to figure out what types of paid writing you enjoy most.

Then, you look for people who truly appreciate your talents, and will pay you well as a result. When you get the love going both ways, you have a terrific project — one that will create a great sample, get you a glowing testimonial, and be a pleasure to work on.

That tends to lead to more work you love with other great clients. If you haven’t noticed, the good ones tend to talk to each other and will refer you.

How to make the leap from losers to lovers

If you’re stuck doing assignments you dread for clients you loathe right now, you’ve got to make some changes to your formula to grow your income.

It can seem impossible to turn this around. But you can.

Start by changing one side of the formula. Maybe you just start working only for clients who appreciate you more and drop the whiners and boundary-pushers.

Or you only write about topics you adore.

Gradually, get these two to line up. Find the clients who love your work in your favorite type of writing. And boom! You’re there.

My freelance client love story

Here’s the story of a client love affair I had once that shows what can happen when you live Steve’s credo.

This client approached me (which I always love!) through LinkedIn. They were a Fortune 500 company I happened to know and adore. Obviously, they had a marketing budget to spend on editorial.

I shop their stores and had covered the company in the past as a reporter. They were big fans of my more recent magazine articles on business topics. I thought their CEO had the highest ethics and admired how the company treated its employees.

They wanted me to write newsletter articles for their business clients about some of their services, the sort of business-writing challenge I enjoy. I’d get to talk to their customers and managers to write the stories, something I also find fun.

Then they asked me to bid it. I said it sounded like $1 a word.

They thought about it and got back to me and said, “That’s not enough. We think it should pay $2 a word.” And they did.

Find the writing you love. Find clients who love how you do it.

Not only will your income explode, but you’ll find yourself loving your freelance writing life, too.

Are you doing what you love for people who love what you do? Leave a comment and describe how it’s working — or what you’re doing to move in that direction.