Time. We’ve only got so much of it each day. For freelance writers who are also parents, we’ve certainly never got enough of it.

What’s the best way to spend our precious work hours? I’m often asked this question by my mentees. I had one say, “I wish I could follow you around all day and see how you do it!”

While I don’t think that would be pleasant for either of us (and might reveal an embarrassing amount of screwing off and/or snacking on my part!)…I realized that after five solid years of freelancing, I have developed some strong opinions on how to prioritize tasks.

Here are what I consider to be the seven most important activities a freelancer should spend their time on, in order of importance:

1. Send a bill. Have you finished a project, but not billed it yet? Stop everything and send that bill out right now. Every day a bill isn’t received by a client is a day it can’t be processed and paid. Many companies only cut checks once or twice a month, so a little dithering on your part could easily result in an extra month’s wait for your money.
2. Finish a project. Do you have a project you’re almost done with — say, an article that’s ready to write? If you don’t have another immediately pressing deadline, then write it today, even if it’s not due now. Clearing mostly-done projects out of the way has a number of benefits — it means a chance to send a bill sooner (notice a theme here?), you write while the topic is fresher in your brain, and getting that assignment off your plate declutters your brain to focus on other pressing tasks.
3. Find sources. This is one I have to admit I am guilty of procrastinating on sometimes…but you shouldn’t. Locating great sources is often key to writing great stories. The longer you wait to start your search, the more pressure you’re under to find someone, and the more likely you are to settle for a less-than-ideal interview subject. Start early and you’ll have the time to hunt down better sources. You’ll also be able to schedule their interview times when it’s most convenient for you, as you’re not in a rush.
4. Write. Once you’ve billed, wrapped up anything close to completion, and done whatever source-finding is needed for upcoming stories, you can look at other writing you might want to get done. The more you write, the better you get, and making a habit of writing helps you avoid writer’s block. So find as much time for writing in each day as you can. This is the point where your personal blog might get written, or you might write ahead on a big project that you want to rewrite and polish up a lot before deadline. (If you’re a designer, substitute “do design work” here, or whatever else it is you do as a freelancer.)
5. Market your business. Even if it’s just a half-hour of connecting on your social-media sites, try to spend a little time each day spreading the word about what you do. Send one query. Sign up for one networking event. Whatever is in your marketing plan — break off a little chunk of it today and do it.
6. Do interviews. If you looked for sources early and left time to prepare for your interview time, you should be ready to rock your interviews and get fantastic quotes and information. You can schedule your interviews or research time for current assignments after your marketing time because you planned well.
7. Analyze your progress. This is an often-overlooked but critical step to building a lucrative freelance career. Every month, see what you billed, and what you received. The gap between those two gives you a quick snapshot of your month-to-month trend — is it going up or down? Compare this year to date with last year to date, or this month with the same month last year. Data about earnings, and about how your client mix is changing, can help you budget better based on what income is really coming in the door, and can also help shape your marketing strategy.

How do you prioritize your time as a freelancer? Leave a comment and let us know.

If you enjoyed this post, consider subscribing to Make a Living Writing. Free tips on earning more from your writing twice weekly. At least!

(P.S. I’m filing this early because tomorrow, I’ll be at the Seattle Society of Professional Journalists’ All Access Pass seminar and networking event! Hope to see some of you there…and hope to report on my experience later this week. Speaking on a couple of panels…and hope to learn from others as well.)

Photo via Flickr user enigmachck1

I’ve written frequently about the need for freelance writers to set a goal of having a high hourly rate. I’ve written about how to raise your rates. I’ve talked about how you can earn more bidding per-project than per-hour.

Today, I’m going to take the rate discussion to another plane and talk about daily rates. That’s the rate you want to earn per work day in order to bring in the amount you want to make in a year.

Why is it important for you to know your daily rate? Several reasons:

1) Quick tracking mechanism. If you know your daily rate, at the end of each day you can evaluate how you did. First, look at what you billed. If you didn’t actually bill any clients that day, review how much work you put in on ongoing projects. For instance, if you estimate you’ll work parts of 10 days on a $1,000 project, attribute $100 of earning on that project for today.

Now add up the total estimated earnings for the day. Does it add up to the daily rate you want? If not, the time to take action to find better-paying clients is now — not at the end of the year, when you do your taxes and are confronted in black-and-white with the reality that you aren’t meeting your earning goals.

2) Good weekly yardstick. Once you have a daily rate, it’s easier to track how you’re doing each week and each month. I find these calculations help me schedule deadlines throughout the month so I have revenue in each week, instead of having a lump of work all stacked up at the end of the month, which leads to late nights and stress as I frantically try to keep projects from hanging over into the following month (thereby screwing up my revenue projections for that month!).

3) Another way to view earnings besides hourly rates. While I’ve often said freelance writers need to aim to make $100 an hour, not all your work may be at your goal rate. Or you won’t be fully booked every day.  A daily rate can give you a better sense of whether you’re charging enough based on other factors including how busy you are, how many hours per day you’re willing to work, and how long it takes you to complete projects.

4) Quick quote ability for exclusive projects. Every now and then, a client may want to lock down all your time for a project. They want you to go cover a trade show for several days. Or they want you to drop everything and work on a rush project for them for a week or two solid. Maybe they need someone to write in-house for a month at their office. Or they’d like you to spend two months ghostwriting their e-book.

How do you know what to charge?

If you know your daily rate, you know how much revenue you would lose by being locked down on an exclusive project, unable to work your usual clients. Without a daily rate, you’re just guessing whether it’s worth it to you financially to take the assignment, so it’s easy to end up shortchanged.

How to figure your daily rate

Now that you know why you should care about your daily rate, let’s figure it up. Say your goal is to earn $100,000 from freelance writing this year. (Think big!)

There are 365 days in the year, but 104 of those days are weekends. There are also roughly 10 holidays a year where it’s virtually impossible to get much work done — Christmas, New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, etc. Family members will likely expect you to shut off the devices and pay attention to them on these occasions.

Let’s hope you’re not working weekends or major holidays, and that you also plan to take at least two weeks off a year (which you certainly should). That leaves around 240 real, viable work days in the year.

Divide $100,000 by 240 and you get roughly $417 a day. That’s your daily rate. Want to earn $50,000 a year? That’s around $209 per working day.

Have you calculated your daily rate? Ever needed to use it for client quotes?  Leave a comment and let us know whether you think it’s useful to know your daily rate, or whether hourly rates are more important.

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Photo via Flickr user bigburpsx3

One of the biggest hurdles many writers face is sending query letters. They don’t want to take the time to research, write and send them because of the seemingly low odds that a particular query letter will result in an assignment.

In summary, they can’t take the rejection!

In an age of social-media connecting and online blogging, some see querying publications as hopelessly old-fashioned. But sending a well-crafted query letter is still one of the most powerful methods available to freelance writers who want to make great new connections with editors at publications where they are currently unknown.

Like a ninja throwing star, your query can slice through all the barriers to seeing your byline in great publications and vault you straight to an assignment. You don’t need to know anybody — the power of your story can take you there. Isn’t that awesome?

Also, despite the complaints you see on many writer forums, crafting query letters doesn’t have to be an all-day project. If you know how to re-slant and re-pitch similar topics to different publications, you can have plenty of queries out without doing a ton of work.

This year, I had a goal of adding to my client list at least one or two more national publications that pay $1 a word or more. I sent many query letters in pursuit of this goal. Most of them were rejected.

This did not bother me in the slightest.

After nine months of making time to send a few queries each month, I finally connected with two new publications — one online, one off. Both pay at or above my target.

How did I keep from getting discouraged? Why didn’t I give up?

The many queries I sent that flopped didn’t bother me because I never experience rejection.

How do I avoid feeling rejected? I follow these four simple rules for querying:

1) Maintain an unshakable belief in your abilities. Many writers seem to take the echoing silence that greets their query as a personal condemnation. They suck as a writer!

Instead, consider the likely reality — the editor never had time to read the query, they already had a story on that topic planned, they’re ceasing publication, remaking the pub and not needing that type of topic anymore, just hired a staffer to  handle those type of stories, etc. There are a million possible reasons you didn’t hear back from the editor, or got a polite “pass” email. Often, it’s not about you.

Resolve not to take a “no” personally. Believe in your talent, and press on.

2) Don’t get emotionally attached to any one query. This is a big problem for many writers. They spend way too long crafting one, single query. It’s for a big, national magazine. They’re so sure this idea is perfect for this magazine — it’s definitely their ticket to the big time!

So the writer waits anxiously for a response. They’re paralyzed into inaction on their other query ideas. When they never hear back, or get a “no,” they’re crushed!

This is like the person who decides they’ve met their future spouse on their first date. You’re getting too committed too soon.

I’ve had really awesome ideas that I thought were perfect for Parade and other major mags, that never went anywhere. Such is life. Happens to all of us.

The antidote to falling in love with your query is to have lots of great ideas and send many queries. Make querying a routine part of your monthly marketing plan. Then you won’t stake too much emotional capital on any single query.

3) Seek a match, rather than an acceptance. Rather than thinking of querying as a one-sided activity — “I need an assignment! Please give me one!” — I think of it more like the old Match Game TV show. I have ideas, and I know editors have needs for interesting articles. I play the querying game until I find a match. You really want it to be a fit from both sides.

If a publication passes on my query, I’m not bothered, because I know editor relationships are a two-way street. And there’s lots I don’t know about this publication and editor.

Maybe the editor is a raving lunatic. Maybe the publication is about to go under. Maybe they’re the type who’d edit my piece into an unrecognizable mass of goo. Or the kind that would have me gang-edited by three different people.

So if it’s a ‘no,’ I assume I’ve just been saved a ton of heartache with a situation that would have turned out to be a terrible fit. It wasn’t a match! So what — no biggie. Move right along and send more queries.

4) Be unstoppable. Back when I covered home-improvement retailing as a staff writer, I once went to a great trade-show seminar on how to break prospective customers’ existing relationships with their current lumberyard and get them to buy from you instead. The speaker advocated staying in touch with prospects even if they seemed very happy where they were.

How long did he advise continuing to try to sell the prospective customer?

“Until they buy…or they die,” he said simply. If they die, the company will name a new person to that buyer’s job — and you can start right in trying to sell the new guy.

I think of querying the same way. Keep going until you get the acceptance you need. (Like Dory in Finding Nemo says, “Just keep swimming…”) Keep learning and sharpening your skills.

One day, a new editor may come on at that publication you’ve always wanted to bag. Then, query them. Never stop trying. Those who take this attitude usually get where they want to go eventually, while those who’re easily discouraged give up.

How do you cope with query-letter rejection? Leave a comment and tell us your strategy.

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Photo via Flickr user Orin Zebest

Hi all –

Last week I wrote over on WM Freelance Writers Connection about how important it is to keep learning as a writer — to keep finding opportunities to grow your skills. This week, I decided to take my own advice.

I’ve been curious about monthly-subscription course models. I’ve interviewed more than one person who I know is making over $1 million a year with their subscription courseware. I decided I need to learn more about how this works, in case I want to do it myself!

After all, I am doing one-on-one mentoring now, for writers looking to grow their income. I’m told the next step for something like that is group mentoring. And the next step after that is the monthly-subscription, online-course model.

I have some real strengths as a writer — years of staff-writing work honed my discipline and helped  me learn how to meet deadlines and come up with tons of story ideas. But blogging — now that’s fairly new for me.

Yes, I’ve found some success as a paid blogger for others, currently including BNET and Entrepreneur magazine, along with some small-business clients, too. Many months now, I find half or more of my total income is coming from blogging! So in one sense you’d say I’m a successful blogger.

But what I’d really love is to find a way to make this blog into more of a paying gig. That way I could spend more time helping other writers earn more, which I’ve discovered is an activity I truly love. Have to say, when one of my mentees tells me they’ve gotten a lucrative assignment by following one of my tips, I feel more excited than when I land a fat client myself! If this blog generated income, I could offer more free tips on the blog and spend more time helping more people realize their dreams of supporting themselves through writing.

I’ve already got a partial plan for monetizing my blog with my upcoming Make a Living Writing e-book (we’re proofing it now!), and with more e-books to come. While I’ve found success blogging for others, I know there’s a whole lot I don’t know yet about being successful here on my own blog — how to grow the subscriber list, engage readers, and reach a broader audience.

This week I got a great offer from two bloggers I’ve been reading for a long time and whom I think are among the top niche bloggers today, Leo Babauta and Mary Jaksch of Zen Habits and Goodlife Zen, respectively. (If you haven’t read Leo’s free ebook on how he got 100,000 subscribers for his blog, stop what you’re doing and take a look now.)

The upshot is… I’ve just joined their A-List Blogger Club. (At last, that graphic’s making sense now, right?)

They were doing a special deal where it was just $20 a month (cancel anytime!) and we got a lot of freebies for signing up now. I thought at that price, given what I could reap from having a blog that earns, it was such a tiny price that I couldn’t say no. I gather there are 700+ of us in the community right now, so lots of folks to connect with in there as well as great learning.

I haven’t had much time yet to participate and work their courses, but I’ll report back when I’ve gotten a chance to do so. So far, I got to look at a video of Mary’s frank assessment of how her blog initially sucked, and what she did to make it more successful — and I got one really valuable tip out of it I’ll be implementing for my site soon. Watch and see if you can spot what I change!

Have you participated in any of the monthly-sub learning communities out there? If so, what did you think? Was it worth the money? What did you learn? Leave a comment and share your experience.

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Photo via Flickr user The National Guard