It’s one of the most commonly asked questions I get from writers: What should I charge?

It’s hard to know, isn’t it? There isn’t one universal rate card freelance writers work from. Fair pay is determined by a million factors — how bad you need the gig, how easy it sounds and how pleasant the people are, how much you like the topic, how tight the deadlines are…and so on.

But lately, I’ve been hearing about one issue in particular that is stopping a lot of writers from earning what they truly deserve.

I’ve dubbed this problem Writer Client Crush Syndrome.

In other words, you fall in love with your client — before you find out what they might be willing to pay you.

The matchup between a writer and a client is a whole lot like dating. Ever get a mad crush on a guy (or girl) on the first email or phone call you had, before you really knew much about them?

Apply that to freelance writing, and you get Writer Client Crush Syndrome.

As in relationships, client love can strike when you least expect it.

It begins when you hear from a prospect

You love that they responded to your query or the resume you sent to their ad. You’re excited that you got an interview with them.

When you learn about the company, you fall hard for their story.

The owner is battling cancer. Their cause is amazing and wonderful and changes lives for the better. Their products are innovative and unique. The company is in an industry where you have great expertise. You’ve been wanting to break into social-media marketing and they’re going to let you run a campaign.

You know nothing about what your working relationship would be like yet. Maybe you’ll be gang-edited by a team of four, or have to pull night shifts to meet their deadline.

But you’ve got stars in your eyes, and you’re already fantasizing about how great it would be to add this client to your list. You’re imagining their clips in your portfolio already.

You haven’t taken the time to reality-check what you’re hearing with other writers you know. You don’t have a sense of what fair pay would even be for this gig.

You’ve jumped straight to the end of the love story and you’re imagining yourself already married to this client and their work.

The problem?

You’re a pushover when it comes to pay

You’ve let the initial-meet phase drag on too long, fallen in love, and now you’re a sucker for whatever offer they make.

They’ve got you right where they want you.

When they start telling you they’d like you to work for $9 an hour, the rationalizing begins. This is the equivalent of “Maybe he’ll call” after the first date.

Maybe they’ll offer me more work later, and I can raise my rates. It’s a foot in the door. It’s an opportunity.

The next thing you know, a big block of your time is being taken up by someone paying you peanuts. You’ve lost critical time you need for marketing to good-paying prospects, and you have a client that doesn’t respect you (in the morning or any other time) and doesn’t pay you professional rates.

Often, these dysfunctional, underpaid writer-client relationships can persist for years. It’s hard to break it off. You’re still not over that first crush you had on them.

How to prevent Writer Client Crush Syndrome

How can you avoid falling victim to WCCS?

Keep your heart in your chest when you first get a nibble from a prospect.

You want initial chats or meetings to be short, gather needed details about the project, and lead quickly to a question such as, “What’s your budget for this project?”

Before you have a chance to fall head-over-heels for a bum client.

What’s holding you back from achieving your freelance writing goals?

I’ve heard from a lot of writers lately about why they’re stuck. Why they can’t get out there and find some gigs.

I call them reasons, but really, they’re excuses — barriers writers throw up in front of themselves to have an excuse for not moving forward.

Often, it’s not the economy, or your lack of clips. The real problem is inside your head.

I finally started a collection of the excuses I hear most. Here are the top ten, along with my excuse-busting replies:

1. I don’t have any clips. Every single successful writer working today once had no clips or experience whatsoever. Hit the Internet and find a website that will print something of yours. Presto! A clip. Build from there.
2. My clips are too old. I routinely send out 10-year-old clips, if they show an expertise I need to demonstrate. Nobody cares — if you wrote it then, you can write it now. So show ‘em what you got.
3. My website isn’t ready. Mine went up in 2008 and it’s still not ‘ready,’ either. I just redid it, but there’s plenty I’d still like to change. Our sites are never ‘done.’ But you pitch with what you have now, and keep improving it.
4. I don’t have enough experience. So get some — volunteer to write for a local business. Intern at an alternative paper. There is no ‘enough,’ anyway. We all just keep learning as we go. 
   
5. I don’t have a degree. Me neither. I’ve edited the work of people who have master’s degrees though, and I can tell you it’s no guarantee of writing success. Unless you’re trying to be the editor of the New York Times, you’re good. If you really have a complex about this, take a community college course in magazine writing or copywriting.
6. It’s too late to get started in social media. I recently read that to this point, only 9 percent of America is on Twitter. It’s still early days. Jump in and start learning. And of course, Google+ just started about yesterday, so we’re all newbies there.
7. I don’t know where to start. Here is the answer: Somewhere. Start somewhere. Try some type of writing that interests you. Promote yourself with some form of marketing you’re willing to try. If it doesn’t work, try another way. Keep trying to get published, somewhere, anywhere, until you do.
8. I don’t have any connections. Completely unnecessary. Concentrate on your writing. One good query letter can open the door to a lucrative, ongoing editor relationship. Wherever you’re trying to get, you can just write your way there.
   
9. You can’t find good pay in this economy, so why try. Good thing I didn’t buy into this fable, or I wouldn’t have grown my writing income every year since 2006.
10. I hate marketing. More than you hate starving? It’s not my favorite thing, but it’s sort of like going to the bathroom — probably not your favorite thing either, and yet you do it each day. Marketing should be like that. Just suck it up and do it.

What lame excuses have you heard lately? Feel free to add to my list in the comments.

Do you have trouble finding time to write?

So many of us have little distractions that make it difficult to get any quality writing time. Things like my three kids, that neighbor’s dog who never shuts up, and oh yeah — maybe your day job, too.

One way to think about your goal of starting a freelance writing business on the side is that right now, with your day job supporting you, it’s like you’re driving down a nice, smooth, paved highway. It’s almost effortless to just drive home at night and watch TV, kick back on the weekends, and start all over again on Monday.

It’s easy to keep going down this highway

But it’s also a little nerve-wracking, as in today’s economy you never know if this smooth day-job road is headed straight off a cliff of layoffs and unemployment.

There are offramps from this smooth road that lead to a rutted, gravel washboard road that heads off into the woods. It’ll be more difficult to travel on and it’s not entirely clear where it leads…but you have the strong sense that it connects farther on to an even better highway. On this one, you’re your own boss and are able to pay all your bills from writing.

Are you scared to take the turnoff?

If so, you have to sit yourself down and ask yourself where you want to be in five years. Will the road you’re on now take you there? If you want to be a freelancer, driving down the full-time job highway will never take you to that destination. So it may be time for a detour down that rough road.

Yes, things will be harder for while, but possibly more interesting and challenging.

It’ll be tempting to turn back when you hit the bumps

I know.

I’ve been down that road, and I can’t believe what a journey it took me on. And how wonderful it feels now to be in control of my own career and earnings.

How to find the writing time

If you’d like more inspiration, motivation, and time-management tips on how to fit it all in, take a listen to the chat I had last Wednesday with Bryan Cohen, author of Writer on the Side, about how to fit in some writing time around your full-time job. I read it and loved it, so that’s my affiliate link. (Congrats to Lin, who won a free copy of Bryan’s ebook on the call, as well as Kelly, who won a copy of my Webinar and report How to Break In and Earn Big as a Freelance Writer.)

Bryan was a fascinating guest and has a practical approach to carving out that precious writing time.

Among the questions we answered on the call:

• What’s the missing element many writers skip that makes it harder to freelance on the side?
• How can you avoid burnout if you write at work but want to get started on your own writing projects?
• What’s really behind your writer’s block, and how can you get the creativity flowing?
• How can you write when you can’t seem to find even a couple of uninterrupted hours?
• How can you discipline yourself to get writing done when you don’t have any deadlines?
• How did Bryan get started as a freelance writer, before he published his ebooks?
• What’s the best way to publish your book – ebook? Print book? Both? What platforms and tools are best?

Enjoy the call:

Player not working? Download it here.

How do you fit freelancing into your busy life? Leave us your tips in the comments.

I’ve written a lot on this blog about how I market my writing business.

But I’ll let you in on something: Since last summer, I haven’t had to actively market my freelance writing business.

Today, most of my new clients come to me through referrals, Google searches for a freelance writer, LinkedIn, or Twitter.

I’m usually fully booked several weeks ahead, and able to pick and choose the gigs that pay the best and that I like most. My family would tell you I’m overbooked, and I should drop a few clients!

But it wasn’t always that way.

Here’s the story of how I got new clients:

Flashback to early 2009. I had just lost a large Web copywriting client, the economy was in the tank, and all of a sudden I need to find a lot of work.

The short version of how I fixed this problem:

I marketed my ass off.

I kept marketing like mad, until I was fully booked.

Then, I kept marketing to find better clients. I started dropping lower-paying clients and substituting higher paying ones. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Result: Instead of seeing my earnings drop after I lost that big client, I kept earning more money each year, straight through the downturn. Last year was my biggest earning year as a freelancer, and this year I am on track to beat it.

How exactly did I do that?

OK, here’s the full story.

It took about 18 months to rebuild my business to where I wanted it, where all my gigs paid great rates and I had all the work I wanted. I created a multi-pronged, aggressive marketing plan and kept at it relentlessly. I probably spent at least 8 hours of each week marketing.

Here is how I spent my marketing time:

• Scanned online job ads. I didn’t send dozens of resumes daily to any and all ads. Instead, I tried to find at least two to four real tasty-looking leads to respond to each week. I developed a system for doing this rapidly and zeroing in on the ads that were really worth my time. From that time on, I got a response to nearly every resume I sent. Over time, I learned to look at better job boards — the paid ads on LinkedIn, and niche job boards for copywriters and business reporters, since that’s my specialty. I also figured out a few creative ways to approach the ads, such as responding to full-time ads and asking if they needed a freelancer. I got two good gigs that way.
• In-person networking. I tried quite a few groups — went to a BNI meeting, BizBuilders, my local Chamber events, Seattle’s MediaBistro and Linked:Seattle, too. For me, MediaBistro rocked — I got a couple of great clients there that provided ongoing work.
• Improved my website SEO. Besides adding “Seattle freelance writer” to the header of my writer site, I made a commitment to update my site each week, usually by adding a new published article link. In short order, I ranked at the top of my local market’s search for a freelance writer. If you’re wondering if this can really make a difference, it can: Two Fortune 500 companies hired me off Google searches in the past year.
• Sent query letters. I targeted both existing publications I wanted more assignments from, and new publications I wanted to add to my credits. I sent queries on a regular basis. Many assignments at $400-$800 an article and up followed.
• Stuffed my LinkedIn profile with search terms. I think it used to say whatever the most recent gig was as my bio! But now it says “freelance writer, copywriter, ghostwriting, blogger…” It’s a laundry list of every possible search term people might use to look for a writer. It helped: One of the publications that found me searching LinkedIn for a writer was Alaska Airlines Magazine.
• Used “who’s viewed my profile?” on LinkedIn. If you haven’t used this tool, you can get some information from it on who has been on your profile. When any of those visitors smelled like a prospect, I’d send them a message through LinkedIn — “Hi, were you looking for a freelance writer? Let me know if I can help!” Almost every one of these notes got a response, as people are fascinated that you can tell they were looking at your profile.
• Reached out to editors on Twitter. This turns out to be a great, casual way to approach editors. Some responded, some didn’t. One gives me $2,000 article assignments now.

What a long list of stuff, huh? The more ways you market, the more lines you have in the water, and the more fish you’re likely to catch. Pretty simple.

You may use a different array of marketing strategies. Everybody has their own marketing groove. I know one writer who gets all his assignments pitching editors on the phone. That’s cool.

But don’t buy into the attitude of hopelessness you hear on many writer chat boards. All gigs don’t pay $5 or $20. Just not true. Good pay is out there, if you commit to getting out and finding it.

Want to go from hungry to overbooked? Come find out how at my next Webinar, How to Make Good Money Writing Online. Registration ends Monday — but sign up now, and I’ll send you a free link to my previous 1-hour Webinar and report, How to Break in and Earn Big as a Freelance Writer (usually goes for $20).