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 remember feeling excited when Tim Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek first came out in 2007. I thought — aha! That’s it exactly. In the future, we’ll all hardly need to work as our Internet businesses run on autopilot. Selling our information products online will allow us to connect with buyers all over the world, and we’ll make money almost by magic.

Three years of long freelance-writing hours and two years of striving to make my own blog into a money-earner later, I have a totally different view of Ferriss’s manifesto.

I think it’s utter bullcrap. The proclamation that soon we’ll all only work a few hours weekly reminds me of the predictions a decade or two back that with computers and email, we soon would enter a paperless society. Still waiting for that to happen, as snowdrifts of paper litter my desk.

Why am I skeptical? Because everything I’ve learned about having a successful Internet business — on A-List Blogger Club and elsewhere — indicates that it’s still a heck of a lot of work. I worked far fewer hours as a staff writer filing four stories a week than I put in now as I strive to make this blog a money-earner!

Nobody I know is talking about magical money on autopilot, including top, seven-figure-earning bloggers. (Except the lying, scammy ones.) The real successful bloggers I know talk about grueling ramp-ups, massive guest posting, and working insane hours to make a new product launch a success. They coach others to work harder at burnishing their writing and revamping their blog design to make it more enticing. They encourage writers to create free products they can use to build their audience.

And you know what? It all takes time. Loads and loads and bucketloads of it.

I see really successful bloggers building paid learning communities or launching interactive training courses, which they earn well at, certainly. And it’s absolutely true that at this point, many Internet-based businesses can be done anywhere. Since I live on a small island and work for companies all over North America, I can say that part’s a fact.

But the tiny work-hours thing? Total bunk.

If you have the model of simply slapping a bunch of ads on a site, that might be something where you could outsource every function and live a life of ease. Except at this point few of those type of sites seem to be earning well. Most Web surfers are sick to death of ad-clogged sites and increasingly stay away. Unless you’ve built the next LinkedIn or Facebook or something with a huge audience, forget it.

Which leaves the monetizing-the-blog model. Which I can tell you is work, work, and more work. You can outsource some of it, sure. You can hire a Web developer, get a few guest posts a month, hire a social-media marketer to tweet about what you’re doing. But the core of it, the part where you build your audience by creating amazingly useful, sparklingly well-written blog posts multiple times per week, and then follow that up with stellar products your audience wants to buy from you, where you build your personal brand until you’re hot stuff and everybody wants you…there are no shortcuts there.

Being brilliant and providing lots of value to readers doesn’t happen in four hours a week, for me or anyone I know.

Yes, the Internet allows people to connect in ways that never happened before, and that opens new markets to those seeking to build a business. But the Internet has also created new demands — to respond to your blog readers (in real time, please!) when they leave comments or ask questions, or to interact with the members of your paid community. And that, friends, takes a lot of time. Even in a model like A-List’s, where leaders Leo Babauta and Mary Jaksch have deputized a small army of moderators to help them, they still need to lend their own presence and insight to the proceedings. I’m sure if they stopped, membership would plummet.

So I’m don’t know if there is any level at which a four-hour workweek starts to look realistic.

Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek theory is a load. When I checked in on Amazon to see the reviews, the first three were labeled:

For Sale: One Bridge in Brooklyn — EZ Payments

21st Century Snake-Oil Salesman

Get-Rich Quick Guide for the Shallow

One thing’s for sure — writing a provocatively titled book about how you once got an Internet business to earn for you with little effort (and how everyone else should be able to do it, too) is the surefire way to get rich and end up not having to work a lot of hours. If only we could all work that angle.

What do you think? Is it realistic to expect that masses of people will be able to devise Internet businesses that only require a few weekly hours of their attention? Leave your opinion in the comments below.

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Book jacket: The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss

By John White

The freelance writing life, as my colleague Jim Schott points out, is “a hard way to make an easy living.”

I often quote him because freelance writing does seem like a hard way to make a living (easy or not), especially if you’ve never spent time around people who are in business for themselves. But every day, people cross their fingers and decide to make a go of freelance writing.

If you’re a beginning freelance writer, the way you work is changing. Here are five New Realities for you to consider:

1. You are now in business for yourself, so stop handing out résumés. Your new tools are business cards, an elevator speech (figure out what you write and how to explain it to people in 15 seconds) and a portfolio, whether online or printed.

I get nicked around the ears a lot for proclaiming this New Reality — especially in writing communities where the résumé still has some currency. But in the quest to reinforce the perceptions of colleagues and prospects in your network, nothing says, “I’m in business for myself” quite like a business card, and nothing says, “I’m looking for a job” quite like a résumé. Besides, when somebody at the PTA meeting next month says, “So, how can I find you when I need a writer?” what are you going to pull out of your pocket or purse: A business card or a résumé?

2. Speaking of your network, that’s where the jobs are. The sooner you figure out a way to engage the people in your network consistently and successfully — phone, direct mail, meeting for coffee, e-mail, or on social media — the sooner you and work will find each other.

Keep in mind that you must feed the people in your network two things: Content that helps them, and information about what you’re doing. Nobody cares that you’re available for work right away, but they will care about ways you can help them solve their problems. And sending an occasional note to people in your network is a good way to remind them you’re still in business for yourself. Ask them what they’re looking for so you can keep an eye out for it.

3. You are now responsible for sales, marketing, operations and accounting. That does not mean that you have to do all of them yourself, just be conversant in all of them. Eventually, you can delegate some or all of the details to a partner, spouse or virtual assistant — if you’re a maniac like me, you’ll try to hang on to all of them — but don’t forget that it’s your business, not theirs.

“Fie!” you exclaim, “I just want to get paid for writing all day. I don’t want to waste time with all of that other nonsense.” Sorry, Shakespeare, but somebody in your one-person company needs to send invoices, chase money, back up the hard drive, pay bills, find prospects, close business, read contracts, upgrade your computer…in addition to writing all day.

4. Your workday will feel strange. For several months — or maybe a couple of years — especially if you’ve departed a corporate setting. Your ideas about how you spend hours in the workday may change completely.

If you’re outrageously successful, perhaps you’ll find that all of your time is booked and billable and your workday is like Mark Zuckerberg’s. More likely, you may discover downtime that makes your workday more like a Boston terrier’s. Once you’ve started meeting your income needs, you’ll find that the downtime is less unsettling. “Money will come when you are doing the right thing,” wrote Michael Phillips in The Seven Laws of Money – be prepared to wade through some strangeness on the way to that right thing.

5. You will almost certainly have good and bad months. Or good and bad quarters, or good and bad years. This is the way of all living things — We humans fancy ourselves the exception, but the freelancers among us know better. Happiness and security rarely occur together in nature.

Steady paychecks are in your rearview mirror now, so you had better concentrate on cash flow. Aim for six months of buffer in non-retirement savings. Everybody’s mileage varies, but this freelance writer has had to dig uncomfortably deep into his 3- to 6-month buffer only twice in the past 13 years. Sure, it’s a drag not always being able to predict income two or three or six months out, but if you’re flirting with freelance, you’ve probably already worked out that there’s not much more security inside a company than outside of it, right?

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So cross your fingers, mull these New Realities over, and decide whether you have the stomach for the freelance writer’s lifestyle. If you try it for a while and still can’t earn enough to keep body and soul together, at least you can say you tried. But I think most veterans will agree in the comments below that the universe yields to the determined psyche.

And that’s the most compelling New Reality of all.

John White of venTAJA Marketing is a marketing communications writer for technology companies. He posts about technology writing from the perspective of the marketing manager. It’s dirty work, but somebody has to do it. Download his eBook, “10 Questions to Ask When Hiring Your Marketing Communications Writer.”

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photo credit: Meisje van de Sliterij

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.

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(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