Freelance Writer

I have been working as a freelance writer for quite some time now, and it occurred to me today to take a closer look at my rates, as it has been quite some time since I adjusted them. One of the things that had begun to worry me was the increasing amount of time I have to spend on administrative tasks. I had not realised just how long I spend on things like writing quotes, creating invoices, chasing customers and keeping the books.

My girlfriend pointed out to me the fact that most morning I spend at least a couple of hours sitting at my laptop, drinking coffee and dealing with the day to day tasks associated with running a business. When I add this up it comes to a staggering 14 hours a week. This is 14 hours that I am not writing, 14 hours I am not getting paid for and 14 hours that need to be budgeted for in my rates.

So I’m going to spend a week keeping track of exactly how long I spend on the purely administrative tasks associated with being a freelance writer. Then I will work out new rates which take this dead time into consideration. One of the great things about being a freelance writer is the fact I can adjust my fees as I see fit.

Possibly the trickiest aspect of my job as a freelance writer is actually managing my time efficiently. I would estimate that around 70% of my work time is spent on my freelance writing work and the remaining 30% is split between dealing with quotes and inquiries and taking care of administrative tasks such as handling payments and chasing up invoices.

When I took up freelance writing as a new career some years back, I never considered that such a large chunk of my work time would be taken up by anything other than freelance writing. I certainly did not envisage so much time being spent dealing with administrative tasks.

So this week I am going to try something new, I am going to set a 50 minute timer each hour, during these 50 minutes I will only write, I won’t check my email, or any other external function that is part of by freelance writing business. The remaining 10 minutes each hour I will give over to admin and customer communication. Just an experiment, to see how it works out.

I have been thinking lately that for freelance writers such as me, who specialise in creating website content and other forms of freelance writing to be used on-line, are extremely lucky to be serving an exponentially growing market.

This huge market has massive amounts of room for other writers to jump in and get a slice of the pie, and I am sure there are many new writers out there who would love to take a crack at supplying the demanding needs of website owners and internet marketers.

SO I have decided to develop a freelance writer mentoring programme, where I will guide new writers through the subtly different aspect of writing for the on-line market. I will spend the next couple of months putting a strategy together, which will be designed to take a new freelance writer from the infant stages of securing their first website content project, through to advanced topics such as writing for an interactive audience.