Freelance Writer

Well, I am now into my fourth year as a full time freelance writer. It has been quite a battle to build a reputation and establish a good spread of clients, but I think I can now safely say I am there.

One thing I have noticed lately is the increased demand for freelance writers. OK I specialise in writing website content and other forms of writing designed to be used on-line, so we can expect a growth in this industry as the internet is still booming. However, the increase in demand seems to be significant.

I can only attribute this to the growing awareness of the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and the fact that many SEO practices revolve around a requirement for quality website content.

This of course is good news for those people like me, who make their living as a freelance writing, focused upon producing high quality website content.

Let us hope the boom continues into the future.

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.