Freelance Writer

Archive for the ‘Clients’ Category

As a freelance writer, it can often be difficult to gauge the integrity of new clients. The problem arises from the fact that I often find myself working for people who are on the other side of the globe, this makes chasing a bad debt impossible.

Recently, following a spate of dealings with blatantly crooked customers, who had placed orders, accepted delivery and then promptly disappeared without a trace, I have begun to insist that all of my clients use an escrow service to handle project funding.

Escrow is a great way to protect both the buyer and the provider. By using an escrow service, the buyer is no longer required to make any advance payment, which could theoretically be lost. For me, the main advantage lays in the fact I know for sure the project funds are available and ready to be released to me once the project is completed. All in all a much safer situation for everyone involved.

One of the problems of being a freelance writer, or more correctly, freelancing in general, is the issue of work load. Unlike a regular nine to five job, with a working day that is always similar in structure, a freelancer has to deal with a more flexible work day.

Possibly the most awkward thing for me, is the fact that I always seem to find myself either deathly quiet on the work front, or snowed under. Yesterday was a great example of this, I was just finishing off a fairly heavy project, and had very little else lined up for the next few days, in truth I was looking forward to a short break.

So what happens just as I save the final copy of the dissertation I had been working on? My email icon lights up, and there in my mailbox are two new, very large projects, both with tight deadlines. In a normal working environment, you would explain to whoever assigned you these projects that you do not have enough time to complete both before the deadline. As a freelance writer, I cannot afford to turn any of my established clients away, I do not want them taking their business elsewhere, so I have to accept both projects and burn the midnight candle again.

This is the only major problem I have with being a freelance writer, and I can see no way to make this issue less challenging, but then again, I am not sure I really would want too.

I came across another prospective client today who has fell foul of using a non-English native speaker to produce their website content. They need quite a lot of text re-written, that they have already paid to have produced by somebody else, somebody who did the job for a few dollars. Just take a look at this example paragraph:

XXX is an Italian fashion company with more than 30 years of experience in the fashion field.
Its history is characterised by a costant research for new value, tangible and intangible, to provide to its clients all over the world.
XXXl has been able to impose itself overall in the Italian and European scenery maintaining a constant growth since 1997.

So many of my clients have been burned like this before they came to me, but who’s fault is it? Personally I believe it is their own fault, anybody who thinks they can have somebody write good copy, whilst paying them almost nothing, is barking up the wrong tree as they say. Luckily a lot of them do move on and find a decent content creator to provide them with great copy.

I worry about those that just throw in the towel, thinking there is no point trying to find a good writer, due to the experiences they have had with bad writers in the past. This is bad for my business. Every bad writer, undertaking projects for peanuts and delivering garbage, is hurting the overall image of all freelance writers who work via the Internet.

Lastly, let’s not forget the freelance work sites, that do nothing to ensure that service providers are actually qualified and capable of doing the work they bid upon properly.