Whether you’re already a freelance writer or are interested in becoming one, you likely already know about the feast or famine aspect of this career. Rarely does work come in at a steady pace. Instead, you might be writing for ten hours per day and still barely meeting deadlines for several weeks, followed by a month of listening to crickets chirping away in your home office. Though this disappointing economy certainly doesn’t mean less writing is needed, it does often seem like employers are beginning to spend less on writing than before. This often means you have to search for more work just to pay the bills.
If you have some downtime lately, don’t spend your days freaking out and feverishly calculating your bill to income ratio. Instead, spend your time doing something about your situation. Even if you don’t see results right away, you might find you’ll stress less and feel more productive when you take the fate of your writing business into your own hands.
The first step toward giving your career some new life is updating your resume. Most people don’t tend to do this every month, yet they might lose and gain clients that often. If you have a few older, less impressive, or short-lived gigs, eliminate them from your resume. You should only do this if you can replace them with jobs that are sure to catch the eye of your potential clients. You will need to have at least a few jobs on there to show that you have experience, yet your resume should not be more than a page or two long unless your career has lasted decades.
The next step is sending this resume to as many companies as possible. Check out online job lists everyday, or at least a few predetermined days per week. It is not unheard of for freelancers to spend an hour or more per day scoping out possible jobs. You may choose to spend your first waking hours doing so, as long as you have had enough caffeine to address the right employers in each job you apply for.
Though sticking to a few tried-and-true job lists is great, you might need to step it up. You probably read several websites everyday, whether through your research for articles or your search for the latest celebrity gossip. If you’re like me, it might take you a while to realize that the owners of the website don’t usually write the content; they typically hire freelancers like you. There are a few sites that I used to visit often for research that I now write for, simply because one day, a light bulb went off in my slow, caffeine-deprived brain that made me realize that I was missing out on a major client. Even if you have never seen a help wanted ad for the sites you visit, it doesn’t hurt to contact them with your resume.
Along similar lines, you can always post ads advertising your services rather than waiting to apply to jobs to which thousands of other writers have also applied. In fact, I’ve received some of my highest-paying, most loyal clients through ads I randomly placed throughout the Internet. Whether you make a website, post your resume on a job board, or simply place links to your work in your email or forum screen name signature line, you never know who will read your writing. The point is to get out there and market yourself in creative ways if you want your business to stay alive and well.
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