10 Mistakes To Avoid As A New Freelance Writer

Your first few months as a freelance writer can be a learning curve, to say the least. You’re eager to get out there and bag your first paying clients, you’re excited about where it could lead, and you’re beavering away at the stuff that you know you should be doing to get your journey off to a flying start.

Just as important though, is the stuff that you should NOT be doing… The mistakes that could hold you back from getting paid work, create bigger problems to deal with in the future, and ultimately just make things harder than they need to be.

I know, because if there’s a mistake to be made, it’s fairly likely that I’ve already made it at some point and learnt the lesson the hard way.

But the good news is that you don’t have to make the same ones I did. Here are ten mistakes to avoid in your new freelance writing business…

1. NEGLECTING TO FOLLOW UP AFTER PITCHING

A successful pitching strategy doesn’t involve just sending off your pitch then waiting to see what happens. If you’re firing it out and then moving on to the next one without ever giving it another thought, then you’re missing a trick.

Your potential client probably has dozens and dozens of different pitches to look through, and they’ll be trying to sort the wheat from the chaff. If you haven’t heard back from them after a week, then it’s not necessarily because they don’t think you’re the right person for the job. They’re probably just bogged down with all the responses.

So this is where you can go that extra mile… Check in with them, politely enquire as to whether they’ve found the freelancer they’re looking for, and tell them that you’re still available to get started. You’re reminding them who you are, and you’re showing that you’re proactive and on the ball. I started following up with all my pitches pretty early on, and I saw an almost instant increase in the amount of work that came my way.

2. LOOKING LIKE YOU’RE A NEWBIE WHO’S DESPERATE FOR WORK

Okay, so I know you’re new. And I know you may well feel like you’re desperate to bag your first paying projects. But if your potential clients get even the slightest sniff of this, then you’re done for. Think of wooing a prospect as being a bit like wooing a potential romantic partner. If the first time you speak, you tell them that you’ve never had a boyfriend before but you’re hopeful that they’ll be the one, then it’s probably going to be a bit off-putting.

I’m not suggesting here that you lie about your experience. Not for one minute. Definitely don’t do that. And I’m not suggesting that go overboard and end up being arrogant and overbearing. What I am suggesting is that you’re aware of how you’re communicating, and the kind of vibe you’re giving off. You want to come across as capable and confident, and like the kind of professional that someone would want to do business with. Not someone who’s having a stab at making a bit of money through writing.

It’s a subtle shift, this one, and it can take a bit of practice to get right, but it’ll make a huge difference to the success of your pitches. If you’ve already been sending out pitches, read back through a few of them and ask yourself this… Are these the words of an expert who has confidence in what they’re offering?

3. ONLY LOOKING FOR WORK WHEN THINGS ARE QUIET

If you’re being consistent with your pitching, you can quite quickly get to the stage where everything’s going great. You’ve comfortable with the amount of money you’re earning. You’re working on projects you care about and that excite you. You don’t really want to add anything more into your diary. And so you take your foot off the gas a little bit when it comes to seeking out new clients.

This approach right here is what’s responsible for getting yourself into a feast or famine cycle. One minute everything’s good, then you lose a client or two, or they want to put things on hold for a while, and then you’re suddenly in a position whereby you’ve got no idea where your next chunk of cash is coming from, and when it’s likely to happen.

Having a waiting list is a wonderful thing, and gives you a massive amount of peace of mind. Once you’re confident with finding work through sites like People Per Hour, and you’ve got enough to be tiding you over, it’s sensible to start looking at how you can get the right people to seek YOU out, instead of always having to pitch.

4. RELYING TOO HEAVILY ON JUST ONE CLIENT

Just a few months into my freelance writing career, I landed a big client who was sending a ton of work my way each and every month. My monthly invoice was almost equivalent to a full-time wage, so it bought me a good amount of breathing space. Still though, I was really conscious not to let this make me complacent. Anything can happen, and you need to think about your longer-term income pipeline.

As it turned out, that client stayed with me for about five years. It could very easily have ended at any time though. Securing some ongoing work is a great thing, for so many reasons, but it can also lull you into a bit of a false sense of security. Think about what measures you can put into place to keep your income streams reliable and consistent, regardless of what might be going on with any particular client.

5. SCRAPING THE BARREL WITH RIDICULOUSLY LOW PAYING PROJECTS

To an extent, you need to pay your dues. You need to build your experience and your credentials. If you’re charging exceptionally high rates straight off the bat, you’re probably going to struggle to get clients. Equally though, you need to value your time and your work.

There are tons of people out there who’ll offer you something silly like £3 for writing an article that’s going to take you two hours. That’s the fastest route to losing the will to live, and it’s also completely unnecessary. Don’t do it! My advice here is to start reasonably low with a fee you’re comfortable with, get some experience under your belt, and start to raise your rates from there.

For reference, I started out charging £15-£20 per 500 word article (which would take around an hour), and I quickly built up a decent amount of clients that way.

6. NOT STARTING YOUR OWN BLOG

I firmly believe that you don’t need to have a blog to land your first freelance writing gigs. I had pretty much zero professional online presence during my first few months as a freelancer, and I still managed to land decent gigs. Still though, you’ll need examples of your work to show to your prospects. Google Docs might do the trick for a while, but a blog gives you the opportunity to build a much more professional portal for your words and examples of your writing.

Freelance job boards like People Per Hour are a great starting pointing point, but ultimately, you’re going to want to create a plan that sees you finding higher paid opportunities. Spending a little bit of time each week on a blog will give you a head start, and it’ll be an asset that you can monetise further in the future.

Of course, you might be coming at this from a slightly different angle. You might already be a blogger, looking to get into freelance writing. If that’s the case, be sure to check out these 10 fantastic tips for going from blogging to freelance writing, from Jenna at The Bloglancer.

7. NOT SETTING CLEAR BOUNDARIES WITH YOUR CLIENTS

You’ll be eager to impress your new clients, and really go above and beyond. That’s great, but it’s important for your sanity in the longer term that you set clear expectations for the working relationship, and enforce some boundaries.

At the start of the relationship, it makes sense to agree on things like how quickly you’ll turn the work around, what you need from the client to facilitate the work and when you can expect to receive it (e.g. any extra information or documents), and how often you’ll check in.

With one of my first ever freelance clients, he’d often send new projects over to me on a Friday evening. I’d beaver away all weekend to have things with him first thing on Monday morning. After a while, this just became the expectation. I’d made a rod for my own back. I hasten to add here that he was a fantastic client, and this whole debacle was entirely of my own making.

You don’t have to make a big deal about laying down the law and spelling out what you will and won’t do, but if you’ll be working with someone for the longer term, there’s a conversation that needs to be had.

8. STOPPING AND STARTING

I didn’t make this mistake myself, because I’d pretty much decided that I was going to make this whole freelance writing thing work, whatever it took. I’d recently ditched a job I hated, and I had no intention of going back into that world. So I was consistent with pitching and attracting clients and building up my knowledge and experience.

Depending on your own circumstances though, it’s really easy to NOT be these things. Maybe you’ve got a full-time job that you don’t absolutely despise, and this is a side project. Your time’s limited and you’ve got income coming in from different avenues. So you do a whole load of dipping your toes in the waters, but never really build up any momentum.

The trouble here is that this way, you’ll never break into a decent stride and start creating results. You’ll get stuck in a cycle of pitching for a few projects, then giving up for a while because you didn’t get the jobs. Then a few months later, you do the same. The real problem is that this never allows you to perfect your approach, and there’s a whole load of stabbing in the dark.

If you want freelance writing to be a real, long term opportunity for you, then having routines is vital. If you can only dedicate two hours per week to pitching, then that’s fine. But two hours only on the weeks when you feel like it probably isn’t going to cut it.

9. NOT HAVING CONTRACTS IN PLACE

You don’t quite realise how important it is to have contracts in place until the first time that a client decides to fall off the face of the earth and completely ignore your invoice. One of the big plus points of using sites like People Per Hour is that all of this is taken care for you by their systems.

Eventually though, you’re going to be finding clients via other routes, and this means that you need to manage this sort of stuff yourself. I naively thought that a verbal agreement would be fine, and it was. For a while. Until a client did a disappearing act, owing me £1,500. That was in my first year of freelancing, and it was a bitter pill to swallow. It was also a good wake-up call for getting my systems and agreements sorted.

These days, all my clients are issued a contract, and I typically ask for a 50% deposit upfront. How you’d enforce a contract if things did go pear shaped and you weren’t paid what you were owed is another subject in its own right, and you’d have several different things to consider. But thankfully – and touch wood! – this is not something that I’ve ever had to deal with.

Having solid agreements in place shows that you’re a serious professional, it ramps up your positioning as an expert, and I’d dare say that it also deters the occasional unscrupulous client that you might attract from taking the bloody Micky out of you.

10. NEVER BEING SATISFIED WITH YOUR PROGRESS

This is one that I’ve been terribly guilty of at various points during my self employed journey. You inevitably start to hang out online with other writers, and you see them landing that big contract that you’d have bit your left arm off for. You see them hitting big income goals. You see them being recommended by big names in their industry. And sometimes that’s motivating and it spurs you on.

But we’re all human at the end of the day, and not many of us are immune to a nasty dose of comparisonitis. There’s a very fine line between having healthy ambitions and goals, and beating yourself up because the progress and the breakthroughs aren’t coming as quick and as fast as you’d like.

It’s also worth noting here your own concept of money can really easily become skewed when you’re running a small business. In the ‘real world’, very few people earn 6 figures a year. Online, it’s a message that’s constantly rammed down your throat. So it’s important to get a bit of perspective on things.

If you’re having a wobble, I find it useful to think about things like this… If you’re paying your bills and you’re living a relatively comfortable life, then you’re doing great. Anything beyond that is just a nice bonus. Maybe you just wanted to make an extra few hundred pounds a month to give you an extra bit of freedom. If you’re achieving that goal, the same applies. Sometimes you just need to pause for a minute and realise how much you’ve achieved so far and the difference that it’s already made.

Learn from my mistakes as a freelance writer…

I might not quite have made all of these mistakes right here, but I’ve definitely made my first share. Despite this, I still managed to quickly replace my corporate income with writing projects, grow my business month on month, and seven years later, I’m still successfully freelance writing.

So even if you recognise yourself in a few (or more) of these, it definitely doesn’t mean game over for your freelance career. It’s just a case of taking a step back, identifying the activities that might be counterproductive to your goals, and rethinking how you move forward from here.

Have you made any of these mistakes? I’d love to hear about your experiences in the comments below!

 

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