Starting A Freelance Writing Business

Just being able to get freelance writing jobs is not enough. You may know how to find freelance writing jobs and how to keep them. It is time for you to learn how to manage your workload and come up with a freelance writing business plan especially now if you are poised on the brink of success.

Freelance Writing Business Plan

A question that keeps coming up when doing freelance writing is how much work are you able to do on your own. Remember that working alone within a company and working as a freelancer are two completely different things. Working on a project alone within a company means you only focus on the project itself because everything else — money, time and effort are taken care of by the company that sponsors that project.

In freelancing, you are responsible for everything about that project until you submit it to the client and get paid if everything is in order.

Which is why it is important for you to be able to know how much work you are capable of doing on your own or if you will need to delegate. A person who works for a company gets to work eight to nine hours out of the total 24 hours there is in day.

However, a freelancer works 12-14 hours in order to catch up with deadlines because not meeting deadlines due to over-committment is considered a mortal sin in the business of freelance writing. You can’t even made this mistake once not unless you want to compromise your carefully built credibility and reputation.

So to avoid this, here are tips on how you can manage your workload and keep your good reputation at the same time:

• Allot thirty minutes every day for miscellaneous tasks like cleaning up disk space on your computer, organizing your schedules and making a list of what needs to be done.
• Allow yourself an hour of rest. Continuously working yourself to the bone will not only affect your quality but also your quantity of and consistency as well. It’s just not possible for us humans to work at 100% capacity, at least not without taking a break every now and then.

In addition, you also need to allow time for some tasks that while are not directly concerned with the paid part of your freelancing, but is nevertheless essential like answering emails from employers since you need to update them on your progress or discuss some points/concerns that you have about the articles you are writing, etc.

This actually doesn’t take as much time as you think so there’s really no excuse not to do it.

If you are employing a team of writers, you also need to take the time to coordinate with them while bidding for projects at the same time. Bidding can take anywhere from 10-30 minutes because you need to do it right and get picked.

This can be an admittedly overwhelming task and there are times when you will wish you could’ve just done it all by yourself but again, this is an essential task in freelance writing — learning how to multi-task.

Learning how to efficiently manage your workload and plan your freelance writing business will also help you keep track of projects that are finished or pending.

It is especially important that you be able to do this when handling a team of writers in addition to yourself since there are additional tasks involved like downloading articles that your writers have submitted, formatting them and putting them on the data sheets which can take up a chunk of your time.