Freelancing - Planning Ahead

In freelance writing, it is essential that you plan ahead

for example, let us determine how much money you want to make and CAN make in the next 12 months. First, let us assume the salary you are seeking, say $30,000. Now, let's divide that number by 2,080 (based upon 40 hours per week over 1 year) and you will come up with $14.42 per hour (gross).

Every day, you would have to make over $105.00, and for every week you should set a target of $577.00.

Let us say you are unable to find a job for the first month, which means you have lost an estimate of $2,500, which eventually has to be added on to the yearly salary that you are seeking. So to play safe put in a two-month period [that the time tour search might take], which increases your annual salary target to $35,000, your hourly target to $16.80 or a daily target of $.134.40 [8 hours], or a weekly target of $.672.00 [40 hours]

Now make note of this;

1. Your targeted annual salary [12 months] – should be set at $.35,000
2. Your hourly rate that you plan to charge would have to be greater than $.16.80, let us say $.17.0
3. Divide the figure in #1 by your answer in #2 to get the total number of hours you need to work in the next 12 months to reach your goal.
4. Divide the answer in #3 by 2080 [based upon 40 hours per week over 1 year] to estimate the gain you would make and the time you would take to breakeven.
5. Then think about how many hours you would have to be putting in, on a weekly basis, so as to figure out how many clients it’s going to take to reach your goal.
6. The result you get here is how many hours a week you have to work to reach that goal. The only advantage is that you can also work on holidays and get paid on it. This, of course depends on your social life.

If this number seems unreasonable, then you need to go back and reassess your goals. Maybe you need to increase your rates or you need to decrease your goals.

Whatever may be the case, I sincerely hope it works out for you.

If you crack the freelance code and start charging a lot more for your services, you can make it to your goal with far-less hours and fewer clients than you have in mind, and beat out most of the freelancer writers out there who work without a profitable strategy.

Wish you the best in your freelance writing efforts

Freelance Writing

Some time back, we discussed the revenue aspect for your blogs.

Now we are going to discuss on how to generate immediate revenue from your blogs and other freelance sources.

The secret is to start using your content to get paid to blog. First you need to find out how to create a blog that gives you added income and exposure. If planned well, blogging can take your affiliate income through the roof.

Being Consistent

Many freelancers are inconsistent in marketing themselves and looking for new freelance jobs. This means that when you do market yourself and something comes in, you feel good because you have some income, you have some money, and you feel like your business is going well. But then you take your eye off the ball of marketing yourself and you just focus on delivering your service for your current projects.

Without keeping some consistent marketing in your routine, you're not filling the pipeline for new potential freelance job opportunities. Therefore, when you get a job, you feel great when you finish the job, and after which you have nothing. Result - you scramble desperately to find the next job.

By the time you start marketing again, it takes a while to get the engine back up and going, so it's a very inconsistent way to market yourself. The best way to remedy this deadly mistake that many freelancers make (especially most people who are new to the freelance business) is to set aside a certain amount of time each day to look for new freelance jobs and follow up with potential employers.

This could be a certain amount of time or it could be a certain number of jobs that you're going to apply to. Even if it's just one job a day or two jobs a day, that’s fine. All you need is to pick your rhythm, a success habit that you're going to do daily, every weekday for your business, and it doesn't have to take a lot of time. Set something as your daily goal and make it a success habit.

The key part of that habit is being consistent. It's where most freelancers fail and this is what takes most freelancers out of their business and puts them back into full-time jobs.

When you crack the code as a freelancer, you're going to love it as you're going to earn great money and you're going to have lots of freedom and responsibility to do what you want to do, when you want to do it.

Blogging for Dollars

Last week, the blog search engine Technorati released its 2008 State of the Blogosphere report with the slightly menacing promise to "deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind.

"Bloggers create 900,000 blog posts a day worldwide, and some of them are actually making money. Blogs with 100,000 or more unique visitors a month earn an average of $75,000 annually—though that figure is skewed by the small percentage of blogs that make more than $200,000 a year. The estimates from a 2007 Business Week article are older but juicier: The LOLcat empire rakes in $5,600 per month; Overheard in New York gets $8,100 per month; and Perez Hilton, gossip king, scoops up $111,000 per month.

With this kind of cash sloshing around, one wonders: What does it take to live the dream—to write what I know, and then watch the money flow?

From the perspective of someone who doesn't blog, blogging seems attractive. Bloggers such as Jason Kottke ($5,300/month) and the Fug girls ($6,240/month) pursue what naturally interests them without many constraints on length or style. While those two are genuine stars of the blogging world, there are plenty of smaller, personal blogs that bring in decent change with the Amazon Associates program (you receive a referral fee if someone buys a book, CD, etc. via a link from your blog) and search ads from Google. (The big G analyzes your site and places relevant ads; you get paid if people click on them.) Google-ad profiteering is an entire universe in and of itself—one blogger by the name of Shoemoney became famous (well, Digg-famous) when he posted a picture of himself with a check from Google for $132,994.97 for one month of clicks.

Blogs with decent traffic and a voice are also getting snapped up by blog-ad networks, which in turn package them as niche audiences to advertisers. On Blogads, advertisers can choose the "Blogs for Dudes!" hive or the "Jewish Republican Channel." Federated Media groups blogs into subjects such as "Parenting" and "News 2.0"; there is also a boutique network for blogs that don't want to cover themselves with ads called The Deck. These networks present blogs as "grassroots intellectual economy" and describe their audiences as loyal, engaged, and likely to see ads as not just ads, but useful bits of information. This may be a comfort to squeamish indie bloggers since it hints that putting ads on your site is not selling out but helping out.

While monetizing your blog may be easier than ever, all of this comes with an ever-present hammer: the need to drive traffic. This month, the writer/blogger/productivity thinker Merlin Mann opened a window onto his angst with an anniversary post. Mann is best-known as the creator of the Hipster PDA (a modified Moleskine notebook) and his Inbox Zero talk (turn your e-mail into actions). In a post titled "Four Years," Mann sketches out how his site, 43 Folders, grew from a personal dumping ground for his "mental sausage" into a full-featured destination for productivity nerds and life-hackers. In 2005, he experienced a key transition:

At some point that year, 43f became the surreal and unexpected circus tent under which my family began drawing an increasing amount of its income. This was weird, but it was also exactly as gratifying as it sounds. Which is to say, "very." But, my small measure of something like success did not go unnoticed. In fact, the popularity of small blogs like 43 Folders contributed to the arrival of a gentrifying wagon train of carpetbaggers, speculators, and confidence men, all eager to pan the web's glistening riverbed for easy gold. And, brother, these guys actually like blogging and love to post and post and post.

Article Courtesy : http://www.slate.com/id/2201325/