I’m often asked about starting life as a freelance copywriter. Just last week, I spent a couple of hours talking with a mother of two who, bored out of her mind working part time as a web editor for an insurance firm, wants to take the leap into full-time freelance writing.

Here’s a quick round up of the advice and ideas I’ve shared during these informal chats.

Please remember, these are only my experiences – there are undoubtedly countless alternative routes to freelance survival:

1. It’s Who You Know

The only reason I made it through my first year as a freelance copywriter was because I previously worked for the well-known digital marketing agency Distilled. As soon as I left, several people got in touch right away to find out if I could work with them on a freelance basis. Although most of them were just looking for cheap SEO, a few worked out as long term sources of copywriting work. That network has continued to spread; I would say, a year and a half after I left the company, about half of new enquiries still come via Distilled in one way or another.

Action: Simple: stay in touch with previous employers. If they’ve worked with you before, they’re much more likely to do so again!

2. Have A Presence

For me, this is all about coming across as a credible, reliable human being. If someone is thinking about giving you some money, they’re going to want to find out a bit more about you first. Whether you have a simple brochure website, a thriving Twitter account or an all-singing all-dancing blog and portfolio website, you simply have to have something there when you’re googled.

I’ve never tried to rank for any keywords and I’m not sure I’m even listed in Google as a business. In fact, my website has undergone many reworkings over the last year and is only just starting to look respectable. There are lots of things on the to do list site-wise but, for now, I’m just really happy that there’s lots of positive, copywright-focused content when someone googles my name.

Action: Get something, something, to rank for your name on the first page of Google. Ideally, it should be a professional presence, but anything that just says ‘I’m real, I’m who I say I am!’ will do for starters.

3. Be Normal, Friendly And Reliable

I can’t emphasise this point enough. Be polite and professional with your clients, but don’t forget to make ‘em smile once in a while. Reply to emails promptly and as clearly as possible. Don’t create extra work for your client – your job is to make their lives easier! If you say you’re going to do some work, do it. Don’t bullshit. Don’t disappear for weeks without telling them.

Action: Reply to those emails loitering at the bottom of your inbox or action folder. Just do it.

4. Stay Up To Speed

For me, it’s really important to know what’s going on in the online world. 90% of my work concerns the Internet in one way or another and knowing the latest on what Google likes or about who’s doing smart things with social media is an important part of my pitching arsenal.

Action: Read blogs, frequent a social news site and spend a bit of time on Twitter each day. You can tailor your ‘feed’ to whatever it is you need to stay on top of.

5. Get Your Rates Right

When I first started out as a freelancer I spent ages trying to find out how much I should be charging. I needed work so I didn’t want to overcharge and lose out but, at the same time, I knew I couldn’t survive on the rates offered by the content networks.

I also had this weird disconnect between producing some work and then getting paid for it. With a salaried job, I always felt like the pay was just a bit of an added bonus for spending all those productive hours in the office. But that might just be me!

If you want to know my writing rates, I have a whole page dedicated to them.

Action: Work out how many hours you work each week and then work out how much you need to earn in those hours in order to make enough money and then divide that amount by the number of hours. That’s your starting point.

6. Have A System

Going from a structured office job to self-employed mayhem can wreak havoc with your productivity. I’d recommend getting a few systems in place to ensure you at least get something done each day. I do it with lists, but whatever works for you.

Action: Try writing a list at the beginning and end of each day, detailing what you hope to acheive and how long you expect it to take, and then what you actually acheived and how long it took. Refine as required.

7. Keep An Eye On Profitability

I find life as a freelance copywriter pretty idyllic but that’s because I indulge myself with projects I enjoy. If I wanted to be making more money, I would need to focus more on profitability – those cash cows that bring in a good amount of money for the time spent.

Action: I’ve just started a really simple timesheet system and it’s working wonders for my profitability! I have a text file on my desktop that I update every couple of days with what work I’ve done and how much I’ve earned. At the start of every week I then port that information into a google spreadsheet and wipe the text file clean.

These are just a few bits of advice I’ve picked up over the last year or so – please feel free to share your own below!

Before I start, let me just say I’ve only been a full-time, self-employed freelance writer for just over a year. I am by no means an expert, but I’d still like to share what I think are some valuable lessons from the last 14 months.

One important lesson (but not what I want to write about today; bear with me) is that, in your first year of self-employment as a writer, it is not a particularly good idea to just ‘take off’ for a couple of months without thinking of a plan for your return. Half way through last year, that’s exactly what I did.

Everything was going pretty well business-wise so I decided that “yes, I would like some time out. Bye London! Bye clients!” One empty bank account later and, as well as calling up old clients, I was scouring the Internet for quick money writing work.

And that, my friends, is how I ended up writing 350-word posts of dubious quality for $10 a pop. But guess what? I learned more from the next few months with that gig than I have from any other job. Here are my takeaways:

1. Learn To Write Fast

I was earning as I typed. I wasn’t working for a content mill, just an agency that didn’t pay so well. For that reason, I was producing average quality posts. The more 350-word posts I could turn around, the sooner I’d be able to upgrade to Heinz beans and extra mature cheddar. So, to begin with, I was motivated by the money. However, as I got back on my feet work-wise, I started to enjoy these articles just for the challenge.

I’m sure you’re not interested in how to write average copy faster, so why should you care?

Here’s why: my writing sped up dramatically across the board – right up to the highest quality stuff I was working on. If you’re getting paid for a finished article, that’s a big coup; if you’re getting paid by the hour, you’ll impress your employer and be able to charge more.
For all the creative writers out there, the same applies!

Lesson: give yourself a solid reason to write something quickly on a regular basis. Whether it’s a personal blogging regime or something you do for work, I guarantee that getting those pinkies working faster will pay off big time.

2. Learn About Crap Writing

I hope I can explain this point without coming across like a jerk. When you have 350 words to kill and you’re writing on a subject that doesn’t usually inspire hundreds of words of entertaining prose, it’s hard not create baggy copy. Know what I mean by baggy? It’s using five words instead of one, or repeating the same point in different language, or featuring an introduction and a conclusion when there’s nothing to introduce or conclude. Word wasting.

At first, I was nervous that I’d pick up really bad habits – that this practice would negatively affect the quality of my top-level writing. In reality, it did the opposite. By exaggerating those bad habits for the dubious quality posts, I became much more wary of them in my normal writing.

Lesson: Try writing 350 words in 20 minutes on a subject you know very little about. Don’t focus on making it bad, but don’t worry about making it great. Leave it to stew for a day and then return and edit at will. Your red pen will find weaknesses and bad habits you didn’t know you had.

3. Understand How You Understand

Two quick thoughts here, neither of which make complete sense but I hope you still get somthing from them:

• Let’s say I was writing a post about cars; something I know nothing about. I’d have to come up with an idea for the post and then research it enough to be able to write 350 words of readable content. Remember, $10 a post. Faced with a wikipedia page of a few thousand words, I learned to read and digest a lot faster. I’m still not a ‘speed reader’, but I definitely noticed an improvement.
• I’ve become worryingly good at writing about things which I know nothing about. It’s difficult to explain, but I think the bonus here is actually to do with how I appreciate language structure. It’s not a skill I’m proud of, but, thinking positively, a side effect is that I have a deeper understanding of how sentences best convey meaning.

Lesson: Find a sentence that makes no sense to you and rephrase it. Now learn what the sentence meant originally and see if your rephrasing says the same thing.

4. Become A Lean, Mean Admin Machine

This holds true for any work, but it becomes particularly important when a) you’re not getting paid much in the first place and b) you’re definitely not getting paid for any ‘admin’ time.

I was only writing about 10 posts per week for these guys, but they weren’t very good at communicating what they wanted – lots of last minute changes in different emails and that sort of thing.

Personally, I’m useless at admin. I try to hold too much in my head, certain I’ll remember what I have to do and by when. After a few rocky weeks of working late on articles I’d missed and not getting paid for articles I’d written in error, I knuckled down and got better at dealing. My emails become more explicit (I don’t mean I got more sweary) and I learned to spot potential confusions before they occurred.

Lesson: Look at a day’s worth of work emails and see how much faff there was. Aim to half it the next day. Don’t worry about causing offense with your curtness; your clients are probably busy people too.