More than One Way to Make Freelancing Pay

In one episode of Sex and the City, Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw character lands a freelance assignment for some incredible amount, like $4 a word. As a real-life freelance writer, I’ve never made $4 a word, or even met anybody who does. I’m not sure rates like that exist. Even $2 a word sounds pretty good to me. But the technology and business magazines I write for don’t pay that much. So what I lack in high-paying clients I have to make up for by being super efficient in what and how I write. I shared some of this philosophy recently on the message forums at Freelance Success, a newsletter for professional freelance writers, and a great source for tips on marketing for freelancers.

One of my regular clients is a technology Web site that pays 50 cents a word for 500-word stories. That’s $250 per story – like I said, not a lot of money. However, I’ve been able to make this market work for me by:

• Sticking to my going hourly rate for the amount of time I put into the stories.
• Doing multiple stories around a single topic so I can interview one source for two stories.
• Getting the editor to assign a story and graphics – which pay an additional fee – on the same topic so I can stretch the research even further.
• Focusing on topics that fall within my already established beat, so instead of starting from scratch on every story I have a pool of sources to draw from or know where to go to find them. I’ve always been a beat reporter, so this is standard operating procedure for me.
• Spinning ideas and sources I find for these stories into pitches at other tech outlets I write for.
• Using stories as basis for posts to this blog, which I guess is a different way of stretching my research.

And since I have an ongoing relationship with the client, I get work from them every month, some of which is assigned, some of which is based on my queries, so for very little marketing on my part I have a steady income stream. Multiply this times a few clients and voila, you’ve got a business.

My style of marketing works for me, but it might not suit everyone. Another Freelance Success member who blogs about the business of writing is Eric Sherman. Check out his blog, Erik Sherman’s WriterBiz. I’d love to hear other freelancers’ marketing secrets.