How to Make Your First $10,000 as a Freelance Writer
By: Jason Mcbride
Tags: Marketing, Writing, Business, Make Money Online, Freelancing

If you can learn how to make $10,000 as a freelance writer, nothing will be able to stop you from earning an incredible living from your talents.

That first $10,000 is going to be the hardest money you ever earn. But once you have overcome that hurdle, you will have made all the basic mistakes and will have learned everything you need to know to make a full-time living as a writer.

After the first $10,000, it’s just a matter of scaling and iterating to make as much money as you want.

Once you make your first $10,000, you are no longer a beginner. You may not be an expert, but you are well on your way to being in control of your own financial destiny.

You need to figure out how to make that first $10,000 as quickly as possible. I’ve spent the past eight years making a full-time living online, primarily through freelance writing. Freelance writing continues to be the most significant chunk of my income.

I didn’t tap into some magic formula. I made every possible mistake. It took me a long time to figure out the ins and outs of making a freelance writing business work.

But once I figured it out, I was able to scale my income quickly.

Your path will be different from mine because no two writers are the same. I don’t believe there is a single correct path to writing success. However, hundreds of roads lead to failure.

This guide will help you avoid the biggest mistakes, and it will show you some of the lessons you need to learn to run a successful freelance writing business.

Once you know what it takes to make $10,000, you’ll be able to make $50,000, $100,000, or more if you desire.

Understanding Your Value

The first thing that you have to master before you can make $10,000 has nothing to do with your skills as a writer, your ability to market yourself, or even your ability to land clients.

You have to learn what your value is.

Writers make the mistake of setting their rates far too low. Many writers feel that they cannot in good conscience charge $100 for a simple blog post because they would never pay $100 for someone else to write them a blog post.

You are not your target market.

You are not trying to sell your services to other freelance writers. You are trying to sell your services to businesses that need and value your skills.

New writers often can’t imagine anyone being willing to pay large amounts of money for their work. Sometimes your friends and family reinforce these false narratives.

When I was getting started, my wife and my in-laws wondered how I would ever make any money. They asked why anyone would hire me when they could write their web copy or blog posts themselves?

Your value is not what you would pay yourself. Your value as a business is how much you value you can generate for someone else.

Businesses hire writers because they lack the time, resources, and skills to write marketing copy that works.

There are thousands of businesses that would eagerly pay $100 or more for a blog post. Why are they willing to pay that much? Because they understand that a good writer will help them attract their ideal customers. A good writer will create content that continues to deliver results for years to come.

Image by studiostoks and licensed through Deposit Photos.

If you want to make your first $10,000, you have to get over thinking that your work is only worth pennies per word. You have to learn that you provide value by creating content that helps businesses make more money. Once you can consistently help businesses close sales and generate revenue, you will be able to charge whatever you want.

Setting your rates is one way you communicate to clients the value you bring to their business. Your rates are not based on whether your prose is pretty or whether or not you know how to avoid ending a sentence in a preposition. Your value comes from results. Freelance copywriting is a results-driven industry.

There is a huge mismatch between the number of writing opportunities there are and the number of writers who can deliver results. There might be thousands upon thousands of freelance writers in the world, but only a small percentage can consistently deliver great work.

Once you understand how valuable you are, it’s time to set your rates.

In the business of freelance writing, you’re going to have to decide how much you’re going to charge. There are three common ways that freelancers bill clients. They charge per hour, per word, or per project.

Charging per hour is the worst thing that you can do as a freelancer. It undervalues your skill and punishes you for being efficient. You will never earn up to your full potential charging a client on an hourly basis.

Consider that even a brand-new law school graduate who has just passed the bar can bill between $150 and $300 an hour. Clients are used to seeing lawyers charge large amounts of money. How much can you charge as a freelance writer with limited experience?

No client is going to ever pay a new writer $150 to $300 an hour. That rate would cause most clients to have a stroke. Clients see that rate, and they do the math.

They start multiplying $150 or $300 by 40 hours a week and by 50 weeks a year. They get an astronomical figure of between $300,000 and $600,000. The clients have a hard time thinking that any writer is providing that level of value.

If you end up charging per hour, you have to find a rate that meets the expectations of your clients. This is how writers get stuck charging $10, $15, or $25 an hour if they’re lucky.

Some excellent writers may get away with charging $50 to $150 an hour to a client. But the smartest writers are never charging per hour.

Charging per word is better than charging per hour because your clients really don’t understand how long it takes you to generate those words. However, when you charge per word, you’re still limiting yourself.

If you charge ten cents a word, that means you’re charging $50 to write a 500-word blog post. That’s not a horrible rate. However, what does charging ten cents per word make clients think? They tend to remember the ten cents.

They associate you with being cheap. That’s not a path for building a successful business. That’s not how to demonstrate the value that you bring to the project.

Charging per project is better for clients and writers. Clients can see right away how you value your services. If you charge $100 for a short blog post, clients know that you are worth the cost if they believe they will be able to get $100 of business based on your blog post.

It’s a straightforward calculation for companies. If you get more efficient at what you do, you can make more money. I can write 1,000 words in an hour that are ready to publish.

That means if I charge $150 per short blog post, I can make $300 an hour. I would have the same internal billable rate as the lawyers we mentioned earlier. But the client will never know that that is what they’re paying me. Instead, they just see that they’re getting $150 or $300 worth of value out of the final product that they are receiving.

When you set your rates, the best way to earn a living in as short a time as possible is to use project-based billing. Tell clients what your fee is based on the expected deliverable. You need to understand what the final word count is going to be, and approximately how long it’s going to take you to complete that deliverable. But those are proprietary details.

The client only needs to know what you will deliver, how much you charge, and when you’re going to deliver the final product.

Project-based billing allows you to have higher rates for different services. You may charge more to write sales emails on a per-word or per-hour basis than you charge to write a blog post. Charging per word or per hour limits your pricing flexibility.

Understanding your value means learning how to set your rates for the maximum amount of money that the market will bear. There are clients available at every price point. Your prices shouldn’t be set in stone. You always have the ability to lower or raise your rates as needed.

The most competitive part of the freelance writing market is the bottom. You don’t want to compete with writers who are charging pennies per word. The more you charge, the less competition there is. At higher price points, clients aren’t choosing between writers based on their prices. Clients are selecting writers based on the value they deliver.

If you learn how to value your services properly now, it will help you make your first $10,000 much faster.

How Long Will It Take You to Make Your First $10K?

There is something magical about $10,000. Once a new business has made its first $10,000, it becomes easier to believe that the business will be successful. It no longer seems like a dream.

But, how long will it take you to make your first $10,000 as a freelance writer?

Some writers make $10,000 their first month in business. However, it takes most writers two or three months to make their first $10,000. The speed that you reach this milestone will depend on three factors:

1. How much time you have to invest in your business

2. What rates you are charging

3. How good you are at attracting and landing new clients

If you are working full time as a freelancer, it will be easier to quickly earn money. The more you charge, the fewer clients you will need to reach your financial goals. The better you are at getting clients to hire you, the faster your business will grow.

Having a timetable will help you stay motivated as you do the hard work of building a new business. However, you want your timetable to be reasonable. It needs to be based on your life situation.

To create an estimate of how long it will take you to earn your first $10,000, you will need to do some math. Don’t worry, none of the math is complicated, and you are allowed to use a calculator.

First, you need to decide how many hours a week you have to put into your business. Be realistic. If this is a side gig, don’t pretend you are going to put 40 hours in each week. This isn’t a competition. You are merely creating a timetable for yourself so that you can hold yourself accountable.

If you are a stay-at-home parent, you will also need to factor in how much time you will be spending on children and household work.

I started as a freelancer while I was also the full-time caretaker of our four young children. I did not have 40 hours a week to put into the business.

For demonstration purposes, let’s assume you have 20 hours each week you can devote to your freelance writing business. If you have more or less time, that’s fine. You can adjust your timetable as necessary.

Running a freelance writing business is about more than just writing. You will also need to spend time each week looking for work, communicating with prospects and clients, marketing your business, and taking care of administrative tasks.

You will need to find your balance. Most likely, you will only be doing client work for half of the time available.

In this example, you are spending ten hours a week doing client work. In your first couple of weeks, this number will be lower because you will still need to get some clients.

We are going to assume it takes you two weeks to land enough clients to have ten hours of work a week.

How much are you going to be making for each hour of client work? Even though you are not going to be charging per hour, you still need to know what your internal billable rate is.

Let’s assume it takes you one hour to write a 500-word blog post. At the end of an hour, you have a post that is ready for the client to publish. If you are a new writer and lack confidence in your skills, you might set your rate to only $25 per 500-word blog post.

I believe that even new writers should charge at least $50 for a blog post. But I also understand that most new writers are scared to set their rates too high. Because I want to make this timetable as realistic as possible, let’s see what happens if you price your services at the $25 per blog post rate.

Under these circumstances, you will only be making $250 a week, producing ten blog posts. At this rate, it will take you 40 weeks to earn your first $10,000. That might seem depressing.

But, don’t despair. Let’s see what happens if you charge more. If you charge $50 a post, and you only have ten hours a week for client work, it will only take you 20 weeks to make your first $10,000.

If you learn to write faster and can produce a blog post in thirty minutes, and you still charge $50 a post, you will be earning $1,0000 a week, only working for ten hours that week on client projects.

Once you become more efficient, you will be able to increase the amount of time you have to work each week. If you can spend 15 hours a week on client work, and you can make $100 an hour, you will be making $1,500 each week. This means it will only take six weeks to earn your first $10,000.

Writers who can devote at least 20 hours a week to working on their business, can earn their first $10,000 in about eight weeks. In the first week or two, you may not make anything. But, once you have built a little momentum and have a few clients, your income will climb quickly. You will want to aim for making between $1,200 and $1,500 a week.

Image by studiostoks and licensed through Deposit Photos.

The more you charge, the fewer hours you will need to work to meet your targets. Writers who start out charging $100 a blog post, and who have the skills to merit that rate, can make as much as $200 an hour. This means they can make $2,000 a week only doing ten hours of client work.

Make your own timetable for how long it will take you to make your first $10,000. Use this timetable to keep you motivated and accountable. If circumstances change in your life, go back and adjust your timetable.

Once you have a tome goal and understand your value, it’s time to start building the business.

The first thing you should do is create a website.

Creating Your Freelance Website

If you are going to create a profitable and sustainable freelance writing business, you need a website.

Being able to point potential clients to your website will help you earn higher fees and will help you make your first $10,000 faster than if you have to get all of your clients from content mills or freelancer websites.

When I started my freelance writing career, I could not afford the ten bucks a month for web hosting. I spent the first couple of months of my career on content mills and freelance websites, earning pitiful amounts of money.

When you have your own freelancer website, you can work to attract clients without worrying about having some other desperate writer underbid you.

You also have more control over your career. Once you get a potential client to your website, your only job is to close the deal.

Your website will liberate you from content mills. You can grow your business without worrying about someone else changing the rules on you. Having a business website is also a confidence booster.

There’s something about having a place of your own on the internet to make you feel more like a real business professional.

You don’t need to get fancy with a freelancer website. In the beginning, the simpler your website is, the better. I love WordPress because it’s relatively easy to use.

There are tons of resources and an unlimited amount of functionality. It is also incredibly well supported. There are regular security updates, and the WordPress software itself is free to download and use.

Web hosting is going to cost you somewhere between $10 and $15 a month, depending on who you choose to do your hosting and what package that you get. You will want to get a security certificate. This is an extra cost. And it may be the most significant investment you have to make because it could cost you up to $100.

However, without a security certificate, Google Chrome, and some other browsers, will display a warning next to your URL that the site is not secure. While this warning doesn’t matter if you are not processing payments on your site, it still worries people looking to hire you.

Many web hosting companies will give a free security certificate for at least a year when you sign up with them. Make sure and do your homework before choosing a web hosting company.

When creating your freelancer website, you can use free templates and free plugins. Once you are more profitable, you can upgrade to premium products if you want. However, I still use a free theme and free plugins on my WordPress site eight years into my career. If WordPress seems too technical for you, you can also use Squarespace, Weebly, or Wix to create a simple website for a small monthly investment.

If you cannot afford web hosting and a security certificate, don’t give up! It will take you a little longer to make your first $10,000, but you can still be successful. If you need to save up the money by like I did, and work at content mills and on some freelancer websites, go ahead and do it.

Make sure you keep your eye on the prize of getting your own website. It is tough to get that first $10,000 until you have created your website.

What should your website look like? Many freelancers make the mistake of making their first website too complicated. The bigger you make this project, the harder it will be for you to finish it. Right now, you want to create a minimum viable product. You want to do as little as possible to launch a website.

Your website doesn’t need to have hundreds of pages or even ten pages. I recommend that you just create three content pages and a contact page. Your content pages will be your homepage, about page, and portfolio page. You don’t even need a blog at this point.

The goal of your website is to allow you to have a place to host your samples so that you can contact potential clients and refer them to your website. Having a website makes you seem more professional and experienced. Clients will find it easier to trust and hire you when they can visit your website.

Choose a domain name that sounds professional. You can use your own name, or you can create a name for your business. I started out using my name as the domain name and later created a separate entity and bought a new domain name.

Don’t waste too much time on your domain name. You can always change it as your business grows.

Should you use a dot com domain name? There are tons of different domain extensions. Your clients are most likely going to find your website by clicking a hyperlink in your email. You don’t need to use a dot com domain name. You just need to choose a domain name that you like, that seems professional, and that will allow you to grow your business.

Image by studiostoks and licensed through Deposit Photos.

Creating Content for Your Website

Your homepage needs to explain what you do. Immediately after your site loads, potential clients need to understand that you are a freelance copywriter or a freelance content writer. If you have a specific niche, you should mention that in the copy on your homepage. You also need to make it easy for visitors to navigate to the about page, portfolio page, and contact page.

You don’t need to worry about SEO at this point because your business is new. Nobody is going to find you in organic search results for a few months anyway. Right now, your website is going to be a place you send prospects to after you have contacted them some other way. SEO is critical to your long-term success. But, your blog and on-page SEO can wait until you are profitable and have two or three clients.

The best way to succeed as a freelancer is to get a few quick wins. This will make it easier for you to be motivated to work on things like SEO and blog posts. Right now, you are building a minimum viable website.

The purpose of every single page on your website is to convince a potential client to hire you.

Many service professionals struggle with creating about pages. The key is to make sure that the about page is actually about your client, not you. Every time you mention your qualifications, it should be to show why that makes a difference to the client.

How to Create a Portfolio Even if You Don’t Have Any Experience

The most important page on your new website as you begin this journey towards $10,000, is your portfolio page. Your portfolio page will show samples of your work. Most clients are going to want to see proof that you know how to string sentences together before they hand over any money to you.

Portfolios are a major obstacle for many new freelancers because they don’t have any samples. There’s a lot of bad advice on what to do for a portfolio page. But, there is an easy way to get the samples you need to get your first handful of clients — and it doesn’t require you to work for free.

You are now a professional service provider. You are a professional writer, say that to yourself three times.

You are a professional writer; you are a professional writer; you are a professional writer.

That means you do not work for free. Do not work for free for friends or family to get samples for your website. This sets a bad precedent that you are willing to do free work. Free work is terrible for you and bad for your relationship with your friends and family. It prevents your friends and family from truly seeing you as a pro.

If you do not have any samples, spend a little time figuring out what type of clients you would like to work for. Find three or four specific companies that you like. Imagine what type of content you would write for those companies. Then, create some fictitious company names that would be in the industries that you want to work with. Write blogs, web copy, or whatever content you need samples of for those fictitious companies. You can post those to your website.

The clients don’t care that they’re fictitious companies. What they care about is the quality of your writing.

Once you have work samples from paying clients, you can take down the fictitious company samples and put up your paid client samples.

There are a lot of different ways to display work on your portfolio. My favorite way is to create a PDF of the product. PDFs are easy to read, even on mobile devices. You can also prevent them from being indexed by search engines, which may become important after posting samples that you wrote for other clients and businesses. You don’t want to be competing with your clients for SEO juice.

Your portfolio is how you will always show clients your samples. Do not send them attachments unless they have specifically asked for them. Email attachments are problematic because they are so likely to carry viruses. Some companies won’t even allow employees to open attachments. Instead, you should send a link to your portfolio page in an email.

Here’s the way I handle my portfolio page. I have a free plugin for WordPress called PDF Image Generator. It automatically creates a thumbnail from any PDFs that I upload. I take the word version of a blog post that I created, and I turn it into a PDF using Canva. I add a logo for whatever company I wrote it for, and I also put a live link from that sample to the actual blog on the client’s website.

If you’re creating your samples from a fictitious company, you don’t have to go to the effort of making a fake logo, and you’re not going to have any links, but make it as pleasing to the eye as possible. You could put your logo or other branding element on the page as well.

I also put my contact information in a sidebar on the PDF. My goal is to make the PDF look like it could be a professional marketing brochure that I could print and send.

I then upload the PDF to my website. I have a portfolio page that is organized by industry type and content type. The plugin automatically creates a thumbnail of the PDF. I place the PDF thumbnails under the right category on the portfolio page. I make sure and link the thumbnail to the PDF so that all the client needs to do is click on the thumbnail to see my sample. Each PDF opens in a new tab.

Setting up a portfolio page like this can take anywhere from 15 minutes to an hour, depending on how much work you have to do to make the PDFs look beautiful, and how much of that content you still need to write.

If this sounds overwhelming, you can take a simple approach. I have seen freelancers create screenshots of their samples and upload those images to a portfolio page.

Because your portfolio page is going to help you launch your career, I would spend more time on making it easy to use than any other page on your site.

One of the best practices for your businesses is to keep your portfolio updated. Take time once a month to take down old samples and replace them with newer, better samples. I am horrible at this. But it is a good way to make your website look professional. Also, search engines often reward sites that are regularly updating key pages.

Lots of new freelancers wonder about blogging. I love content marketing. I’m a passionate content marketer, and I have landed a lot of business through content marketing. But, until you have made your first $10,000, do not stress about your blog. The truth is, nobody is going to find you on a search engine when your website is new. Nobody is looking for you specifically, and your content is unlikely to have enough SEO juice to attract the kind of clients that you want right away.

Plus, the world of content marketing is changing. Simple 500-word blogs don’t do much for SEO or discoverability. You will want to work on in-depth blog posts and other types of content marketing once you have made some money.

Content marketing is a long-term strategy; your initial goal is to get some success as a freelancer. Once you have that first $10,000, you will have the confidence to invest money and time into long term strategies. But when your business is new, it’s easy to get discouraged. Spending time blogging every single day or even every single week and realizing that nobody is reading your blog can make you want to give up.

The truth is, even if you are a tremendous writer, it can take months or even years for a blogging strategy to pay off for freelance writers. I think blogging is something valuable to do for your long-term success. But your initial efforts need to be focused on making that first $10,000. Then you should start investing time into content marketing. But right now, skip the blog and do what you need to do to get some paying clients.

Who Will You Serve?

The easiest way to fail as a freelance writer is to decide that everyone in the world is your potential client. You are not a good match for every single business in the world.

However, as a beginner, you probably don’t know what niche will be most the most profitable for you. You don’t have to niche down right away to make a good living as a freelancer. Some freelancers take two or three years to find their niche. Some freelancers never niche down.

I’m a generalist that writes in half a dozen to a dozen different industries. For me, the idea of a niche is more of a marketing tactic. But I do have a very well-defined idea of who my clients are. That’s what you need to figure out. Who will you serve?

Do you want to write for small businesses, medium businesses, or large businesses? Do you have an idea of what types of industries that you want to write about? Do you want to target local businesses, or do you want to be location independent and only contact clients online?

Every choice you make has pros and cons, and every freelancer needs to make their own decisions based on what works best for them. I started out targeting local clients very briefly and realized I didn’t like it. Local clients always wanted face-to-face meetings. I changed to my marketing so that my business became location independent.

I have written for Fortune 500 companies before, but I prefer writing for well-funded small businesses. It takes longer to get paid by big businesses, and many small businesses are easier to work with than large companies.

Often huge corporations require several rounds of revisions, and your work has to be approved by several different people, or even committees. Some freelancers love that prestige of writing for Fortune 500 companies, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

I find that small business clients are easier to land when you’re just getting started. But you do have to be protective of your rates because many small businesses will not be able to afford you. Keep in mind there are thousands of small businesses that gross millions of dollars a year, and they can pay you professional rates.

Image by studiostoks and licensed through Deposit Photos.

Some niches are going to be more profitable than others. Travel writing is extremely competitive, and the rates are much lower than writing for software as a service or FinTech companies. Again, there is no right or wrong choice. However, refusing to make a choice is a mistake. You cannot afford to market to everyone. If you try and appeal to everyone, you will appeal to no one.

You need to choose what works best for you. Most decisions about your niche and what types of clients you make can be changed later. You are not swearing a sacred oath to only work in one niche or with one type of client. What matters right now is that you make some decisions about who you will serve so that you can begin marketing yourself.

If you find you’re not able to get clients in your target market, you can always go back and change your ideal client profile. That’s the beauty of working for yourself. But you can’t succeed targeting everyone. The narrower your scope, the easier it will be to market and manage your first clients.

When I began freelance writing, I had just retired from a nine-year career as an attorney. I targeted lawyers to do content marketing for them because I understood that industry. It did not require a lot of research for me to do any of the writing, and I had a natural advantage over other writers.

Many attorneys preferred hiring somebody with a law degree over a writer who didn’t have that same credential.

My clients were generally small and medium-sized businesses. I eventually moved away from writing for lawyers and started writing for B2B technology companies because the work was more interesting, it paid better, and the clients were more fun to work with.

You want to create some type of profile for who you’re going to be serving. Again, if you strike out, there’s nothing that prevents you from going back and making a change. But when you sit down to start doing your marketing, you will feel much calmer, knowing who you are trying to reach.

Payment Issues

You need to figure out how you’re going to get paid. You need to have three things figured out about the mechanics of how a client is going to pay you:

1. How much will you charge upfront?

2. When do you expect payment?

3. How is the client going to send your money to you?

The easiest way to get paid is to have a PayPal account. You want a PayPal business account because there are more features available to you. It’s a simple process to convert a regular PayPal account into a business account. You only have to click a few links on your account page and fill out a short form to explain what your business does. There’s not a fee for a PayPal business account.

You can connect your PayPal account to your regular checking account so that you can transfer money back and forth as needed. You can also get a PayPal business debit card, which can be invaluable for keeping your business and personal expenses separate.

Some clients will prefer to pay you via an ACH transfer, also known as direct deposit. This is nice because you get to avoid PayPal fees. I’ve run into a few clients who want to pay me by check. I refuse to work with these clients because it takes way too long to get paid, and I’m far too impatient for that.

Stripe is another payment processor that is becoming increasingly popular.

If you’re overwhelmed by the options, start with PayPal. Most of the time, I also use PayPal to send invoices to my client. Clients can click a link and pay me in less than a minute.

Once you have the mechanics figured out of how a client is going to pay you, you need to figure out what your pay policy is going to be.

I strongly recommend you get paid upfront. My policy is that for anything under $1,000, I get paid 100% upfront. Anything over $1,000, and I need a 50% deposit, and the rest needs to be paid upon completion of the work. Jobs that are for $10,000 or more require a more complex payment structure. I work out these details as required, but I always get a significant payment before commencing the work. Occasionally, I’m willing to do the work and get paid after I submitted the work to the client if I have worked with that client for a long time, and they have always paid on time.

If you get paid upfront, you will never be ripped off. Clients who are hesitant to pay you upfront may not be good clients for you. They may be inexperienced. Many vendors are going to require payment upfront. Clients who don’t want to pay anything upfront may not actually plan to pay you in the first place.

Clients have all the protections in the world, especially if they are paying you via PayPal. If for some reason, you fail to deliver the work, it is easy for them to get their money back from PayPal. If you do the work and don’t get paid, it’s almost impossible for you to get your money.

You also need to decide when you plan on sending out your invoices for clients you work with regularly. I send new clients invoices immediately because I won’t start working on the project until the invoice is paid. For recurring work, I send my invoices out on the 30th of every month, or the last business day, whichever comes first.

If you are willing to pay for the feature, PayPal allows you to set up recurring invoices, where you don’t have to manually send out an invoice every month, the client is charged automatically. I don’t do a high enough volume for that to be worth my time or expense. It works best for me to batch my regular invoices and send them all out the same time each month.

But again, this is your business, and you need to decide what makes the most sense.

You will never reach your first $10,000 if you don’t have a way to get paid, and you don’t insist on getting paid on time.

Image by studiostoks and licensed through Deposit Photos.

Set Your Policies

Every business has a set of standard operating procedures or policies (SOPs). You are running a business now. You need to develop the standard operating procedures to guide your operations. These policies will help you make the right decisions for your business, even when you are under pressure.

The purpose of having policies for your business is to save you from having to make the same decision hundreds of times and to make sure you are consistently providing your best work for your clients.

Some areas you need to set policies for right away include:

Rush work or emergency orders

Revisions

Refunds

Phone calls

Creating a policy ahead of time means that you will make a better decision when faced with a question from a potential client. Instead of having to decide on the spot how you want to handle something, you can clearly communicate your policy.

Rush Work

The beautiful thing about being a freelancer is you get to set your own deadlines with the client. I hate having work hanging over my head. I tend to turn things over relatively quickly. For small projects, my turnaround time is seven days. For longer projects like white papers or skyscraper posts, my turnaround time is between 14 and 30 days.

If a client wants something faster than my standard turnaround time, then I consider that rush work. I charge a 100% premium for delivering something faster than normal.

You don’t have to charge as extreme of a premium for rush work as I do, but you need to charge some additional fee for rush work. It helps keep you sane, it can provide you a little extra profit, and it sets boundaries with clients.

I hate rush work. Most of the time, I don’t even accept rush projects. The reason I charge the 100% premium when I do accept rush work is it forces the client to reconsider their deadlines. It also helps compensate me for the trouble of upsetting my schedule to move that client’s project to the front of my queue.

Revisions

I hate revisions. They make me want to gouge my eyes out. Once I finish a project, I want to be done with it forever. Very few clients ask me about my revision policy. That probably has to do with the way that I find clients and the types of clients I tend to target.

I don’t offer free revisions unless I have made a mistake. If a client asks me to write a blog post about microlending in Malaysia, but for some reason, I wrote a post about microlending in Asia, I will fix the mistake as quickly as possible. For blog posts, I will fix the error within 24 hours. This rarely happens because I am careful — but I’m not perfect.

When the client hires me to write a post about microlending in Malaysia and then tries to change the scope of the project or the topic I am writing about once I have started writing, I let the client know they are going to have to pay me for the revisions.

At this point in my career, this rarely happens. But, it used to happen frequently. By charging for revisions, you protect your time. You may lose a few clients over this type of policy — and that is a blessing. You don’t want clients who are so disorganized that they change their minds about the work they are hiring you for.

If a client needs minor tweaks, and they request the changes in a professional manner, I always make the changes quickly and without any additional charge.

Anytime a client is rude to me, I will not do any additional work on that project. I refuse to be treated with rudeness.

Refunds

What is your refund policy? My general principle is that I deserve to be paid for my work. If I delivered what I promised, I am not going to offer a refund. However, there is also something called the gambler’s fallacy. This is the idea that you keep chasing something because you have already invested so much into it.

If a project starts to go sideways, I would rather cut my losses and issue a refund than continue to work on a project where I have negative feelings towards my clients. In the short-term, this means losing some money even though I have done some work. However, in the long-term, it gives me more time to find clients that are a better fit, and it makes me happy to fire clients I don’t like.

Phone Calls

Phone calls are disruptive to your day because they interrupt you. A phone call takes you out of your writing workflow. It can take twenty minutes or more to get back into the right state of mind after an interruption.

I am an introvert — I hate talking on the phone. I have a draconian phone call policy. I do not answer my phone when it rings unless a client has a scheduled call.

I will not take client phone calls that are not scheduled. If a client or potential client calls me, the call goes to my voicemail. I return all my calls within one business day. But I am in control of when I will call them back. Often, instead of playing phone tag, I send an email and set an appointment for a call.

I rarely have to talk on the phone. I handle 99% of my client communications through email. I do not like working with clients that need a lot of hand-holding or want to talk to me about each detail of the project. Most phone calls are a colossal waste of time. I’d much rather have the client put their thoughts into a few sentences in an email then spend even five minutes on the phone.

Some people enjoy talking with clients. If that is you, wonderful! But be careful. You typically aren’t getting paid for the time you spend on a call. The more time you spend talking, the less time you have to make money through your writing.

Another issue with phone calls is that they often end up with you providing free consulting services. Lots of clients are going to try and get free consulting work out of you. Some will do it quite consciously, but the vast majority are just innocently asking questions. You need to decide what your policy is about the kind of questions you answer for free.

At the beginning of a relationship with a client, when they’re still trying to decide if I am a good fit, I am happy to spend as much as an hour on the phone discussing their project and making marketing recommendations. I know a lot more than many small business owners do about marketing, and I’m happy to provide prospects some extra value. I don’t charge for that because we are still outlining the project, and I also want to make sure they are poised to use my work in the most effective way possible.

But, after we have an agreement about the services I am providing, I am not willing to provide free consulting services. If the client asks, I will explain that they need marketing consulting services and send them a quote. I either make some extra money, or the client turns somewhere else to get the help they need. If you handle this situation professionally, you will not damage your relationship with the client.

Having policies for these common client issues will save you an immense amount of time and stress. It will also help you reach your financial goals faster because you can spend more time doing the work you’re paid for, and less time dealing with client issues.

Getting Paying Clients

Image by studiostoks and licensed through Deposit Photos.

Now that you’ve done all your preparatory work, you are ready to hit the ground running and start making money. The next thing you need to make your first $10,000 is a few paying clients.

It would be nice if all you had to do to get new clients was to create a website. However, that isn’t how it works. The internet is a crowded place. If you want to be successful, you have to let potential clients know about your services. Simply launching a website is not enough to attract paying clients. You have to hustle to get your first set of clients.

The three best ways to get paying client as a new freelancer are:

1. Sending cold emails

2. Freelancer job boards

3. Freelancer marketplaces

You may be tempted to dabble with content mills. These are websites where you get paid pennies per word for assignments that the platform sends you. Content mills are awful places to work. The entire platform is set up to extract as much value from you as cheaply as possible. You may never earn your first $10,000 if you rely on content mills.

Instead, you need to focus on maximizing your value. The best return on your time investment when it comes to finding new freelance writing clients is sending out cold emails.

Cold email is a pure numbers game. The more cold emails you send out, the more clients you will land. If you have never sent a cold email before, plan on only getting a 1% conversion rate. This means that only one out of every 100 cold emails is going to land you a client. That first client is probably only going to pay for one blog post.

However, once you get the hang of writing and sending cold emails, you will never have a prolonged period without paying clients. The keys to sending an effective cold email are:

· Identifying the right target market. · Make sure that you’re sending your cold email from a proper email address. Do not use Gmail or hotmail.com address. You will end up getting banned. · Have a catchy subject line and a very brief message. Your message should only be three or four sentences. · Explain what you do, how you can help them, and have a link to your portfolio and invite them to click that link.

You will also need a way to find potential clients to email. You can find them through LinkedIn, a Google search, or by paying for a list of prospects.

It can be daunting to sit down and write 100 cold emails, and it can be tempting to just cut and paste the same content into each message. You will get better results if you personalize each message. The basic content can be the same, but you should make each company feel like you are only messaging them.

You don’t have to send out 100 emails a day. But, if you don’t have any clients, you should be spending most of your available time every day looking to build your client base. Start out sending five cold emails a day. Once you have mastered that, start sending 10 emails a day. Try and work up to sending 20 cold emails a day so that you’re sending out 100 a week until you build up your client base.

Once you have client work to do, you can scale back on the number of messages you are sending out, but you should still send a few each week to avoid a future drought.

Another way to find work quickly is through job boards. The best freelance writer job boards are:

The rates that you will make on jobs you find on freelance job boards are often less than what you can charge when you directly contact a client through an email. When you are just getting started, you need a few quick wins. Landing a few clients from a job board will give you confidence, more portfolio samples, and money in your pocket.

Each listing will have very specific instructions for applying for the gig. If you do not follow the instructions, your application is going to be deleted. Keep in mind that most of the job boards are updated each morning. If you are interested in getting a job through a job board, you need to be applying every morning.

While getting paying work through a job board is also a numbers game, you only want to apply for the jobs that you feel you are a good fit for. Most of the job applications are like a cold email. Keep your responses brief, but make sure you include everything that the poster has requested.

I have had clients that I landed from job boards that I kept for years. Some of them paid extremely well. I have also had a lot of clients where I did one job and knew that I would never want to work for them again.

When it comes to applying for work on job boards, I recommend only using job boards where a client has to pay to place their listing. These tend to be less scammy than places where anyone can post anything for free.

Freelancer marketplaces can be another great source of paying clients when you are a new freelancer, still chasing your first $10,000.

There are hundreds of different freelance marketplaces. I have tried a lot of them. I disliked working on UpWork and other sites where you bid against other freelancers for gigs. For me, these sites felt like a race to the bottom. Bidding for jobs on marketplaces drives down rates, and a lot of the best clients are not on those types of platforms. However, some freelancers have had great success on these kinds of platforms. If you don’t have any clients, you need to be doing everything you can to find clients. That might mean creating profiles on one or two freelancer marketplaces.

My favorite freelancer marketplace is Fiverr. I’ve been on Fiverr for six years. I’m a Fiverr Pro, and a top-rated seller. Today, the platform accounts for a much smaller portion of my income. But, in years past I have made good money from the clients that found me on Fiverr.

Fiverr is different than other marketplaces because you’re setting your own prices and not bidding for job listings. It’s more productized. Clients either buy your services or move onto a different seller. You’re not bidding against other freelancers.

It does take some time to make decent money on Fiverr. It is incredibly competitive. The platform also takes a 20% commission on the fess you earn.

Many sellers are making excellent money every month on the platform. Fiverr has even produced at least one million-dollar writer.

It is going to be difficult to make $10,000 through exclusively freelancing marketplaces. But, these platforms can be a part of your strategy. After you have more experience and connections, you can move away from the platforms.

Now that you are a professional writer, it is up to you to go out and find clients. Over time you can work on strategies to get clients to come to you. But, right now, nobody has ever heard of you. You have to do the work of finding clients. Once you start earning money as a professional writer, you will be hooked, and landing clients will get easier.

Image by studiostoks and licensed through Deposit Photos.

Structuring Your Day

The best part about being a freelancer is that you are in charge of your schedule. You start your day when you’re damn well ready. The hardest part about being a freelancer is that you are in charge of your schedule. It’s easy to procrastinate. There is no boss to please, and there’s nobody looking over your shoulder.

When you don’t have any client work to do, it’s easy to get lost on social media, binge-watching something on Netflix, or playing a video game instead of building your business.

If you’re going to be successful, you need to impose some structure on your day. That doesn’t mean you have to get up at five o’clock in the morning. It doesn’t mean that you have to get all your work done at one time. But you need some type of rhythm so that your mind and body know that when it’s time for you to get to work

As a freelancer trying to make your first $10,000, there will be four primary parts of your day:

1. Prospecting

2. Marketing

3. Client Work

4. Administrative Tasks

Because this is your life and your business, you need to decide in what order you will tackle these tasks. Keep in mind that there is a mental cost to switching tasks. That means that when you go from working on one type of project to something completely different, it takes your mind a while to fully focus on the new kind of work.

The most efficient way to get through your day is to batch similar tasks. This also keeps you from having to open different software or websites, you’ll have everything that you need to do a specific set of tasks at your disposal.

I like to put in breaks to separate the different parts of my workday. It helps to reset my mind and gets me focused on what I need to be working on.

During these breaks, I usually get up and walk around. This helps me from getting bored, and it also helps to prevent me from dying early. When possible, I will go for one or two walks a day, walking two to three miles each time. This exercise also gives me time to brainstorm ideas for my business.

What should you be doing during each part of your day? Here are a few examples.

Prospecting

Prospecting is the work of staying in contact with potential clients. These are people that you have already had at least some contact with. Prospecting includes following up with people you have sent emails to and responding to people that emailed you back. It also includes following up on applications that you sent through a job board.

You are trying to convert those prospects into paying clients. Your very first day as a professional freelance writer, you may not have to do any prospecting because you may not have created any prospects yet.

But by your second week, you should have made some marketing efforts that you will need to follow up on. I do not like to bother people. I also hate when people are aggressive when following up with me. My rule of thumb is I give potential clients a week to respond to me from a cold email before I follow up. With job board applications, I wait three days before sending a message.

If you do not follow up with potential clients, you will leave a lot of money on the table. It’s easy to feel like you were rejected when you don’t hear back from someone who at one point expressed interest in you, or when you send a cold email out and don’t hear anything back. But the truth is, people are busy. Email is also complicated. There’s a decent chance your email ended up in a spam folder. I have found throughout my career that prospects generally appreciate it when I politely follow up.

Once I have been rejected, or someone has asked me not to contact them again, I put them on my do not contact list and leave them alone. I then focus my efforts on people who do want to work with me.

Marketing

Marketing is the part of your day where you try and make new contacts. Prospecting should be a higher priority in your schedule than marketing because those people are closer to paying you money. That doesn’t mean you have to do prospecting before marketing in your day. But when you only have a finite amount of time, you need to spend most of your time on activities that will bring you money the fastest.

However, you cannot ignore marketing. If you aren’t doing any marketing, you will soon run out of prospects to follow up with. You have a lot of options when it comes to marketing your services.

In the beginning, you need quick wins. You need to get to $10,000 as fast as possible. This means you should focus your efforts on activities like applying to job boards and sending out cold emails.

Later on, you will want to add marketing tasks that will benefit you over the long-term. This includes things like content marketing and email marketing.

You want to spend some time marketing every day. If you market your services every day, you will avoid dry spells. You will have a constant flow of prospects. Spend at least 15 minutes a day doing marketing tasks. At first, all of that time will be spent sending out cold emails or completing job applications on job boards. As your business matures, you will want to add content marketing tasks to your daily routine.

Client Work

You can’t get paid unless you do the work for the clients. I like to batch my client work. I try to spend my mornings focused on client work. This helps me control my anxiety about deadlines. It also allows me to take a long lunch break before I tackle prospecting, marketing, and administrative tasks.

When my kids are at home and I am balancing distance learning, I often can’t get started on client work until after lunch. When that happens, I try to work on administrative tasks in between troubleshooting my children’s technology issues and helping them with schoolwork.

I find that when I let the client work pile up, it stresses me out, and I feel overwhelmed. The quality of my work tends to suffer. While I am capable of spending eight hours a day just doing client work, I am happier when I only have to do two to three hours of client work in a day. Doing a few hours of client work a day also makes it easy for me to meet deadlines.

Administrative Tasks

You are running a business now. That means you need to take care of several administrative tasks. These tasks may include paying bills, sending invoices, finding a bookkeeper, or tweaking your website.

When it comes to the administrative part of my day, I like to combine my personal and business tasks. I will pay all my bills at the same time. If I have to run errands, I do them during my admin time.

There are a million admin tasks that need to be done in your business and your home. Many of them are not that important. But if you keep neglecting them, over time, it can erode your ability to build a steady freelance writing business.

Since you are at the beginning of your journey, and you’re focused on making your first $10,000, give yourself the gift of a good foundation and spend 15 minutes every day doing administrative tasks. This keeps things from piling up and will help you feel better about the growth of your business.

Over the past eight years, I’ve also been the primary caretaker of our four children. I’m a work from home dad, and this fact has influenced my schedule. If you don’t have any children or you have a spouse that is the primary caretaker of your children, then you may have a completely different plan for your day.

There is no magic routine that will make you a rich freelancer. You can structure your day in a way that makes sense for you. You can change your routine any time you want. What is important though, is that you do have some structure for your day. You should have regular business hours because you are a regular business. You will be more productive, and you will also make more money if you are committed to a certain number of work hours a day.

Your business hours don’t have to be traditional business hours. However, if you are going to have client contact, you need to have some overlap between your schedule and what everyone else considers normal business hours.

I make a full-time income working on client-specific work for only two to three hours every day. I rarely work more than four hours total on my business, five days a week. I do not do any client work on weekends.

If you set your rates high enough and learn to do the work quickly enough, you can earn a full-time income with only part-time hours. Freelance writing can provide you with much more freedom than almost any other kind of job.

Image by studiostoks and licensed through Deposit Photos.

Troubleshooting Marketing Issues

What happens if you do everything you can, and you can’t get any clients? Don’t panic. It happens. I’ve been there. Every freelancer has been there.

You need to remember two things. One, you have to be patient. It takes time to get a new business off the ground. You will not be an overnight success. Two, if you keep doing the same things, you will keep getting the same results.

If you have been trying for two weeks to land a client, and you have not succeeded, you need to evaluate where the problem is.

Are you getting responses to your cold emails, but not getting any to hire you? Are you not getting any response to your cold emails or job board applications? Once you identify the place where things are breaking down, you need to see what you can change.

If you are not getting any response to job board applications or cold emails, you need to look at two things.

One, are you sending out enough inquiries? Cold email often has a low conversion rate of 1%. If you have only sent out ten cold emails, the problem is likely you need to send out a lot more emails. The same is true for job applications. There are often hundreds of applicants for each job posting. If you are only applying for one a day, your odds aren’t very good.

If you are doing enough work, but you still are not getting any response, you need to doublecheck your emails and applications for issues like spelling mistakes, typos, or awkward sentences. All of these can turn off potential clients. You should examine your cold email for possible spam filter triggers. See if your offer is clear. Ask yourself if your email is brief enough. You may want to ask a friend to look over your cold email template or job application template for issues.

If you are getting responses but are failing to close the deal, you need to adjust how you respond to people. Why are you not getting hired? One simple way to diagnose the problem is to ask prospects why they decided to go with a different freelancer. Be nice, and explain that you want to improve. Do not attack them for not hiring you. You may find out your prices are not right or that your samples are not the right fit.

One common issue new freelancers have is that they lack the confidence they need to land a gig. You may just need more practice talking with prospects.

Image by vectorlab and licensed through Deposit Photos.

While not getting client work is frustrating, it is part of the process of building a writing career. You have to get used to rejection. You also have to learn how to iterate and try again. If you are willing to learn from your mistakes and you keep prospecting, you will land work.

Rinse, Repeat, and Improve

Once you start landing clients, it’s going to become addictive. You’re going to be so excited that you will catch yourself looking at your bank account in shock that you made all that money by writing online.

As you start to meet your income goals, celebrate your small successes. Once you reach your $10,000 goal, throw yourself a bigger celebration. Have an expensive dinner, or treat yourself to something expensive. You deserve it. You have proven that your business is viable. The first $10,000 is much harder to earn than the next $10,000.

Image by studiostoks and licensed through Deposit Photos.

After you treat yourself, it’s time to get back to work. You have to keep doing all the things that have made you successful so far. Market yourself every week, with a combination of short-term and long-term tactics.

You need to set your next goal. Maybe your new goal is to make $10,000 from your website, and not from freelancer websites.

Another step you need to take is to raise your rates. You now have a decent portfolio. You have also improved as a writer. Quote a higher rate to all of your new prospects. The biggest mistake I made in the early part of my career was I kept my rates low for far too long. There are eager clients at every pay rate imaginable. As you develop better skills, you deserve to be paid more.

Some freelancers are scared to raise their rates because they think they will lose clients. The truth is, you will lose clients. But that’s okay because then it makes room for you to find more clients who are ready to pay you what you deserve.

You are not going to have the same clients for your entire career. As your business matures, your business is going to outgrow some clients. Some clients will accept your rate increases, and some will not. But you owe it to yourself to regularly raise your rates.

The other thing that you need to do to continue to flourish as a freelance writer is to experiment. When working on earning your first $10,000, you will probably mostly write blog posts. There is a ton of blog post work out there, and it is simple.

But as you start earning more, and as you learn more about marketing and copywriting, you should try writing other kinds of projects. Branch out and write emails, explainer video scripts, white papers, or anything else that interests you. You may find that there are different types of content that you enjoy writing more than blog posts. You may find work that is more profitable for you.

My most profitable projects are emails and explainer video scripts. They tend to be shorter than a lot of the other web copy projects that I take on, but I can charge more for them because they have a higher perceived value. For me, they are also fun to write.

This is your business. It doesn’t have to follow anybody else’s rules. You will succeed much faster, and you will avoid burn out if you enjoy the work. So, experiment. Find the type of work and the type of client that makes you happy. If you try something new and you hate it, you know that you should turn down that type of project in the future. There’s no downside to experimenting as a freelance writer.

You’ve got this.

You now know everything you need to know to make your first $10,000.

Go ahead and get to it!