Never Rely on One Source of Income as a Freelance Writer

Here is a personal rule of mine that I had to learn the hard way:

If you are a freelance writer, don’t ever rely on one source of income.

 

That is a mistake I realized I was making after I got back into freelance writing. Of course, that one sources of income ended, and it taught me the importance of having multiple sources of income. Thankfully, it wasn’t too late for me to pull myself up by my bootstraps and find other ways of earning that income as a freelance writer, but it is definitely one lesson I will never forget.

 

If you are a freelance writer, this can be an easy thing to avoid. Unless you are working with a client who demands exclusivity or first review of all of your work (which is another bad idea!), then you have the option of pitching multiple clients for work – magazines, E-zines and websites.

 

I was reminded of this rule recently, when my original source of freelance writing income experienced problems with its website.

 

When I made the decision to go back to working as a freelance writer, I had one problem: I couldn’t remember how to write a query letter! I read several resources about how to write a query letter, but none of them helped jog my memory.

 

Thankfully, a friend of mine was working for a content creation platform, and suggested I join. I applied and was accepted. In that position, I had to write pitches for articles. A tutorial was provided and I followed it to the letter.

 

After a while of writing those pitches, I finally remembered how to write query letters again. Yay! It was I the task of writing those pitches that helped it all come back to me.

 

And while I had a lot of work going on there, I knew it would not last forever. (It didn’t.) So, I got busy doing regular freelance writing again – that is, querying markets and pitching ideas for articles. It helped that I signed up with a newsletter that listed markets looking for writers, as well as checking for calls for pitches on Twitter.

 

And here I am, many months later, still going at it. Even after the work at the content marketing platform dried out, I wasn’t worried, because I had multiple markets to pitch to as well as a small pool of clients to run ideas by.

 

That site I got started at recently experienced a crash, with members unable to log in. I felt bad for all the writers who were a part of that site currently working on projects for their clients, and only hoped that at least they had other sources of income so they can get their bills paid.

 

But that debacle reminded me of me, when I was first starting out there. That was my one and only source of income as a writer. I’m so glad I reminded myself of the importance of having other sources of income before the work ran out, and this site outage only goes to show just how important it is to avoid relying on just that one source.

 

When you are a freelance writer relying on your income to help you buy food, medication, pay bills, etc., then you really can’t have just one client or one source of income. Part of freelancing is the “free” part: You are free to work with other clients and pitch work to other markets. As you should do. If you rely on only one client or one market for your income, and especially with how iffy technology can be, then you are only setting yourself up for trouble if that client or market is unreachable or the website crashes for days. It’s just bad form, so try to have as many clients and different venues of income at the ready as possible. Have telephone numbers and email addresses handy in case you can’t reach clients through a website.

 

Technology is great and all, and there are many websites out there which can help writers to earn a decent monthly income. Just make sure you have a backup plan for keeping that income coming in if that technology isn’t working correctly or websites are down.