Your Writing Career: How to Cash in Month After Month (Editorial)

Web writing can be an amazing career. Unfortunately, many Web writers aren’t as productive as they could be, and they certainly don’t make the income they should be making. They spend far too much time hunting for new writing jobs, and too little time making the most of the clients they already have.

Want to learn how you can cash in, month after month, with a stable, steady writing income? Anyone can achieve this, you just need to think about what you’re doing.

Commonly, your normal process looks like this:

1. Hunt for new writing jobs

2. Land a new client

3. Complete the project for the client

4. Repeat 1, 2, and 3…

Every writer starts out with the above process.

If you stick with it past total-beginner status however, you’ll remain prone to feast or famine syndrome. You’ll either have too many projects, or too few. It’s a nerve-wracking way to live, because you’re never sure of how much income you have coming in from month to month. Will you have enough to pay your mortgage, or not?

There’s a better way. You need regular clients, sending you gigs, and money, each month, like clockwork.

So how do you achieve this?

There are many ways, all of them based on your willingness to engage with your clients, and provide great service to them. The more you engage, the more repeat projects you’ll receive from clients you’ve worked with in the past. Ideally, within a few months, 80 per cent of your new projects will come from current and former clients, with just 20 per cent from new clients. (Your new clients will be referred to you by your current clients.)

If you can achieve this — and it’s simpler than you imagine — you can eliminate hunting for writing jobs completely. This is a huge time and energy saver.

Use memberships to build a solid income: Create a membership offering for your writing services

The best way to engage with your clients so that they send you new projects is to set up a membership offering. (I’ve just completed a new membership guide to help you — the Web makes it simple to set up membership offerings.)

Let’s look at how membership offerings could work, if you want to sell your writing services to current and former clients. There’s no “right” way. Memberships are completely customizable: they work the way you set them up to work, depending on the services you’re providing, or new services you want to provide in the future.

Membership offering examples

Writer A writes Web articles. She gets her clients from the outsourcing sites, and is reasonably busy, but isn’t making as much income as she’d like. She enjoys what she does, but finds it difficult to win projects: other writers underbid her.

She decides to set up a membership offering. Member clients pay $100 a month, and receive up to five new articles a month, on topics which Writer A covers. This is basically a retainer.

Writer A is thrilled with the number of members she signs up for her $100 automatically recurring memberships. Most of the members order additional articles each month. She realizes that the memberships are very appealing to her clients, because they save clients time too — the clients are reminded each month that they need articles for their sites, and ordering what they want is simple: they’re working with a writer who knows them, and their business.

Writer B is a professional blogger. He hunts for blog jobs, but he realizes that this is a waste of time. It’s hard for him to find jobs which match his abilities. He’s tired of clients who nickel and dime him.

He thinks about how a membership offering could work for the blogging services he provides. He decides to stage his offering as blog creation/ revamp, with a recurring fee of $500 a month, over six months. This is appealing to companies which want to set up a blog, as well as to companies which already have a blog, and want to get more content and traffic.

Write B rapidly finds clients for his membership offering, which he promotes on his own blog. He realizes that he shouldn’t be surprised that he’s getting so many members. His clients like handing their blogging off to a pro — they have businesses to run, and don’t understand blogging. It’s a relief to them to be able to turn over their blogs to him.

The ways in which you can structure membership offerings are unlimited. You can make them work for any writing services you provide, as well as for information products you sell. Best of all, you’ll find that your clients appreciate these offerings, and you’ll have a stable income you can count on.