Writing Career: One-Year Fast Track to Success

The idea of planning your writing career can be intimidating. How do you know what you want to spend your life writing? Instead of planning your whole career, ask yourself: Where do I want to be a year from today?

Over the past 30 years of writing, I’ve become a huge fan of planning. I plan consistently, and have yearly, monthly and daily writing plans. I never follow any plan precisely as written. I may ditch my plan for the day if I decide that something else needs attention.

However I can see from my own career that a lack of planning leads to a lack of action, and ACTION is what counts.

You may feel that you don’t know enough about available writing opportunities to plan, or that you’d rather be spontaneous, and wait to see what comes along. In either case, your lack of planning leads to inaction… which leads to disappointment and frustration.

Any plan (no matter how minimal) is better than no plan at all. Even if you ditch a current plan because you decide to focus on a particular opportunity, your plans inspire action, which ultimately leads to success.

Start planning today. Here’s how to set yourself up on a one-year fast track to writing success.

1. Decide you want to write

What do you want to write? Web writing is hot, but so is creating information products (for yourself or others), and blogging is huge too.

You may choose more than one opportunity, but aim to specialize in the subjects you cover, so that you establish yourself as an expert and command higher rates.

2. Decide on your subject area, or areas

By setting yourself up as a specialist in one subject, whether it is health-care, dogs or something else, you can ask for, and get higher rates.

You can also eliminate the hassle involved in writing about a subject you know nothing about (in which case, you may have to do a lot of research for a low-paying assignment).

3. Decide whether there’s a particular client you want

Some people dream of writing for a Fortune 500 company — do you? What do you think you would have to do to get them to consider your services? (If you lack experience, you may want to devote this year toward building up your portfolio so you will be confident in approaching your dream client.)

4. Work out how much time you’ll devote to your writing each day

If you have a full-time job, how much time can you devote to your career? Do you eventually want to become a full-time writer?

5. Decide the income you’d like to make in 12 months

Set an annual earnings goal for you to make a year from now and then break it down into monthly, weekly and perhaps even daily goals. If you are switching from a full-time job to your writing career, perhaps you want to exceed your current income. This may feel scary, but having goal will give you a challenge to shoot for and focus your efforts.

6. Now you’ve settled the basics, decide how you’ll meet your goals

Now that you’ve focused on the kinds of writing you want to do, how much time you can devote to your writing career and how much you want to make from it, it’s time to figure out how to meet those goals. Do you have clients already? How can you gain new ones?

7. Set milestones for your writing career and then break them down into doable steps

For example, if you’ve made a goal of earning $100,000 within 12 months by writing ebooks and blogs on real estate, your monthly goal should be to earn at least $8,333 per month or $2,083 per week at the end of 12 months.

Think about any assets you have which you can leverage (contacts? experience?), and then create stepping-stone goals which will help you to achieve that figure.

Once you have your goals, you’ll focus. Remember to create monthly, weekly and daily plans by setting goals and action steps. You’ll soon have your writing career on the fast track to success.

Write more – become a pro writer

Yes, you can write more and become an expert writer – even if you’re a world-class procrastinator.

Did you know that when you write more, your writing improves? Many of my writing students experience this. They find that when they write more, writing is easier for them – they’re not dominated by their inner editor.

My new writing class, “Write More And Make More Money From Your Writing: Develop A Fast, Fun Productive Writing Process” is based on lessons I developed for my private coaching students to help them to write more, improve their writing, and make more money writing.

If you’re struggling with your writing, the class will help. The techniques you’ll learn in class with help you write fiction, nonfiction, and copy for business.

Discover how you can write more, improve your writing, and sell more of your writing to higher-paying markets.

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Tagged as: freelance writing, Make money writing, planning, writing, writing career