Freelance Writing Success Tips

Want to be a freelance writer? Good! But before you do, be sure to cover some of the bases. For starters, here’s a few of them:
First: Consider it a business, not a hobby. Yes, hobbies are more pleasurable. But they don’t make you sweat for quality content, meet a deadline, or satisfy not yourself but someone else. Hobbies, generally, don’t pay the bills.
Second: As a business, you must have business goals and business goals require a change in lifestyles. Keeping track of your progress vis-a-vis your milestones can be very dreary. But track them you must, not to satisfy your ego, but to satisfy the needs of your family, if you have one.
Third: Like it or not,it is a paradigm shift. You are now your own boss, working on your own time and place, writing your own check, which may come more often than what you were used to or never. Success or failure is entirely on you.
Still interested? Great! To set you off on your journey, keep the following in your survival kit. They will come in handy as you venture into the unknown:
Be an entrepreneur:
A friend of mine is a freelance car salesman. And he is extremely good at it that the company he is freelancing with has, on numerous occasions, attempted to put him in the regular payroll. They have never succeeded so far.
Entrepreneurs are a different breed. They love to tread where others are scared to, do things others cringe at and soar while others are content to crawl. They don’t mind losing a few battles, but they will work their butts off to win the war.
Smile even if there is no reason to:
I usually have coffee with entrepreneurs. They are a good bunch to be with. They can be zany or serious, pretty dumb or deep in their fields of business. And they are quick to smile even if their orders are down and a mountain of payables is due in a couple of days.
Don’t lose your capacity to smile and be happy even if you are about to lose your car or your house. All the people I am dealing with online have had that experience. I am not very hopeful that you will experience otherwise
Being happy is not being indifferent or apathetic. It’s just the acceptance that, though things are not going your way today, things will be better tomorrow. This mindset is rejuvenating.
Have a game plan:
Nobody wins without a game plan. It will be next to a miracle if you succeed without a game plan. And miracle workers have long been supplanted by operating systems.
Make your game plan or operating system by asking yourself these questions:
What are you good at?
What do you really want to do with your life?
How much of it do you want?
What are you willing to give up to get it?
Do they give you a clearer picture now on what it is you are going to do and how you are going to do it? Don’t venture into it if it doesn’t.
Learn, learn, learn and learn:
When I went into freelancing, I knew nothing. But I had a burning desire to do it. Never mind if I didn’t know why I wanted to do it. I just that I wanted to do it – period.
If you have the same approach, guaranteed, you will have the same results.
Now I am loaded with information and a few tricks. Have I arrived? Definitely not. My desire has not waned but I have to temper my impulse to forge ahead with a few hours of reading. And you will never run out of reading materials. In fact they are overwhelmingly abundant.
The proliferation of the Internet has made online business available to all. Millions are already into it and more are going to A very few will succeed but many will fail. The differences between the two are many but can be summed up in one word – knowledge. Knowledge in what you have and knowledge in what you are going into.