How To Diversify Your Income As A Freelance Writer
How To Avoid Putting Your Eggs In One Basket
After a somewhat faltering start, I’ve finally broken through the noise on Upwork and landed my first “gig” as a freelance writer there.
Thanks are due to the advice received from the wonderful community at /r/freelancewriters and a couple of participants in particular (to protect people’s anonymity, they will be left anonymous). Thanks are also due to the diminishing container of caffeine pills on my desk and spending a lot of time sending in proposals over the past few days.
Signing up to Upwork was not a natural decision for me. To date, I have preferred to cultivate clients from direct sources. Periodically, I have explored working on Upwork and then thrown in the towel in frustration.
But I believe it’s worth trying to land business there for no other reason than that it provides freelance writers with another source from which to land clients.
This, in turn, speaks to the importance of diversifying one’s income. Which any investment advisor will tell you is an axiomatic principle of sound financial planning.
Here are some of the ways in which one can diversify one’s income while still participating in the crazy world of freelance writing.
1. Work With Both Marketplace And Direct Clients
This week, I have gone from working exclusively with direct clients to opening another channel of working with clients through marketplaces.
In addition to Upwork, one can find freelance writing projects on Fiverr and a long tail of smaller marketplaces that connect those providing freelance services and those buying them.
2. Use Both Inbound And Outbound Marketing To Find Clients
I’ve discussed the various ways in which one can find freelance clients on this publication before.
They include:
- Cold emailing
- Asking for referrals
- Engaging in PPC advertising (use with caution)
- Inbound marketing
Inbound marketing — such as using content marketing to market your content marketing writing business! — is the one that a lot of writers neglect. I joined the party about four years late and wish that I had got going sooner.
If you’re currently only relying on outbound (or inbound) to land business, then open up the other channel in order to widen your exposure.
3. Work With Both Local And International Clients
I’m going to be transparent here.
When people tell me that they only work with local freelancing clients — because doing business internationally is “too difficult” — I sit there silently judging them. Yes, really.
Does that make me a judgmental and disagreeable person? Quite possibly. But I mean well (I think).
These days services such as Zoom, TransferWise, and Payoneer have all made it easy to work with clients both in your local market and across the ocean. Yes, one faces the threat of currency rate fluctuations by doing so (and right now the USD:NIS currency pair is particularly volatile). But I believe that that is a small price to pay for broadening the pool of clients you could be working with by an order of magnitudes. Think big. Trade globally.
4. Cover A Variety of Niches (Rather Than Just One)
I’ve written before about how pigeon-holding yourself into one writing niche can mean that you end up writing about the same topic over and over again. This gets boring fast. Trust me.
“Niche down” is one of the most basic pieces of advice that gets bandied about in writing forums. But equally I believe that one can go too far and limit oneself to too small a target market.
Those mathematically-minded could probably model exactly what level of niche is optimal (if you’re done the workings, please be in touch). As I’m not a market analyst I will leave you with the suggestion to “go niche, but not too niche.”
5. Work With More Clients To Lower Your MCIP
Freelance writing authorities differ in terms of the “maximum client income percentage” that they suggest one should aim for. I’ve never seen anybody call it the MCIP, but I’m happy to coin the term (just remember who you heard it from first!).
Common recommendations, however, are 20% and 33%. That is to say that no one client should constitute greater than that amount of your income.
One obvious way to lower your average MCIP is to take on more clients. There are those who suggest that a well-diversified portfolio of freelance clients can provide one with better income stability than working a job can (in which case one’s eggs are in the basket of one employer). Although I can’t say that I’ve gotten to such a lofty position, I tend to agree with that idea.
6. Leverage Both Active and Passive Income Sources
Of course, no matter how many countries you work with and channels you receive leads from, you’re inevitably going to run into the realization that you only have so many hours in a day with which to work. Even a prodigious supply of caffeine pills cannot circumvent that limitation.
This is where passive income comes into play. Note: I am suggesting, including to myself, and not teaching: at the time of writing I have no significant passive income sources.
Common passive income sources which freelance writers develop include:
- Teaching online courses (disclaimer: I think that most of these are not worthwhile)
- Selling books through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP)
Diversification Is A Philosophy
Freelance writers are currently navigating a precarious time in the market with a glut of supply from those recently joining the race for quality clients.
While the globalized nature of the freelance marketplace is in some respects a challenge, in others it can be thought of as an opportunity. There are more sources to tap than was previously the case and remote work has been normalized thanks to the pandemic.
Widening one’s lead sources, working with different geographies, and developing passive as well as active income sources are just some of the ways in which freelance writers can diversify their income.
