For those writers, I promised to post links to basic business resources to help them develop those skills or more easily plan and run their growing freelance businesses. Here are those free business resources — from free templates and worksheets to free online courses.

Business – General

• Owner’s Checklist for Starting a New Business (from SmartBiz.com)
• Business Selection Checklist (from SmartBiz.com)
• Small Business Success Course (free email course from About.com – Small Business: Canada)
• Improve Your Personal Networking Skills (free online course from the HP Learning Center)
• Building Your First Web Page (free online course from the HP Learning Center)
• Principles of Entrepreneurship (free online textbook from America.gov)
• Business Fundamentals (free online textbook from cnx.org)
• Business Communication for Success (free online textbook from FlatWorldKnowledge.com)

Business Plans

• How to Write a Business Plan (a free online course from the U.S. Small Business Administration)
• Business Plan Outline (from Bplans.com)
• Sample Business Plans (from Bplans.com)
• One Page Business Plan Template

Market Research

• Conduct a Marketing Analysis (a free online course from Kutztown University)
• SWOT Analysis Worksheet
• Advertising and Marketing Psychology (free email course from About.com – Women in Business)

Marketing Plans

• One Page Marketing Plan Template
• Marketing Plan Outlines (from Mplans.com)
• Sample Marketing Plans (from Mplans.com)

Marketing / PR – Other

• Marketing 101 (free online course from the U.S. Small Business Administration)
• Principles of Marketing (free online textbook from FlatWorldKnowledge.com)
• eMarketing Textbook (from Quirk.biz)
• Core Concepts of Marketing (from OERcommons.org)
• Press Releases Made Easy (free e-book)
• Social Marketing (free online course from The Open University)

Accounting

• Introduction to Accounting (a free online course from the U.S. Small Business Administration)
• Accounting I (free online textbook from peoi.org)
• Sample Business Balance Sheet (from FindLaw.com)
• Sample Profit and Loss Statement (from Findlaw.com)

If you have other favorite free online resources to help freelancers build basic business skills, please share them in the comments below.

Once you have a freelance writing specialty in mind,  it’s time to move on to the next steps — market research and creating your marketing plan.

Market Research for Freelance Writers

Freelancers are notorious for jumping into work without realizing that freelancing is really running a business. Many freelancers fail because they don’t have a realistic plan in place or because they don’t understand the competition (like assuming extremely low rate writers are your competition when they have nothing to do with markets you should be targeting). But you can’t come up with that plan if you don’t conduct basic market research first.

What is Market Research?

As a writer you’re likely intimately familiar with research in general. Market research is much like researching a story. You’re digging for background information to help you determine the most important things to consider (in planning a business in this case rather than what to cover in an article).

Market research involves figuring out who your target market includes. Hint: it’s not everybody. It’s not everybody hiring writers. It’s not even everybody within a vague group (like newspapers).

Example: You want to be a professional blogger.

Bad target market: People who own blogs. Even “businesses that own blogs” is a bad target market.

Better target market: Owners of blogs covering a specific niche or reaching a specific audience, with a particular audience size, in a particular region of the world, with an adequate budget to cover a professional blogger’s rates for at least X posts per month

Market research goes beyond identifying your target market. It also helps you research your competition and set appropriate freelance writing rates. We’ve talked about setting your rates extensively here before, so rather than repeat myself I’m going to link you to an article that will walk you through the process.

How to Set Your Freelance Writing Rates the Right Way

Below you’ll also find a link to our free online freelance writing rate calculator. It features a basic mode and advanced mode to give you some flexibility in how you can use it. These two resources will help you set realistic target rates. Don’t be surprised when considering all important factors leads to higher target rates than you might have expected. This is exactly why undercharging is such a problem for so many freelance writers.

Freelance Hourly Rate Calculator

You can find other free tools and calculators by exploring our additional exclusive free stuff for writers.

How to Conduct Market Research

How can you actually conduct this kind of research, learning more about opportunities available in different markets and how your competition behaves in each? This can vary greatly depending on your specialty area. For example, you would learn a lot about magazine markets and what they’re looking for by reading the magazines themselves.

With business writing, you would research things a bit differently. For example, if you wanted to write white papers for small B2B software companies you could search online to create a master list of those companies and then sort them by which ones already use white papers and which don’t. Each group has different opportunities where a white paper writer might come in handy.

Competition can be easier to research, especially if you already have a strong network. You already know your colleagues. If you know writers who share your specialty, review their websites. What specific services do they offer? What do they charge? What kinds of clients are represented in their portfolios? Do they work with small businesses or larger corporate clients for example? How much experience do they have compared to yours?

Even if you don’t have a large writer network yet, you can find other specialists with a simple online search. Get a better feel for other options your prospects have. If you don’t know what competition exists, you can’t come up with a value proposition that convinces clients to choose you over them.

Here is another article from our archives that gives further information on conducting market research:

4 Tips for Better Understanding Your Target Market

When you find information about the competition, it’s a good idea to complete a SWOT analysis to look at your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the current market. Here is a free downloadable template you can use to do that:

Free SWOT Analysis Worksheet for Freelance Writers

After you’ve conducted some basic market research, it’s time to put together a freelance marketing plan.

Freelance Writing Marketing Plans

Your marketing plan will serve as a road map for growing your freelance writing business. This is another step many freelancers skip. If you feel like you’re wandering around aimlessly trying to figure out what’s next, you need to step back and come up with a plan.

While you would ideally create a comprehensive business and marketing plan, I know many freelancers won’t. With that in mind, I created some simplified planning templates to help you out. Below is a link to my one page marketing plan template.

One Page Marketing Plan Template

You can also find a one page business plan template on our Freebies page if you’d like one.

As you can see, this abbreviated marketing plan serves as a snapshot. You’ll list some of your biggest competitors, industry trends that will affect your business, your goals and strategies for achieving them, and larger marketing tactics you’ll use throughout the year.

If you want a guide to help you fill out that marketing plan template, you can find one at my small business blog.

If you prefer to use a traditional long-form marketing plan to figure out your strategies and next steps in growing your freelance writing business, I suggest reviewing the marketing plan outlines and marketing plan templates available at Mplans.com.

Hopefully these resources will point you in the right direction as you begin to research newer (and better) freelance writing markets and develop your plan to grow and thrive as a freelance writer.

As always, you’re invited to share your thoughts, questions, or other recommended resources in the comments below.

Here are three simple ways you can better insulate yourself from bad writing clients.

1. Be Choosy

As a business owner, you can’t say “yes” to everyone. You have to be able to turn work down when there are signs that a prospect will turn into a nightmare of a client. If you take on that client anyway, you really have no one else to blame. So say “no.” Sure, that means you won’t have that gig bringing in income. That’s life. You move on. You find another, even better, gig. The more time you waste with bad clients, the less time you have to find and land great ones.

This is one of the reasons I push the idea of building a writer platform so much here. You build your visibility and your network and gigs find you instead of the other way around. If you have an effective platform, chances are you’ll have more prospects coming to you than you can take on. That means you can choose to work with the best and not feel guilty about saying “no” to others. It’s also another chance to network as you refer the “no” gigs to other colleagues (just don’t refer gigs with major warning signs or you could hurt relationships more than you help them).

2. Charge Professional Rates

The lower your rates, the more likely you are to come across these bad client types. That said, there are lousy clients in higher paying markets as well — just not as many. Why does your pay level play a role? For a few reasons:

• Clients who pay very little don’t have much invested in the project.
• If they aren’t willing to pay for professional work, they’re less likely to respect you as a professional (in their mind, you might just be some amateur doing the job for “play money”).
• It’s easier to say “it’s only a few bucks, so it’s not a big deal if I pay late.”
• They know it doesn’t make much sense for you to go to collections or sue them in small claims court if they screw you out of a very small payment.
• Clients who pay next to nothing are either cheap or not properly funded. In either case, they need to squeeze as much value as they can out of every cent they can. This is why low paying clients are sometimes even more demanding than those paying professional rates.

The best way to avoid this kind of treatment is to raise your rates to professional levels. Don’t sign over all rights to an article for $10 for example. Those writers are, and always will be, replaceable. If you want respect as a professional writer, you need to show that you’re not that easily replaceable — that you offer value the extremely low-priced writers do not. Charge what you’re worth, and you’ll immediately kick a large number of bad prospects off your doorstep.

3. Build Alternative Income Streams

When you’re desperate for income you’re probably more likely to say “yes” to any project that comes along, bad client or not. So you need to come up with a plan to get out of that desperation phase. One way to do that is to create alternative income streams. This is an especially good idea early in your freelance writing career when you probably don’t have clients beating down a path to your door yet.

These are income streams that don’t rely on you landing new freelance writing clients. It’s income that fills in the gaps so you never make bad decisions out of desperation. You know something else will still be coming in. Here are a few examples:

• Offer another freelance service (like design or marketing consulting) so you can choose the best prospects from both markets to work with at any given time.
• Publish and sell short e-books and reports.
• Run a niche blog. Earn income through ad revenue while you build an ongoing portfolio piece to attract new clients.

It’s all about diversification. Just like you shouldn’t rely on any single client too heavily, you shouldn’t rely on one income stream either. The more you diversify your incoming revenue, the more insulated you are against one of them failing (like a bad client refusing to pay on time).

4. Nurture Relationships with Regulars

It’s basic math. The more clients you need to work with, the better your chances are for coming across a dud in the mix. So rather than looking for short one-off projects, focus on existing clients and building regular contracts. Regular clients are people you have an ongoing relationship with. They’re more invested in that relationship. After all, it’s easier to keep a good freelancer they’re happy with than to spend time and energy trying to recruit one that could adequately replace them. It’s win-win.

Reach out to past clients and pitch ongoing gigs (like one or two articles into you managing their blog on a monthly basis). And keep existing regulars happy (within reason). The more regular gigs you have with clients you know and trust, the less time you’ll have available for those potentially bad prospects to get on your schedule.

You won’t always know up front if a prospect is going to turn into a bad client. Look out for warning signs, and know when to say “no.” If you do land one, don’t be afraid to “break up” with them after your current project. And work hard to maintain the relationships you have with good clients and build other income streams. If you do these things and make a conscious effort to avoid the cheapskate, deadbeat variety, you’ll never have to take on a bad client again.

This discount is the first of many that will be offered to Twitter followers on products I release. So if you want to save some money, follow me at @QueryFreeWriter. Other discounts will follow in coming weeks and months and they won’t all be mentioned here.

For this discount you can save almost 30% on my latest e-book, getting it for just $7 (normally $9.97). But check out the Twitter profile before it’s too late. The offer is only available this week!

Let’s say you’re a freelance writer working for a mill where you earn $15 per article on average. You need to earn at least $3000 per month for a modest full-time freelance income, so you churn out 200 of these articles each month (assuming you can find that many available topics to write about on a consistent basis). Before you assume $3000 per month is too grand of a goal, and you can get by full-time for much less, read this and use our freelance writing rate calculator to find out what you really need to earn.

Two hundred articles is a lot of writing each month just to earn a relatively modest full-time income. And the time involved in writing that much content doesn’t leave you with much left over to pursue higher paying freelance writing jobs within better markets. Let’s talk about how writing even just one or two e-books can bring in enough income to help you dig out of that low pay rut by replacing some of your low paying work while also freeing up some of your time to pursue better markets for future freelance writing work.

E-book Pricing Strategies for Success

There are many different ways to price your e-book. And in the end, it all comes down to your e-book’s specific market. For example, if it’s a massive market (like weight loss) you could probably get away with a very low pricing strategy, knowing that you could sell a boatload of copies. But if your market is much smaller (let’s say freelance writers), that strategy doesn’t work as well. You’ll never sell to everyone in the niche so to make a decent profit you need to price higher, knowing that you’ll sell fewer copies. At the same time that means you’ll have to create an e-book that justifies the higher price (why I treat my own as mini-courses or extremely in-depth tutorials, and load them with tools and worksheets).

Let’s look at a couple of different examples using different e-book lengths and prices to find out how much you would have to write and sell in order to replace all or part of your content mill work.

Strategy 1: Short E-book and Low Price

In this example let’s say you write a short, 25-page e-book. You price it at a low $10 price point — a relatively easy price point to find buyers for. Now in many cases a “page” in an e-book is actually much less content than an individual article because of spacing, images, and font choices. But let’s assume a worst-case scenario where each page equals a flat 400 words, comparable to an article you might right. How many of these $10 e-books would you have to sell to earn $3000? Three hundred of them.

If you’re new to writing and selling e-books, 300 sales in your first month might be a bit ambitious (although doable, again depending on your niche). But I’d say 100 sales is a pretty reasonable goal to set if you take the time to plan out your launch marketing strategy effectively. And keep in mind, any marketing you do for your e-book is also marketing you do for your personal brand, meaning it also has the potential to attract clients in the better markets you want to target. Just keep your e-books relevant to the markets you’re interested in.

So if you can sell 100 copies, you’ll earn $1000 from 25 pages of content. That’s in comparison to the more than 65 pages of content you would have to write for the mill in that same month for that same $1000, plus any marketing you do also has the potential to help you grow your career rather than pulling time away from marketing your services.

As you can see, an e-book doesn’t have to replace your full monthly earnings in a low pay rut to have a benefit.

Strategy 2: Middle-of-the-road Length and Pricing

Now let’s look at another example where you create a more in-depth e-book and you charge a bit more for it. Let’s shoot for that same 100 sales goal in your launch month. In this case we’ll say you wrote a 50 page e-book (including a few value-added resources to make the content more interactive) and you decided to charge $27.

In this example, 100 sales would earn you $2700. That almost completely replaces your earnings from the low pay gig. Better yet, you almost completely replace that income with only a quarter of the content being written and published. That clears up even more time for you to pursue better markets that month (and really a month is plenty of time to get your foot in the door with better paying clients if you’re even remotely aggressive about it).

Strategy 3: High Value, Higher Price

Now let’s look at a third strategy — creating a much longer and more detailed e-book and charging a premium price for it (this is what I did with my first Web Writer’s Guide e-book). Let’s use my own e-book’s price as an example here — $37. And let’s choose the similar length of 100 pages. If you sell those 100 copies during your launch month you earn $3700 and more than account for your content mill pay. You earned more money while writing only half the amount of content. if you have a small niche, and a big enough topic for the e-book where you can write 100 pages and keep it valuable to your readers, this can be a good way to go.

Other Considerations in E-book Writing

There are a few other things you’ll want to consider if you want to use e-books to help you work your way out of a low pay rut as a freelance writer. Here are some things to think about:

• You won’t get paid for the e-book until it’s complete. So you might want to use off-hours time to work on your first one until income is directly coming in rather than cutting the existing paying work while you write it. This doesn’t have to take long though. I wrote my first e-book during a single weekend (wrote it all Saturday morning and edited it that Sunday and had it up for sale for $17 on Monday — it sold very well and was in a niche where it attracted new paying clients at the time as well). If you start off with a long e-book, that kind of writing time probably isn’t possible.
• You can always write more than one e-book. If one short e-book won’t bring in enough income to satisfy you, go ahead and write two (or three, or however many you think you can write and sell within your market). I suggest spacing them out a little bit if they’re all targeting the same buyers though. You don’t want to give them e-book fatigue with an onslaught of new titles all in the same month.
• E-books earn residually. You don’t get just a one-time payment for writing your e-book like you might if you wrote one for a client. You’ll earn money as long as the e-book continues to sell. For example, the one I released in 2008 and do pretty much no marketing for anymore still can bring in a few hundred dollars each month without me even trying. And that’s all income beyond my initial goal.

Whether you aren’t being paid enough to make ends meet and live a comfortable life or you simply know you can earn more than you are while stuck in a low pay rut, e-books are just one of many options you have to help you dig your way out. Have you used e-books to help you grow your freelance writing career? Have you implemented one of these pricing strategies? Did you remember to plan out your launch marketing to take advantage of an initial push in sales? Tell us how they worked out for you and what you’d do differently if you could do it again in the comments below.

Specialty: Web copywriting

Rates: 50 per Web page

I am a freelance copywriter based in Minneapolis. In five years as a full-time professional copywriter and editor, I have written hundreds of effective websites for clients throughout the United States. I use in-depth knowledge of search engine optimization and current best practices to write effective Web copy.

My optimized Web copy has won several awards, including selection as an Official Honoree at the 14th Annual Webby Awards.

My writing experience has included Web sites, product descriptions, reviews, informational articles, blog entries, press releases and e-mail newsletters. Most of my work has been as a copywriter for an industry leader in lawyer marketing, writing websites for law firms throughout the United States.

I am a graduate of Vassar College with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature (2001) and of William Mitchell College of Law (Juris Doctor, 2007). I am an attorney admitted to and in good standing with the Minnesota Bar.

My grammar and spelling skills are strong. While I typically follow AP style, I have experience using the Chicago Manual of Style and will conform to your in-house style guidelines.

I believe in meeting strict deadlines with high-quality work. I also believe that strong communication is the key to a good relationship between copywriters and their clients. Please contact me with questions about my work.

Website: http://melissasouza.webs.com

Specialty: Writing

Rates: 50 per hour or project rate

Melissa Souza writes regularly for examiner.com as the L.A. Horse Examiner. She has contributed to the Nashville music scene through various press releases, written several articles for eHow.com and freelances as a copywriter. A dash of prowess, a heaping handful of zeal and a pinch of talent, Melissa composes a wide variety of materials: turning drab copy into caliber marketing material for a medley of pieces a client may need to sparkle in their industry.

Website: www.ashleyfesta.com

Specialty: commercial writing, blogging, profiles and feature stories

Rates: 50 per hour

I’m a freelance commercial writer, specializing in blogging and creative materials. I’ve been writing and editing professionally for nearly 10 years and enjoy helping businesses build brand recognition.

Is anyone really listening to you? Need to improve your message? E-mail me today at ashley@ashleyfesta.com to discuss what I can do to help you achieve your business goals.

Website: http://www.loriwidmer.com: http://www.wordsonpageblog.com/

Specialty: Risk management / insurance

Rates: 100 / hr.

Exceptional business and technical writing and editing expert ready to deliver success for your next project. Trusted writer and editor with proven record of driving readership following with compelling copy. Areas of expertise not limited to:

- Insurance
- Risk Management
- Business
- Finance
- Healthcare
- Marketing copy
- Press releases
- Collateral materials

With over 15 years of experience in magazine, Web, corporate, and educational writing, I have supplied content that generates results. To learn how I can advance your business goals, please contact me for a free consultation.

Website: www.seesarahwrite.com

Specialty: green living, environmentalism, sustainability

Rates: 75 per 500 word article

I write, edit, advertise and market to help clients achieve their goals. Services include website content development, social networking, advertising copy, press releases and more. My specialties are green issues and small business, although I serve a variety of clients.

My 10 years of experience in journalism, advertising, public relations and marketing make me a cutting edge resource for clients wanting to boost their bottom line. For more information, e-mail sarah@seesarahwrite.com.