Measuring Your Freelance Writing Success

Every freelance writer wants to be a success.  The thing you have to remember though is that you are not just a freelance writer; you are building a freelance writing business.  With this in mind what I want to talk to you about today is measuring your freelance writing success.

You have probably made some goals in relation to your freelance writing that you want to achieve in 2010 and the tips that I am sharing in this article should help you to focus and ensure that you reach your goals.

For the purpose of this post I am going to use the example that you want to earn an additional $10,000 in 2010.

This sounds like a reasonable goal and one that is very achievable if you put your mind to it.

The first thing that you need to determine is what this $10,000 will be made up of.  Where will the income come from?  Will it be additional client work?  Will you earn more from your own writing?  Will you monetize your blog to increase your income?

How will you know if you are achieving your goal?  Will you wait until 2010 draws to a close and you add up your yearly income?  How will you know if you are on track or if you have veered off track?  The key to this is measuring.  Measuring is something that you should be doing daily, weekly and monthly and in order to do this there are some questions that you need to ask yourself about your freelance writing business and you monetary goal for 2010.

If you are trying to achieve your goal using a combination of the methods listed above then the first thing that you will have to do is analyze exactly what you will need to achieve in each area and what it will take for you to achieve this.

If you need to attract new clients what do you need to do?
If you want to monetize your blog what do you need to do?
If you want to sell your own products what do you need to do?

The first thing that you need to do before you can start measuring your success is to take each of the above and create a list of things that you need to do on a daily basis to make them happen.  If you have a notice board or white board in your office this will be perfect for this.  What you need to do is write your list of daily things to do down the left hand side of your board and then divide the remainder of the board into days of the week.  For each item on your board you will give yourself points for completion.  Here’s a simple example below:

Let’s say for example that you give each item 10 points and you have 10 items in your list, your daily target will be 100.  If you notice at the end of the week that you have only managed to get 100 on two days you will see immediately that you are now off track for achieving your goal and you can do something about it.  If this pattern continues over a number of weeks you will be able to pinpoint exactly what is going wrong and what is causing the problem.  You might have a daily blog post on your list but you are only managing to post twice a week.  You need to ask yourself why you are not managing to post daily.  The answer could be that client work is keeping your really busy.  If so then you need to find a way round this.  Maybe you could take a couple of hours over the weekend to create some blog posts and schedule them to post.  Maybe you could take ten minutes every couple of hours to work on a blog post.

These blog posts are essential for monetizing your blog without them your blog income won’t increase.  They are important and that is why they were listed in your daily to do list.

Hopefully you can see what I am getting at here.  If you are measuring your freelance writing success on a daily basis you can see when you go off track and you can also see if you are on track.  If you are on track then you are guaranteed success.

Why wait until the end of the year to see if you have met your goal when you can ensure your success by measuring.

Let me ask you, do you have a measuring process in place for your freelance writing business?  Do you know when you are off track?

If you don’t have a measuring process in place do you think it is wise to work on implementing one now while the year is just beginning?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this.

Until next time,

Keep Writing

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