It’s time to start looking forward to 2010, and making your new year business plans, if you haven’t started already. Now is a great time to reflect back on 2009, and to look toward what you expect for your business in 2010. If you haven’t started working on budgets, goals, and plans for next year you should sit down and get started soon.

Why do you need to set budgets goals and plans for the year?

Having a plan can help you guide your business growth. If you have no plan for where you’re going in the next year, how can you …read more

“To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent. The most effective way to manage change is to create it.”
—Peter Drucker
The creator and inventor of modern management had it right about change—the best way to manage change is to create it.
Of course, I believe Drucker was talking about larger organizations when he offered that very sage advice. But I think the same advice can helpful to one-person businesses and independent contractors. If you create change for yourself, it’s easier to manage when it comes along—even when the change is not something you initiated. And …read more

Is fear ever a good thing?
Absolutely. Fear can help you move off dead center and take positive action. And if used in the right way, it can save you and your business from going belly up. Fear is natural, and it’s there for a reason. But when that natural instinct is overdeveloped, it becomes an issue—especially if you remain stuck in the problem and don’t move toward a solution.

In my book, inaction is the biggest thing to fear about fear.
The other day, I talked about taking action to face your freelance fears—those things that you tend to put off or …read more

If you want to run a marathon, you have to work up to the kind of physical and mental conditioning that makes running that 26 miles possible.
I don’t run marathons (yet anyway), but I have trained for a 10-mile walk for the past two years. And what I’ve learned is that consistency matters more than mileage on most days. In other words, I might be able to walk 10 miles on one Saturday. But there is more of a long-term training benefit if I get up every morning before work and walk or run for three miles. Because over the …read more

Are you skeptical of social media and how it can help you grow your freelance business?
If so, you’re not alone. But you might want to explore the possibilities—especially given the current economy. Social media can help you find new markets, reach more potential clients, and help get your name out in front of more people. And why wouldn’t you want to extend your reach right now?
I talk at length about the benefits of social media marketing in a recent interview that I did with Heather Boerner, a San Francisco-based freelance writer and consultant, for her blog, Serenity for the Self-Employed. …read more

When I first started freelancing full time, it was just me, my 14-year-old cat, the ticking clock, and the occasional phone interview during the day. In other words, very little human interaction and some very welcome silence.
And for a while, that was just fine with me. I’ve always been a bit of a lone wolf. And having grown up as an only child, I’ve never minded my alone time. In fact, sometimes my family and my closest friends argue that I seem to enjoy my alone time a little too much. So for the first few months of freelancing, I …read more

When was the last time you had ink-stained fingers after reading an article?
It’s been a while for me. As someone who grew up around newspapers, I am almost ashamed to say this: I can’t remember the last time I picked up and read an actual newspaper. These days, I read all my news online.
But sometimes (days like yesterday, in fact), I do miss that tactile sensation of picking up and reading a “real” newspaper.
I had a welcome interruption during my workday yesterday when an old friend of mine called me out of the blue. It was a business-related phone call …read more

Have you ever hammered nails into a board with a banana?
Me neither. But yesterday, a Minnesota news station demonstrated that cold weather has certain unlikely advantages. Apparently, when the mercury drops to -13 or below, a banana will freeze so solid that you can use it to hammer nails into a board.
By now, you’re probably thinking—what on earth does this have to do with freelance writing?
Well, sometimes climate changes bring unexpected advantages—whether the changes are weather-related or economic. All the rules change when the temperature hits subzero temperatures—even bubbles freeze. And in an economic downturn, all the rules change too. …read more

I know many freelancers who would love to skip over the marketing and self-promotion part of this business and simply write and edit all day long. And I’ll be the first to admit that I used to fall into that camp.
But unless you get the word out there about your services and what you have to offer to clients, editors, and publications, no one will know about you and your business. And especially in an economy like this one, you want to make sure your name is the one that clients and editors think of first when they need quality …read more

I didn’t *get* Twitter at first. And I certainly didn’t comprehend how Twitter could help my freelance business when I first heard about it in a Wired magazine article back in 2007.
Fast-forward to the present, and Twitter is one of the most important ways that I interact with my readers. In fact, I just don’t know how I existed without it.
Building a business is all about building relationships, and so is blogging. And certainly when readers leave comments below one of my posts, there is the beginning of a dialogue. But Twitter extends that reach into real time. When I …read more