When does the money come ?

Hey

I've been around the bush a bit and many, many moons ago I wrote a post on here telling the world how my life sucked and I was a loser. Now i'm making $5,000 a day and I'm about ready to move into the white house.

Sorry, just kidding.

But, in almost a year I've turned myself into a sucessfull freelance writer who has written well over a million words of content for almost every type of customer.

Seriously, this isn't a sales pitch. It's quite the opposite really. I'm here to find out where the money comes into play? After all I have the online business, 3 hours of e-mails a day to deal with and 5,000 words to write, but honestly - even living in Thailand I'm lucky if I break even!

I've tried outsourcing and quite honestly, I spent more time editing than I would have done writing the work myself! It's a catch 22 I think. I am looking to grow a business, but to grow I need to up my rates and that involves customers leaving me.

at $7 per article, I've got almost an endless supply of work. In fact it's killing me, but people are almost glorious about the quality - it's quite hmbling but in retrospect after looking at the state the freelance writing industry is in, I can see why.

at $15 per article, I'm getting critiqued for using whilst instead of while and apparently I don't use enough semi-colons. Generally speaking, the more I charge, the more exacting my customers, which also means the harder the work is to outsource? sadly a $15 job is around once weekly...

So - what does one do?

Can I blackhat this mother fucker and get that $10,000 I need to actually put some money in the bank?

Do I jump on the nearest buffalo and ride the fuck outta Thailand?

or just keep writing insane amounts of content giving me absolutely no time to do anything but write

God damnnit. I'm having the anti-epiphany..


Answers on a postcard ! but seriously, anyone else experienced this sort of plateau? Any suggestions would be welcomed.

A few practical tips..

Try and balance your service out. If you're spending 3 hours responding to emails..It seems you're very very hands on with your customers. Try and make your emails shorter and save a bit more time. You might loose a few customers but you'll be spending your time more productively.

Outsourcing is really the way to go. Managing an offshore writer is a lot harder than managing one who works in your office. You'll be able to get the writer to write better after a few weeks of tweaking if he's near you.

Another option...
Try scaling down your freelancing business. Yeah.. SCALE it down. If you can manage to filter out a handful of easy to deal with clients you'll be spending a lot less time responding to emails. Here's what I mean... if you get it right .. you'll make 75% of what you currently make doing 30..40% of the work. Then you can spend the rest of your time exploring and investing in niches that your clients get you to write for