I’ve often said that, as soon as you think you can afford it (and that happens sooner than you might think if you shop around a bit) a freelancer’s first “hire” should be an accountant. Having someone else in charge of making sure my taxes are prepared correctly takes a huge load off my mind each spring (though I’d love it if he e-mailed me a reminder to pay my quarterly taxes!)

Who Else Can Help?

In time, though, you might find that other professionals are a big help to you as you can afford them. When it’s time to move from a blog hosted on WordPress to your own domain, or when you want to set up your own website, hire a pro if at all possible.

Even if you have the skills or think you can figure it out, pay someone to do it for you. It’s a business expense, for one, but you can be assured that things are being done the right way, the site will probably be less buggy and it will get to the point where you want it to be a lot faster than if you do it yourself.

There may come a time when you want to have a newsletter and you might hire people to write articles for you. You may have improvements you want to make to your website or content you want to add that you’re just not getting to on your own that you could hire someone to create.

Ultimately you may end up with so much work that you have to hire out some of your jobs, or there may be parts of the work that you don’t enjoy (like initial research) that you could pay someone else to do.

With What Money?

I know right now most of you are thinking “but I’m freelancing to make extra money; why would I want to pay someone to help me?”

Good question. And I don’t mean to suggest that you would do such a thing right away or early on in your career.

The main point is to know that it’s possible to hire people to help you out with all sorts of different jobs, and that there’s no shame in having people help you when you get overwhelmed or have things to do that you never get to because you don’t like that kind of work.

Freeing yourself up to do the work you like to do means in the end you’ll make more money because you’ll be able to focus on projects you’re really excited about, but the less-fun stuff will get done, too.

Why I’m Thinking About This

This article is as much for me as it is for you. As you might have noticed, I’ve been struggling to get regular content onto this site, and I can’t even remember the last time I had a newsletter out!

I have an ebook that’s days away from completion if I get someone else to format it and prepare it for sale. If I tried to find the time to do it myself, it would be months longer.

I’ve been thinking about getting help for a long time now, and I’m finally taking the steps I need to take to get some. (For my other site, I already have a little extra help, and so far, so good.) I hope for you all this will mean a better experience with more helpful tips and resources for you, and a little less stress for me.

If you’ve outsourced part of your work (or the necessary drudgery of being a freelance professional) in the past, I’d love to hear what you did and how it worked out for you!

I’ve been catching up on old magazines lately and I saw something in an issue of Real Simple from this spring that dealt with this issue of figuring out how much your time is worth. It was written to help people decide if they should do something themselves or pay someone else to do it, but it’s instructive for people trying to figure out how much money they’re really making at their day jobs as well.

Basically, you start with the amount of take-home pay you have. Add up all the expenses associated with working, such as clothes, transportation, meals you eat away from home. Subtract that from your take-home total.

Then you add up all the time you spend on work and work-related activities. That’s not just time at work, but time spent commuting, going to after-hours events and doing reading or other activities that are off the clock.

Divide the amount of money you’re really making after work expenses by the amount of time you’re really spending and you’ll find out what your hourly rate is.

How Does This Help You?

This doesn’t mean that whatever number you get should automatically be how much you charge for an hour of your time. You might want to ask more, and for some projects you’re sure to get less.

But it does help to have an idea of what you’re really making at your day job so you know how much you’re really living on. Once you’re approaching that figure in your freelance life, you can start giving serious thought to giving up your day job.

What I — and, maybe, you — need to do is to actually put some time into my schedule that’s just for writing, refining and sending queries. As it is right now I’ll get an idea, write a draft of a query on a piece of paper while I keep an eye on the little one, and then it usually never makes it onto the computer or into the inbox of an editor who might be interested.

This could even have a cute name like Work Out Wednesday (getting the work out of the house) or Finish it Up Friday, or it could just be Tuesdays because you have more time on Tuesdays. Whatever.

The point is that if you work getting queries out into your schedule, you’ll get more queries out (surprise!) and have more success.

I still send out queries to print publications occasionally (and have far more than I’m willing to admit sitting around in various stages of almost ready to send) but the bulk of my focus is on online work.

I like working for online publications because in my case it’s instant gratification — I write a post, publish it and it’s online immediately. I get paid quickly that way, too. I might make more money if I wrote some of these articles for print publications, but it would also take me more time and energy to send a query, wait for a response, do the research, send it off, wait for it to be edited and published, wait to get paid … I’m not so good at all that waiting.

And the good news is, it’s not that difficult to get into regular paying gigs writing online. One of the publications I occasionally write for I think I got hooked up with through a Craigslist ad. And of course About.com is my main source of income, but if you have a passion for a topic they’re looking for a Guide to, it can be a great way to get your name out, write a lot and get paid pretty well as well.

Writers, I’d like to know how much of your income comes from online publications versus print. Do you make most of your money from one or the other? Which do you prefer?

There are all sorts of these sites online and it seems like new ones pop up with regularity. Back in the day, I used to work for a site called Write for Cash (long-since defunct), then I moved on to LovetoKnow (I launched their Crafts site and wrote for more than a dozen other sites in my several years working there). I’ve done a few articles for Demand Studios, probably the biggest content farm out there right now, just to see what it was like.

I also wrote keyword-rich articles for other websites that might not exactly be called content farms, but the idea is the same: relatively brief articles stuffed with sometimes absurd keywords with the aim of getting good placement on the search engines.

An In-Depth Look at Content Farms

If you haven’t worked the content farm circuit, or if you’re thinking about signing up at some of these sites, or wondering about the reputation such sites have in the wider world of journalism, you need to check out the series happening at PBS’ MediaShift all about content farms.

There’s an overview of the major players in content production, from Demand and Examiner.com to AOL and Yahoo.

But more important for anyone who does this kind of writing — or who is thinking about doing this kind of writing — is the look at what it’s like to write for content farms. The writers mention cranking out stories on topics they don’t really know anything about but that they can write quickly for the paycheck ($15 an article; one writer says he made himself write three an hour for three hours a day, which isn’t bad money but certainly isn’t great content, either).

There’s also a look at how content farm writers are trained (though for most of my farming experience I wasn’t trained at all, or very little).

Are Farms the Future?

It’s possible that such sites are a sign of the new way forward for writing on the web — more efficient than traditional journalism, maybe not the most nuanced or in-depth information you could ever want, but fine for an overview of a topic.

That’s probably the best-case scenario, where people are actually writing about topics they care about and not just churning out information they found elsewhere but have no way of verifying.

For the writers, as with any other kind of writing, it’s up to you to decide if it’s worth it. If you can crank out a bunch of articles in a short period of time and don’t care what your name is on (or use an assumed name, as many people do who write for these websites) then such opportunities can be worth it for you.

If you’re more interested in writing about things you’re, well, interested in, even if it takes longer and means you’ll make less per hour, then content farms are not for you.

I’d love to hear what you think. Have you or do you currently work for one of these sites? What did/do you think about it?

Work-at-homers with bigger kids are sure to understand the situation of being excited when summer comes because of the break from routine and the ability to spend more time with the kids. That lasts for a few weeks until suddenly you’re wishing you just had a few uninterrupted hours to get some work done.

For those of us with smaller kids, this is a year-round problem. We want to work at home so that we can be with our kids, but we can’t actually get a lot of work done because the kids need all our attention.

That’s certainly the case with my very active almost-11-month-old. She doesn’t want to hang out in my office while I work, so other than the briefest spells (or sometimes when her daddy is home) I only work during naps. Which gives me maybe 2.5 to 3.5 hours a day to work and do household chores that need to be done when the baby isn’t underfoot.

So, clearly, I’m not getting a lot done.

Setting a Work Schedule

I bring this all up because knowing when you’ll work and how much time you have to devote to work each day is an important consideration for freelancers who are already home and those who are freelancing on the side. If you don’t know where you’ll find the time (and don’t want to get creative about making the time), you aren’t likely to succeed.

I am in no way a morning person. I will tell you, if you ask, that the worst thing about being a parent is not having control over when, how long and where you sleep. Right now I’m unwilling to give up any of my precious shut-eye to work, though I know that would be the best time of day to work if I could get out of bed (my husband would still be home to take care of the wee one if she woke up, for example).

I could probably work more in the evenings than I do, but of course I want to see my husband and I don’t want to saddle him with baby duty when he needs some down time, too.

I know all of this will get easier when the kiddo’s older (and I am planning to use at least some daycare/preschool when she’s a little older) and I just have to be patient with myself and know this is not a period for a lot of growth or change in my businesses. I just don’t have a lot of time to be innovative or start new projects.

That said, I still have goals and new things on the horizon. They just will come more slowly than I would have hoped. And the key is just to know what you can do, when you can do, having a scheduled time when you’ll work and actually working during that time (rather than, say, reading e-mail or catching up on Facebook).

How I Used to Work

When I was working full-time and freelancing nearly full-time, I didn’t have a child. I actually got a lot of freelance work done at my day job (which I don’t really recommend, unless you can get away from the office and work on your lunch break), and I’d work an hour or two in the evening and half a day on the weekends (usually Sundays; I had a strict rule against working on Saturdays that I still usually abide by).

I worked a lot. I was knitting most of the time I wasn’t on the computer (that’s still true, when I’m not deep in playtime mode), and I was always thinking about all the things that needed to be done (also still true). It was exhausting, but in a completely different way from having an infant who needs constant attention, affection and regular entertainment.

I honestly don’t know how I would do it if I were trying to start my freelance career now. I guess that’s why I planned to do it before we had kids!

How Do You Deal?

I’d love to know when you work, whether you’re a full-time or part-time freelancer, and about how much work time you get each day. If you have any tricks for working around kids or squeezing more work time into the day, I’d love to hear them, too!

I used to like to write down everything I hoped I could accomplish in a given day, meaning that I never actually got everything marked off.

Lately I’ve been trying to keep my to-dos to just three or four a day. That way I’m focusing on the things that really are priorities, and it’s a lot more likely I can get a handful of things done than it is that I can get a dozen things done.

So far I haven’t been able to mark everything off every day (yesterday, for instance, was bad, but there’s a sickish/teething baby in my house), but it does make me feel better even to get closer to marking off everything than I used to.

And with that, I’ve already got three out of four off the list for today. Try it and see if it doesn’t at least make you feel like you’re getting more done.

Writer and mom Christina Katz shares ideas for how moms can do just that in her book Writer Mama: How to Raise a Writing Career Alongside Your Kids.

The book is instructive for other people who want to start writing businesses from scratch when their lives are already busy, whether because of children or a day job. It starts with looking at writing that you can do in advance and then try to sell (such as tips, lists, fillers and personal essays) before moving on to articles you query before writing.

This makes sense for people who are really busy, because you save the step of querying and waiting for a response before writing, but it can also be more difficult to sell articles that are already written, particularly these days, when more fillers and short pieces are being written in house so publications don’t have to pay for them (the book was published in 2007, so some of it’s advice is pretty dated, including the suggestion that you send queries by mail).

Before You Even Get Started

The first part of the book, which is helpful for anyone thinking about freelancing, covers preparation for a writing career. It includes tips for gathering and keeping ideas, identifying the audiences you want to write for (and thereby the niches you might want to write in), how to look at magazines with an eye toward writing for them, reading and properly following guidelines and more.

She offers good ideas for getting around the problem of not having clips and offers good ideas for places you might be able to pick up some quick clips to use on your queries and cover letters.

Professionalism in Everything

One of the biggest hurdles for work-at-home parents is being able to present themselves in a professional manner. We’re in a hurry pretty much all the time, we might not be able to schedule telephone interviews with any assurance we’ll have a quiet house at the appointed hour and, yes, unfortunately, sometimes we blow deadlines because of sick kids or other household problems.

Katz emphasizes a “do what you’ve got to do” attitude for finding the time you need to make your business a success and to always look professional while you’re doing it.

For example she talks about doing a lot of pre-writing of articles — even those you’re going to send queries about — so you are sure you know what the story is and the sources you are going to use before you send your query. This can be a time saver because you’ve done some of the work in advance so you’re more focused on the direction you want a story to take once you start writing.

She also covers the nuts and bolts of query writing, how to get and conduct interviews, negotiation, finishing the story and more.

Taking Your Career to the Next Level

Finally the book moves beyond the basics to things writers can do to advance their careers even further such as attending writer’s conferences and getting book deals.

All of this information is useful to writers who might not know the progression their freelance writing career should take. The book also includes helpful resources, books and websites new writers might want to add to their reading lists (geared toward women, but men will find some useful stuff here, too).

Though I did find the book a little outdated (you can find updates and more information at the Writer Mama blog), a lot of the advice is still perfectly valid. Most important, it reminds people who want to become freelance writers or who are just starting out in the field that becoming a successful freelance writer is a process that takes time and that there is a logical way to go about it.

Following Katz’s advice is a good way to get ahead more quickly and sanely, whether you’re a full-time parent or have a day job and are trying to build a freelancing career at the same time.

If you don’t know about mind maps, they’re essentially a visual representation of the ideas or topics that you want to cover in an article. A really simple mind map for an article might look like this:

(This image is from the free mind mapping software called FreeMind, though I often as not use a piece of paper to do my mind maps.)

How Mind Mapping Works

I don’t remember what this method of outlining was called when I was in school, but I remember using it there, too. You simply write your main topic in the center of the page, draw a circle around it, then have subtopics branch off of that.

More details or sub-subtopics branch off from the subtopics, and so on, as detailed as you want or need to get.

I tend to use mind maps to focus my thinking in a broad overview sort of way, then go back and flesh out more specific topics in an outline or list format.

But the point of using any outlining method is to use it in a way that works for you, so as you work with mind mapping or any other method, you’ll find out your own best ways to use it.

Mind Mapping Software

As I mentioned, you can do a mind map on a piece of paper, or you can use mind mapping software. There are many free options out there as well as a few pay programs. Play with a few of the free ones if this is a style that interests you before shelling out money for a paid version, which you may never need anyway.

Like outlining with note cards, mind mapping is a handy way to get your thoughts organized before writing a query, doing an interview and writing the article itself.

A mind map truly gives you a road map to follow to get your writing where you want it to go.

Notecards for Ideas

I like writing down each story idea I have on a notecard as it comes to me. This helps jog my memory if it’s a few weeks (or, let’s face it, a few months) before I get to really working on the idea.

Sometimes I’ll write down just a few words or phrases (like “organic baby food: mass produced, local, make yourself), while other times I’ll write down more specific topics I want to cover in the article or even what might turn out to be the lede of the article or the query.

Some other potential things to include on your notecards might be:

• a general outline of the article you intend to write
• questions you want to answer
• sources you want to talk to
• potential markets, if you have some in mind
• the format of the article, such as personal essay, Q&A, list, etc.

Notecards for Article Writing

Using notecards is also a great idea once you’re writing the article. I vividly remember putting together a presentation when I was in junior high that involved hundreds of notecards containing different facts I had uncovered.

I probably wouldn’t suggest going that far for an article, but each major point or subtopic that you want to cover in your article could get its own notecard.

For example, if you had questions you wanted answers to, each answer could be on its own notecard. Or you could imagine the subheadings that might be in your article and give each one of those a notecard.

The point of the cards is not to write the article itself on them, but to highlight the major points, facts or quotes that you want to be sure make it into the article. That way you won’t get overwhelmed by all the information you’ve collected and forget something really important.

If you’re writing a short piece, such as a blog post or a brief, one notecard may be sufficient (as it was for this post). Just write down a quick outline of the major points you want to hit and move on from there.

Notecards are an easy way to sharpen your thinking and organize information before you start writing so that even your initial draft will be well organized and include all of the most important information. It makes the writing faster, too, when you have a good idea of what you want to say and in what order before you sit down to write.

Storing Your Cards

I like to keep my cards in a plastic recipe box to keep them organized and so I won’t lose them in the middle of a project. You may find that a stack on the desk (maybe rubber-banded for extra security) works just fine for you.

I keep stacks of blanks on my desk, by my bed, and often in the diaper bag so I can jot down notes for articles and ideas wherever I am or whenever I get a spare moment.