by Leo Wiles
15 July 2015
Hi Rach and Leo. I’m fairly new to freelancing, and have found that I’ve hit a dry patch this past six weeks with commissions drying up and editors going quiet. I’m starting to panic. Is this normal? What do I do? Vicky
With tax time looming, July and August are traditionally the worst months of the year for freelance commissions – so slumps are normal for a lot of us. But, instead of throwing in the towel, channel your inner Rocky and ride it out with my no-fail business fitness plan:
Trawl through your inbox. While deleting and filing all the old dross, watch out for those pearlers you missed the first time round. You know, the ones where the editor bothered to tell you they loved your piece. If you didn’t follow up with a new sparkly article pitch, now’s the time. You may even find sketchy notes where an idea was batted to and fro and then of course went the way of the Dodo because you were in between deadlines. Reinvigorate the idea by finding a new hook and send it out again. You never know – it may have legs after all.
Make new friends. Been too busy to introduce yourself to a new market? Not anymore. Find a title or website you love. Read the back issues, old posts and of course the latest offerings. Dissect the sections, research the commissioning heads and start pitching.
Cull your Twitter feed. Delete eggheads you can’t stand and follow and tweet those editors or other writers you’d like to strengthen ties with.
Create a slump force-field. If you can’t stand the insecurity of a slow period (I’m one of those people), it’s always good to have a financial buffer. Not just money in the bank, but a bread and butter job a day or two a week that pays the rent/mortgage, groceries and utilities. That way, if work does dry up it won’t threaten your livelihood or the financial security of your family.
Get to it. We all have jobs that we hate. Perhaps it’s scanning that pile of cuts, uploading new screen grabs to your site – or asking people if you can use their kind words as testimonials. Before the next feast period hits, use this famine to refresh your online portfolio and embed it with SEO metadata and take a good hard look at your social media platforms. Does your LinkedIn profile reflect what you’ve been working on or where you want your business to head? The same goes for Facebook. Have you got a branded business page with your logo? Does it have your correct information? Are there pages you should be following and connections you should be making?
Conduct a skillset survey. Have you become complacent? Are there areas in which your writing could improve? If so, identify what you could work on to make you a more attractive proposition to clients. Take it one step further and look back at the past financial year. What did you do well that had a great response from clients or was financially rewarding? On the flipside, which clients would you like to fire? Use these insights to sus out where to put your energy and how to avoid the clients which suck the very oxygen from your lungs.
Don’t panic. Rather than see this as the beginning of the end, take stock and realise that it’s not a personal reflection of you or your worth as a freelance creative. As dear old Oprah said, ‘Your focus is your future’. When you focus on the negative, it is impossible to get positive results. Living in the past is like driving while looking through the rear-view mirror. So don’t give in to a state of negativity or complacency. Use this time wisely instead. The real upside of having a slump, apart from clearing out that in tray that’s threatening to avalanche onto the floor, is that it often motivates us to take actions that in the long run strengthen our business.
What’s your M.O. when a slump hits – panic, or get proactive? Let us know in the comments.
I’m actually hella busy at the moment but I’d definitely advise your to do your admin. I just found about $700 worth of unsent invoices from the past financial year due to poor bookkeeping on my part (they were all waiting on client approval of copy and I should have followed them up sooner).
And I just spent a couple of hours slowly filling out my website with a portfolio of work, which is worth doing properly.
Agree completely – such a nice bonus to realise there’s outstanding payments. I used to print out my invoices and keep them in a dedicated folder until they’d been paid where they went into the accounts folder.
Now I have an excel spreadsheet, no surprise to regulars, that has the date, the contact, the job, the date I sent the invoice and if it has been paid. That way it’s all in one place for a quick glance. I also update it as soon as a commission has been signed off!