Question: how did I hustle for freelance gigs?

Paul Raven asks:

Hey, Toby; if you’re still doing your ‘ask me questions’ thing here, a certain somebody not a million miles from where I’m sat right now would really appreciate a post on how you went about hustling for freelance writing gigs to support your fiction career…

I’m always happy to answer direct questions.

My hustling involved me initially posting an announcement on my site saying I’d become a freelance writer. That was important, I believe publicly declaring something makes you feel more committed. I think that was in March (I had until August to work out my contract).

Then, I took out a loan for about 6 months income while I still had a dayjob and provable income.

I also calculated the minimum amount of money I needed to make (worse case scenario), to be about 75-80% of what I was making at the dayjob.

After that, I became a google hound. I used the phrase of the kind of job I wanted and searched. I used Technorati, I frequented every freelance listing board I could find. I subscribed to mediabistro. I signed up to every market listing type newsletter I could find. Since I had almost 10 years blogging experience, I decided to aim at ‘paid blogging.’ I also set up custom rss feeds of searches for freelance work, paid blogging, blogging, editing for Craig’s List in every metro area. I was monitoring some 200 rss feeds and searches and applying the minute anything appeared. It was exhausting and obsessive and fueled by caffeine and desperation to do something I loved and would be passionate about.

Here are a few:
The golden pencil
Bloggerjobs.biz
Problogger job board

After that, I started querying and applying for everything I could a hold of.

There isn’t a ton of money in blogging just yet. I got a lot of offers for $2/post gigs, or $200/month gigs, and the amount of posting required to add them up into a full time job didn’t add up.

And in the end, after a couple months, things started happening and I got a couple jobs and some other freelance work from a friend (contacts are helpful) and that was enough that I had 50% of my income.

The leap from that to where I am now, I don’t know if it is repeatable or what, but several people have followed through on links I’ve posted to interesting blogging tips and have found some good part time income positions.

I’ve also been lucky to have some really great readers and friends who’ve thought of me for various one-offs or work and referred people my way, which has lead to work.

But mainly, I went crazy searching and applying for whatever I could find.

Filed under the topic Journal on February 7th 2007 at 2:13 pm. You can subscribe to the RSS feed for this entry to keep track of comments. You can also use to trackback.