How to Transition from Your 9-5 Job to Being a Freelance Blogger

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Your life sucks.

You work at a job you don’t even like. You collaborate with people whom you don’t care for. You’re doing this simply for the paycheck.

You’ve always wanted to turn blogging into a career, following the many things you’ve read about it. You want to do something that fulfills you as a person and gives your life meaning. You want to write about your passion and monetize it.

However, you find yourself stuck in the same situation for years. Still pissed off at your job, still longing for something better.

There is no point in spending most of your time being miserable.

You should always ways to make your life better, even if it means quitting your job.

I know what you’re thinking:

“I’m scared!”

“I don’t know what to do!”

“There’s nothing out there for me!”

If you keep thinking this way, then you’ll be stuck with the same job before your retirement.

Therefore, you need to make a move now. Change your life forever by quitting your full-time job and become a freelance blogger.

In her quote about moving on, Vivian Greene says, “[l]ife is not about waiting for the storms to pass. It’s about learning how to dance in the rain.”

If you can’t afford to quit your job right now, then you can still develop your freelancing career on the side until you get it up and running. Below are steps that you should take to establishing your blogging career.

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Yes, It’s Possible to Grab Loans When Working as a Freelancer

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Freelancing has become an incredibly popular way for men and women around the world to make money. Freelancing is, in essence, having your own business. It allows you to not just generate your own income, but to control how much you earn. When you freelance, you take charge of your own finances and work life. Even though you may not actually register as a business, but rather as an independent contractor doing freelancing work, you may have difficulty acquiring a loan. [Read more…]

5 Thoughts For Investing In Your Freelancing Career In 2017

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If you want to succeed as a freelance blogger or writer, it’s very important that you make the right decisions when it comes to investing your time and money into your career. For most people, this is hard to determine, but knowing what to invest in shouldn’t be that difficult. Take a look at the list below and see the five things you need to invest in so that you can have a fun, fulfilling and lucrative career.  [Read more…]

When Clients Don’t Pay: Legal Options for Freelancers

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It’s a worst case scenario for a freelancer. After spending valuable time and energy completing a project to your client’s exact specifications, they drop contact as soon as your invoice hits their desk. Ordinary employees have numerous protections granted to them under the law, but the legal waters are murkier for independent contractors.

If a client doesn’t pay up, what are your options? Here are a few points to consider. [Read more…]

Freelancers: Don’t Let Work Kill Your Relationship

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Working from home. It’s the dream, right? Never again will you have to wake up and drag yourself to the office. Since you’re around the house all the time, your family obligations will be a cinch to take care of. When you work remotely as a freelancer, it’s much easier to manage your work/life balance, right?

The unfortunate reality is that working from home is hard work, indeed. Sure, you don’t have to wake up and drag yourself to the office—but that convenience comes with a price. In our quest to be successful, sometimes we create the inverse scenario: the office never leaves us. As it turns out, your work/life balance may actually be more difficult to manage when your workplace and home are one and the same. It’s hard to keep up with things when you work all hours of the day and night, only sometimes finding time to eat and sleep. [Read more…]

Blogging Local: How to Find Freelancing Gigs in Your City

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Working at home is great, but it comes with a major drawback: it’s easy to start feeling isolated if you never get the chance to leave the house. It’s quite a dilemma. You love being a freelance writer for all the opportunities and freedom it provides, but sometimes you feel like you’ve been shackled to your desk for weeks.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get out there, amidst all the action, and then come home and write about it? Here’s the good news: it’s entirely possible, if you find a freelancing gig that’s local to your community.

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Blogging Jobs: How Much Are Bloggers Paid to Blog?

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Blogging Jobs by Lorelle VanFossenAs we continue with this series on blogging jobs, it’s time to look at the income a blogger can make by blogging for pay.

The skills and qualities a company or blog owner is looking for from a blogger are extensive, far beyond just writing abilities. As with any freelance job, determining how to put a value on the time it really takes, and the costs associated with the time and production, is really hard when the real cost is in time, not materials. Bloggers should be paid for the time as well as their expertise and abilities. Are they? This is a problem that has been around for a very long time. How much is your time worth?

For many decades, professional editorial writers found a compromise on the time/value issue with payment by the word with a restriction on word count. I often was told, “We’ll pay you a dollar a word up to 1,000 words maximum.”

This meant the magazine, newspaper, newsletter, or other print publication had space for one thousand words that needed to be filled. Going over meant changing their magazine or newspaper design structure. Giving them less meant I’d be paid less, but somewhere in the middle was a compromise for both of us, usually in the form of me setting a minimum fee I was to be paid, no matter the word count, such as “I want $500 minimum for 700 words and a dollar a word thereafter.” If the article came it at 400 words, I would still be paid my minimum. If it crossed the 700 word mark, at which point I should have been paid $700 for a dollar a word, that’s when they have to start paying me the dollar a word rate. It wasn’t the best, but the companies felt like they were getting a deal and for the most part, I covered the minimum I needed to pay my rent and eat.

Here is a chart for the various traditional writer’s pay scale based upon a dollar amount per word. The more experience and expertise, the higher the fee per word.
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Blogging Jobs: How Much is Blogging Worth?

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Blogging Jobs by Lorelle VanFossenIn “Blogger Jobs: What Are They Looking For?” we talked about what jobs are out there and what blog owners and companies are looking for when they hire a blogger. Blogger Jobs: How to Apply For a Blogger Job? covered how to apply for a job as a blogger, with some good tips on what to do – and not to do. Today, I want to look at a very serious issue: How much are they paying bloggers to blog?

The issue of the blogging pay scale is very important, not just because I’m one of the workers in this new industry who expects to be able to pay the rent or meet a mortgage, but also because I represent the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, of people who want to make money blogging.

In a NY Times article on the blogging sweatshops by Matt Richtel (Print Version) the description of people of one of the hottest jobs in the world has writers churning out mass volumes of content working around-the-clock to make enough money to survive. It’s called blogging.
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