Feast or famine, will you starve?

Will you have any of this during the slow times?

Mastering the discipline of restraint may just be the most important tool in your arsenal as a budding pro blogger, freelancer or internet mogul. If you are generating any income at all from sponsored posts, paid reviews or even paid writing gigs, then you’ve probably seen it.  For a few days there will be well paid opportunities available everywhere, so many that you can’t fit them all in.  It’s like a money making heaven.  Then, a few days later you find yourself looking at a screen full of just about nothing, with no way to make your daily goal for income and no real chance of making that goal for the next few days.  This is the life of a freelancer, it’s the way things go.  It’s called feast or famine, and how you deal with it can make the difference between being successful as a pro blogger or freelancer and having to go back to the Evil Day Job.

Why am I mentioning freelancers and bloggers that do paid posts in the same paragraph?  Because by definition, they are the same thing.  There is no distinction between a person who accepts a job to write a 500 word article for $40.00 and a blogger that accepts a 300 word post for $20.00.  Both are freelancing.  Also, by definition all bloggers (with the exception of photo-bloggers, perhaps) are writers.  If anything the definition between the two only blurs in the editing department, since most bloggers are not the world’s best editors!

Now that we’ve got the definitions out of the way, what is a freelancer to do when there is a ton of work one week and no work the next?  For me the short answer is always to tackle as many projects as I can, when I can, especially if they present themselves early in the month.  If you can whip out double or triple your weekly income for the first week of a given month, a slow space in the middle isn’t going to cause you undue stress.  But if there’s a boom at the end and you’ve managed to keep up with your goals, just take what you can get and if possible, allow the extra to roll over into the following month.

In this way you start building yourself a slush fund for those slower times.  Think of what you do as a business.  If you owned a company that suddenly made a few extra million one month, chances are you wouldn’t just give all of your employees a raise, or pay them the next three month’s salary at once.  That money would go into the bank and pe paid out as usual.  If you can master the discipline to do this in your writing or blogging career, you’re well on your way to never being worried about a slump.

Of course, if you are consistantly going over the mark and find that you’ve got over two months worth of slush fund, it might just be time to consider giving yourself a raise.

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