Most of the time, I assume my clients are working from a traditional business setting. No matter who they are, I envision a nice, air-conditioned office, a telephone answering service, regular working hours, and a professional wardrobe that puts me to shame. Working from home is still new enough to me (and seemingly incredible from time to time) that I assume I am the exception rather than the rule.

However, while individuals working from virtual offices may still be in the minority, there are substantially more work-from-home professionals and parents than you think there are. This is because people working in offices still seem to carry a bit more authority than individuals clocking their hours around soccer schedules and day care issues, so those of us in the latter category tend to “hide” the fact that that is exactly what we are doing.

Although the rational part of me knows that working from home or a virtual office is no source of shame, I can’t help but perk up when I hear the screams of someone else’s children on the other end of the phone. I adore getting apologies from seemingly collected businesspeople as they are forced to attend to what only can be teenagers demanding the keys to the car or money for the mall.

That’s why it is a continual delight to come across clients who are in the exact same situation as the rest of us. In the past two weeks, I have discovered that not one, not two, but three of my client contacts are WAHMs. They work from virtual offices and around the needs of their small children. And these aren’t small potatoes clients either – some of them are incredibly successful professionals amongst whom it is an honor to work.

In reality, working with individuals in virtual offices is beneficial for a number of reasons:

• They have more flexible schedules, so questions are often answered in the middle of the night and phone calls can be set up during untraditional hours.

• They understand the costs of working as a freelancer or an independent contractor. When you ask for a reasonable hourly rate, they automatically know that you are calculating taxes, administrative hours, and PayPal fees into the overall charge, so they don’t balk at the total number.

• They are an incredible networking opportunity. Our website designer and our nonprofit blog designer (yet to be unveiled, thank you very much) both work from virtual offices. We send work their way, and they send work ours. We all belong to the same club, with the never-discussed-but-readily-apparent rules of loyalty and reciprocation.

• They employ the latest in communications technology. Instant messages, Twitters, and emails abound among the virtual office set. Telephone and face-to-face communication methods are oftentimes a heavier time investment than sending off a quick email every now and then, so it’s nice to work with a group of people who operate along the same lines.

• They work on different pay schedules than traditional offices. When I submit an invoice to a large organization, I typically have to wait until the right department approves and submits the payment. The work-at-home set typically pays much, much faster (oftentimes on the same day as the project completion).

The work-from-home set is an incredible bunch of people (as many of us will attest). Although I would never turn down a job from a traditional office setting, I am happy to include so many WAHMs and virtual office professionals in my client list.

Writing website content for a company you are working with for the first time is a tricky business. Because a website is a very personal representation for many businesses (especially smaller businesses, which are the ones doing the bulk of the hiring for freelancers), you really have to focus on capturing the essence of who they are and what they are trying to accomplish. (This is, of course, excepting those websites that just want a cheesy sales pitch in CAPITAL LETTERS with exc!lam!ation! points placed randomly throughout the text and emphasized wherever possible. Those, in my estimation, are another category entirely.)

For the most part, website content writing is very hit-or-miss. There will be instances in which your client loves every single word, and there will be times when you get what is the email equivalent of a blank stare and several bemused blinks. Rarely, if ever, have I landed anywhere in the middle.

There are typically three client types when it comes to needing website content:

Type A: Has no idea what they want to say. You get a brief overview of the company and general writing directions (“I want it to be creative but traditional; innovative but not too risky”). Once you complete the writing and turn it in, they immediately pounce on what needs to be changed. What you don’t change, they do, eventually compiling your sentences in a random pattern that for some reason makes them happy.

Type B: Has no idea what they want to say. You get a brief overview of the company and general writing directions. They love every word and immediately put it up on their website (occasionally changing your punctuation in a manner that completely nullifies your intent) since they know very well that they could never write anything better.

Type C: Knows exactly what they want it to say but can’t say it themselves. They offer what they have attempted to come up with in the past as well as insight into their company’s vision and founding. No matter what you turn in, they are happy with the result, oftentimes asking for one or two revisions on a tricky portion, but still pleased with the outcome.

Fortunately, a good freelance writer can navigate a relationship with every single one of these client types – even the Type A folks. The outcome is all in how you handle your side of the job.

• You usually can’t tell a Type A from a Type B right from the start, so it’s best to always assume you are working with the former. Avoid a conflict by asking probing questions designed to get a better understanding of what they want before you get started. Who is their primary audience? What words would they use to describe the reaction they want from readers? What do they hope to accomplish right away? In two years? How important is search engine ranking? How hard should sales be pushed? Eventually, you’ll come up with your own list of pertinent questions that will become a sort of template for each website you write.

• Have patience with the Type A clients. Here at Berry-Brewer, we’ve been there ourselves; when we asked for a website design, we had no idea what it was we wanted. It was so much easier to nitpick a sample than it was to clearly define what it was we wanted in the first place (mostly because we didn’t know). It’s not that we weren’t happy with what our designer came up with, it’s that we wanted it to reflect us a little bit more – and we did that by picking out what we wanted to change. That’s the nature of this type of work. (Trust me, if you look in your past, you’ll probably find that you, too, have been a Type A at some time or another.)

• Always reinforce your willingness to make revisions (assuming you are willing, of course). If your clients come back horrified with the outcome of your writing, they might actually be worried that this is a one-time deal and that you won’t work with them to achieve a happy outcome, thereby making you a complete waste of money. I consider website writing a collaborative process, and I let my clients know that from the start. I also make sure that my cost to the client includes this process, so that they don’t end up with hidden fees for revisions.

• Never, never take rejection personally when it comes to websites. It’s easy to be affronted when someone comes back and dislikes what you’ve come up with – but it’s not your website. Your job is to make the client happy. If that means they want to move paragraphs around and add sentences to the point at which you are no longer willing to use their website as a sample, so be it. Of course, you may want to gently offer your professional opinion, especially if you know more about SEO or marketing than they do, but in the end, it’s not your decision to make.

If you’re the type of freelancer who gets website content spot on every time, good for you. (Or, perhaps, how fortunate that you never had to work with a Type A.) At the end of the day, most of us will come across at least a few of those hard-to-please clients who seem to dislike anything and everything that we do.

The moral of this story is that you can’t win the first time every time. What makes a good freelancer great is being able to make revisions and collaborate so that the client is satisfied with the end result. In this case, it’s the destination that counts, not the journey.

The question of how to charge more money (and how to make more money) as a freelancer is one that continually plagues us here at Freelance Parent. A little while back, I mentioned that we are just learning to walk that fine line between making good money and having enough work to keep us busy. When all is said and done, perfecting these navigation skills is really all it takes to charge more and make more as a freelancer.

The “Charge More, Make More” Idea

One recurring theme in the “how to make more money” game is to just charge more. However, the concept of charging higher fees in order to raise your income level is a deceptively simple one. The idea is that by selling yourself as a professional worthy of commanding higher prices, you will find the clients willing to pay that much. Period. However, I recently ran a little experiment wherein all my bids for jobs for a month were placed at the rate I really want to make rather than my usual, slightly-lower rate.

You know what the response was? Not a single bite. In fact, I placed a bid yesterday at my lower rates and already have a job lined up. Go figure.

I wasn’t catastrophically upset by this experiment, since it fits in with my theories about charging more and making more (and I made sure I had enough work lined up to keep me busy in the interim).

How “Charge More, Make More” Really Works

Making more money and getting higher rates of pay is actually a really complicated balance that most of us are still working out. If you want to make more money, you have to charge more money – but not to everyone, and not all at once.

When I break down my income into averages and include all my own administrative work, I make a decent hourly rate. However, it is hardly achieved with any measure of consistency. Here’s how it works: I have one client who pays very, very well. I love them, but they are the exception rather than the rule. I’ve built a solid relationship up with them over time, and they continually send more work my way. Understandably, my income has risen with these changes.

The rest of the time, I fill in the “gaps” with lower paying work. While I’m not making the kind of figures I want with these clients, it is still income. Some pay better than others, and some are simply a great way for me to expand my experience and make more connections. I have enough work to fill my 15 to 20 desired hours per week, but not all of it is blow-me-away fantastic.

The next step in the “Charge More, Make More” game has been said all over the blogosphere: a freelancer should fire his or her lower-paying clients and slowly ease his or her way into the upper echelons of clientele. Although I rely heavily on my good-paying client right now, I know that sticking to just one client is not a feasible long-term plan. Securing several high-paying sources will (over time) replace all the lower paying ones I currently rely on to make up my income differences and fill my time. Eventually, I should be sitting exactly where I want to be financially.

When “Charge More, Make More” Doesn’t Work

There are several scenarios in which this process might not work:

You don’t have any high-paying clients yet. Although I’m willing to take on what amount to $15/hour jobs as a secondary measure, it would not be a happy situation if that is all I could ever get. Remember, freelancers have quite a bit of communication to do and administrative work to attend to. If you’re only billing $15/hour (or making the equivalent with flat-fee or per-word writing), you’re probably making half that by the time you clock all your hours. That’s minimum wage. You have to have some better-paying gigs to balance out the lower-paying ones, or you’ll just get burnt out and frustrated.

You really aren’t worth the amount you’re charging. Whether it’s a lack of experience, a lack of skills, or a lack of effective marketing, you may simply find that people aren’t willing to pay more for your services because they can get better for less somewhere else. That’s the nature of competition. Sometimes, you may have to beef up your skills/education/experience, create a stellar marketing platform, discover a new approach to writing queries, network better, or simply charge less in order to get the jobs.

You aren’t being patient. When a potential client posts a bid on an online site or a job board, we freelancers typically scramble to get a query in ASAP. However, your client may not get back to you with the same hustle and bustle. I’ve had clients hire me as much as four months after I made initial contact, without a word in the meantime. The moral of this story is that even though you might feel like you are climbing ladders to nowhere, things can turn around very quickly. Stick with it, try a few different techniques, and be patient. Old clients may return or new ones may discover the other guy they hired isn’t working out. You never know.

Most of us take the things we read online with a grain of salt – a wise move, since you never really know what kind of cracked-up individuals are purporting to have years of experience and mountains of expertise. Unless you take the time to check references, look businesses up in the Better Business Bureau, and call various universities to ascertain if said Master’s Degree is a reality (none of which is a bad idea), you pretty much have to assume that blog writers, clients, and freelancers are telling the truth. That’s why any freelance writer worth hiring double checks all facts gleaned from the wonderful world wide web before putting them in an article; and why that same freelance writer won’t work with a new client without taking some contractual and/or escrow-related steps prior to getting started.

That being said, I’m going to tell you a little something: as I move my way around the Internet and the blogosphere, I’ve caught several blog writers, clients, and freelance professionals in a lie. Oh, not the sort of lie that smacks of utter deceit or that will cause anyone undue harm. It’s more like a few bluffs now and then to make themselves seem more professional, more experienced, more something.

Good for them.

So What Good is an Online Personality?

Sanity

Freelancers are notorious for their inability to separate home lives and professional lives. With children screaming underfoot, last-minute work occurring well into the night, and telephone interviews taking place in the bathroom with the door firmly closed and locked (or is that just me?), it’s no wonder that we struggle to create a boundary between what we do and who we are.

Building an online persona is a great way to strengthen that boundary. Although blogs are known for being an opportunity to bear our souls and air our grievances (at least it is here on Freelance Parent from time to time), there still remains a barrier between the you that others see and the you that you really are. This is simply a healthy part of this kind of life; by keeping a part of yourself closed to your audience, you are maintaining a semblance of privacy.

Marketing

Depending on what you are trying to sell and who your primary audience is, having an online persona can be a great way to bring in clients and get yourself that elusive USP. I always feel deeply mortified when I see a used car salesman on a commercial, since I have yet to see one (a salesman or a commercial) that doesn’t fit into the sleazy, I’d-sell-my-kid-for-a-million-dollars stereotype. I have sincere hopes that at home, among their families, these guys are perfectly nice and normal; and that for them, the car salesman persona is simply a part of their sales gimmick.

While we freelancers don’t have quite the same stereotype going (nor do I think we should plan on getting one), building up a quality online personality can help to strengthen your image as an expert (or whatever else it is you want to convey) in your field. That could very well mean more money. More money is good.

Confidence

Having an online persona is also a great way to boost confidence: your own and that of your clients in you. Opening yourself up as the neurotic, second-guessing freelancer that you really are isn’t a great way to inspire confidence among those who might hire you. Most clients want someone who can take charge, ask the right questions, and get the job done in a smooth, professional straight line. Putting forward that person - even if he or she appears to be taking an extended leave of absence - might mean the difference between getting one or two jobs a month and making a living.

Having a confident exterior will inevitably work its way inside, as well. Even if you still quake in your shoes every time you have to do that telephone interview from the bathroom (again, is this just me?), knowing that others think of you as a calm and cool professional does wonders for your self-esteem. If they feel certain that you are qualified (and you didn’t lie in your qualifications), then you are. Go with it.

Feast or famine. It’s a term we hear a lot in the freelancing world. One day you may be overwhelmed by the number of projects on your plate, while the next leaves you wondering if you’ll ever have a paying gig again. We’ve found ourselves on both sides of the fence, and we’ve determined that it’s actually not all that bad of a deal.

Despite your best efforts, you’re likely still going to come across times when you just don’t have as much paying work as you would like. This is frustrating at best and terrifying at worst. We found ourselves in this situation a while back, and our first instinct was to panic. This kind of lull is an open door for worries and self doubts.

Fortunately, we didn’t spend too much time focusing on the “famine” aspect of our situation. You know why? Because we were too busy. You read that right. Just because we didn’t have an overabundance of paying clients at the moment didn’t mean there was nothing to do. In fact, we were able to use the lull to take care of ourselves and our own business. It gave us a chance to sort of catch our breath and look around to discover what else we needed to be doing.

• We spent more guilt-free time with our families.
• We became revitalized when it comes to blogging.
• We came up with a new strategy to make our Berry-Brewer web site work for us.
• We discovered some earning opportunities we hadn’t fully considered before.
• We developed classes for SparkplugU.
• We got to have actual conversations with our colleagues.
• We revisited our goals and our business plan.

Want to know something amazing? Once we got these things in order, the jobs started coming back. Don’t get me wrong, we bid on jobs before, during, and after the lull; but it was almost like the universe gave us the opportunity to get our ducks in a row.

So, the next time you experience a lull in your business, take a look around. What things could you be doing that will help take you to the next level? As long as the bills are paid, you’ve got the perfect opportunity to redirect your attention for a short time. Take advantage of it.

One of the interesting things about working with a business partner is that we don’t always agree on everything. This could be a terrible burden, of course, depending on exactly where the disagreement falls.

• Let’s say we disagreed on how to split our money, for example. Well, that’d probably be a deal breaker.
• What if we disagreed on the types of projects our company would accept? Nope, that wouldn’t work.
• Oh, what if Tamara wanted to have a brick-and-mortar business, and I wanted to work from home 100% of the time . . . Actually, we decided to cross that bridge when we come to it.

The point is that there are a lot of disagreements that could really cause us some trouble. Fortunately, whether or not we should work on holidays isn’t one of them.

Last week, Tamara posted about how she kind of feels like she should work on holidays. As she explained to me, her entire family has worked in the service industry (nursing, cinemas, etc.), so it just seems par for the course.

I was raised by entrepreneurs. My parents saw holidays as a way to offer some sort of “special” to their customers and then be closed for the big day to do family stuff. I’ll admit that I worked my fair share of Thanksgivings and New Year’s Eves when I was still a slave to the retail grind, but those days are behind me.

They’re behind me because I choose to leave them there.

Not too long ago, we wrote about how we define success as freelancers. In our case, it has a lot to do with being able to say “no” when we want. The flip side of this is that we can also say “yes” if we want. If Tamara is willing to accept a Christmas day deadline, then more power to her. I, on the other hand, am likely to take the entire week off to travel to Montana.

As for the time zone thing . . . well, we both get hosed on that one.

I’ve been around the blogosphere enough by now to come to understand that there remains one issue that freelancers skirt, avoid, and downright ignore: money. Oh, sometimes we talk about how much to charge or our goals for the future.  There’s even a fair amount of discussion about how to set freelance pay rates.  But rarely does anyone come right out and say, “Hello. I’m a freelancer. I’ve been doing this for about ten months now, and I’m happily bringing in what averages out to $1,200 per month take home pay for 15 to 20 hours of work per week.”

But there you go. I’ve just said it.  After reinvesting in the business and taking taxes into consideration, my pay rates allow me to take home about $1,200 a month working a bit less than half time.

Money is one of those things few people talk about, and I get the reservations. You don’t want to seem boastful when you talk about your six figures. You don’t want to be ridiculed for what you charge. You don’t want someone to come right out and say, “Dude. You are making way too little. I’m making three times that in my first two hours of the week.” However, I can’t help but feel that it’s the elephant in our giant freelancing room.

Here at Freelance Parent, we actually get quite a few questions about money and freelance pay rates in general. Oftentimes, these aren’t asked through the blog itself, but come through in our personal email.

• Readers want to know if my pay rates for spec work are the same amount of money I would normally charge for a job. (Yes.)
• Readers want to know how much money we are actually making through Guru.com. (We expect to hit the $10,000 mark by our one-year anniversary in August.)
• Readers want to know how we came up with the pay rates listed on our website. (It starts at $0.10/word or $30/hour. Believe us, this number took some agonizing over, and we don’t always get this much.)
• Readers want to know what portion of our freelance income comes from a single client. (Most of mine comes from two regular, well-paying jobs that I’ve had for six months or so.)
• Readers really, really want to know how to make more money freelancing. (This isn’t a one sentence answer. It’s a complicated tangle of marketing, writing skills, perseverance, and luck.)
• Readers want to know why we undervalue ourselves by charging lower pay rates than many others in the field. (We don’t. We are learning to traverse the fine line between charging what we feel we’re worth and having enough work to keep us busy.)

Money, income, and pay rates are also very much dependent on the freelancer. I like working only a few hours a day, but I know that I make less because of it. I live in a pretty cheap city and have super-low overhead (as well as a husband), so I can get away with making less without stressing about it. Although my income is small compared to someone working full-time, it, along with my average pay rates, has been increasingly growing since I started. I’ve also reached a point where I can turn away work I don’t want without worrying about it, which is one of my financial goals.

Money makes people nervous. I get it. But I’m hereby inviting everyone to ask questions and share their opinions on this oh-so-touchy subject. Let’s talk about freelance pay rates.  Let’s talk about how much money we’re really taking home.  I’m happy to have this conversation with you.

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Defining a freelance writing niche is an incredible way for freelance writers to narrow their own focus and really jump-start their businesses. There are so many advantages to working this way. Not only does it give the freelancer a place to start looking, but building up expertise helps ensure future jobs in the same niche writing market.

Throughout the course of writing Freelance Parent, we have repeatedly stressed the importance of finding a niche in which to focus. We have done our best to help other aspiring writers get started by offering solid suggestions for niche writing markets. As a matter of fact, we’ve even taken our own advice, and we’ve been working hard to define our agency as one that caters specifically to the needs of nonprofit organizations. But what about the freelance writer who doesn’t want to specialize in grants and donor newsletters?

The following list contains 67 real freelance writing niches that an enterprising freelance writer could explore as a means of starting or growing a business. Some of these ideas could comprise an entire business all on their own. Others might be combined to offer a full-service experience. Each niche writing market listed here could also stand on its own to offer at least a little part-time income.

1. Interpretive Panels – Ever go for a walk on a city or state trail? Most public outdoor recreation areas put up those great little signs along the way, telling passersby all about the flora and fauna, the history of the area, and other interesting tidbits. Tamara is currently working with a graphic designer friend of hers to put in several local bids for this surprisingly profitable freelance writing niche.

2. Menus – Not all restaurants are up for something out-of-the-ordinary when it comes to their menus, but more and more eating establishments are willing to add a little creativity to their text. The freelance writer who knows cuisine and restaurant terminology could really have an edge in this niche.

3. Synopses for Scripts, Movies, and Books – Believe it or not, there is an art form to being able to take hundreds of pages of text and turn it into one or two relevant paragraphs. Tamara has dabbled in this niche writing market with a few script synopses for a friend at Spokane’s movie production company.

4. Wedding Websites – Build-it-yourself websites to share all the intimate details of an upcoming wedding are becoming incredibly popular. However, while most companies (like Wedding Window) offer templates and advice, they generally leave the text up to the potential brides and grooms. People spend fortunes on their weddings, so shelling out a few bucks to have a professional writer jazz up a proposal story is something many people are willing to do.

5. Personal Bios – Whether it’s for a business website, a job application, or personal web page, there are countless reasons why a personal bio needs a professional touch. Although there are a number of websites offering how-tos on writing one’s own bio, there are also a number of freelance writers (including us) who offer them as a part of their services.

6. Real Estate Ads – The great thing about writing real estate ads is that the freelance writer can either work for an agency or for individual real estate agents. Writing real estate ads combines a little bit of writing and a little bit of marketing, so it is definitely a specialized freelance writing niche.

7. Band Bios – From writing for small bands looking to make an impact on the web to filling the content of entire sites devoted to all things musical, writing a band bio is about more than just listing the facts. Freelance writers who are passionate about music and really know their stuff when it comes to the current scene can find this niche to be a great way to combine what they love with what they do.

8. Writing Prompts – Aspiring creative writers love having someone to dig them out when their muse completely abandons them. If you are good at brainstorming, you might be able to mine this freelance writing niche by coming up with ways for writers of all ages to get their thoughts going.

9. Case Studies – These can be considered a form of business writing because many organizations need case studies to share with potential clients; although textbooks are full of them, too. This is a great niche writing market for someone who likes to share facts but can throw in enough creative flair to make them come alive for the reader. Lorna did a batch of these to accompany a learning module for a nonprofit organization.

10. Catalog Descriptions – This is an area of copywriting that often gets overlooked. You can extend it, too, to include descriptions for ecommerce sites. This is technically how Lorna got her very first freelance writing job, and Tamara’s described more than her fair share of t-shirts and funky furniture for online retailers.