Occasionally, I feel like a broken record, encouraging writers and other freelancers to concentrate on building a business. I encourage all of you to build income beyond just straight writing, and not just because you can significantly increase your income that way.

It’s also a matter of security. There are times when freelance work just seems to dry up. The end of August, for instance, always seems a little quiet. I think half the world goes on vacation right now, if only to get in one last bit of fun before their kids have to be back in school. If you’re dependent on purely freelance income streams, though, any vacations your clients or editors take can cause you some financial difficulties.

Having even one other source of ongoing income smooths out the valleys and mountains in your income, making your financial situation a little more secure. You can make it through rough spots if you have something to fall back on.

I’m a big fan of passive income, especially for writers. As a writer, most of the work we can find involves directly trading our time for money. Sure, we can write faster or raise our rates, but we still face a limit in how many hours we can actually work.

But the flexible schedule that many writers enjoy provides some definite opportunities to create income opportunities that don’t require nearly as much of our time, at least in the long run. Consider books — you have to put in plenty of time at the beginning, to actually write the book. After that, though, if you do just a little bit of marketing every week, you could continuing selling copies forever. I’m simplifying the situation a bit, but writing a book really is comparable to the classic passive income source — the rental property. You have to make a major investment when you buy (or build) a house. But beyond the occasional upkeep, like finding tenants or putting in new carpet, you keep making money.

There are some things you should know about passive income before you start looking for your own opportunities:

1. ‘Passive income’ is a misnomer. In most cases, you can’t just plop down cash or time and expect a constant, consistent payout for the rest of eternity. A house will eventually need a remodel and a book will eventually need an update. Passive income is really reoccurring income.
2. Financial instruments come the closest to truly passive income. If you really do want to just buy on-going income, your best bet is going to be investment opportunities: stocks, bonds, CDs and other financial instruments. Even these require some management — but significantly less than a rental property. You will need a significant amount of upfront money, though, to invest successfully. You can’t mortgage a stock to buy it, after all.
3. Many businesses can be made more passive. There are many options to make any business more passive. A writer, for instance, could outsource certain parts of her business up to and including the actual writing. The paperwork may be more complicated, but you can free up your time without losing income.
4. Any industry has passive income opportunities. Don’t limit yourself to your current niche when thinking about passive income. You may know a ton about writing, but that doesn’t mean that you should ignore investment opportunities. Instead, focus on the return you can expect for your time or money.
5. Not all your income needs to be passive. It’s very hard to turn all of your income streams into passive income. On average, passive income streams don’t have huge payoffs. Instead, I recommend treating any passive income opportunity as a supplement to your day-to-day work.

The only other piece of advice I can offer about passive income is that the sooner you start, the better. You’ll earn more money over time than if you start looking for passive income options after exhausting your other opportunities.

As a general rule, I’ve worked primarily on projects where at least most of the participants are based in the US. Lately, though, I’ve been starting to rethink my opinion on taking on projects where at least some of the project is international, for several reasons.

I know have two ongoing projects with companies headquartered in other countries — although my direct supervisor for both are located in the U.S. I’ve had no problems, although honestly I didn’t really expect to: these are both fairly established companies that I was easily able to check out.

My comfort level is growing, although certain factors do keep me a bit leery of taking on new international clients, especially those not affiliated with known companies:

• Language barriers. It’s hard enough to make sure that everyone’s on the same page when we’re communicating solely via email. But factor in language barriers (as well as different cultural expectations) and I feel like I run a significant risk of disappointing a client.
• Potential payment problems. I have enough problems waiting patiently for a check from two states over — waiting for payment from another country entirely gives me the opportunity to think up far too many worst case scenarios.
• Limited recourse if something goes wrong. I know the U.S. system — collections, etc. But I have no idea where to start with an international client.

But I’m very tempted to start looking for writing projects in, say, the U.K. Magazine markets over there used to pay fairly competitively with U.S. markets. But as the U.S. dollar has been slipping, payment from U.K. markets has held fairly steady. That basically means that writing for U.K. clients has gotten far more lucrative than it was a few years ago.

It’s tempting, and I’m going to start looking into a few possibilities for international projects. Keep your fingers crossed for me but I think it should all work out fine.

Editors love stories that come with photographs, but not all freelance writers are familiar with the laws governing how a person’s likeness can be used. This post is meant to be a brief introduction and you should keep in mind that I am not a lawyer, and consider my advice in that light.

As a general rule of thumb, your editor will not ask you if you have a model release. The assumption is that, if you managed to arrange an interview with a subject, that individual is fine with having his or her picture in the paper (or whatever publication you’re sending your article to). For this sort of situation, a model release is essentially just in case a subject changes his mind at the last moment. You don’t absolutely have to get a release signed.

However, if you plan to capitalize on your photos beyond a few magazine articles, it is worth the time to get your model release signed. Unless, of course, you enjoy lawsuits. You will need to be able to produce a signed model release if you want to sell your photos to a stock photography site, enter them into photography competitions, sell prints and half a dozen other actions.

Apogee Photo Magazine has an excellent sample release available on their website — although you should keep in mind that their release is for adults only. If you are taking photos of minors, you’ll need their parents’ signatures, as well.

I remain convinced that adding Google AdSense (or many other advertising options) isn’t the best way to monetize a blog or website. That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to make money off of this website, of course — it just means that I don’t plan on selling advertising space unless I have some kind of life-altering epiphany.

I don’t have a problem advertising my own side projects, though. I’d like to think that most of them would be of some interest to most freelance writers, and you, gracious reader, might have an interest in providing some financial support to this site. I’ve posted a few t-shirts in the past several weeks, and I think that this tactic does have potential as a fairly small source of income. (Also, I have a deep and abiding interest in funny shirts.) I plan to continue doing so. However, I won’t be doing it through Cafepress, anymore. To be honest, every time I add a shirt or something on Cafepress, I have to jump through so many hoops, that I get a headache. Right now, I’m testing out Zazzle, as you can see from the shirt below. So far I like it, although I’m planning to try out a few other options in the near future.

make custom gifts at Zazzle

In addition to hoping to make this blog somewhat self-supporting, I consider this whole t-shirt sideline (and other side projects I’m working on) to be part of my end goal: to have several passive income streams related to my writing. The general idea is that if some client or project suddenly goes south, I’m not up the creek without a paddle.

I finished reading The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, by Timothy Ferriss, not too long ago, but it’s taken me a little while to digest. I found it more than a little arrogant in tone, but I have to recommend it to just about any entrepreneur — especially freelance writers who need a kick in the butt to get serious about their incomes.

The basic premise of the book is that anyone can figure out a business plan that requires minimal attention from anyone except for a few very inexpensive virtual assistants in India. Not every writer is going to be able to work with that premise, but the methods that Ferriss used to free up time in his work day can help any of us make more time for those activities that actually make us money.

Answering emails are a good example. With clients and editors, we often get sucked into a back-and-forth trying to hammer out details. How much time could be saved with a first email that set out one or two options including all the details? Ferriss has hundreds of these little methods he uses to clear his time for racing motorcycles and other activities.

These little tips are enough to overcome the tone of Ferriss’ book, which admittedly seems to question why all the rest of us can’t build a business capable of earning thousands of dollars a month between now and when we start supper. It includes numerous resources and generally is a good read-once type of book, in my opinion. It’s worth buying if you only use a quarter of Ferriss’ suggestions.

Taking on bigger freelance projects requires a writer to develop project management skills, if only out of self-defense. The ability to run a project, coupled with a knowledge of writing can make you the perfect freelancer to pick up contracts to do project management, as well as writing. We’re talking about nothing more than organizing people and resources — and I’m willing to be that you’ve built those skills as a freelancer or in your personal life.

Marketing Yourself as a Freelance Project Manager

If you want to add project management to the services you offer, start by listing out projects you’ve worked on in a management capacity. Prospective clients are practically guaranteed to ask for examples of your past work. You need to be prepared to discuss your projects in terms of time, cost and scope — the three key variables of project management. There are certifications that project managers can obtain, as well, such as the PMP (Project Management Professional) designation from the Project Management Institute. I wouldn’t recommend rushing out to get these certificates — at the very least, they’re expensive. However, it is something to keep in mind if you often find yourself managing projects.

Project Management Resources

For a very basic overview of project management, try this article from About.com. If you’re interested in learning a bit more, try the video below (it’s 15 minutes and split into two parts). It’s a good overview, though meant as an advertisement for Surprise! Now You’re A Software Project Manager. Ignore the bits where he says software — the information is just as relevant to writing projects.

While writers who work with magazines and such won’t run into the idea of estimates too often, those writers who work on corporate communications projects — something like writing an employee handbook springs to mind — will often be asked for an estimate.

Estimates are straightforward things, right? You multiply your hourly rate by the number of hours you think it will take to complete a project, and tell your client that number. And that’s the amount that the client will just about always pay at the end of the project.

The problem that I’ve run into, however, is that it can be surprisingly hard to judge how long a project might take. You might need to do some research you hadn’t factored in, or a client might ask for fairly major changes. And even if you do take much longer to complete a project, your client is going to expect you to stand by your estimate.

I’ve heard plenty of advice to take the number of hours you think a project will take — and then add half again that number to figure out your estimate. It can work as a general rule, but it can bulk up a quote significantly and might cause a client to find a different freelance writer. It comes down to a judgment call on what you think you need and what your client can afford.

But I do feel it’s important to add a clause saying that the estimate does not include any changes that the client requests. I may be willing to do a round of edits without additional charge, but any major changes in a project’s direction renders my estimate null and void.

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As a sort of follow up to last week’s post about where freelance writers can take their careers, I compiled a list of just a few options for increasing your income. Now, most of these won’t work for every single writer out there, but I tried to include options that could be adapted to different situations. If you have any thoughts on increasing a freelancer’s income, please, add them to the list in the comments.

1. Sell reprint rights to your articles. While you can’t make as much money on reprint rights as on first rights, you can sell them over and over again. Using this technique turns your past work into a source of passive income: all you have to do is keep those articles on the move to new publications.
2. Write a book. Now, I know that for a lot of freelance writers, the idea of a book seems like it would require a lot of time, with no guaranteed pay out. But I’m not recommending writing fiction (I’m not saying to avoid fiction writing projects — they just tend to have lower payouts). Instead, I’m suggesting that you come up with a book proposal and shop it around. Don’t put all the time and effort into writing a book until you have a publisher willing to pay for it. Furthermore, once written, a book is a long-term earner, especially if you can update the material regularly for later editions.
3. Look for speaking gigs. If your writing has established you as an expert in a specific niche, you can get paid for talking about it. Conferences, organizational meetings, guest lectures: there are plenty of speaking opportunities out there. And if you’re nervous about public speaking, there are plenty of opportunities for online seminars or podcasts, where you’ll never see your audience.
4. Teach a class. While many writers seem to take on opportunities to teach writing courses, there are other options as well, if you consider all of your skills and expertise: if you are a technical writer, you might be able to provide insight into the communication  between engineers and management; if you review movies, you could look for opportunities to teach film appreciation courses. And just like speaking gigs, there are plenty of online opportunities.
5. Consult. It can help to think of consulting as an individual teaching gig. You sit down with a few representatives of a company and offer them the benefit of your experience. Once again, any skill or expertise you have can lead to a consulting opportunity.
6. Create your own product. Greeting cards, ezines, marketing instructional manuals — these products, and many more, can be created in those minutes that you have between writing gigs. Best of all, once you created this sort of material once, you can continue selling it for only the cost of printing. Most can be sold via the internet for minimal expense on your part.
7. Take on management positions. You’d think that there aren’t many management opportunities for a freelancer, but plenty of publications have begun to rely on freelance editors, who are responsible for managing content, as well as coordinating freelance writers. While these sorts of opportunities can take a lot more of your time than pounding out an article, the pay is also significantly more, as long as you stick with reputable publishers.
8. Add to your skills. Learn other aspects of publication, and you can make yourself more valuable to editors. For instance, if you can take your own photographs, you can negotiate your per article rate upwards. If you can offer a cartoon that goes with your story, you have the same opportunity. If you write copy for advertisements and can design the ad that the copy goes with, you can get a leg up as well, just like if you can layout corporate documents you have written for printing.
9. Find long-term projects. Long-term projects are typically  better paying  for writers because there is less of a time sink  in finding work on a regular basis. Time is money, after all, and the more time you spend looking for work, the less time you spend actually working.
10. Reduce your expenses. I know that it sounds counter-intuitive to make more money by doing less, but it is possible. The best example I can offer is the processes of querying and through the mail. At 41 cents a letter, I simply can’t afford to query widely. I don’t. I’ve been able to more than make up any income lost from publications that only accept snail mail queries through the sheer quantity I can afford to send out by email.

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