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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There are plenty of job sites out there that offer freelance work at the rate of a dollar per 500 words, or some other extremely low rate. I won’t work for those rates, but for some people a single dollar has a sufficient buying power to make it worth their time. Consider a country like Cambodia, where the average income in U.S. dollars is $290. A dollar is more than a lot of people can make in a day, making it worthwhile.

I leave the low-paying gigs to the people who can benefit from them. Instead, I focus on landing work that meets my bare minimum payment requirements. I’d love to be able to categorically state that I work for a dollar a word, period. But my payment standard fluctuates quite a bit. I’ll take $15 for a 400 word blog entry — that works out to less than 4 cents a word, but blog posts rarely take much research or as long to write. In general, for articles, I don’t go below 10 cents a word.

I take on a lot of low paying gigs, to fill in the many gaps between articles and other projects. I would rather write a page of SEO text for $15 than not earn anything at all.

What is your time worth? What work will you just not take?

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You’re a freelance writer, right? You spend all day chasing after contracts and jobs, which can be fun in it’s own way, but isn’t perfectly stable.  I’ve talked before about passive income, but today I want to try thinking outside of the box for ways to make money off our writing.

How can we use our writing skills to help us make more money?

A lot of freelancers feel the entrepreneurship drive, but want to expand a little beyond what they’re doing. Here are the first couple of ideas that came to mind, and I want all of your opinions, too!

• Become a publisher of content, as well as a creator. I’m not suggesting that you try to compete with the local daily paper, but what about creating a website or blog if you see a niche?
• Teach a class. There are plenty of aspiring writers out there, and if you write about a specific niche, you might be able to teach about that, as well.
• Work with an agent. Agents don’t just need writers — they need readers to help decide on a manuscript, assistants for office work, etc.

Help me add to this list in the comments.

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Sometimes there is a slow down in who’s hiring in your area. Maybe the magazines you usually write for simply have had to hold enough stories over that they can fill whole issues. Maybe your technical writing clients are just taking a break themselves. Or, horror of horrors, you’ve been relying on only one or two clients for all your work — and they’ve dropped you. There’s a whole slew of reasons that your usual income streams might dry up. But you can keep them from causing you problems by employing some of that famous freelancing flexibility.

The question here is how you can create multiple income streams, so that you’ve always got a little work rolling in. First of all, make sure you’re not putting all your eggs in one basket. Even if a client wants you to devote 40 hours every week to his project, you need to make a point to keep up connections that bring in work from outside, or even keep up working on outside projects. As a freelancer, you can go to a client and say that you can only devote 30 hours a week to a given project. You don’t even need to explain why.

Now, I’m not suggesting that you load up on multiple huge projects just to make sure that you’ll have work down the road. No, sir. That way leads to stress and unnecessary pain. I’m saying that in addition to your one big project, work on a couple of smaller projects. For instance, you might make a point of writing an article or two every month for different magazines, or look into freelance blogging opportunities.

Diversification is a just in case strategy — just in case your main job falls through, you’ve got something to tide you over. It’s a little peace of mind in the uncertain world of freelance writing.