Starting out as a freelance writer can be a big upfront investment in time and money. That investment can pay dividends, but making mistakes while looking for freelance writing jobs for beginners can jeopardize the entire venture.

Mistakes To Avoid When Seeking Freelance Writing Jobs for Beginners

Mistakes are inevitable when starting any new endeavor, especially when you don’t have much experience. You may have experience writing but not in entrepreneurship, and that is where many new freelance workers struggle. Here are some mistakes that can do significant damage to your current or future career prospects as you seek to make a living at freelance writing.

1. Quitting Your Day Job Too Early

You might want to quit your day job right away to devote all your time and energy to freelance writing. This can be especially tempting if you don’t like your day job. However, it can take time to start earning a significant income from freelance writing jobs for beginners. In the meantime, you have bills to pay as well as yourself and possibly a family to feed. Quitting your day job too early can sink you into deep financial difficulty, and it can be difficult to extricate yourself.

Instead, make the freelance writing venture a side hustle that you do during your off hours. As the venture becomes more successful, talk to your boss about reducing your hours at your day job so that you can split your job more evenly with your freelance writing. Once you have determined that you can become self-supporting through freelance writing alone, you can finally quit your day job.

2. Failing To Make Sufficient Plans

If you intend to make a living as a freelance writer, you have to make both long-term and short-term plans. Short-term plans include making schedules and deciding when you are going to work on your side hustle every day and how many total hours a week you are going to spend on it. This type of planning helps you to avoid procrastination.

As a freelance writer, time is your most valuable resource. Procrastination is your enemy because it steals time that you can never get back. Short-term planning on a daily and weekly basis also helps you to avoid burnout by scheduling time away from both writing and your day job for rest and relaxation.

Long-term planning involves assessing your financial situation and figuring out a benchmark that you need to meet before you can start scaling down your hours from your day job and eventually quitting it altogether. Both types of planning are crucial to your success, and you should start the planning process before you start looking for freelance writing jobs in earnest.

3. Falling for Freelance Writing Scams

There are many legitimate freelance writing jobs for beginners available, but there are many more scam offers that are trying to take advantage of you. Learn to identify the signs that a job is legitimate. Furthermore, heed the old advice that if an opportunity sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

4. Taking the Wrong Kinds of Jobs

Just because a job is legitimate doesn’t necessarily mean that it is right for you. The “wrong kinds” of jobs are jobs that aren’t worth your time and that you don’t believe in.

A job that takes hours to do but doesn’t compensate you enough for your investment of time isn’t worth it. You can figure out whether a job is worth your time by estimating how long it will take you to write it and comparing it to the pay rate. Bear in mind that it takes time and practice to reach your top writing speed.

Earning a living as a freelance writer could present work opportunities that might compromise your ideals, especially at first. Therefore, you should clearly delineate the lines that you won’t cross under any circumstances and avoid taking jobs that feel wrong to you. If you don’t believe in the project, you won’t do a good job, and that doesn’t help anyone.

5. Having Too Many Grammatical Errors

Everyone makes occasional spelling and grammar mistakes, but having too many in your writing can hurt your credibility. Budget time for proofreading before the deadline so you can look at your writing with fresh eyes. As you gain success as a writer, you can consider whether hiring proofreading services would be worthwhile.

6. Not Following Up on Inquiries

When you’ve found some prospective freelance writing jobs for beginners, make inquiries to the client. However, don’t give up if you don’t hear back right away. Following up on your inquiry shows that you are serious.

The Biggest Mistake: Not Working With Content Creation Firms To Find Freelance Writing Jobs for Beginners

When you first start out as a freelance writer, you can spend at least as much time marketing your services as you spend actually writing. If this doesn’t sound appealing, look for freelance writing jobs for beginners with content creation companies.

If you have other tips on how to get started as a freelance writer, please share them in the comments below.