18 Oct

5 More Ways to Become a More Efficient Freelancer

BY Sweet Jane on Sunday, October 18th 2009 under: Writing Tips

iStock_000000103597XSmall Jim Connolly of Jim’s Marketing Blog fame wrote a post on his new blog about speed v.s. quality. It brings up an important point – quality should come first. However, I personally believe that efficiency need not be sacrificed for quality…

Freelance writing is a balance of time and skill. How much quality work can you complete on time? There is a quote about this very concept that sticks in my mind:

I can write better than anyone who can write faster, and faster than anyone who can write better.”

I’ve written before on the topic of time-management for freelancers. Now, this post is going to show you how to write faster while maintaining your quality. Here are five tips for becoming a more efficient freelance writer:

Get All of the Details at the Beginning

How you handle the project requests you receive will directly affect how fast your overall writing process is. It is essential to identify all of your client’s wants and needs the first time around because it saves you the trouble of having to ask for critical details further down the road.

For example, my writing services contact form includes the following fields:

Topic: what niche does the client want the article to be about?
Project Information: what kind of writing needs to be done?
Budget: how much is the client willing to pay for these services.
Deadline: when does the client want their work?

Acquiring the subject, budget, deadline, and details about the project allows you to determine whether or not you can take the project. In addition, if you decide to work with that client, you have everything you need to begin working immediately and get paid faster.

Faster Communication

Alongside gathering important details first, quick communication is the key to finishing a project. You should always respond to initial client requests as soon as possible, because it lets them know if you are interested in the project and allows you to get more information quickly.

In addition, you should update the client at least once a week when working on long-term jobs to touch base and make changes. Gaps in communication provide a larger time period for you to create “useless work” or to go back and have to make drastic changes. Remember, communication is a two-way process, but should never be ignored by writers. You have to encourage your client to get involved in the project.

Use Outlines

Every professional freelance writer should understand the importance of the 80/20 rule – spend 80% of your time preparing and developing a project and 20% completing it. By preparing adequately, you can double your writing output, and your writing quality.

Preparing outlines gives you the ability to think through your articles on a more in-depth level. In addition, creating an outline of a client project allows you to work with more direction, get approval before writing anything, and further develop your ideas. You can even create templates from outlines and past writings for future personal client and writing work.

Templates and outlines greatly reduce your writing time because they allow you to plug in your ideas to an already formatted structure and spend less time revising and formatting your final copy.

Auto-Correct Yourself

Spell check is great, but to improve your productivity and your writing skills, you should learn how to self-correct your spelling and grammar mistakes because it reduces the amount of time you spend later correcting your mistakes.. Understanding where your mistakes are will allow you to correct them “on-the-fly” and you can build a habit of automatically correcting your work.

In addition, learning how to go without spell check will drastically increase your spelling skills. The more you practice spelling the word correctly on your own, the more you will be able to write more effectively. Increased spelling skills decrease the amount of time spent fixing your copy later.

Utilize Tools

While auto-correction makes the actual writing process go by much faster, using tools such as a spellchecker or an online grammar check enables you to bullet-proof your content for submission.

One extremely helpful tool is the Advanced Marketing Institute Headline Analyzer that checks the emotional appeal of your headlines. Cut down time on your split-testing by getting some initial feedback on your headline effectiveness.

Another important tool is Reference.com, which includes a thesaurus, dictionary, and general encyclopedia. I personally use Reference.com to get speedy results for definitions and synonyms.