I’m back. I promise. Every summer I swear that I’m going to keep blogging over the summer. But it never works out. And I always stop blogging. So next year, I’m just going to plan to take a break. And if I forget, hopefully someone will remind me.

Here are the five things I learned was reminded of this summer:

1. Vacations are important. The last time I wrote a blog post, I was burned out and stressed. And in need of a vacation. I was right. The vacation Down Under was exactly what I needed. And I managed to keep my client load light for the month after and it was also wonderful. Now, I’ve got my client load get too high again, so I need to figure out how to pare back (unfortunately, I can’t go back to Australia). But even after 10 years, I’m still struggling (and think I always will) with how to find the fine line between ‘enough’ work and ‘too much’ work. I never seem to realize it has happened until I look up and see that I haven’t taken a day off in 10 days and my family members (even my dogs) are hiding from me.
2. Always ask for more money from clients. I’m a terrible negotiator. Not just that, I hate negotiating. It might be my least favorite part of freelancing – other than figuring out time zones. But I have started adopting the rule that another writer told me of asking for at least a little more money. No client gives you their top price as a starting point and they expect you to come back and negotiate. So don’t let them down. I’ve also gotten better about asking for rush fees. And on a recent project, I pocketed close to $2k in rush fees on top of the project rate.
3. Your goal should be to have clients come to you instead of you searching out each gig. This summer I got at least 40 cold client requests, meaning clients that I didn’t approach contacted me first. While there were a few low payers in there, I would say about 80 percent were good leads and willing to pay competitive rates. Seriously. I’m going to expand in coming weeks on what I’ve done to make this happen over the years. But I think that too many writers focus on approaching clients, rather than doing the work needed to make it easy to for them to find you. With journalism, clients rarely come looking for writers, but with content marketing clients often seek out and approach writers.
4. Never have a single client make up more than 25 percent of your income. Work on various IBM projects has made up a good bit of income for the past few years, but interestingly, I did work for the client through three different agencies. I always knew that my work through an agency could go away for whatever reason, but I never stopped to consider a shift in strategy at IBM and how that would affect my income. But Big Blue got a new CMO and has made a bunch of changes, so overnight all of my IBM projects basically went away. Luckily, these all added to up to less than 25 percent, but it reminded me of the importance, once again of making sure I have multiple buckets of income.
5. Making time to work on your own projects is hard, but important. OK, so I’ve been trying to turn my blog into a book for something like three years now. It’s 95 percent done. But I can’t get all the way there. And this blog as well as my new B2B blog sat untouched over the summer. While client work is important because it pays the bills, taking time for our own projects is just as important and shouldn’t fall to the back burner. It feeds our soul. And having the flexibility to do projects that we care about is part of the benefits of freelancing. But only if we take advantage of it.

So now that it’s officially fall, I’m going to start writing on the blog again publishing at least on Mondays with another post on Wednesday if I have something interesting to say.

Let me know in the comments what topics you would like to read about. Also, share what you learned during the summer. I bet you have some great lessons to share that other writers can learn from!