Chris Taylor

It’s important to remember that your needs for balance can shift over time. In some seasons of your life, such as when your are just starting your career, your time might be weighted more towards work; in other seasons, like raising a child, that time will tilt more towards family. So take stock occasionally, reevaluate what your current needs for balance are, and then design a schedule that creates the most fulfillment for you.

It is true that there are countless writers, so you should have something that makes you distinctive. That’s different for different people. For myself my talents are making complicated financial issues clear and understandable, along with bringing humor to that material, and getting to the emotional heart of a story. Play to whatever your strengths happen to be, and that ‘brand’ will set you apart.

As a writer you don’t want to be totally dependent on the platforms of your employers or clients, since those are controlled by others and can be taken down for any number of reasons. Ensuring an online presence for you and your own brand - on multiple social media platforms - gives people a familiarity with your work, a springboard to personal relationships, and a way to amplify your content.

Freelance writing is very much a feast or famine proposition — sometimes you’ll be very busy and sometimes you won’t be, often due to factors beyond your control (such as the strength of the broader economy, which affects freelance budgets). As a result you need to be prepared for leaner times which will surely come — with pots of emergency savings, prepaying what you can in good times (like quarterly estimated taxes), and trimming high-interest debt when payments come in.

This is something you should always be doing, no matter what your workload … but you should be reviving old connections, deepening current ones, and reaching out for new ones. You never know which ones will result in gigs, but if you plant many seeds then at least some will bloom. The upside of a dry spell is that you have more time than you normally would, to work on longer-term goals like building relationships.

A mentor-mentee relationship doesn’t have to be one-sided. You can bring something to the table too, and that can make the idea a more attractive one to busy C-suite professionals. Always approach a budding professional relationship with the motivation of ‘How can I help’ - if you do that, it should grow organically from there.