What Are Your Limitations?

Maximizing Income in an Up-and-Down Economy

By Peter Bowerman - www.wellfedwriter.com

"Limitation is a creation of the mind." Words shared with me by a dear friend recently who silenced her own nay-saying inner voices enough times to build a successful freelance commercial writing business. She takes this experience of hers and invites others to map it on to their lives. In a job you can't stand? Have a sense there's something more out there waiting for you? Well, there is. And you'll never know what it is until you step out of that old life.

If you're writing for a living, what's your frame of reference? In your mind, what's the existing universe of possible writing jobs? If you're used to working with just magazines, is that all you see? If you're writing technical manuals, can you see past that? Think "writing" just means fiction? For many people, my book, "The Well-Fed Writer" opened their eyes to an arena of writing they never knew existed. To them, "freelance writing" was magazine writing. Now they know differently.

But my books are only the beginning of the conversation, not the end. What other arenas might be right under your nose that you haven't considered? What past work or life experience could you parlay into writing income? In the research I did for my second book, I've run across writers of all stripes and backgrounds, many of them carving out handsome full-time livings in interesting niches.

There's the KC-based gentleman who, enjoying the writing projects he did as part of his corporate management position, built a nice 1-2K/month sideline commercial writing income in less than six months, while continuing to hold down his full-time job (and juggling marriage, fatherhood, church and community activities).

And the 29 year-old African-American woman, who moved from Philadelphia back home to her small predominantly white hometown of Ft. Myers, Florida, building on her 10 years with a large newsletter publisher. With a combination of aggressive marketing, resourceful ingenuity and an unbeatably optimistic attitude, she's making it happen.   She's got lessons for folks twice her age.

I've become buddies with a 30 year-old husband and father of two living in a small town one hour outside of Atlanta, Georgia, who's carved out a lucrative niche ghostwriting articles for executives and landing his work almost exclusively by targeted e-mail prospecting.

There's the woman in Taos, New Mexico, who's built a juicy business just writing case studies for corporations: compelling success stories of how their products solved their clients problems for use on their web sites and in company literature.   

These individuals, and countless others, all have one thing in common: they love to write, are good at it, decided they wanted to do it for a living (part- or full-time) and weren't interested in struggling financially.  

And speaking of struggling (and given my commercial writing focus), when times got tougher for commercial freelancers a few years back, many struggled because they'd relied on certain avenues for their work for a long time and when those arenas scaled back, they didn't replace them with new markets. In a tighter economy, your best bet is really "end-user" clients (corporations, large and small), as opposed to the "middlemen" (agencies, design firms, etc.). When budgets are lean, clients who historically hired "middlemen" are more likely to hire freelancers directly and save big money.

I've come across many small-to-medium sized companies that absolutely needed writing help on any number of projects but lacked the know-how, inclination, or resources to pull them off. You'll be doing these people a truly grand favor by contacting them. If you're going after those end-users, you might have to do a little more educating as to what a commercial writer (or "copywriter") does and why it makes sense to hire one. Here are a few "talking points":

AN INVESTMENT, NOT AN EXPENSE

Good copywriting is an investment that can pay big dividends in new business far beyond the actual cost. Hiring a smart, savvy copywriter to rework marketing materials or a web site can mean a world of difference to a company's bottom line.

MORE THAN JUST WRITING

A good writer does more than just craft grammatically correct sentences. He or she might see things about your business that you don't and suggest a campaign, approach, or idea that could translate into real profits. And with their network of graphic designers, photographers and other creative professionals, they can be an indispensable single-source solution.

FOCUS ON WHAT YOU DO BEST

A small business makes constant demands of all partners and employees. Why take time away from the things that you do best and get bogged down in aspects of the business that aren't your strong suit?

Peter Bowerman is a successful commercial freelancer in Atlanta, Georgia and the author of both The Well-Fed Writer , an award-winning 2000 Book-of-the-Month Club selection and "how-to" guide to starting a lucrative freelance commercial writing business, and its companion volume (September 2004), The Well-Fed Writer: Back For Seconds . For more info and to subscribe to his free, critically acclaimed ezine, THE WELL-FED-E-PUB, visit www.wellfedwriter.com .