agency

One of the biggest moves a freelance writer can make to earn more is to move into better-paying types of writing.

When you go from, say, writing $20 blog posts to writing white papers that can pay $1,500-$10,000, it’s a big leap.

Of course, a lot can also go wrong when you step into a new, more sophisticated kind of writing that you haven’t done before. But if you want to earn more, at some point you have to buck up your courage and go for it.

A few years back, I fell into an opportunity to write my first white paper, when a writer I knew referred me for the project. I’d heard this was a great-paying writing niche, and I was dying to sink my teeth into one of these big, detailed projects.

Even though I hadn’t written white papers before, I was tapped because the topic was a big company’s nonprofit efforts — which I’d covered in the past, as a reporter. So I knew the end client and what we’d be documenting fairly well.

Maybe that made me a little overconfident. I made a boatload of rookie mistakes that made this first $2,500 white paper gig a lot more unpleasant and lengthy than it should have been.

And I never ended up working for this client again. So. Relationship blown.

Where did it all go wrong? Let me count the ways…