30-Day Marketing Challenge: Contract bottom lines

Yesterday I shared my bottom line for the number of queries I send a week. Today, I'll talk about why I have bottom lines for how much I earn and contract terms.

In my first year freelancing, I regularly took assignments that paid 10 cents a word, on publication--and I was happy to get it. I was thrilled to see my name in a magazine I'd read for years, even though I often found myself in the odd position of occasionally receiving a check for $50 and wondering what it was for. It might even buy a dinner out--but it didn't pay my bills and it left me having to churn out tons of work--and tons of queries to make ends meet.

So it shouldn't be surprised that my other marketing bottom line goes like this: Those three queries go to markets paying $1/word or more on acceptance. Period.

If I'm only going to send three queries a week, I need to make them count. Spending them on a publication that isn't going to meet my financial needs is a waste of time. I'm pretty adamant about this because I remember clearly what it was like to work nights and weekends and still barely be able to afford my rent. I don't want to go back there--and I don't want you to suffer the same fate.

Does that mean I never query lower-paying markets? Of course not. But I don't count those queries toward my weekly total. The practical reality of it, then, becomes that I accept assignments that pay less than $1/word, but I don't spend my precious marketing minutes trying to get that work. And I don't accept pay on publication work. Ever.

Limiting my querying to what I consider higher-paying markets makes my marketing life so much more serene. Suddenly, my marketing decisions aren't personal. They're professional. Just like me.

And limiting my querying to pay-on-acceptance brings me one step closer to having a guaranteed income--as guaranteed as it can be in this economy. Pay on publication is essentially an interest-free loan to your client, with no guarantee of payment. Especially in this economic climate, publications can go out of business between the time your work is accepted and the time your story is slated to run. If that happens, you're out money and a clip. I don't know about you but I'm not rich enough to provide a mini-bailout to my clients in the form of contract terms.

The payoff of this system is I don't feel like the victim of my marketing anymore. I mean, really: If you have to query, do you want to make it any harder on yourself than you have to? I don't. Bottom lines make sure it isn't.

Bottom lines eliminate from my work life the kind of unnecessary drama that comes with financial panic. I have more energy and attention to spend on my work, I'm more able to show up for my clients and have time to do the last-minute edits that are an inevitable part of this business.

I can spend my days full of gratitude for my work instead of resentment.

Just like in yesterday's post, your terms may vary. You might not get out of bed for less than $2 a word (and if that's the case, I want to buy you coffee and pick your brain). Or, you might feel that 50 cents a word is a fine fee. Whatever it is, the key is to know it and live by it.

How good are you at sticking to your marketing bottom lines? What stands in your way?

30-Day Marketing Challenge: Establishing a marketing bottom line

When I did my first business plan, I thought I'd have to do maybe 10 or 20 queries a week to get the kind of work and income I needed.

Today my plan is quite different, and it's landed me a lot of high-quality and high-paying work. The key has been to have bottom lines and stick to them.

Here's the simple fact about bottom lines: Without them, you'll spread your querying around so haphazardly and so broadly that you'll feel panicked and confused about why your work isn't fulfilling your professional and financial needs. But once you establish your marketing boundaries, you're free to focus on what you want to query and where to send it.

I focus my bottom lines on three terms:

• How many queries to send a week.
• How much the client pays.
• How the client pays (ie, on acceptance or on publication).

If you have a business plan, you know the answer to those questions. If you don't, it might be worthwhile to sit down and answer those questions quickly--because they will guide your bottom line marketing behavior.

Today, I'll tackle the first and tomorrow I'll elaborate on the second.

Question #1. How many I send weekly: Three queries, minimum.

There are several ways to arrive at this number. Erik Sherman has a whole matrix for helping you figure out how many queries you need to send in a week to get enough work. When I started out, I didn't have a clue how many queries I'd have to send before I made a sale, so just to be safe, I assumed I'd need to send 15 a week. That was my goal.

I quickly failed. And failed. And failed.

Now I have a better idea of the number I need to send before I make a sale. But for me, there's a difference between what I know I should do and what I'm capable of doing. To me, three queries a week seemed doable, it didn't overwhelm me and it seemed like it might be enough to make a difference.

If querying is particularly painful for you, the number may be one a month. If you're particularly prolific, you may think nothing of sending 10 or 20 queries a week. The point is to choose a number and stick with it for at least a month.

Check in with yourself: Does that number work for you or are you spending more time resisting working on your queries than sending them? Are you berating yourself for not meeting your goal instead of sending the next query?

Adjust your number according to your answers.

What's your weekly query minimum?

30-Day Self-Care Challenge: Roundup

So 30 days have come and gone and I've been so busy that I haven't had a chance to reflect on what I learned in that month.

My overall impression is that writing about this keeps my focus on it. Like with anything else, what I focus on gets bigger: If I focus on my problems, they grow. If I focus on the solution, it grows. In this case, I'd say that self care grew.

Here's a roundup of what I learned:

You can start anytime.
This is an important reminder because, like with everything else, I didn't do self-care perfectly. There was a time when I was religiously taking five-minute breaks to stretch and turning off the TV at 10 so I could unwind before bed. But illness, stress and, well, life, got in the way. The good thing is that I've at least tried those self-care tricks and I know I can pick them up at any time.

Go on a news blackout
As a former newspaper reporter, I'm a little ashamed of this tip. I like to think I'm tougher than this, but let's be honest. I'm so not. Limiting my exposure to the financial meltdown has done wonders for my focus and emotional health.

Earlier this week, I was reminded of 2001, when I was a newspaper reporter at a small, coastal-California newspaper. Near-constant thinking and working on stories on the September 11th tragedy sent me into an emotional meltdown. A friend was getting preparing to find out whether she had cancer. I had a friend who worked in the Wall Street Journal offices near the World Trade Center. I had other friends who were still in the city. And I walked into the newsroom and was confronted with the planes slamming into the towers on a perpetual loop on the 24-hour news programs. Eventually, my editor, seeing my despair, gave me a few days off. I did a lot of yoga and I found a therapist. That's all I remember.

Today, I feel grateful that I don't work in a newsroom, that I have the power to control the information that comes to me. This doesn't mean I'm not still paying attention. But it does mean that I care for myself by gentle management of my environment.

Query and do other things to say yes to money
This lesson goes hand-in-hand with the one before it, in my mind. Once I clear my head of all the madness of the markets and my own worrywort nature, I can focus on my 1 percent. In this case, that's marketing, marketing, marketing.

When I started writing these posts, I wondered if these really had much to do with self-care. After all, marketing is part of the muscular development of your business--not the gentle hand of serenity. But the more I think about it, the more I know marketing is self-care. It's care for my business. It gives me an outlet for the anxiety I feel about the markets, news blackout or not.

Say No
Wouldn't it be nice if it were that easy? Just say no? Well, it turns out that I ended up saying, "Yes." I found a way to afford a trip to visit my family--without stretching myself too thin or adding complication to the holiday. But as we head into the holiday season, it's still an important lesson. We feel like we have to do things--out of desire or obligation, it doesn't matter. The truth is, we have choices. And the more we accept that and act on that, the more serene we are. Guilty, sure. But serenity and guilt can go hand in hand, don't you think?

Draw up a balance sheet
I love this lesson and have practiced it several times since I made this post last week. It's so hard to keep from having a negative focus, especially when your financial and professional future depends on you. Since no one else is going to give you perspective, you've got to take it.

What would you add to this list?

Serenity Tip: Radio Silence

Recently, several self-employed people have told me that the biggest block to their serenity during the day is compulsive checking of email.

Boy, do I hear you. I love the little "ding!" of my email program to tell me that something new has arrived. Whether it's a coupon from Staples or an email offering me work, I seem to have the same Pavlovian response. And boy does it make it hard for me to complete tasks.

The worst is when I get an email that unnerves me or angers me in some way--and then I'm off and running, and the smooth progression of my day grinds to a halt.

But I had an inspiration on Friday that I thought I'd share.

I've heard several people say that it's OK to turn off your email while you're hard at work. I've also heard people say it's okay to relegate your email time to a certain part of the day, but I've never been able to do it. Like I said, there's something gratifying and compulsive about that little ding.

On Friday, though, I was on deadline with two stories. Needless to say, I didn't have a lot of time for that kind of compulsivity. So when I meditated that morning, a gentle thought drifted into my mind. For some reason, I was willing to listen to it.

I set up the away message on my email for three hours--just till noon--saying that I was on deadline and would not check email until after that time. I urged them, if it was an emergency, to call me.

And guess what? No one called. No crisis broke out that I had to deal with.

Something about setting the away message on my email made me comfortable clicking off the email program. I think I often feel scared to turn it off because I'm afraid clients will think that I'm not responsive enough. And in this world on immediate accessiblity 24 hours a day, we have to work very hard to not be available, and there's a strange pressure to never set any boundaries around communication. But to do so is also to keep ourselves chained to others' needs instead of acting on our own.

It's not selfish, though. When I turned off my email, I was doing it so I could give my full attention to my client's project. It was the furthest thing from selfish. It was completely professional.

At the same time, I also turned off the ringer on my office phone so I could work without distractions. I turned off my Web browser also, except for things I needed for work.

In two short hours, I had written both stories. And I had done so calmly and happily.

It doesn't have to be a struggle. Others will understand if we give them a chance.

Does this answer your question? If not, fill me in on what I've missed and I'll answer that, too.

Serenity Tip: Knowing Your Value

Not long ago, I wrote about transfering your creative skills to your business life. But here's another good reason to cultivate your skills:

Better negotiation

The first thing Erik Sherman will tell you about negotiation is to remember the value you bring to any project. If you're a perfectionist or simply prone to negative thinking, that's not just the first step but the most important one. Here's what I mean:

When a client contacts you to do work, do you negotiate pay?
Do you know what your hourly rate should be?
Do you believe you deserve it?

I know many freelance writers who don't value their own skills enough--or at least struggle to value their own skills enough--to ask for the money they need to make their career sustainable. They may have a business plan. They may even know how much they need to earn per billable hour to make their minimum income. But without the belief that their skills matter and that they are offering something of value to their clients, they constantly feel like their clients are doing them a favor by hiring them. Without that sense of value, they can't put the rest of their plan into action.

So don't skip this step. If you're particularly prone to focusing on the parts of your work that aren't good enough, make a list of your skills, and the good things editors say about you and put it behind your computer monitor or on the wall in front of where you look most often (obviously, this should be out of view of your clients).

To help, here are some questions to ask yourself:

* What compliments do you get most often from clients?
* What skills have you fought hard to develop?
* What do you like most about your work and what energizes you?
* Are you good with deadlines?
* Do you return calls quickly?
* Are you professional--do you fess up to errors, do you double check facts, do you respond quickly to edits (if you're a writer)?
* Are you always looking for ways to improve your work? (This is a twist on "negative thinking:" if you are focused on what you didn't do perfectly the last time, you're also focusing on changing it. You don't make the same mistake twice or three times.)

These may seem like small things to you but they are of great value to your clients--and they often make the difference between hiring you and another writer. You become the go-to contractor for clients by having these skills.

So the next time you go to negotiate your price, remember the value you provide and ask for what you deserve.

Serenity Enemy: Illness

Look up "illness" and "self-employed" on Google, and most of what you'll find is the conundrum of how to afford health insurance in the U.S. if you aren't part of a large company. What it doesn't tell you is how to deal with your work when you come down with a bad cold, or when you get pheumonia or bronchitis or any of the other cold-weather illnesses that abound right now.

Unluckily for me, I seem to be a guinea pig. Last week I picked up some horrible virus that left me unable to sleep, stay awake or form a coherent sentence. Writing the posts on this blog took hours. And finishing my work? Last week, it took some Herculean will to get it all done.

I was proud of myself that I had, and then I went to the doctor.

"Don't talk," said my physician. "And don't work. Do you need a note?"

"No thanks," I croaked. "I'm self-employed."

But see, that's the crux. Sometimes I like to say, "I'm self-employed, and my boss is a slave driver."

But what to do when the reality of your health butts up against the reality of your work life. If you're even moderately successful in your work, you come up with a schedule that keeps you steadily busy. Illness is never factored into that. And unlike staff employees, you can't get sick and call in, assuming someone else will pick up the slack.

And so the nattering brain starts:

You're weak.
If you don't finish that assignment, that client will never hire you again.
But what if you finish it, and it's terrible because you can't focus?
Why did I ever leave my cushy full-time gig?

Aside from whatever naturally comes up for you when you get sick (self-pity, depression, etc., seem pretty common among my self- and outside-employed friends alike when illness strikes), you have to cope with what to do about maintaining the momentum of your business.

Here's where you really have to put your 1 percent into action. In other words, ask yourself:

* What can you control here?
* What actions are your responsibility?
* What are your limits?

This last question is the most important one. For me when I'm sick, I go into deep denial about my limits. Heck, someone with a realistic sense of limits might not become self-employed in the first place. If I had thought about the intense learning curve involved in self-employment when I began, I might not have pursured it. I simply thought, "I like to learn. And I can do it. Let's go!"

So one of the new mantras I have for myself right now, as I convalesce, is "I accept that I have limits."

So I finished the work I could get done, was honest with my clients about the work I hadn't finished, told them how long I'd be out of comission and asked for direction. I've always found that clients want to collaborate. So I swallow my pride, and I invite them in. In some cases, my rigid determination to meet a certain deadline softened when the client told me the deadline wasn't so firm after all. In other cases, I was invited to complete the work when I was well.

And, most important, the world did not collapse on me. I continue to have relationships with my clients. And those emails from clients that I didn't respond to immediately because I was too tired and ill and fuzzy-headed to do so? I got to them. And the clients weren't enraged at the delay.

Now I'm going to sleep. You'll probably see me again next week, after I'm better.

Serenity Tip: Track Your Time

As a self-employed person, you probably feel like you spend every spare minute of your time thinking about work if not actually doing work. There's that invoice to send, that marketing effort you are waiting for a response on, the work in progress and the work recently submitted. It's a lot to deal with and it can feel exhausting.

Recently I was telling some self-employed friends how much I felt I was working--all the time. And they suggested I try tracking my time. I hesitated.

After all, do I need to add something else to my to-do list?

Well, it turned out to be a valuable exercise and one that didn't take more than a few seconds of my time.

First, a word about how to do it: There are lots of programs to help you track your time, including MyHours.com, TaskTime, Tick for Mac and Clocking It, TimeTrax, among others, for PC.

But I'm old school. There's a reason I worked at newspapers for years and that I still plan my day with an old-fashioned paper planner. I like to be able to hold it in my hands. So I bought a tiny notebook at Walgreens and every day, I just write the time spent in this way:

1.5 hrs. spirituality
.5 food
3 non-income work
1.5 income work
.25 personal
.5 income
.75 non-income work

Those are just examples, of course. You'll notice a few things right up front:

I'm not specific about time breakdowns--like "9-9:45: marketing; 9:45-10:30 a.m.: Client X."

The reason for this is that I didn't want to make it so onerous that I didn't do it. Remember, I'm just starting. I may eventually get to that level of specificity and I see the value in it. But for right now, I just wanted to start with something manageable.

I divide work into "income" and "nonincome" work.

Recently a friend asked me if I felt I was devaluing my marketing, admin, IT and other projects by calling it "nonincome." The answer is that I don't. For me it's a matter of getting clarity about what's work that's got a formal assignment and contract (income) and what's work that supports the income-generating work, such as admin, IT and most importantly marketing (nonincome).

I wanted to see how much time I was spending on income and non-income work for two reasons:

1. I want to know my hourly rate.
Knowing my hourly rate requires me to know exactly how much time I spend earning income.

2. I wanted to see how much time I'm working overall.
One of my goals for this year is to increase marketing efforts to select clients and to increase my proportion of marketing-to-income work. My theory is that it will increase my income overall without substantially increasing my income work time. Why? Because it will create steady work over time instead of the boom and bust cycle that's so common for self-employed people.

You'll also notice that I put space for "spirituality," "food" and "personal." I also include categories like "health" (for gym and doctors' visits). I do this because I want to see how much time I'm spending away from work. This isn't to berate myself for not working but to see on paper where my boundaries are. I find that taking breaks for meals, taking time for the gym and for meditation and other spiritual work improves my concentration and work. But looking at it, I definitely see how my priorities show up in my work. It's more balanced than it once was.

Now my work is to figure out how to create more high-quality work time while keeping my serenity.

Serenity Tip: Put Yourself to Bed

One of the first symptoms of stress is sleep disturbance, and if you're self-employed, you're almost certainly stressed. There are clients to worry about, invoices to obsess about, marketing efforts to worry about and the future to order in your mind. It can tire a person out while robbing them of restorative sleep.

So how to cope with bedtime breakdowns?

Well, I won't be the first person to mention the idea of sleep hygiene--that is, the idea that maybe you shouldn't be drinking coffee right before bed or sleep in a room with a bright light right outside the room or try to sleep next to jack-hammering.

But I will share what's working for me. A few months ago, cognizant of my own tendancy to stay up till midnight and be unable to unwind from the day, I treated myself like a little kid and tucked myself in at a regular time every night. Here are the main changes I made:

No staring into monitors of any kind--TV or computer--after 10 PM

This was the hardest and most dramatic change. I love my 10 p.m. reality shows as much as anyone, and it's tempting to slink over to the desk and do a little work late at night when it's quiet. But I also know that both those things ramp me up. It takes about an hour for me to settle down after I turn off the TV or computer at night. So if I'm staring at it till 11 p.m.--or later, if I catch a bit of the Daily Show--it's almost impossible for me to fall asleep before midnight.

I will add that I'm naturally a night owl, but I actually do my best work first thing in the morning. So this routine works for me. Your mileage will almost certainly vary. I know there are many people who do their best work at night--after the kids are asleep, etc. But I know that I need at least 8 hours of sleep a night or I'm cranky. And since I don't drink caffeine, I don't have the option of giving myself a chemical boost. So, off with the TV and computer by 10 most nights.

I'm not perfect with this. Just last night, I was on the computer till 10:30. But by having that guideline I make it more likely that I'll get enough sleep.

Do a little yoga

I had been doing my yoga practice in the morning, but as the days got shorter, I found I needed more sleep and that I was having a harder time falling asleep. So I adjusted. Right now, I'm doing yoga poses for my shoulders, neck and back, as well as relaxing poses like child's pose. I light a few candles, and between that low light and the light of my bedside lamp, I go to bed with my body humming and relaxed.

Don't save up your worrying till the end of the day

Let's get back to the comment I made at the beginning of this post: Worry. Obsessive thoughts. Obsessive planning. Sometimes I hit the sack and lay there with a spool in my chest unwinding all the exciting and anxiety-producing events of the day. If I'm really on a role, that spool also includes events of the past week or upcoming events that hold a lot of charge for me.

So for my own sanity, I can't wait till the end of the day to think about and address those things. If our actions are our only possessions, then we need to address the things that worry us before they intrude on sleep hours. So I write and talk to fellow business owners throughout the day about my stresses and anxiety. I write them down before bed if they're still bothering me and end with this comment:

All these feelings will be here waiting for you when you get up. It's okay to let them go right now.

And if all else fails, I meditate just before bed. Then I can usually slip into sleep without much resistance from my overactive mind.

Serenity Tip: Create a New Mantra

On the heels of the most recent discussion on this blog about how to identify serenity when you've got it, I'd like to add a mantra:

I am not my work.

I know, it chafes. As self-employed people, we pour so much of our hearts and souls and intellects and emotions into the job that at some point it becomes tempting to merge with it. It isn't just a fulfilling, and sometimes erratic, part of our lives, it is our lives. It isn't just part of our identity. It becomes the whole thing.

If you're like me, there's even a bit of a swagger to it: Yeah, I run my own business. What do you do? Oh--sit behind a desk every day doing someone else's bidding? That must feel... safe.

Yikes. Just like there's a difference between pride in making self-employment in a field you love actually support you and arrogance, there's a difference between your job and you.

I had a hard time with this one at first: My job is basically my thoughts. I'm a sole proprietorship. In a very real sense, Iam my job, right?

Not really. Even the IRS recognizes a difference between you and work--you can't deduct everything, after all. And my job is my thoughts--it's creative. But I'm not just my thoughts, am I? This gets very philosophical very fast. But it's a good question to ask. What else am I? I'm the things I love, I'm how I treat the people I love, I'm how I treat the people I hate, I'm my feelings, I'm my spirituality. I just am.

But most important, when it comes to serenity, this is one of those techniques for practicing nongrasping. When I was a newspaper reporter, my job was my entire identity. I was a workaholic, as I've already said. So when I left, I went into crisis. I didn't have a life outside work. I didn't have anything that gave me a sense of wellbeing or self-esteem. It very quickly became clear how unmanageable my approach to my self-concept had become.

Nongrasping frees us from suffering. So when a client rejects a marketing effort, when the work is draining, when the checks aren't flowing, remembering that you're not your job can free you from feeling like this is something you have to fix. And remembering that you're not your job when everything is fabulous and everyone lovbes you and you're rolling in dough can free you from the delusion that it will always be this way. Neither is a reflection of you. It's just business. Both of those are part of the job. But they aren't a reflection of who you are as a person.

When you're off work, whenever you're obsessing about things you can't control and that are keeping you from enjoying family and friends, practice saying to yourself:

I am not my job.

The Serenity of Saying No

As any workaholic knows, saying "no" is not in our vocabulary. We want to please. We thrill at surpassing our clients' expectations, even in terms of how much work we can take on. We enjoy the accolades, the approval and, of course, the income.

But when we're alone, the truth sinks in: Our clients' approval and even the money don't do anything to assuage the nagging feeling of falling behind, and the fear that the more work we do, the lower its quality. We push aside things in our personal life to make room for work (We tell ourselves, "I don't need to go to the gym today" or "I can skip time with my family to finish this project, just this once"). We feel like we're always letting someone down.

Not long ago, I did a story for Yahoo! Hot Jobs on improving work boundaries. One of my favorite pieces of advice in that story comes from Susan Newman, the author of The Book of No:

"It's wonderful to be the go-to person to a point -- until you find you're totally overwhelmed, exhausted, resentful and in a time crunch.... Setting workplace boundaries means you will be doing better work and not spreading yourself all over the lot."

Her advice is to track your yeses, set priorities and then tell people (in this case clients) that you're changing your boundaries. Elsewhere, I've heard this described as the three A's:

Become Aware
You can't make a change until you know what's wrong. So for the next week, just pay attention to the work you say yes to and how you feel. Are you resentful? Are you anxious that the work won't help pay the bills? Are you blackmailing yourself because you're afraid you'll lose the client if you say no this once?

See how it feels in your body. Then:

Accept it
Accept that, like it or not, this assignment--or future assignments like it--isn't working for you. It's no one's fault. You're client isn't wrong for offering you the work, and you're not bad for being unable to do it for whatever reason. It's just a fact. For the next week, sit with that fact.

And finally:

Take Action
If your clients aren't paying you enough, explain that you've just revised your business plan and you need to earn $X on this project in order to spend the time on it--and produce the quality--it deserves. Ask for a raise. Ask for a new deadline. And, if all else fails, say no to new assignments, kindly and with the caveat that if something changes you'd love to work with them again. Then you may need to take another action: reevaluate your client list and look for clients that better match your skills and interests. And then start doing the work to land them as clients.

This creates space for newer, more appropriate work and strengthens my resolve to seek out only the work that feeds me. Then, the work you take on is done with loving kindness and gratitude instead of under the gun and rushed. And it's done with some measure of serenity.