1. Sell your services. Sorry. There is no way around this one.
2. Research the industries you serve. You have to keep a perspective on the big picture.
3. Build relationships with editors. These people are the gateways to accelerating your work and are often under-appreciated.
4. Invest in social media. If people can’t find you online, you don’t exist.
5. Make phone calls. Great writing is often sparked during interpersonal communication.
6. Meet people in person. If you want someone to ask you to write for them, they have to trust you. Presentation matters.
7. Understand accounting. A professional writer is a business. Find a CPA to handle the nuts and bolts, but learn enough to know how to operate a business.
8. Learn about and leverage technology. This makes it easy for your clients and prospects to work with you.
9. Protect your health. There is only one of you. And you won’t do your best work if you’re always tired and never take a break.
10. Create referral networks. You won’t exist if you try to do it all on your own. Be sure you’re feeding your partners and not just expecting them to feed you.

What surprised you the most about this list? Why?

If I must starve to be a “real” writer, then I’m out. The good news is there is a way to create a financially sustainable path to being a professional writer.

In any sales situation (and whether you are a doctor, lawyer, dentist, business leader, writer, sculptor, painter, etc. — everyone sells something) you must know the level of “pain” the prospect has is the primary determining variable in what size of fee the prospect is willing to pay for your services.

Pain often manifests itself in the form of lack of time, opportunity, skill, or perspective. A company or individual’s willingness to pay for a particular service or product is in direct proportion to the perception of their pain.

• If a company needs a sales letter written that will generate $5,000,000, then is $10,000 for sales copy unreasonable?
• If a consultant knows that a trade book will help them close twelve more consulting gigs a year with an average fee of $30,000, then is $40,000 too much to pay for that book?
• If a nonprofit wants to share stories of mission impact during a campaign that is expected to increase the donor base by 10 percent with an average lifetime gift value of $100,000, then is $5,000 too much to pay for a shortword eBook?

(Note: These numbers are for illustration purposes only.)

If you’re goal is find someone to pay you to write, you’ll always land at the bottom of the fee scale. If you’re goal is to help others accomplish their personal or organizational goals, then you become a strategic partner and your fees increase.

The fees you command are directly related to the value you provide in helping other people be successful. Another way to say it is this: your fees are directly related to the size of the pain and the urgency of the prospect to relieve or eliminate that pain all together.

How do you communicate value, and how has that impacted the fees you receive for the services you provide?

1. Consistency. This is why most people jump off the blogging bandwagon. Before you start a blog, commit to a regular posting schedule. Even great content delivered irregularly will not help you get the results you deserve.
2. A great title. In the digital world, titles should be driven by keywords. Don’t be afraid to use popular words and numerals. Strange enough, negative expressions of an idea seem to draw broader attention on a whole than positive ones. (Not sure what that says about us as a culture.)
3. Appropriate length. My recommendation is that your blog posts be between 200-400 words. People don’t read with the same commitment online as they do in print. As more and more content is consumed via smartphones, the pressure to reduce the length of your post will continue to weigh heavy on those of us responsible for creating content.
4. Actionable content. Use bullets, numbering systems, and styling (bold or italics) to help guide the reader to the most significant ideas and phrases in your post. Make sure your reader walks away with something they can put into action immediately. This will keep them coming back.
5. Avoid perfection. A former journalism professor once told me, “What is on the front page today, ends up on the bottom of a bird cage tomorrow.” Perfection is not something you should reach for in your posts. Search and archiving helps keeps digital content alive longer than printed content, but don’t overthink your blog post. Just do write, review it, and publish it. There will be another post to write tomorrow or the next day.

What would you add?

When asked what I would recommend leaders stop doing in 2012, my response was to stop being efficient. The larger the organization, the more tempting it becomes to focus on process rather than outcomes. Leadership has very little to do with efficiency, yet that’s how we try to operate the organizations we lead and accomplish the work that we do. Here are some suggested next steps:

1. Reacquaint yourself with the phone. Email is great, but it isn’t real time. It doesn’t always make sense to make a phone call, but when it does there is no substitute.
2. Focus on excellence. The pursuit of excellence is an inefficient one. It means you’ll have to say no to more things and become even more vigilant about how you use your time. People won’t remember how much you did, they will remember your style and impact.
3. Learn something new at least once a month. Learning is a great way to stay connected to the awkwardness of life. Learning puts us in a position to ask a lot of questions, find new voices to pay attention to, and expand our perspective or point of view.

When asked what I would recommend leaders start doing in 2012, my response was to get comfortable with chaos. Technology is accelerating the rate of cultural change. Sometimes–even for those of us immersed in the middle of it–it can be overwhelming. Remember these things as you navigate your own chaos:

1. You won’t be doing what you’re doing today in five years. You may transfer your skills, but your role and function will be different.
2. Your next opportunity probably hasn’t been invented yet. Much of what I do–and use to accomplish my work–didn’t exist ten years ago. Why do we think the pace of invention will slow down?
3. What doesn’t change will become even more important. When so many things are changing, we begin to gravitate toward things that don’t change. Relationships will continue to be the primary means by which we accomplish our work, build our business, and make a difference in the world. Invest in people, and you will survive the chaos.

If someone asked you what leaders should start and stop in 2012, what would you say?

1. A new approach to church budget communication
2. Top 5 lessons I learned as a freelancer in 2011
3. 5 characteristics of conversation
4. Guest Post: Your church is a brand and 5 reasons it matters
5. 4 keys to building a sustainable freelance business

Thanks for reading!

Three ways tablet publishing will revolutionize higher education:

• Information can be kept current. Electronic publishing greatly reduces the time and cost associated with updating information. Authors will be able to incorporate recent statistics and ongoing research into their existing publications keeping them relevant and providing students the best text possible.
• Information can be delivered in multiple formats. Educators know that we all learn differently. The delivery of course-related content on tablet devices enhances the opportunity to learn for students who need more than a lecture.
• Any educator can publish. This changes everything because anyone can publish for a tablet. Educators will no longer need a publisher to get their work in the hands of their students. As a result, texts will be tailored to individual classes. No longer will an educator have to tailor the course to fit the texts that are in print. Textbooks will be less expensive, more relevant, and easier to carry from class to class.

So, why won’t it work in every educational setting? Here are three reasons:

• The academic world doesn’t adapt to change. Herein lies one of the biggest issues facing higher education. Many professors teach relying only on the content they studied when they were in school three decades earlier. Many professors are riding their tenure into the sunset and have no plans to change anything. I find it interesting that many institutions to which we entrust the next generation are more concerned with preserving the past than in preparing for the future.
• Publishers are powerful. Traditional publishers will lobby institutions with all sorts of horror stories about the dangers of independent publishing. Sadly, many administrators will listen and encourage professors to stick with the tried and true textbook classics. That’s great—if they plan to recreate the 1950s.
• Professors are overcommitted. The academic world is on the brink of collapse. The cost of “doing business” means the professor to student ratio is getting worse. Professors used to have time to write and research. Today, however, they have more classes with more students per class. They don’t have the time to keep their books updated or to write new ones. Therefore, the tendency is to rely on texts that always have been used.

I think tablet publishing will change a lot of things including higher education. I just don’t look for academia to lead the way. Why wait? While you were reading this post, new ebooks written by people just like you hit the ebook shelves. In 2010, 114 million ebooks were sold—many of them produced by average, everyday people.

Dr. Terry Hadaway is the Research Director at BenStroup.com and author of 30 Seconds to Chaos: The Art of “What If” Thinking. You can get his book in the Kindle store, but you won’t find it in the bookstore.