If you want to be a doctor, the path is clearly defined. Get good grades at school, go study medicine at university, and then do whatever it takes to get into the branch of medicine you want to work in. Actually doing it may not be easy, but finding out what you have to do is.

Being a freelancer in creative industries is different. Everyone seems to find their own way. There is no clearly defined career path.

I’ve been a freelance writer since last November and I’m still solvent and ‘living the dream’. I haven’t fallen behind on my bills or worked myself into an early grave. I’ve learnt some important things in that time that I’m sure will help anybody who’s thinking of leaving full-time employment for the freelance life. What works for me may not work for you, but I’m sure these tips will help.

1. Writing can generate a good part-time income but a lousy full-time one.

The preparation for my freelance life began when I was working as Technical Editor for EOS magazine. One of my goals was to look for extra work that I could do in my spare time. The aim was to boost my income and to make contacts and gain clients that I could continue to work with as a freelancer.

I quickly found that it was fairly easy to find extra work and earn an extra £300 or £500 a month. This is encouraging, and a very useful addition to just about anyone’s income, but it’s not enough to support a freelance lifestyle. Part of going freelance is coming up with a plan that enables you to make the leap from earning a bit of extra cash to making a proper living.

2. It’s important to have paying clients

This may sound like common sense but it’s easy to overlook in this age of online businesses, monetizing blogs and ‘multiple streams of income’. Yes, you can put AdSense on your website, join affiliate schemes, write articles for your blog and so on but how much money does it generate each month really?

What you need as a freelancer is genuine paying clients. You need to do work that someone pays you for completing at the end of the month. If you’ve ever worked out your cost of doing business you know that the amount of money you need to earn for a day’s work can be a scary figure. Paying clients help you do that.

I have two major clients; EOS magazine and Craft & Vision. The work I do for them forms the bulk of my income and makes being a freelancer possible.

I also need new clients, and one of my activities each month is dedicating some time to finding new people to work with.

3. Freelance success is built upon long-term relationships

Working as a freelance writer is a long-term game. Working relationships take time to build. A single article for a magazine written today may one day turn into regular work and a main source of income – but it takes time. The work I do for EOS magazine is based on a long-term relationship that started three years ago when I wrote my first article for them. That single article led ten months later to a full time job and then to my freelance career.

4. Time can be separated into productive and non-productive time

We’re all aware of how precious time is. Wasted time can’t be earned back. If you spend money on something and change your mind, you can go back to the shop and get your money back. But you can’t do that with wasted time.

I divide the things that I do for my freelance business into productive and non-productive tasks. These are my own definitions. I define a productive task as something that someone pays me to do. For example, writing an ebook for Craft & Vision. They publish it, and pay me royalties. It’s the same as writing an article for a magazine. The end result is money coming into my bank account.

I define non-productive tasks as things that need doing but nobody pays me to do. These includes things such as blog posts, keeping accounts and social networking. These are important to the long-term success of my business but they won’t put money into my bank account at the end of the month.

It’s important to keep a balance between productive and non-productive tasks. Is a blog important? I think it is, but there are writers that don’t have blogs and don’t need them – they are too busy writing stuff for paying clients.

5. Be patient

This is difficult for me because I’m an impatient person. If I have a good idea I want to act on it now. But clients aren’t always so quick. They need to think things over, and they are acting with their own interests in mind as well as mine. Being patient is part of building long-term relationships. Sometimes being pushy is good, sometimes it drives people away. You need to develop a feel for when being pushy is counter-productive.

6. You need to pay your dues

There’s no way around this one, unfortunately (I wish there was!) For me, paying my dues meant taking a full-time position with EOS magazine so I could learn the craft and business of writing. I enjoyed every moment of it and they are now one of my major clients. Paying your dues is part of being patient and building long-term relationships.

7. Don’t get too busy

This may sound counter-intuitive and it’s part of the freelance mentality to accept any job that comes along, on the basis that you never know when you may have a quiet period. But it’s easy to lose sight of the ‘big picture’ – your long term hopes, dreams and goals.

It’s important to take time out to reflect on what you’ve achieved and what you hope to do in the future. Where do you want to be in a year or five years? The answer to this question influences the business decisions you make today.

For example, in five years time I see myself making a living from writing photography ebooks, photography books and selling my work as fine art prints. This is my dream and my ultimate goal. Knowing this helps me be selective in choosing what type of work to get involved in or which clients to approach.

Andrew S. Gibson

Andrew S Gibson is a writer specialising in photography. He’s the technical writer for EOS magazine and he also writes articles for Smashing Magazine and Photo Tuts+. Andrew can be found at:
http://www.andrewsgibson.com
EOS Magazine: http://www.eos-magazine.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/andrewsgibson

We have a special guest joining us today to talk about the challenges that we, as entrepreneurs, often face when developing our businesses. Clamorate! would like to give a warm welcome to world-renowned humanitarian photographer, best-selling photography author, founder of Craft & Vision, and one heck of a swell gentleman – David duChemin.

David truly embodies what it means to be a successful entrepreneur. He’s achieved the type of success that any self-employed person would aspire to, but like all things in the arena of business, success didn’t come easy. David made his success through hard work, a few life lessons, and the ability to find opportunity in every experience. In this Q&A session, David candidly shares his insights on overcoming the challenges we face as entrepreneurs.

clamorate!: What was your biggest challenge when you first made the decision to work for yourself and what did you do to overcome it?

David: I’ve been working for myself my entire adult life. I kind of fell into it as a comedian and if you can make a living in comedy, you can make a living at just about anything. But learning the finances didn’t come easy. I spent money as I had it, ignored tax issues, failed to save or even consider seeking some help. I overcame it by going bankrupt; a hard process to walk through, but I had a great trustee who helped me learn some financial sense and knocked it into my head that business is largely about money and you need to learn about it in the same way you learn your craft or marketing.

Beyond that, and you’d think this one was obvious too, it took me a while to learn to work. I mean really work and hustle. As I’m writing this it’s 6:30am and I’ve been up an hour. When I started I just kind of let the day happen to me. Now I hustle. I work hard and smart. And while we don’t all work well in the mornings, you’ve got to find your sweet spot. Mine is not the middle of the day. I photograph, write, and do my important business stuff in the early mornings and in the evenings. The idea that creative entrepreneurs don’t have a real job is crazy. While others work 40 hours a week for someone else, we work 80 hours a week, and in part that’s the love of it, but it’s also got to be pure, old-fashioned elbow grease.

clamorate!: One of the most difficult challenges for a creative entrepreneur is maintaining a balance between developing their craft vs staying educated and current with their industry-specific trends. How do we deal with the balance between “actually working” and “learning?” How much (if any) should we be outsourcing?

David: Outsourcing is great, if you can find the mix. My manager, Corwin Hiebert, literally holds my business world together. His presence allows me to concentrate on the creative stuff, and to do the work of photographing and writing. But it also gives me time to read business books and play with social media. But he does similar things, so we share what we’re reading, and we try not to double up on things. Learning is key, but I think it needs to happen organically or we just won’t have time to do the work. So install a new Twitter client, but learn it as you do the work of maintaining your online community, don’t take a day to fiddle with it. I did the same with Adobe InDesign. I wanted to learn it but had no time to sit down with tutorials. So I gave myself a project, and that turned out to be my first eBook, TEN. I learn faster when things have an immediate application, and some urgency attached to them. And if whatever I am learning isn’t working for me in real-life, I can identify that faster and move on.

Other than that, I think we need much less than we’re told we do. You don’t need to know it all. And, you don’t have time to absorb it. I have stopped reading most blogs. I don’t do forums. The people I like and follow on Twitter are my aggregators. If enough of them mention something I’ll look into it further. All this learning can just create a fog and make us think we’re making progress. It’s the same with purchasing. Buying that new laptop or camera makes us feel we’re making strides. We aren’t. We’re just procrastinating. Use what you have and get the work done. If you can do so, find someone to do the work that isn’t you-critical. Like bookkeeping. Stop doing your own bookkeeping and taxes!

clamorate!: Typically, entrepreneurs in creative industries face high numbers of would-be competitors who are all trying to “make it” in similar fields. How do we deal with that (and actually make money in our industry) when there are so many others trying to do the same thing, potentially even within the same market?

David: Aside from out-hustling them, you be the most unique brand you can be. I think I succeed because I know who I am and who I am not. And when you know that, there is no competition. Just opportunities that fit or don’t fit. You take the ones that do, and when things dry up you make them. Creative entrepreneurs are their own rainmakers. Look at the ones that are doing interesting stuff and not starving and they share two things – they’ve got a very clear sense of who they are and what they offer, and they out-hustle the others. They work harder. They have more conversations. They follow up more. And they do that without neglecting the creative work.

clamorate!: Looking back over your well established career, what do you feel is the most important business lesson that you could share with us?

David: My first inclination is to say, “Figure out your brand and remain true to it.” But that’s so obvious, it’s like saying to a shop-owner, “Ok, first figure out what you’re going to sell.” It’s good advice, but still, a turnip would tell you the same thing. I think the best business lesson for me was to tear down the wall between work and play. Obviously you need time to do the things you love, and go fly-fishing or whatever – but you should be doing what you love. That gives you more time because now you aren’t distracted by the thing you wish you were doing.

More than that, it stops you from ever thinking the words, “it’s not personal, it’s business.” Especially where people are concerned. Everything is personal because unless you work with vending machines, you work with people – they are your vendors, your fans, your clients, your cheerleaders. The more you care – genuinely care – about them, the more they’ll care about you. This is the old model – the one where people care about each other, refer business to each other, become each others’ advocates and evangelists. Collaboration and word of mouth are still more powerful than slick marketing and SEO (Don’t even start me on SEO).

Tacking on to that, and it’s related, I think the best reminder I could give is this: Every opportunity begins with a conversation. Have more conversations. Be curious. Be generous. Be kind. Be engaging. This isn’t touchy-feely smoke and mirrors; it’s the way people have been doing business for hundreds and thousands of years. The smokescreens are the laptops and the iPhones and the Twitters. Those things aren’t magic, they’re just ways for us to have more conversations, to reach out more, and to out-hustle and out-care the so-called competition, but it’s we that have to use them for that instead of just mindlessly surfing the blogs.

David duChemin is a nomad, a world & humanitarian photographer, the accidental founder of Craft & Vision, and the author of Within The Frame, The Journey of Photographic Vision, VisionMongers, Making a Life and a Living in Photography, and, Vision and Voice, A Vision Driven Workflow for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom. David’s latest book, Photographically Speaking will be published late in 2011. David’s work and blog can be seen at PixelatedImage.com.

In Episode 1 Corwin Hiebert (Clamorate) interviews Dr. Ben Kadel (Emotus Operandi) about his insights on how creative entrepreneurs can change the way they feel about work.This 45-min podcast is a fast-paced, inspiration-filled discussion that touches on Ben’s latest eBook “Finding Your Sweet Spot” – but it doesn’t stop there. The podcast covers topics like emotional dynamics, workflow, peak experiences, action planning, work/life balance, understanding feedback, the constraints of technology, and dealing with the barriers to creative work. In case you’re new to clamorate! – this guy, Ben, he’s a real-world sociologist and an entrepreneur and he’s one smart S.O.B.

Seriously, this thing is jammed full of insights that cut to the matters of the heart. For so many creative people the goal is to do work that matters, to make a meaningful contribution to the people, issues, and organizations that make up our world. Ben is inspiring, and motivating, and it’s hard not to go 2-min without having an AH-HA moment! This interview is a great launching point for start-ups and emerging freelancers but it’s also invaluable for those small business leaders who are looking to hit the reset button on their work-life.

If you’re thinking this is a bit of a déjà vu – you’re right, sort of. Ben’s ebook came out last week and though we’re to young of a web community to have any protocols we can tell you that we’re already breaking our own rules. The interview went so well, and it complements Ben’s ebook so well that we can’t contain ourselves! As clamorate! carries on our plan is to publish content that is varied, both in topic and application; however, we felt it was critical we get start on the right foot. We wanted to kick things off in manner that focused us all on what’s most important – US. And by US we mean YOU. We wanted to make sure that clamorate! didn’t take the easy road by simply throwing up some tips-n-tricks and tell you that we’re here to help. We’re serious about the “helping” part and we’re confident that Ben Kadel’s insights are more important now than later. Well, they’re important later too but we didn’t want to hold out on you.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 43:21 — 19.8MB)