After nine years of freelancing, it still amazes me when a client does something totally unexpected. Here’s the situation. I have been working on a book project with a client for over a year now. This project was supposed to be completed within three months.Now, I admit that a couple of delays were my fault. The project was a bit harder than I initially thought, so it took me about three months to just understand the subject in order to write about it. However, once I had a better understanding of what I was doing, it was smooth sailing.

I then created a great rough draft. I thought so and so did the client. He read it over and told me that it looked great on first glance but that it would need tweaking. Well, that was nine freaking months ago.

To make a long story short, this client jerked me around for over a year now. And I had little choice but to keep working because my final payment was held “hostage.”

Well, today I just got sick and tired of this client. I gave him an ultimatum. I told him that the stress of this project was just not worth it to me. I told him that I was slowly losing interest in his project and that we needed to get this done or he needed to find someone else to assist him.

Well, he chose the latter, so now I’ve lost my $1500 final payment. But I’ve gained something else…a new outlook and peace of mind.

Good riddance, dude. The money I lost will be made up with my IM efforts as I now have more time to get my own books and reports written so that I can receive residual income for my efforts.

This experience has taught me that as hard as you try, you can’t please all your clients all the time. You will have some good days and some bad ones. Sometimes clients can jerk you around but you have the power to simply say, “the heck with it, it isn’t worth my time and effort.”

In the future, I will be clearer with my terms. I will set limits as to how many “free revisions” are covered and will request that clients submit revision requests within seven days or the project is considered complete. I’ve also learned that by refocusing my time and energy into my own efforts, I will reap a hundredfold.

Okay, a little sneaky, but I did a bit of underground research. I secretly worked for a few well-known freelance websites like Need-an-Article (NAA) and Internet Research Associates (IRA) in order to see how they operated. It was actually a very interesting experience.

In all, I liked NAA much better, as their system was extremely easy to deal with, they had a lot of open projects, and the payments were always delivered on time. As for IRA, I didn’t like working there. The article delivery system wasn’t as nice, payments were a tad bit slower, and I didn’t get that warm and fuzzy feeling. Plus, other writers could review your submitted work.

Even so, I must say that working at places like this have some value to beginning IMers. Although you will have to work your fanny off in order to make decent money, that shouldn’t deter you.

Instead, you can use places like this to perfect your writing skills and use the income that you gain and turn them into wealth to support your IM efforts. Here’s how: Let’s say that you work a few hours writing 10 articles and you’re paid about $50.00 for your time. Let’s say you don’t spend this money on a new outfit. Instead, you reinvest this money into your Internet Marketing business and use it as seed money to fund another online venture.

With this method, you could take those meager earnings and turn them into something worthwhile.

To explain further, let’s say you take that $50.00 you made and buy a logo from a talented designer on eBay for $25.00 and obtain a domain name from namecheap.com for $9.00. Then you use blogger.com to create a free blog, create or purchase some articles, place them on your site, add a bit of AdSense, promote a few affiliate products, and boom, you have a website/blog with much possibility. In fact, you could even write additional articles and reinvest the money again to purchase some back links. By doing this investing, you will take a $50.00 investment and turn it into a cash cow.

In conclusion, websites like NAA and IRA aren’t likely to make you rich, but you can help them grow your IM business. The key is to use a bit of creativity and boom…you’ll be raking in the cash/building a sustainable business and your broke money-spending counterparts will be left in the dark saying…freelance writing is too hard and doesn’t pay the bills. 

About a week ago, I received a notice from a prospect that was referred from another client. This lady wanted to retain my services for a small “test project” in which I was asked to write two short articles of 500 words each for her newsletter.From the very beginning, I had a bad feeling that this client was going to be a royal pain in the rump. First of all, she was super cheap and kept complaining about my price of $50 an article. Then, she told me that she had previously hired another writer and had to rewrite all of her stuff because she honestly didn’t feel as if they were able to write to her standards.I listened intently, but had an uneasy feeling. I then told her my payment terms of 100% upfront (sometimes I offer 50% down and 50% upon completion but not when my intuition tells me otherwise). Well, she accepted. I was still hesitant because she was a friend of one of my favorite clients, but I committed myself to doing a great job.

Big mistake. My initial intuition was right. Not only was this client unclear about what she wanted, she complained the whole time. Two short articles turned into four once she didn’t approve of the first two. Then, to make matters even worse, she still wasn’t pleased with the revised articles.

Now, here’s the kicker. This client didn’t even have the audacity to tell me herself. Instead, she waited an entire week and then asked her “assistant” to email me. Her assistant then wrote telling me that she would no longer be utilizing my services but that I could keep ½ the payment. I couldn’t believe it. No note from her, no chance to redeem myself or even resolve the issue. Nothing but a note from her administrative assistant.

Anyway, I did what any rational person would do, I had my assistant write her a letter. I told her that I would be sending her a complete refund as I don’t accept

partial payments when clients are not happy with my work. I then explained that I wished her the best of luck in future endeavors and would keep the work and publish it as my own.

Next, I edited it and submitted the work to Associated Content, spun it and sent it to Ezine Articles, and you know what? I am very happy with myself. After all, I spent my precious time and energy on this lady’s project and the articles were darn good.

In essence, I made lemonade out of lemons and feel good that I didn’t have to sacrifice my principles for money. Thank you, Internet Marketing, for this. A year ago, I would have sold my dignity for $50.00 – now I know the value of my work and will use the work to my benefit.

Bidding websites like Elance can make you a lot of money, but only if you know how to work the system to your benefit. Take me, for instance, I win a lot of projects on Elance and have developed a good reputation there. However, I don’t just blow the money I make ghostwriting. Instead, I use ghostwriting to support my growing Internet Marketing business.

I have to be honest with you, though. It wasn’t always this way. When I was just starting out, I was so excited because I received an eBook project to write a book on How to Teach Your Parrot to Talk. I put my heart and soul into this project. I researched and wrote the heck out of that book, and you know what? I was ecstatic. I got paid $500 for 50 pages and spent it all. Woohoo.

What I only realized about a year ago, when I started studying Internet Marketing was that the guru who hired me to write the How to Teach your Parrot to Talk book then went on to make hundreds of thousands of dollars off my ghostwritten eBook.  And, to make it even worse, he boasted all over the Internet about how he could get cheap writers to write eBooks for him and make a killing using Internet Marketing strategies. In fact, he even created thousand-dollar courses to teach other Internet Marketers how to get one over on writers, too. Makes you cringe, doesn’t it?

Anyway, the key to succeeding on bidding sites like Elance is to realize that you are only ghostwriting as a means to an end. The end is financial security.  So, be smart and use the funds you make from bidding sites to build your Internet Marketing business. Use a portion of the funds to create more websites, build a membership site, or do something that will actually make you some money long term.

Don’t spend all your earned money frivolously. Instead, do something to build a sustainable business and don’t “piss all your earnings away.”

Here are some additional tips to ensure success when bidding on websites:

1.    Don’t lowball. You are worth so much more than the lowest bidders on those sites. Although you shouldn’t try and bid the highest bid if you don’t have the experience to demand that much, you shouldn’t bid $5.00 or so per page, either. Instead, bid an amount that you can make a profit with.

2.    Pay attention to your feedback. Feedback can make or break you. Although you should do everything you can to secure great feedback, don’t let clients bully you into free work in exchange for good feedback.

3.    Study your competition and do better than them. When you lose a bid, you should study the wining bidders carefully. Did they write a more convincing bid? Did they have more relevant experience? Did they offer better value for the money? Did they have better feedback?

4.    Build a solid online reputation. If you work hard to build a solid reputation for delivering quality work every time, you’ll always be able to make money ghostwriting to support your IM efforts.

Over the past nine years that I worked as a freelance writer, I have come across many writers who have experienced writer burnout. To me, writer burnout is when writers lose their passion for writing. Instead, they begin to dread the writing process, procrastinate about writing-related tasks, and feel an overwhelming sense of career stagnation and frustration.

When writer burnout happened to me, it was a scary feeling indeed. I have always loved to write and can literally write for hours when I am writing about a subject that I’m passionate about. However, when I experienced writer burnout, I even considered leaving my writing career behind.

For a brief moment, I considered pursuing a career as a Natural Labor Coach or Doula. Now mind you that I have had three kids naturally, believe in natural childbirth, and believe that women can have miraculous natural births (if they so choose.  But coaching other women through the natural birth process is not my passion. It is not something that motivates and excites me. It was something that I was trying to do to avoid writer burnout.

Anyway, I believe that you can avoid writer burnout if you follow these tips:

1.    Put your IM goals first. If you’re serious about Internet Marketing, then every single day, whether you feel like it or not, you have to do something to further your IM business before you do anything else. This includes writing articles, blog entries, conducting niche research, whatever will help you achieve your IM goals. You must do this before you handle your client’s projects and before you surf on the ’net, or do other tasks.

2.    Have realistic expectations. Remember there are only 24 hours in a day, not counting the eight hours need for sleep, personal and family time, etc. Never take on more work than you can realistically handle. If you ignore this rule, you’ll be increasingly stressed out and frustrated because you won’t be able to get everything done and you’ll feel a sense of failure for not meeting high expectations.

3.    Don’t be so hard on yourself. As a ghostwriter turned Internet Marketer, you’ll experience highs and lows. Clients may or may not like your work, you may experience the dreaded Google slap, your eBook may be a success or a complete flop. However, you must not dwell on the negative. Instead, figure out what works and what doesn’t and then do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

4.    Enjoy the journey towards success. Keep your eye on the prize but enjoy the journey. Although financial security is a worthwhile goal, you enjoy your life. For instance, if you like going to plays then take a portion of your earnings and treat yourself to theater tickets once in awhile. This will motivate and entice you to keep going.

5.    Don’t ever give up on your dreams. With Internet Marketing, you’ll try a bunch of things.  Some will work and some won’t. The key to ultimate success is to never ever give up. You have to keep at it. Just like Edison didn’t give up with the first failed attempt at the light bulb, you have to keep improving and using failure as feedback.