Home   >   Writing for a Living   >   How To Set Your Freelance Writing Goals

How To Set Your Freelance Writing Goals

By on October 24, 2018
How To Set Your Freelance Writing Goals - Writer's Life.org

Becoming a freelance writer can be a lucrative and rewarding way to earn a living. Many writers who want to free up more time to work on their novels decide to write non-fiction articles, blogs, web content and much more for clients as freelance writers to allow them to manage their time better and earn money doing what they love.

However, to become successful as a freelance writer, it's important to set some goals to keep improving not only the quality of your work but the kind of work you undertake as well. Goals give you motivation, direction and allow you to focus on what’s most important to you too.

So how do you set goals for yourself as a freelance writer?

Think about what you hope to achieve

Goal setting is all about giving yourself targets and to that you need to think about what you hope you achieve in your freelance writing career. Start by thinking about where you’d like to end up and be clear and specific. This can be both a financial target (how much you’d want to be earning), but also around job satisfaction. Would you like to specialize in a particular area for example? Start big, then try to work out the step by step actions you need to take to achieve get there.

Organize your goals in order of priority

Working out what you want to achieve the most, or what is most important to realize first is essential. Some goals might not be possible to achieve without first doing something else, so by prioritizing your goals you’ll start to see a timeline emerge showing you what you need to do in what order.

Make sure your goals are SMART

Any goal you set for yourself should adhere to the SMART theory. Smart means they should be, specific, measureable, attainable, relevant and time sensitive.

Thinking about your goals in this way will mean that you are very clear about what you need to do to move forward. You also create deadlines for yourself and make sure that every goal you set for yourself is related to your work and important to you, but not so impossible that you end up getting exasperated with the process and feeling demotivated.

Be prepared to be flexible, but hold yourself accountable

Sometimes goals have to be rethought, and goalposts need to be shifted, and that’s OK. Just make sure that you can be flexible enough to do this and not beat yourself up about it too much if this is what has to happen. At the same time, it is important to hold yourself accountable for your goals and track and review them progress as time goes on.

Becoming a highly paid and successful freelance writer won’t happen overnight. By setting goals for yourself, however, you can pave the way for yourself and see how to get there. So set goals, work hard to achieve them and don’t forget to celebrate your success as you do!

Bethany Cadman -author of 'Doctor Vanilla's Sunflowers'

Bethany Cadman -author of 'Doctor Vanilla's Sunflowers'

About Ty Cohen