I have learned both through my own personal experience and asking others that the secret to making a high income as a content marketing writer is to have long term clients that give you steady work. This decreases the time you spend on marketing and increases your hourly rate. When you are familiar with what the client wants, know the tone, and understand the content, you can most always write faster. As an added bonus, you have more billable hours available to spend on other clients.

However, when a writer tells me that they had a bad year earning wise, they almost always follow it up by saying that they lost their anchor client and were not able to quickly replace the income. This is what I call “the egg dilemma.” When you put too many eggs in a basket, you also run a big risk if the project ends, the client runs into budget trouble, your favorite editor leaves, or one of the many other reasons that clients disappear.

On the flip side, I have learned the hard way that having too many different clients is crazy-making as well. There is a tipping point where I am working too much and producing lower quality work than I would like because I am frazzled and not able to provide each client with the level of service that I pride myself on. And it seems like the line between prosperity (the perfect number of high paying clients) and complete stress overload is very thin. I only seem to see the line when I’m on the wrong side of it.

So what is the answer? I don’t think there is one. But I have found that the following five strategies help me maximize my income while minimizing my risk:

1. Try to make sure each client accounts for less than 30 percent of my income.

My goal is that if any of my client’s leave that I can either easily replace the income or cut back my expenses until I find a new client. I try to keep each client around 20 percent, but will go up to 30 percent for especially high paying clients. The main point for me is knowing of the percent each client represents in overall income and making a conscious decision regarding the risk each client represents.

2. Limit the total number of clients I am actively working with any given time.

For me, that number is six or seven. Multitasking is one of my strengths so my number might be higher than some other writers. But the trick is to know how many different clients you can successfully handle and try to keep a limit on it. It’s not just the amount of work, but the number of different people who are emailing you and projects you have to manage that is time consuming. I will also take in account the PITA (yes, that’s pain in the you-know-what) level of the particular client as well as my enjoyment of the project. I have some clients that I don’t work with every month, but who call me when needed so I only count them into the equation when I am currently working on a project.

3. Avoid one-off projects if at all possible.

This is probably the most important piece of advice I could give any new writer. The first time you work with a client, it takes you twice as long to complete a project and you wind up earning half as much (per hour). I find it stressful to work with new clients since I don’t know exactly what they want yet. I much prefer working with people I already have relationships with. Yes, there are situations where it makes sense, such as the client is especially high paying, the work will help you land other clients, or you desperately need the money. But taking one-off projects should be something you do only with careful thought and a very good reason. Writers who earn six figures often tell me that their secret is avoiding one-off projects and focusing on long-term work.

4. Have clients in multiple industries.

I know several writers who primarily wrote in the construction and real estate niche that found themselves with very little work in the downtown of 2008. Others had huge income gaps when the tech sector busted last decade. Since factors outside our control (and our clients control) can often affect entire industries, I try to make sure I have clients in multiple industries at all times. And when I start to see that most of my work is coming from one industry, I make an effort to search for clients in another.

5. Keep a variety of types of clients.

For the same reason, I try to have a variety of different types of clients with the industries as well to hopefully minimize any industry affects from that angle. For me this means working with a mix of content marketing agencies, trade publications, businesses and non-profits. In addition to reducing my risk, I also enjoy the variety and different types of work from the different types of places that hire writers.

 

What strategies do you use to earn a high income while decreasing your risk?