Don't Put All Your Eggs In One Basket

Don't Put All Your Eggs In One Basket

Multiple Income Streams

If you are one of the thousands of people now making a living by writing from home, you've probably had an experience a lot like this one. You signed up for a popular content website and were accepted as one of their writers. You learned all about their process and became efficient enough at producing content that you could make a decent amount of money for your efforts. You got used to the steady income and started planning your budget around it.

And then, without warning, it all went bad. Available assignments dried up or even disappeared over night. Rules were changed, so that a job you could previously do for the equivalent of ten dollars an hour or so now paid less than five because of the extra time needed to complete assignments. Perhaps the company you worked with was less than completely honest about what was really going on, delaying you from accepting the inevitable because you kept believing things were about to get better.

 

Stories like this are sadly common in the world of home-based writing work. Unfortunately, there probably isn't much you can do about the behavior of the content farms, because you're a freelancer rather than an employee. In other words, it's a case of a difficult client rather than a bad boss- and you don't have a lot of leverage over a difficult client. The only thing you can really do is to avoid working for just one company. Make sure your writing income derives from at least two sources, so that if one of them suddenly disappears you can focus on the other.