Whatever! The answer is all the same, which is: as many as you can handle. Do not chew more than you can digest. It will give you an upset stomach.

What’s the benchmark?

There is no external benchmark; the benchmark is the quality of work you produce. The moment your quality starts deteriorating you should put a stop sign outside your home office. You would not like to risk producing second-rate content, articles, or whatever it is that you write for your clients.

Then…

How many should I keep?

I cannot say for sure how many you should keep, but I can tell you about how many I keep and how you can decide how many you should keep. Generally, I keep 2-3 fulltime clients—depending upon the volume of work given— and work 1-2 one-off projects that do not have too tight deadline.

How you can decide how many?

How much you want: Say what you may, but you are doing freelance writing to pay your bills, be it your fulltime venture or part-time juggle. Therefore, you need to keep in mind your monetary target for a month.

How many hours can you devote: You also need to find out how many hours in week you can put aside for your freelance writing job.

How many articles can you produce in an hour: I understand this sound like absurd, but bear with me because I know people who can produce two articles of 500 words in one hour. Initially, you will not be able to write more than 40-50% of an article in an hour, but soon you will improve.

Do the math

Use the number you got from the above and calculate to find how many articles you need to write in a month to meet your monthly monetary target. The number you will thus get is the amount of work you need per month. If one client can fulfill this requirement then you do not need a second client—which is unlikely.

So, how many clients do you need at a time to fulfill your goal? Post the number you get after doing the math. I am eagerly waiting to hear from you.

What to do when clients are hard to come by?

• Look for more clients: This is the first thing you should do, but do not waste inordinate amount of time on client searching. 2-3 hours a day should be more than sufficient. Scan twitter, job sites, and freelance boards and see if you can land up in a good deal.
• Work on the basics: There are some shortcomings in your writing which you have noticed earlier as well, but due to unavailability of time, you could not work on improving them. Now as you do not have many works, why do not you take it as an opportunity to improve your writing skills? You may want to revisit English grammar, or you may want to read some books on writing, or attend some class. This is the right time to invest in improving your skills.
• Start you own project: In the years or months you worked for your clients, you must have thought of starting some exciting project: may be write an e-book or create an informational product, or a course, or a website, or a blog. This is the time to execute the plans you were making. Why do not you start working on the stuffs you have been planning for long?
• Spend time with your family: It often happens with us that when there are lots of works to finish within a tight deadline then we tend to overlook our family. As you do not have much work, you should spend your time with your family, and recover the lost family-time.
• Take a vacation: If you have sufficient bank balance to pay for your vacation then cash in on the opportunity you got and take your family for a long due family vacation.

These represent just tip of the iceberg. There are many more things that you can do. Just be creative and plan out something.

To succeed as a freelance journalist, you need to have:

• A willingness to spend as much time as required chasing a good story.
• A desire to travel from place to place in search of a good story.
• A knack for working under tight-deadline

If you have these three traits then freelance journalism is a right career for you, and the more you will do each of the things discussed above, the more successful you will become in your career. This is not a career for you, if you are looking for a job that gives you lots of personal space. The news story is the life of a freelance journalist, and he has time for nothing else.

A day of freelance journalist begins quite early in the morning when the editor of the newspaper gives the topic to cover, which is followed by calling up concerned person for interviews and interview bites. The information collection goes on till evening after which the journalist needs to sit down and craft a story using the information he collected. In the process, he may also require to verify the credential of data collected and recheck the numbers. He will have to do all these things before mid-night when the newspaper goes for printing.

The day of a freelance journalist ends after news submission to begin once again at 6 AM for the next day news. Not everyone can take this, so you need to ask yourself if you can handle such pressure or not.

E-Book writing

Writing a book is the ultimate dream of any writer, but not everyone can accomplish that goal despite having all the required ingredients. Well, I wandered off the topic. The point I wanted to make was this, there are lots of demand for niche market e-books, and lot many people are looking for ghost writers for their e-books. If you can meet the tight deadline and write 20-100 pages e-books then this market is waiting for you with its arm flung open.

Report writing

Reports are short documents written about a specific topic. A report is primarily a condensed output of the research or survey done by the report writer. Reports are objective and based on factual data only. It may or may not contain interpretation. For example: an online marketing report will have data about rise or fall of online marketing effectiveness, and a blogging report may contain the new advancements in the blogging world, etc.

Essay writing

Essay comes in various shapes and sizes. It could be persuasive, descriptive, argumentative, comparative, evaluative, or narrative. Most of them are academic in nature, and they follow a certain writing style as well as opening and closing statements. If you know how to write academic essays then you can earn a lot more than any other form of freelance writing. This is the best paying writing market. You need to know MLA and/or APA style of citation to succeed in this market.

Sales letter writing

An effective sales letter is often the difference between winning and losing the sales battle, online. If you know this fact, and if you posses the ability to write a good sales letter that converts well then you can ask for lifeblood as a fee for your services. An online marketer struggles for a good sales letter to promote his product. He will embrace you like his new-born first child.

Review writing

Writing a review is entirely different from other forms of writing. A review takes more time because you need to familiarize yourself with product before you can write an honest review about the same. You need to know features and attributes of the products and services, its competition, and history of its producer etc. There are many paid review works available online as well.

No priority list: This is the first thing in the list because I wanted to tell you emphatically the importance of having a prioritized to-do list. In the absence of such list you will not know what is more important and what can wait till evening. Hence, what you end up doing first in the morning is the thing that was not at all important.

A pile of task: This is almost always unmanageable. A huge list of work to complete will just immobilize you and you cannot accomplish anything, so bite only what you can chew, and leave rest on the plate for others.

Wrong Timing: This is important. Do the critical work in the morning when you are fresh, and push the less important works for the rest of the day. Checking mail in the morning takes away the time in which you could have accomplished many important things.

Untidy Mailbox: This kills your time more than anything else. Too many mails in your mailbox will not boost your productivity; rather it will stamp it down. You need to organize your mailbox by filing important mails in folders and deleting the unnecessary ones.

No Do Not Disturb Sign: This is very important. In the office, being accessible to your subordinates, colleagues and bosses is considered professionalism. It indeed will win you many friends and support, but at times this will result in delayed reports and missed deadlines. Hence, you need to put “Do Not Disturb” sign on the door when you have important work with a tight deadline to finish.

Working Long Hours: If someone told you that working for hours in a stretch will fetch you great result then he was wrong. You need to take breaks at equal intervals to recharge your battery. The more relax you will be the better result will come out. Working continuously does nothing but worn you out.

Stand Up and Say No: Saying no is a good thing. It says you care and that you know the importance of the additional work that is going to get assigned to you. If you say no when you are caught up, this way you will not only save yourself from missing deadlines due to overload, but this will also help your organization get the work done through someone else who is free at that time.