5 Possible KPIs For Your Freelance Writing Business
Tracking Metrics Can Help Keep You On Target
KPIs: can help keep your freelance writing business on track and in profit
Working for yourself can be tough.
Besides having to do everything yourself — from the taxes to the administration to the work that you’re paid to do for clients — there’s the additional challenge of keeping yourself productive and motivated.
When you’re working in a home office — however well you may have rigged it up for productivity — Netflix is only ever a few clicks away.
One way to avoid derailing your own productivity is to set key performance indicators (KPIs) to try hold yourself to some sort of account. Here are a few that could work to help keep your writing business on track.
An example KPI dashboard. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Inbound Leads Per Month
This is the KPI that I’m focusing on and trying to budge northward this year.
How many inbound leads did you receive interested in hiring you as a writer?
Inbound leads — in my definition at least — can come from a few different directions:
- Contact form completions to your website
- Inbound referrals from your existing clients
- Word of mouth style referrals from friends / your professional network
I don’t like to get too caught up in the weeds of sales and marketing jargon here or ask whether those leads are well-qualified or not. I just want a certain volume of top of funnel activity to demonstrate that my inbound marketing activities are showing ROI.
Words Written Per Day
My Medium followers may already know my philosophy about how to charge for freelance writing.
I think that per word is generally a lousy way to go about it and charging per project is both better and tends to lend itself to doing better writing. Churning out content just for the sake of it isn’t a good habit to get into as a writer.
Charging Freelance Writing Clients Per Word — Pros and Cons
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Nevertheless, to get paid for writing at some point you have to …. string together letters and words.
If you can predict the volume you need to write with some measure of science, then you might wish to set yourself a KPI centered around words written per day. Hitting it can then be a surrogate for meeting your target income and keeping the ship on tack.
Prospective Client Calls Per Month
If your business development process looks anything like mine, then you may find, after a while, that there’s a somewhat predictable cadence new clients follow on their way from being interested marketing leads to filling up your book of business:
- First they want an exploratory phone call
- Then you quote and send writing samples
- Finally — often some time after the previous step — they become paying clients
Over time, I’ve developed the belief — yours may differ! — that it’s worth talking to most prospective leads until there are very obvious reasons to disqualify them from my pipeline.
If you tend to have good success with this kind of cadence then prospective calls per month might be a good KPI to keep track of.
Maximum Income Per Client (MIPC)
Time for a secret folks.
I just cooked up the acronym MIPC.
I’ve never heard anybody talking about or endorsing it. But I submit that that’s a great pity because diversifying your income and client-base is essential to being able to weather downturns in industries, entire economies, or the freelancing ecosystem at large.
Ways You Can Diversify Your Freelance Writing Business
The Art Of Not Putting Your Eggs In One Basket medium.com
How To Diversify Your Income As A Freelance Writer
How To Avoid Putting Your Eggs In One Basket medium.com
Freelancing authorities will differ in terms of what percentage of one’s income they recommend any one client constitute.
I’ve heard numbers ranging from 20% to 33%. I think the exact number isn’t as important as figuring out what number works for your freelance writing business’s risk tolerance profile.
The greater the share of your monthly income any one client constitutes the greater the risk you accept — because if that client leaves then that’s a larger chunk of your income out the window.
Figure out what ‘MIPC’ works for your particular set of circumstances. Then make sure that none of your accounts exceed it.
Total Number of Clients
If you’d rather not go into the nitty gritty of breaking down your monthly income by client and figuring out exactly how much of your monthly income each client constitutes, a simpler exercise is to simply tot up the number of clients you have at any one time.
Again, freelancing authorities and authors will differ in terms of how many clients they recommend any freelance writer should have become they can be said to be under-diversified. Again, I recommend that you figure out a number that works for you.
Personally, I would think that anything under four clients (ie three or less) is getting into risky territory. Maintaining only one client is desperately risky and presents a high likelihood that the client is actually treating you as a shadow employee.
On the flip side, I find it tricky to juggle more than six clients — although I’ve heard of freelancers that can keep as many as 14 on the go at any one time (and I’m sure there are those who work with more.)
Choose a range that you know works for you and — unless you’re ready to scale — try to stay within it.
The Value of KPIs For Writers
I’ve found that setting a few KPIs and trying to track them helps keep me on track as a freelance writer.
There are plenty of free (and paid) tools on the market for building KPI dashboards and if you have a spare TV screen or monitor in your home office you might find using one for this purpose motivating.
Free Business KPI Dashboard Software | Databox
Quickly and easily build a consolidated view of your company's key performance indicators. Build custom views and… databox.com
KPI Software for creating Dashboard and Reports | SimpleKPI
See what's really making up the numbers. Compare trends over different periods and get to the root cause of any peaks… www.simplekpi.com