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Why Getting Too Comfortable Will Screw up Your Online Writing Career

Complacency is your enemy. You should care more.

Photo by Mitchel Lensink on Unsplash

We all start out writing online like new kids at school. We’re keen. We want to make the right impression. We submit articles and blogs to new clients like we’re giving shiny apples to teachers. We crave praise.

But, over time, many writers lose their focus and become complacent. Once they work out that they can earn money from writing online, and once they start building a client base, they stop putting in as much effort.

This is natural — and often unconscious — behaviour. Once you know you can do something, you don’t have to try so hard to do it. Problem is, if you take your foot off the pedal, your writing career will stall or even break down.

Don’t just take my word for it, listen to the co-founder of Intel, Andy Grove:

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

So, what might happen to your writing career if you get too complacent?

Your funnel dries up

Ideally, you want to have enough work to do at any given time to earn the money you need. However, you also need to fill your client funnel so that you have future prospects or projects.

This isn’t a perfect science. Any online writer who tells you that they move seamlessly from project to project without any oh-my-god-I’ve-got-no-work sweaty-bum moments is lying.

But, you should always try to set up future work while you work on current projects. While this sounds logical, a lot of writers stop doing it once they get some traction.

For example, you work for a client regularly enough to feel comfortable that they’ll keep you busy forever. You feel so confident about your work that you just know in your bones that clients will queue at your door to beg you to work on their projects.

This is complacency delusion. You could end up with no work or no pipelined prospects. You’ll have to start from scratch, and your bum will be ever so sweaty until you start earning again.

You lose clients

When you first start writing for a new client, you want to impress them. You deliver to their brief so that they pay you fast and maybe even give you more work.

You want that little happy dance boost you get from making a client happy. Over time, you stop caring as much about their happy. You get too comfortable and focused on your own needs.

If you work for clients regularly, and get on with them well, then it’s easy to get complacent about your relationship with them. After all, if they keep giving you projects, then they must like you, right?

So, you take less care over your writing. You do less research and spend less time crafting perfect articles or blogs. You get bored and sloppy; you let your quality standards slip.

You stretch a deadline without asking if that is OK because the client has always been laidback about this in the past. You get pissy with them when they ask for a perfectly reasonable revision.

Eventually, you stop treating a client like a client. You get so wound up in being your own boss that you start acting like you’re doing them a favour working for them.

This can really backfire on you.

Online writing clients are all different, but they share one characteristic. They need you to deliver the right copy at the right time. If you don’t do this, then there are plenty of other writers out there who will.

Clients don’t have to slap you into shape or train you. They can just sack you with no notice.

You earn less than you could

It’s common to get too comfortable with work you do regularly. You get in a groove. You understand the subject and the client brief. You’ve done so much research in the past that you think you can write without it.

You think you’re golden when you’re actually being complacent. This can cost you money.

Every article or blog you write gives you an hourly earnings rate. If you get too complacent and turn in sub-standard work, you’ll likely have to make revisions or rewrites.

Revisions and rewrites increase your working time on each project. The more time you spend on a project, the less you earn per hour. You also lose time you could have spent on other work which would have boosted your income.

So, let’s go back to the last part of Andy Grove’s quote:

Only the paranoid survive.

You don’t actually need to be paranoid (unless that floats your boat, of course) but you should be vigilant about becoming too complacent. If you really want to make a go of an online writing career, then you need to stay engaged and on the ball.

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