Four key strategies for developing a business mindset as a writer

This is a guest article by Indiana Lee. If you want to submit a guest article of your own, be sure to read the guest article guidelines.

Making real money as a writer requires you to become more entrepreneurial-minded. It’s a business mindset that will inspire you to develop additional skills, like marketing and managing business finances. It will help you establish a professional image that resonates with your ideal clients. 

More importantly, you can’t grow your writing business without an entrepreneurial mindset. Develop one with these four strategies. 

Set goals for your writing business 

Business goals help you define the vision for your company. It’s also easier to create actionable plans for achieving that vision with clear goals. 

Define where you want your business to go and what it looks like at its peak. Be as specific and detailed as possible when creating your writing business goals. 

For example, let’s say your goal is to have a successful writing business. Instead of this generic objective, craft something like: 

“I want to make $3,000 a month writing articles and blog posts for small businesses.” 

This goal is much more specific and easier to define what precise steps you’ll take to achieve it. You’ll start with your end goal and work backward, identifying everything you need to do to achieve this goal. 

In this case, you would have to determine how many articles and blog posts you would need to complete to make $3,000 along with the following factors:

• How you would secure clients to do these articles and blog posts for;
• How much you would charge per piece; 
• Who would be involved in helping you complete your articles and blog posts;
• If you would be in charge of publishing them; 
• Where your articles and blog posts would be published. 

Once you form your business goals, flesh them out into a full-blown business plan. 

Create a business plan 

Strong business goals are a good start to illustrating your vision for your writing business. However, you need more to develop a business mindset. 

A comprehensive business plan helps you outline not just your business goals, but your strategies, target audience, structure, financial projections, and feasibility too. 

You’ll start envisioning your writing as a business versus a hobby when you dig into these details. It’ll also inspire you to learn how to run your writing business so that you achieve your vision.  

Cover the following details in your business plan: 

• Executive summary: Talk about what your writing company is and why you think it will be successful
• Company description: Describe specifics about your writing business, like the problems it solves and its competitive advantages
• Market analysis: Discuss how your business fits into the current market and who your target audience or ideal clients are
• Organization and management: Define your company’s structure and talk about who’s involved in running it
• Services: Talk about the writing services you offer your clients and how they benefit them
• Marketing and sales: Document how you plan to market your writing services to your ideal clients and bring in sales 
• Financial projections: Discuss how your business will be stable and include any documentation that proves it will be a long-term success 

Laying out a plan for your business will help you embrace entrepreneurship and turn this into a full-time venture. 

Design a dedicated workspace 

One of the best things about being a writer is that you can do it anywhere. You can set up shop in your pajamas in your bed. You can write on the beach. You can take your craft to a coffee shop. 

As good as it is to have that kind of flexibility in a career, it might also be stopping you from developing the strong business mindset that you need.

Having a dedicated workspace transports you into work mode. You know that this is the space that’s all about business and elevating yourself as a professional writer. 

Take a look around your home and pick out the best place to create a well-organized and comfortable workspace. For example, you can transform your garage into an efficient, personalized home office. 

It’s simpler than you might think. The first step is decluttering and cleaning your garage to see the space you’re working with. The next step is to determine the upgrades needed to make your garage habitable, comfortable, and convenient for writing work. At the very least, you’ll need:

• Electricity
• A quality HVAC system
• Properly insulated walls, doors, and ceiling
• Security accessories, like keypad entry and motion-detecting lights, to keep all the valuables in your office safe

The third step is setting up good lighting. If you can install windows to let in more natural light, even better. After that, add good home office furniture, like a sturdy desk, ergonomic chair, table, and bookshelf. 

The last step is adding your personal touch to your home office. Pick colors, visuals, plants, and other items that make the space you so that you’re inspired every time you enter it. 

Embrace the habits of successful business people

There’s no one better to learn how to grow a business and develop an entrepreneurial mindset than people who are already successful in business. Doing what they do in the parameters of your own life will put you on a path to thriving much like they do. 

Adopt the habits of successful business people, particularly other successful writers. For instance, it’s easy to spend so much time on writing that you neglect the other essential aspects of running a business. 

Owners of flourishing writing businesses mastered time management and continually improved these skills to ensure they have room in their daily schedules for business and writing. 

You should work on your time management, embracing habits like setting personal and professional goals, automating marketing tasks, and outsourcing duties to trusted professionals. 

Here are a handful of other habits successful business people have that you should adopt:

• Experiment constantly: Your business will only succeed if you’re constantly going beyond your comfort zone to seek out methods that work out best for your business.  
• Exercise: This will keep you physically and mentally capable of handling all the peaks and valleys your writing business will bring.
• Prioritize self-improvement: Even when your business is doing well, there is always room for growth. Developing a self-improvement mindset will help you look for these opportunities. 
• Surround yourself with people you’re inspired by:  You can’t succeed in business alone, so find others who not only inspire but are also willing to help out—whether in your business or your personal life. 

Don’t stop here. Keep searching for habits of successful people that you can incorporate into your life for a better writing business.  

Conclusion

It can be hard for writers to be business owners because they put their all into their writing. Sometimes that inevitably means you don’t have room for learning all the other things it takes to grow an actual business.

If, however, you want to make a real living doing the thing that you love, it’s going to take climbing out of your comfort zone and becoming some version of an entrepreneur. Use the advice here to grow a business mindset and bring your writing company vision to life. 

About the author: Indiana Lee lives in the Northwest and has a passion for the environment and wellness. She draws her inspiration from nature and makes sure to explore the outdoors regularly with her two dogs. Indiana has experience in owning and operating her own business. Feel free to follow her on Twitter @indianalee3.