I’ve been dusting off my American Express business card, ready to do some professional wining and dining. The biggest conference in my industry is in San Diego this week, and many of my biggest clients are in town. Thursday I grabbed coffee with a VP from one company, and last night I had dinner with an old friend/new client.

I took out my card at the coffee shop (wearing business attire, despite my clothing angst), and the VP said, “No, it’s on me. My boss insists.”

“But, you’re the client,” I protested. “This is how it works.”

He smiled. “We consider this a partnership,” he said.

Later I pondered this statement. I think what he was telling me was that I offer more value to their company than the words I write a page. He was saying that I contribute to his company’s productivity, to the idea pool, to the direction of their product launches and marketing. (I’m not reading too much into his one statement — he actually told me those things during the meeting.)

I do all this outside my hourly work, which is really one of the reasons I don’t bill as many hours as I’d like to. But, in creating these partnerships with my clients, I’m building the relationships and making it more likely that they’ll come to me for all their copywriting needs.

Here are six things I do to foster these types of partnerships with my clients:

1. Send them helpful articles
   When I find a blog post about a new marketing technique that a client is considering, I’ll send a link and a little note. I’ll forward newsletters with articles I think are helpful. These efforts take almost no time, but they let my clients know I’m thinking about them, and the notes remind them to think about me.
2. Reexamine their document pool
   When I write a longer piece for a group, I suggest ways we can create shorter pieces as well. Or I’ll surf their website to see if they have other information we could spruce up and reuse.
3. Help them make long-term plans
   I try to help my clients look forward to the next article or project, saying things like, “We ought to follow up with a piece on X in a couple of months.”
4. Pay attention to news in their industry
   If I’m working with a group that does online registration for events and I see a story about a group getting in trouble for selling tickets to a wine tasting to underage attendees, I’ll forward the story and suggest that my client write an article on how to avoid this problem, since it’ll be on their clients’ minds.
5. Be on the lookout for other article placement opportunities
   A couple of months ago I wrote an article that didn’t generate much buzz for its intended audience. The problem? The article was for techies, not education managers. So I took the initiative to write to a technology newsletter editor from the same industry, and they picked up the article. Although my clients weren’t disappointed that the original article didn’t get much play, they were thrilled that the new article was going to reach another audience.
6. Introduce new people to your clients
   I interviewed an expert for on sponsorships for an article for one of my clients. The expert loved the exposure, and she wants to create a partnership with my client to create more opportunities for them both.

Some of these are specific to freelance writing consultants, of course. What other ways do you cement relationships?

I’ve been sweating about this post since I decided two days ago to cut back on writing. Since I only write three times a week, each post has to meet the needs of every single reader, right?

My sister said she only reads to see how bananas I am. I think D.J. comes to maintain proper boyfriend support quotas. Steph, Sarah and Sara stop by for tips on freelancing, I think. And Lesli and others read because I make them laugh (I hope). Moonbeam loves the tech tips, and Chris likes the marketing insights. And at least eight of you want to keep hearing about the cupcake cravings (click here to take the poll — what do you want to read?).

So, should my three posts a week be about my ongoing 40-something angst? The business side of my small business? The best technology tools I run across? I covered all topics when I wrote every day, but how can I possibly do everything to make everyone happy?

Ah. Therein lies a true problem.

Sunday is my official one-year anniversary. Here’s the list of services offered that still appears on my website (which I haven’t updated since it launched):

• Marketing Copy
• Brochures
• Emails
• Press Releases
• Catalogs
• Newsletters and eNewsletters
• Strategic, Marketing and Business Plans
• Organization-Produced Technical Papers and Books
• How-Tos for New Clients
• Industry Research and Benchmark Documents
• Conference and Workshop Promotions

New small business always want to help. A prospective client says, “Is that something you do?” and a new business owner says, “YES! Of course! When do you need it!” I’ve done that several times, committing to projects I’ve never tried before, then searching the web for information about whatever the hell it is I’ve just committed to.

But after a year in business, I sat down and asked myself two questions:

1. What do I write best, and
2. What do I best like to write?

Lo and behold…. the answers to both questions were the same!

1. White papers
2. In-depth articles and pithy press releases (beyond the new product announcements)
3. Blog posts

This list is not a real surprise, given my first passion for journalism. Sure, I can write the heck out of a postcard, and my email campaigns can get the phones a’ringin’. But I’m happiest when you give me a juicy, problem-solving white paper with research to track down, people to interview and real thinking to do. And I am usually really proud of the end results.

So, what would happen if I focused the second year of Avenue Z on marketing my in-depth writing services? People who write these types of pieces are generally called “content writers” instead of “copywriters.” My next marketing campaign (if I ever find time to market again) will target organizations that need longer, stronger, more researched pieces. I’ll enjoy my work more, and my end products will show it. Thus I’ll get more work and increase my value and my income.

But about this blog… don’t be concerned. Although I’ll try to focus my business in year two, my blog posts will continue to be both schizophrenic and bipolar (why limit myself to one mental disorder?). I try to turn my personal life lessons into insight about my business. Thus, happenings with my dating life, my running, my cat and my neuroses usually end up providing inspiration into something I can use for a post about being a small business owner.

A special note to those of you who wrote to me, depressed about the fewer posts…. Yes, a bribe would help. I did find a “cupcake of the month” club, though I think I’d have to move Chicago. If the cupcakes are worth it, I’ll consider relocation.

Update… Cool! One of my favorite clients just gave me permission to reference one of my best white papers as a sample here. It’s a guide to choosing the right media for conference handouts. You’ll have to register on their site, but they’re nice people, I promise….

Many small businesses start blogs to increase SEO, to keep in touch with customers, to create community among people in their industry and to show leadership in their niche. I am working with several clients to create blog posts, and they always ask me, “How many times a week should I post?”

One of my new favorite blogs, Men with Pens, announced yesterday that they are cutting back on the number of posts. “We’ve realized something very important: People are busy. They try to keep up with favorite blogs but they become overwhelmed. That’s pretty normal – it’s tough to read 30, 100 or 300 blog posts a day and absorb everything.”

Men with Pens is going to four days a week instead of six. “We want you all to have time to read our posts and enjoy them, and we feel this decision is the best route to take. It gives us more room to continue to offer readers good lessons, strong messages and creative content.”

The MarketingProfs Daily Fix blog includes the top ten reasons why posting daily is “so Web 1.0.” Eric Kintz said many bloggers can’t keep up the pace (they like their families too much) and abandon blogs after 3 months or so. He added that the pressure to post daily can keep corporate leaders from becoming respected thought leaders because they don’t have time to post, and the duty often goes to a PR agency (or your friendly neighborhood copywriter).

Marketing guru Seth Godin talked about RSS fatigue on his post, “The noisy tragedy of the blog commons.” Godin said, “Over time, as blogs reach the mass market, the number of new readers coming in is going to go down, and the percentage of loyal readers will increase. The loyal readers are going to matter more.

“Blogs with restraint, selectivity, cogency and brevity (okay, that’s a long way of saying “making every word count”) will use attention more efficiently and ought to win.”

Thus, it sounds like I can offer this advice: posting regularly doesn’t mean every day. We bloggers can post twice a week, four times a week or whenever we have something real to say without losing our loyal readers, perhaps even increasing the number of people who value our content.

Here at Avenue Z, I’ve decided to heed my own well-researched advice. Although I’ve really never had much trouble coming up with a post a day, I’m cutting down from five posts a week (one each weekday) to three: Tuesdays, Thursdays and once over the weekend. I hope my blogging community (joyously discovered yesterday) will still find value in their visits.

I’m taking this step for two reasons. First, I think the blogging gurus are right… most of my readers don’t have time to visit daily, and I want to respect their time and keep them coming back.

The second reason is a little more selfish. After the analysis of how I spend my time, I realized I put in an hour or more (sometimes much more) messing around with my blog: writing posts, watching stats, generating traffic… all those things suck time from what I do for a living, and, more importantly, what I want to do for a living. Now that I’ve created a real daily writing habit, I can use the three free mornings per work week to write non-copywriter things such as book proposals and magazine article queries. I can spend a little more time on a marketing plan for my main business or a life plan for my future as a writer.

Although I’m cutting back on the regular posts, I reserve the right to post little random things as they pop up, like the news about the recent Southern California earthquake that shook my desk and rattled my nerves, or assaults against the English language such as the call from an academic criminologist to abandon those pesky spelling rules. And, of course, I’ll keep you abreast of cupcake emergencies.

See you all Thursday!

After a thorough examination of the way I spend my days, I’ve discovered some large disconnects between what I think I’m capable of doing in a day and what I actually get done. These challenges seem to be inherent in day-to-day life of freelancers, so I’ll share.

1. Discover your Dead Zone
   As I meticulously recorded my activities last week, I noticed weird entries between noon and three: “read blogs, answered emails, … did stuff.” What the heck was that stuff? What I actually discovered was my Dead Zone, a persistent period of time each day that I just floated, billing no hours. I once called this the Idiot Hour.
   The Remedy: I started scheduling meetings — phone and in person — during my Dead Zone. This at least gave me billable hours during those times and kept me on track for my daily billing goals.
2. Manage your phone calls and meetings
   Here’s what happens… your little reminder comes up to tell you that you have a meeting in 15 minutes. So you stop working. If you have a meeting 30 minutes after the first one, you don’t get back to billable work until after your second meeting. And if the meeting is late or canceled, you don’t dive back into billable work. You can waste 30 minutes on either side of a meeting if you’re not careful.
   The Remedy: Schedule meetings in clusters so you’re not constantly ducking in and out of calls. If you schedule them back to back, you’ll also manage the length of each call so you don’t get too chatty.
3. Turn off IM and hide your cell
   It’s so very, very easy to get caught up in conversations with friends when there’s no boss looking over your shoulder. But, as a freelance writer, I am the boss. I know when I’m not being productive, when I am surfing the web or sending funny links to friends instead of working.
   The Remedy: Give yourself time to interact with friends, but don’t get carried away. Fifteen minutes of funnies is fine… 45 minutes is not.
4. Rethink what constitutes “work”
   In my business plan (you know, the one I haven’t written yet), this blog plays an important role. Thus, when I’m blogging, I’m working. When I’m answering emails, I’m marketing, networking, connecting. That’s work as well. No, I can’t bill those hours to anyone, but those jobs are a part of running Avenue Z Writing Solutions, and I have to plan them into any day.
   The Remedy: Figure out what YOU have to do vs. what has to be done. Can you outsource some parts of your basic business activity? I just hired an assistant to help with some things that have to get done but not necessarily by me.
5. Understand your limitations
   Although I would like to be more productive throughout the day, my observations over the last few days have helped me realize that I am not really capable of billing an 8-hour day. There’s a reason I come across a Dead Zone — the work that I do can be pretty intense: concentrated thinking, meticulous editing, focused word selection. Perhaps I can bill an extra 30 minutes a day, but an extra hour? Two? It doesn’t seem likely. At a party earlier this week, I meet a freelance designer. She said she can work 6 hours, no problem. But she clarified — she can work 6 hours when she’s in production mode. When she’s conceptualizing and thinking, she can focus for 2-3 hours max. As a writer, I’m rarely in “production mode.” Sometimes I have to take one email and tweak it for three audiences, but those tweaks don’t take hours — they take minutes. So I rarely have projects I can just plow through for hour after hour.
   The Remedy: Even if you’ve reached your peak in terms of hard-thinking hours per day, you can still grow your business. How can you create services that have more value? What other ways can you use your time to increase billable hours (like the phone calls)?

What are your biggest time wasters? What did I miss?

Thursday I received some family news that shook me hard. It’s the kind of news that makes you want to forget about living in exotic places and move home to be near the family.

For the first time since 2006, I was compelled to write… for myself, for my family, out of pure need to express myself.

I wrote a very short essay on Friday to read at a local prose reading on the first Friday of every month.

I literally heard a collective gasp when I finished reading. I looked up, and the audience members were leaning forward in their chairs, several with tears in their eyes. I was crying. By the time the applause died away, I was in the street, releasing the anger and the fear in a torrent of tears. My wonderful friend Erin held me as I shook.

One man was standing by the door, waiting for me as I came back. “Thank you for reading that. It was beautiful,” he said. Others approached me. “My family is going through the same thing.” “I live in fear that something like that will happen to someone close to me.” “That was brave.” “You really touched me.”

My family and I will approach last week’s news one day at a time. It’s something everyone will survive (I have to add an “I hope” here).

But that’s not the point of this post.

I love my job (here’s a small sample of the number of times I’ve said that). I write press releases and white papers and emails for sales people. I make my clients very happy, taking care of jobs they can’t manage, coming up with ideas they don’t have time to think about. It’s a kick, and it makes me very happy and pays the bills every month. I’m quite fortunate.

But no one gasps when they read an article I write for a newsletter. I don’t bring tears to anyone’s eyes or make them laugh aloud. It’s not my job to touch people. The things I write right now don’t bear my name. We give the byline to the VP of sales or the company president.

I want to make people gasp and laugh, cry and want to share my piece with others. I want to write a mystery series with smart women as lead characters, and nonfiction that speaks to the universality of the human experience. I want to touch people and allow them to use my essays as support when things go wrong.

But back to reality, right? Most people can’t make a living as an essayist or novelist. It’s best if I stick with what works.

But let’s examine that thinking for a moment. Before I started my own business as a copywriter, I was convinced that making a living on my own was REALLY HARD and something that only ENTREPRENEURS could do. Turns out it’s not that tough. At one time I thought that people who went to grad school were WAY SMARTER THAN I AM and that I’d never fit in. Turns out I did. And I thought Peace Corps volunteers had some mystical power of giving that I’d never possess. And running a bed and breakfast was something that only really lucky people were able to do. And taking six months to travel around the country was a luxury that I’d never be able to afford.

But it turns out that all these things are doable. Not only that, it turns out all these things are pretty easy once you get over the OH MY GOD CAN I REALLY DO SOMETHING LIKE THAT??!!

What would it take to make the switch? I don’t often plan — I frequently jump. I say to myself, “If you want to make it happen, the only way to make it happen is to make it happen. Today. Now. Before you get too caught up in the fact that it will never happen.”

But I’m not going to do that right now. I wouldn’t drop out to my clients out of the blue. I wouldn’t be able to pay my bills. And I’d like to have a book proposal written and accepted by an agent or publisher before I leap. But that doesn’t mean that I can’t or that I’m going to put it off until it becomes one of those dusty things in the closet. It means that I have to remember how those people gasped when I shared a piece of myself, and how I reached them, and how lovely and amazing and right that felt.

So, back to you. Many of you who read here think about your passions and your true calling and how you’d rather spend your days. What will it take to make those dreams come true? How can you convert what you want to do into what you are doing? And why are you waiting? What is your bright treasure?

Sorry for the very personal post. I’ll go back to Avenue Z-ing tomorrow.

PS — the piece on Friday was recorded on audio. I won’t post it, but write me if you want the link when it becomes available.