How to Track Your Articles as a Freelance Writer

There are many ways that being a freelance writer is easy, but there are other things about the job that are a challenge. One of the most difficult and time consuming things for a busy writer is keeping track of article submissions.

You might think it would be easy, you type the article and save it to your documents, maybe print a hard copy to file, and ta-da the article is there anytime you want to follow up on it. Not exactly true, if you are doing jobs for more than one company or person, and writing multiple articles for each per day. Through hit and miss we've discovered that there is one simple solution to this problem that will let the writer see at a glance all the details that they will need to locate the article and to follow up on it. What could possibly make this a simple job? Why, the ever flexible and expanding spreadsheet.

Keeping track of article submissions may seem to be pretty simple, after all what more could you need than who you submitted it to and the title, right? Wrong.

First you will need the date that the article was written- in case you get an inquiry about articles written in a certain month or week, you can locate them by date.

Where the article is located should be included in the also. Many writers use a sort of shorthand code when saving documents, usually something with one word of the title and a number format date. This makes it easy to find the article after looking on the spreadsheet.

The name of the article is needed because most people that you submit to will reference the name when asking about an article, and the writer can search for it by title.

Date submitted will help the writer keep track of how many articles were submitted in a certain time frame, and can be searched by this criterion as well.

Yet another thing that needs to be kept on the spreadsheet is who the articles were submitted to and how they were submitted- if by email then the email address needs to be noted, and if sent through snail mail then the mailing address should be included.

The final columns on the spreadsheet should be the payment columns, so the writer can keep track of if it was a paid article, how much for the article, the date it was pad, and how it was paid.

Keeping good records is the key to success in any business, but for a freelance writer it can make the difference between making a living from home and having to join the rat race. If you haven't tried using a spreadsheet for you article submissions you should definitely look into it. The programs are relatively simple; the hard part is remembering to enter the information when you finish an article.