Last week, we talked about 5 Common Ways Freelance Writers Get Scammed, nearly all of which centered around ways that unscrupulous clients attempt to get work from their writers without paying them.

However, knowing what the scams are isn’t terribly important without an understanding of how to avoid them. Unfortunately, even though all of the tricks have the same premise and outcome, nuances in how they are executed makes it so that there’s no single “magic bullet” for avoiding them and most of what it takes to avoid such scams is keeping a good, clear head at all times.

That being said, there’s still a lot that you can do to avoid freelance writing scams and, specifically, here are six very smart steps you can take today to ensure that it doesn’t happen to you. After all, every writing job unpaid is money out of your pocket, time out of your day and, possibly, food off of your table.

It’s best to get wise now rather than learn a hard lesson later. [Read more…]