It’s a great pleasure to have Abigail Bassett to Skype into our class to share the stories of her freelance life. She spent 10 years working for CNN and CNNMoney but is now a freelance content creator and curator whose work has appeared in publications like Maxim.com, Forbes, Fortune, Money Magazine, Yahoo, Automobile Magazine and on CNN.

She talked about her career transition and the opportunities and challenges she has as she is pursuing a freelance career. First of all, she mentioned the importance of deadline. Because freelancers are self-employed, sometime they may lose the initiative to keep everything going. So you have to manage your time properly and maintain the balance between life and work. It’s really crucial to get things done in advance and meet all the deadlines set by the editors of news organizations so that it will accumulate your credibility and reputation.

Furthermore, reaching out to people is also important as a freelancer. Abigail pointed out as a freelancer you need to pitch your ideas all the time to the editors. More importantly, you should create a website posting your past pieces or works to show people what kinds of fields you have expertise in and you would like to dive deeper. It’s also a branding strategy to attract the potential editors to seek partnership with you.

Thirdly, one of the challenges Abigail faces is how to manage her financial budget. She shared her strategies to deal with all kinds of math in her life which is using the mobile apps to pay the bills and have an overall supervision of her budget. As a freelancer, I think she has to plan everything ahead and manage each little aspect in her life because she is her own boss.

Last but not least, Abigail told us to find what we are passionate about in our life because that is the real drive to keep yourself moving forward and pursuing your goals. While determining our passion, she suggests us to broaden our horizon and build various skill sets because the more skills you have and the more areas you have expertise in, the more likely you will find your desired job. For instance, as a journalist, you should be able to write for print, shoot photos and videos, use different editing software, and manage social media accounts.

In a word, it was a valuable experience for us to interact with Abigail Bassett. We got a closer look at the freelancing life and knew about what the keys are as being a freelancer.