To me, the practice of going to low-paying markets and trying to convert them into high-paying markets is unproductive. Even if you get an extra 5 cents a word -- which in my example represents a 50 percent pay hike -- we’re talking about only $50 more for a 1,000-word article.

If you really want to get start making big money from your writing, don’t haggle over nickels and dimes. Don’t try to get a penny a word market to pay two cents a word, and then feel pleased that you doubled your fee. It’s still pennies.

Instead, target high-paying markets and assignments -- large-circulation consumer magazines, Fortune 500 corporations, and mid-size businesses. These folks are used to paying top dollar, so you won’t have to do a song and dance to get the fee you deserve.

Moving to higher-paying assignments accelerates your climb to the $100,000 a year mark. It’s much easier to meet your goal of $400 a day when you get $2,000 per project instead of $200.

When considering the profitability of assignments, calculate your earnings per hour rather than per project or per word. If it takes you 10 eight-hour days to do a $2,000 feature article for a glossy magazine, you make $25 an hour. If an industrial manufacturer hires you to write simple press releases for the trade at $500 each, and you can do two per day, you make $125 an hour.

8. Royalties, sales, and mark-ups. Dentists have a saying: “The more you drill and fill, the more you bill.” That means, despite their high pay, they are still in essence hourly laborers, getting paid only for their time -- just like writers.

Dentists get around this by hiring other dentists to work for them in their practice, and collecting more in revenue from the work of these dentists than the salaries paid to them.

For writers there are basically three options for escaping from the limitations of “drill, fill, and bill”:

* Royalties. When you write books or music, you get a royalty for each book or CD purchased. You can make thousands of extra dollars a month from products on which you are paid a royalty -- without doing any more work. Direct mail writer Dick Sanders, for instance, charges his clients a mailing fee per package mailed in addition to his flat fee for writing copy. If a publisher pays him 3 cents per package mailed, a mailing of 1 million pieces earns Dick an additional $30,000 in mailing fees.

* Sales. You can create and sell your own information products, such as books, e-books, subscription Web sites, newsletters, videos, audiocassettes, and special reports. This is the “self-publishing” option Dan Poynter discusses in his book The Self-Publishing Manual (Para Publishing) and his columns in Writer’s Digest.

* Mark-ups. Some writers make money by buying products or services, marking them up, and reselling them to their clients. For example, a freelance corporate writer may supervise the printing of the brochure he wrote for his client. The printer bills the writer directly. The writer sends his own printing bill to the corporate client, with the actual cost marked up 20 percent to compensate him for his project management services. On a $20,000 print bill, your mark-up would be $4,000. “Never miss out on the opportunity to coordinate printing,” says Flynn. “The profit potential is too great to pass by.”

These three strategies may enable you to make money outside of your own hourly labor, but they are not without pitfalls. What happens if you print 3,000 copies of your self-published book and sell only 100 copies to friends and relatives? What happens when the corporate client declares bankruptcy (can you say “WorldCom”?) and you are stuck with a printer’s bill for thousands of dollars of color printing?

9. The secret to solving the “supply and demand” problem. To earn 6-figures as a freelance writer, you have to be pretty busy most if not all of the time. Writers who suffer prolonged periods without work are going to have a difficult time meeting their revenue goals. If your goal is $2,000 a week and you make zero this week, you’re going to have to make $4,000 in an upcoming week to get back on track.

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