When new freelance writers ask me what kind of writing I do, they are sometimes surprised to discover that I work primarily in web content. “Don’t magazines pay more and isn’t it better to have your name in print?” they ask. Indeed, magazines seem like the superior freelance writing alternative but before you decide to go down that route, you need to remember a critical part of your freelancing business that most freelancers completely forget: Cash flow.

My choice to write web content over magazine content is not because I prefer to charge less. Instead, there is a very practical reason for it: Cash flow is the money that comes into your freelancing business. Cash flow is a critical part of business because it allows you to keep working: You can pay your bills and put food on your table. Even if it’s not a pile of profit, it’s still important to have cash coming in so that you can afford to continue earning more cash.

Way back when I first started freelance writing full time, I had already written a few magazine articles before and knew something about the magazine industry: They can pay pretty well, but it can take days or even weeks (4-6 weeks is the average that I’ve found) to get a response on an article idea. Once you get a response, you write the article and submit it. Once they approve it (after your revisions), they put it into their publishing cycle and it might not be published for 1 to 6 months. And in most cases, magazines pay 1 to 3 months after publication. Add that up and you could be looking at 6 to 9 months before you see payment, sent by check through snail mail.

How do you pay your bills in the mean time?

Web content may pay less per word (but you’ll discover as you build up some experience in this business that it doesn’t actually pay that much less), but the projects can be won faster, completed faster, published faster, and you’ll get paid faster. I may earn slightly less per word writing for the web but I can earn it at a far faster rate.

Don’t get me wrong, magazine content is good: We still live in a world where print content tends to be viewed with more credibility and authority than web content, and once you have your foot in the door of a few magazines, it’s easier to get more magazine work. And, once you have a good system going where the content you wrote for a magazine six months ago is paying you today while the content you wrote for a magazine five months ago is paying you next month. But until you get to that point, magazine writing is going to keep your cash flow from being as good as it could be.

Whether you are starting out as a freelancer or you’ve been working for a few years, cash flow will continue to be of critical importance to the survival of your business. While you might end up finding ways to pursue higher paying projects, remember what I’ve told you here as a lesson to consider when weighing your options between potentially more profitable projects or projects that provide cash flow today.