I also love, love, love case studies, but haven't landed as many as I'd like. So, those are going to be two main targets for me in 2011.

My plan is to roll out my own white paper to use for marketing purposes.

That's one problem with starting at the top – no bigger markets to tackle.

For more than a year I've been trying to shift some of my work to covering other industries (I've never put all the eggs in one basket), but the trend seems to be starting all "new" writers off on the low end of the pay scale…despite the fact that I've sold more than 600 articles to publications spanning dozens of different subject areas.

Still, I'm better than a friend who specialized in what was a lucrative field until the downturn and lost some major clients. I'm just annoyed that pay rates never seem to go up. She's scrambling to replace longtime clients and a good portion of her income.

I'll have to brush up on how to write query letters, since it's been awhile since I tried it. So, some more researching to do, but I can handle that.

In 2001 one of the $1/word magazines folded after something like 28 years in business. The $2/word place eventually cut their rates and started doing the bulk of work in-house. Thankfully the one magazine still pays roughly $1/word, but most of their assignments have shrunk from 800 words to 300-words or less.

Then there's the place that paid 75-cents/word and "temporarily" cut back to 50-cents/word….two years ago.

Sometimes just trying to keep pace is an uphill battle.

I already have two new potential clients lined up. Neither one pays close to the $1/word mark, but they're blogs that pay at least double what one especially "bragadocious" writing blogger claims is her fee for blog posts. So that's something.