by Danielle Corcione on The Write Life site:

A year and a half ago, I was planning baby steps to transition towards full-time freelance writing. At the time, I was working a monotonous day job in real estate content marketing and freelance writing on the side on weeknights and weekends.

My quest for anchor clients

My main strategy was securing a handful of anchor clients — or “businesses or individuals with whom you have an ongoing relationship and a steady flow of projects and income,” according to Funds for Writers — to help cover basic living expenses: food, rent, utilities, etc.

Freelance writers also use the terms “anchor gigs” and “bread and butter gigs” to refer to anchor clients.

This strategy is how I ended up writing for a content mill — and totally failing at it.

I won’t say which site it was, but it’s sort of like the Huffington Post (because they don’t pay their writers) but for mostly college students. Although this was a publication and not UpWork, I still refer to it as a content mill because of its embarrassingly low wages.