If you’re a freelance blogger, your computer and smartphone are your livelihood as well as the tools of your craft.

They’re where you store your work, where you do your work, and they’re how you access the internet to get more work. So it’s safe to say your computer and phone are among your most valuable and important possessions.

And you need to protect them. Vigilantly.

Other people can recover much easier if they’re the victim of a security breach or a data leak due to a hacker. The worst most civilians have to worry about is identity theft.

But if something like this happens to you, a freelance blogger, at the very least you’ll lose several days trying to fix everything back up and checking to make sure everything is there. At the worst, your security vulnerabilities could tarnish your professional reputation for years to come.

Don’t panic, though. Here are some simple ways to improve your online security and protect your career from damage:

Just for a moment, pretend you’re looking to hire a freelance blogger instead of be a freelance blogger.

Now imagine this scenario: it’s 10pm. You’re on the sofa in the midst of a well-deserved Netflix binge when you remember you need to check out that candidate blogger’s website for tomorrow.

Thankfully, your tablet is in arm’s reach. You grab it, punch in the URL, and… seriously? Their website isn’t responsive. You’re left staring at a full-size web page that’s simply been shrunk to fit on your tablet screen.

You squint at the tiny text and do the zoom-in-finger-thing. You try flipping the tablet vertically. Yet everything stubbornly remains the same.

Frustrated and unable to find what you’re looking for, you start to have second thoughts – who is this person? It’s 2015! Surely they don’t expect you to go find your laptop just so you can see their site properly?

Now go back to being your usual freelance blogging self, and imagine how awful it would be if that was your freelance writer site. How many customers might you lose if your site doesn’t work right on a mobile device? 

It’s been a few months since you took the plunge and became a freelance blogger, and the water is just fine. Better than fine, in fact.

Your new life as a freelance blogger is everything you hoped it would be. Except you still can’t shake the feeling that there’s something missing.

You’ve made a great start. You’ve taken on a couple of jobs and been paid… maybe not as much as you’d like but at least you’ve started something good.

But you feel like you have to put in a lot of effort just to get work. Maybe that means lots of unanswered pitches, leaning on existing connections or trawling social media looking for jobs.

Whatever the case, you’re spending more time than you’d like looking for your next gig. Time you’d rather be spending writing blog posts… because that’s why you started this whole thing, after all.

If all that sounds familiar, then this post is for you. I’ll tell you the 6 things I wish I’d paid closer attention to before and during my first freelancing slump.