By Carol Tice
Today, I bring you good news about freelance writing:
There has never, ever been a better time to be a writer.
I know what you’re going to say: Haven’t I noticed the daily-paper world is in collapse? Magazines have folded. Many online sites pay squat.
So how can I make this claim?
Here’s why the golden age for writers is now
There are three reasons why things have never been better for freelance writers. They’re all things the Internet has made possible:
Compare this with the supposedly wonderful days of last century. There were a fairly set number of major magazines, major newspapers, major corporations, and major book publishers that paid well. If you couldn’t crack some of these, you didn’t earn so great.
In the case of books, your novel often never saw the light of day, or if it did manage to get published, your royalty rate was usually pretty small. Now, you can self-publish and keep every dime of revenue over the modest cost of creating your product.
The Internet has introduced new business models that scads of startups are trying out. These online markets are attracting venture capital and in some cases real revenue…which is opening up many new opportunities to earn.
It used to be difficult to make connections with companies or magazines that weren’t in your town. Either you wrote awesome query letters and then waited two months or so for a mailed response, or you got on planes and went to trade shows in hopes of meeting editors. Now, Twitter, LinkedIn or just a simple email can instantly connect us to new editors wherever they are, and help us land gigs.
Here’s the amazing opportunity
But really, nothing is as life-changing for writers as the ability to have unlimited earnings by writing your own products and selling them online.
Let’s pause to fully appreciate the empowering moment we are living in right now. If you have an idea for a how-to book, or a novel, you can shop it to a traditional publisher if you like. OR…you can just write it, build an audience for it on your blog, and sell it to your readers. And keep selling it, over and over, for years to come. No gatekeeper can stop you from publishing now.
Instead of earning $100 from an article, or $1,000, you can earn from it indefinitely. You can repackage a blog post into an ebook, which gets bundled into a course, or gets you consulting work. The possibilities truly are endless.
Your earnings are limited now only by your imagination, and your willingness to dive in and master these new methods of making your writing pay.
But then there’s the tricky part
If everything is so fantastic, what is holding so many writers back from earning a good freelance living?
I believe it’s change.
Things have changed a lot for writers in the past decade or so. It can be pretty boggling. Many writers I’ve talked with are still in mourning for a writing ecosystem that is gone and never coming back — one where they didn’t even have to know how to write headlines, much less how to use blogging platforms and Twitter. Today, writers have to know how to market their writing more actively than before.
While there may be more opportunity today — boundless opportunity, really — two things have to happen for writers to take advantage of it.
The first one is a mindset change: Writers have to not only accept, but embrace the new reality of our lives. Throw off your black clothes and realize these are the good old days.
The second one involves learning: Writers who want to take full advantage of the opportunities online need to learn how to create a powerful blog.
Commit to constantly seeking more information about how you can improve your online presence. Take it from me, every small change you make will make a difference.
By Carol Tice
Freelance writing is a line of work cloaked in mystery.
It seems like during the past few economically depressed years, myths about freelance writing have only multiplied. So today I want to take some time to blow up the harmful myths that hold writers back.
Here are some of the biggest freelance-writing myths, in my view:
by Ollin Morales
Before you read this article, I would like you to try something:
Move your eyes away from your computer screen and take a deep breath. Feel the air as it moves through your nostrils, down your throat, and feel it fill your diaphragm to the brim. As you do this, I want you to take in your surroundings.
Notice the light as it flows through the window, acknowledge the noises you hear, the chatter of the people around you, the chairs and other objects that surround you. Do not resist anything you see, hear, or feel. Just become aware of everything.
Do this exercise right now. When you have done this for a few minutes, come back to me.
You done?
If you did it right, you should feel a little bit more at peace and relaxed.
Most importantly, you should have felt that a certain, negative emotion was not present: fear.
Now, before I go on about how to overcome your writing fears, you need to first understand how fear works. Once you understand how fear works, you’ll feel a lot better about yourself and you’ll understand what Franklin Delano Roosevelt meant when he said:
“We have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
When Fear Was A Good Thing
Fear actually serves a very important purpose in our human physiology.
Dr. Joan Borysenko, in her book Minding The Body, Mending The Mind, calls the process by which fear manifests itself in our mind and our body as the “fight-or-flight response.” I won’t go into too much detail about this response but what you, as a writer, need to know is that human beings were initially designed with sophisticated hardware that utilized fear to help us survive “life or death” situations.
You see, there was a time when we humans were just hunter-gatherers out in the wild, susceptible to dangerous predators. In those days, when we saw a tiger, our mind sent a signal to our body. The body, in response to this signal, made our palms sweat, made our heart beat faster, caused our muscles to tighten, and sent a shot of adrenaline through our veins. Our mind was so sophisticated that, in a nanosecond, it would prepare our body to run as fast as it could (or to fight as hard as it could) in order to survive a tiger’s attack on our lives.
When Fear Became A Bad Thing
This “flight-or-flight” response was very useful back in the caveman days, but as many of us are realizing, our primordial response to highly stressful situations has now become harmful to our livelihood.
Have you felt, for instance, after receiving a rejection letter from a potential employer, that your heart started to beat faster, your palms began to sweat, and a shot of adrenaline went through your veins that sent you reeling?
You have felt that way?
Guess what? We all have felt that way. That’s because we, as human beings, are hardwired to respond in this way to high levels of stress and fear.
In the example above, your mind mistook that rejection letter as a tiger about to attack you, and so your mind sent a signal to your body that it was time to run (or fight for its life).
Human beings were not built to handle a 21st Century workload. We were built to hunt, gather food, eat, poop, sleep, have sex, and avoid being eaten by predators and that’s about it.
How To Overcome Your Fears
As we’ve discussed, your mind is designed to look at something you fear as a tiger ready to kill you. However, the truth is you will never die from having your writing rejected, criticized, or misunderstood. I repeat: WRITING FREELANCE ARTICLES NEVER KILLED ANYONE.
But you are still afraid, right? So, how do you get past your fear when your mind wants to view every rejection as a tiger ready to attack you?
The answer: you need to stop relying on your mind to overcome your fears.
It is your hunter-gatherer mind that is behind all your fears, so you can’t expect that same mind to help you overcome your fears.
Therefore, the only way to move past your writing fears is to move past your mind.
“But how do I do that?”
Remember that exercise you tried at the very beginning of this article? That exercise is called meditation.
Meditation is one of the best tools a writer can utilize to overcome their fears. Because when you meditate, you leave your mind and return to your body and the world around you. In a sense, you return to reality and discover that there is actually no tiger that is ready to attack you. Your “fight-or-flight” response is neutralized.
“Are you telling me that the only thing I have to do to overcome my writing fears is to take a long, deep breath and look around me?”
Yes, the answer is that simple.
But even if the answer is simple, the process of meditation is not. Just like your ability to write great articles, meditation is a skill that you need to learn, practice, and perfect.
If you need help getting started, I recommend reading books by Dr. Joan Borysenko, Dr. John Kabat-Zinn, and Thich Nhat Hanh to help start your journey into meditation practice.
Here are two articles from my blog that discuss meditation in further detail: The Key to Finding Peace When You Sit Down to Write and Patience.
Good luck to you, and remember: When it comes to your freelance writing career, you really have nothing to fear but fear itself.
Ollin Morales is a writer and a blogger. {Courage 2 Create} chronicles his journey as he writes his first novel. Through his blog he also offers a writing consultation service designed to help his readers improve their writing skills.
Tiger photo via stock.xchng user MeiTeng
By Carol Tice
Most bloggers have heard the expression that when it comes to websites and blogging, “content is king.”
For a while, it was true.
Sites stuffed their pages with junk content — much of it almost unreadable, robot-generated SEO garbage — and were rewarded with better rankings in Google searches, and more traffic and sales.
Lots of bloggers went nuts, throwing up any old error-filled, half-baked, two-paragraph post, just to have a post every day of the week. Having boatloads of content was important!
This ushered in the era about 2-3 years back when it seemed like every job ad you saw was to write three posts a day for $5 each, accompanied by threats of employing Copyscape for plagiarism checking. A lot of content was really about content-stuffing, not creating anything useful for readers.
Or as I liked to say, “You want someone to write posts for robots to read. I only write pieces for people to read.”
People warned me that this was the new reality, and in the future it would be all cheap junk and low rates. But I never believed it. I knew the pendulum would swing back.
It’s already happening. Many sites I know have raised their rates and changed their standards because they’ve tried the low-rent approach and it didn’t work.
Eventually, so many sites did the junk-content thing, website readers got hip to it and stopped visiting these sites. The sites quickly lost their credibility. Rankings for junk-post sites went down.
The days when blogs could be sloppy, half-thought-out pieces written in 10 minutes and still succeed are over.
Which brings us to the new era. Know what the watchword is now?
That’s right — it’s not about quantity any more. It’s all about quality.
Over time, readers ignored the junk-stuffed sites and became enthusiastic, loyal fans of sites with terrific content. I know some of the ones I read may only post once a week. Those sites still became the real money-makers.
That’s because what they post is amazing, enlightening, terrifically useful information.
As my Webinar partner Judy Dunn said earlier this week, bloggers who want to succeed today should write like they already have 1,000 subscribers. Or take the attitude I always did — that each blog post I wrote was as important to me as a $1-a-word article I would write for a national magazine or major corporation.
I always thought of the time spent on posts as an investment in my future earnings.That turned out to be a good approach.
There’s two ways to play it in freelance writing today — you can pitch companies and publications and get assignments like always. Or you can create your own blog, which in essence is like your own rolling magazine, and use it as a tool for earning. If you build a successful blog, you can use it to get gigs, sell ebooks, get consulting work, or sell products for others. This is the unique, new opportunity of the 21st Century for writers.
But it’s not easy, or we’d all already be millionaires.
It’s about really thinking about what readers want to know, and delivering it every single time. Share generously from your own experiences, while offering concrete tips on what others can learn from them.
It’s also about writing irresistible headlines that draw readers to come visit.
The days when just great content alone could make the blog-success magic happen are also gone.
The new era of blogging is also about great design and usability — making your site look inviting and uncluttered, and easy for readers to navigate and find what they want. It’s about committing to constantly learning more about this emerging, evolving art of blogging, and making your blog better and better. If you have no natural aptitude for design (which I certainly don’t!), you still can’t ignore this critical element.
In other words, your great blog posts are like pretty pictures. Put them in a hideous frame, and people won’t want to look. You have to bring it all together — the great content and smart design — to have all the ingredients for blogging success.
By Judy Dunn, Cat’s Eye Writer
When I was writing for children, I used to cut out photos of cute 6-year-olds from magazines and tape them to my whiteboard.
You could say I invented them.
It helped me fill that big black hole, you know that audience you talk to as a writer, but can’t see?
I am often asked, in my blogging workshops, and in emails from my readers, “How do I get more subscribers to my blog?”
I can hear the tension in the email. I can almost see the frown on the face, the furrowing of the eyebrows.
And I say, “Just invent them.”
I can hear the deep silence on the other end, see the question mark at the end of their sentence get bigger.
Dance like no one is watching, blog like everyone is
I know the advice. You’ve heard it, too. It goes like this:
Slow and steady wins the race.
Walk before you run.
One reader at a time.
And it’s true. Because that is how you build your community. And, yes, turning a visitor into a subscriber is one of the most difficult of all conversions.
But you see, if you only focus on that, you are limiting yourself. You are looking at what is, rather than what can be.
I ask my blog coaching clients this: “Would you blog differently if you had 1,000 subscribers?”
There is a pause and I can almost hear them thinking. Most everyone says, “Well, yes, I suppose I would.”
Here is my challenge for you. Blog today, starting right this moment, as if you had 1,000 subscribers. Because, you know what? If you keep doing that, those 1,000 subscribers will show up.
I promise.
5 ways to blog like you have 1,000 subscribers
1. Focus less on incentives and more on kick-ass content.
Offering a free gift to subscribers is common and does help you to some degree. But there are people who subscribe to get the gift and then unsubscribe. There just are.
The best way to get subscribers is to keep cranking out the highest quality posts you can. Day after day, week after week.
2. Watch your consistency.
Readers don’t magically turn into subscribers. They become converts because they eagerly anticipate your next post. And part of that is knowing which day or days they can expect it.
Keep to your posting schedule. Be that consistent and loyal voice they have gotten used to hearing.
3. Claim your voice.
Think about the blogs you subscribe to. You probably could read any one of those bloggers’ posts and know who wrote it without looking at the author’s name. This is what you want to strive for.
Claim your voice and wear it proudly.
4. Tell your stories.
Whether you are a freelance writer, an author or a business blogger, you have stories to tell. When you tell them, readers just naturally connect with you emotionally. And that is exactly what you want to happen.
Weave a little storytelling into your blog posts from time to time and see what happens.
5. Have fun.
If you show your passion and sense of fun, your readers can’t help but follow along. One way to do that is to become a child again.
Don’t be afraid to show your passion for the topics you are writing about because that’s the way to draw your readers closer to you.
As I work more and more with both freelance writers and small business owners looking to build up their blogs, I find these two groups have the same problems. Their blogging journey generally develops like this:
I find this happens because of a basic disconnect people have about blogging.
Here’s why nothing’s happening with your blog:
When you write a blog post, you have created a tool. It’s like you’ve built a bullhorn for broadcasting what you know, who you are, and what you do.
But if no one picks up the bullhorn and talks into it, what will happen?
Nothing.
If you haven’t properly built your bullhorn, and it isn’t strong and sturdy and useful, what will happen?
Nothing.
No one is surprised that a silent bullhorn doesn’t accomplish anything. But people continue to be shocked when their unpromoted blog doesn’t make them an overnight millionaire.
What is the missing element in so many blogs?
Someone has to use the tool.
I know — blogging is so much work by itself! But it is actually just the first step in the process of using your online articles to draw people to you. Once you have that bullhorn, you’ve got to pick it up and start talking into it. Do that enough, and some people will notice and come on over to visit the blog.
As we saw earlier this week with one blogger’s bafflement about Twitter, many writers (and companies, too) don’t understand how to promote their blog. They aren’t using social media. They’re not sending out an email newsletter with their blog posts in it. So no one is discovering their posts. I’ve actually had clients sending out newsletters…but without including any links to their blog posts!
Another example: I had one client hire me to do two posts a week for two months, for instance. After six weeks, they hadn’t even bothered to read, approve, and post all the pieces I’d written. No one at the company was tasked with regularly promoting the posts in social media. So naturally, they were ready to pull the plug because “it just isn’t monetizing the way we expected.”
They expected their bullhorn to shout by itself. No surprise that didn’t work.
How to make something happen on your blog:
The good news is, you can fix this. The skills needed to succeed in blogging are not hard to learn. There are just four basic elements you need:
While those elements may be basic, they’re not necessarily easy or fast for you to develop. But head that direction, and as you improve, so will your blog’s prospects.
By Alan Kravitz
Can you really make a living with nonprofits?
I get this question a lot — especially since I specialize in nonprofits. My answer is an emphatic “yes” — if you’re realistic and target your prospects carefully. These are gargantuan-sized ifs in the nonprofit world.
By realistic, I mean that at least for now, be prepared to negotiate pricewise. While $75-$100 per hour is still realistic, there’s no question that nonprofits have been adversely affected by the economy.
Many face not only charitable decreases, but also state and federal funding cuts. As a result, CEOs are slashing every budget they can — including outsourcing budgets.
But the good news is that you can navigate these bumps and do pretty well for yourself by being smart and strategic in your approach. Here are five steps that have always worked well for me.
1) Go for big organizations and/or big names. If the United Way likes you, they’ll give you lots of work. So will Bill Gates. The best nonprofits are run very much like businesses — and often by top businesspeople, too. But this leads me to:
2) Avoid the grassroots. Yes, it sounds heartless. But if you want to make a decent living here, you’ve got to use your head more than your heart. Small, local organizations probably can’t pay anything close to what you want (or need.) Save the grassroots for volunteering.
3) Pay attention to your mailbox/inbox. The causes you already support should get priority on your contact list. Why? Because there’s already a bond there. Non-profit professionals are very passionate and dedicated — and they like vendors who share their mission. And be sure to mention your support in your pitch. While that alone probably won’t be enough to seal the deal, it’s still a big plus.
4) Do your research. There are many online tools, but my favorite is Charity Navigator. Here, you can easily see what an organization raises annually.
For me, a charity has to raise at least $3 million to pique my interest — and ideally I go after the ones raising $13 million and up. These are the organizations that have budgets to pay writers decently.
Just as important, Charity Navigator also independently rates charities for financial effectiveness. I pay attention to charities that get at least 3 stars (out of four.) The more professional a charity is with their own donors’ dollars, the more professional they’re likely to be with you. Charity Navigator will also link you directly to the organization’s website, so you can research names of marketing/communications directors, development professionals and chief operating officers. Once you have all that:
5) Start calling and emailing. I hear collective groans now, but I’ve gotten several clients this way (including two just this week.) And since nonprofit folks are some of the nicest people around, even the rejections are sprinkled with thank yous. Referrals, too!
Final tip: Just be patient.
Especially now, you’ll probably hear prospects say, “We want to do this, but we’re waiting on funding.”
Don’t despair. Be understanding and stay on their radar. Your persistence will eventually pay off.
In fact, one of the great advantages of a nonprofit niche is a steady work flow. If clients like you, they will come back to you – a lot.
Alan Kravitz is a freelancer copywriter and editor at The Infinite Inkwell. He specializes in writing for nonprofit and socially conscious for-profit organizations.
By Carol Tice
One thing’s for sure — if you’re going to be a high-earning freelance writer, you can’t spend a lot of time staring at a blank page (or screen). Beating writer’s block is an important skill that can up your earnings. When you can block out a few hours and count on getting your post done in that timeframe, you can book more work and bill more hours in a year.
It’s just simple math. Downtime is deadly to your bottom line.
Because I’ve had staff writing jobs where I absolutely had to turn in several articles every single week, plus Web briefs sometimes every day, I’ve learned how to reliably stick my finger down my figurative throat and spit out my piece, no matter what — come fever, screaming kids, sleepless night, boredom with the topic, or anything else you could name.
Here are 30 different exercises I’ve used to get my piece rolling when it’s not coming to me easily (in no particular order). Some of these relate to writing blog posts, some articles.
By Carol Tice
It happens to me time and again. Since winning Top 10 Blogs for Writers, writers email me and ask —
“Would you take a look at my blog and tell me what I’m doing wrong?
“Why can’t I get any comments?
“Why doesn’t anyone subscribe?”
There could be a lot of reasons for these problems, but let’s focus on one of the biggest reasons.
It’s something that’s incredibly common, and fairly easy to change. But if you’re making this mistake, you can keep on blogging until the messiah comes, but you’re probably not going to attract an audience. It’s sort of a fatal error for blogs.
I originally planned to write a long post building the tension up until I finally revealed the nature of this devastating mistake. Fortunately, I can cut right to the chase, because my friend Derek Halpern from Social Triggers and DIYThemes recently made a short video that explains Why Most Bloggers Fail. (Really, watch it — it’s only 20 seconds long. So we can wait while you do that.)
That’s right. Most blogs are all about me, me, me. And that’s boring.
They’re not about what readers need to know.
It’s really that simple. If you think of your blog as a place to brag, pontificate, rant, vent, muse, or otherwise go on about every tiny detail of your life, your day, your greatness…it should be no surprise that few people will take an interest.
Of course, if something that happened in your day might help enlighten a reader on how to do something, you can use it as a springboard for that. Nobody wants you to write a sterile blog devoid of personal experience — but that experience needs to be in service of the important goal of any blogger who wants their blog to help them earn:
To help readers.
Blogs that exist to help readers solve their problems become popular.
How do you know what readers are interested in learning from you? One great way to do that is simple: Just ask.
by Larry Brooks
It’s so easy to get overwhelmed in this business. Deadlines. Writer’s block. Procrastination. Cranky clients. Competition.
And perhaps at the bottom of the barrel, apathy and boredom.
This is as true for freelance writers as it is for novelists and screenwriters. Believe me, I do both. And I’m as overwhelmed as the next guy.
It’s so easy to get overwhelmed, in fact, that we can sometimes forget what this work is about. Why we got into this game in the first place. We forget that this isn’t just a job (emphasis on just, because if you’re doing this for money, make no mistake, this is a job).
At least it shouldn’t be.
Our mantra should be to prove Moliere dead wrong.
You remember Moliere, right? That little 17th century French dude with the cheesy beret who said (and I paraphrase), “Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love and pleasure, then you do it for a few friends, and finally you do it for the money.”
When that happens, you can be sure you’re heading down a dark and lonely road. Because then it really is just a job. And I’m guessing that’s not what signed up for. Hell, you started writing precisely because you wanted more out of life than just a job.
Some other wise old sage said this: “Happiness isn’t doing what you like, it’s liking what you do.”
Amen to that. You used to like this work. And you can like it again. Even love it.
So let’s hit the reset button today.
Let’s put the bliss back into your writing. Make this fun again. And, despite all those deadlines and clients and connecting the factual dots, I have a way to get there.
It’s a choice you can make. A brand you can adopt. A voice you can embrace.
The great trap in freelance writing is the tendency to start writing generically. Like a journalist rather than columnist. Like a technical writer rather than a creative writer. Like all the other commodity writers out there writing commodity stuff for commodity clients. The commodity-like nature of non-fiction work isn’t completely within our control, but how we position ourselves within the crowd of applicants absolutely is.
Even if we started out absolutely bubbling with attitude, over time we tend to slide into this vanilla writing mode, avoiding risks and playing it safe. We are driven there by our clients and the nature of the competition, sometimes simply to take the easy road and just get the thing out the door.
That needs to stop. And in stopping it, in cultivating your own voice as a writer – even a freelance writer with chops in a wide breadth of fields and niches, some of which are completely antithetical to passionate writing – you will be building the most important thing you can possibly give your writing career.
You will be building a brand.
If you want to separate yourself from the crowd, if you want to build a brand, and if you want to fall in love with the process of writing again, then choose not to be a machine. Instead, be a pro at it, someone who writes with heart and humor and edge and attitude, and knows when and how to lay it on or back it off.
Anybody can research a topic, go deep, make it sell, sell a point of view, elicit a response. That’s non-fiction 101. And it’s necessary… as a baseline objective. The trick is to not stop there.
If you want to bring passion back into your writing, don’t settle for that.
Make what you write interesting to read. Not just for the content, but for the experience of encountering it. Make readers notice the writing, but without allowing the writing to distract from the point.
Make your voice an advocate for the point.
I do some ghost writing for a guy who bills himself as the world’s foremost authority on public speaking. You’d think this respected guru wouldn’t need a writer, and in fact he’s a darn solid writer on his own. But when he needs something to pop, something with an edge, something to publish in a big national magazine, he hires me. He feeds me the content and tells me to do my thing.
Why? Because I give him passion.
I infuse his stuff with energy and juice. I make him look good. I won’t say he doesn’t have to reign me in once in a while, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. And because of that, we’ve been working together for three years, and he pays a premium for what I do.
Of course, this little sauce of attitude that infuses the writing with a taste of attitude can be tricky, it depends on the nature of the piece and the willingness of the client to go there. Less is usually more, but the right touch can change the driest of non-fiction into a joyful and enlightening ride.
Not just for the read, but for you, too.
Suddenly it’s not just work, it’s art seducing craft and erasing the lines that separate them.
So if you’re tired of working at this writing thing and yearn for the days when you looked forward to sitting down before a blank screen, make a shift. A choice. Choose to like what you do.
Choose to do it with love. Because passion is so much more rewarding, and universal, when it comes from that place.
Larry Brooks is the creator of Storyfix.com. His new book is Story Engineering: Mastering the Six Core Competencies of Successful Writing.
