By Carol Tice
Time. We’ve only got so much of it each day. For freelance writers who are also parents, we’ve certainly never got enough of it.
What’s the best way to spend our precious work hours? I’m often asked this question by my mentees. I had one say, “I wish I could follow you around all day and see how you do it!”
While I don’t think that would be pleasant for either of us (and might reveal an embarrassing amount of screwing off and/or snacking on my part!)…I realized that after five solid years of freelancing, I have developed some strong opinions on how to prioritize tasks.
Here are what I consider to be the seven most important activities a freelancer should spend their time on, in order of importance:
By Carol Tice
I’ve written frequently about the need for freelance writers to set a goal of having a high hourly rate. I’ve written about how to raise your rates. I’ve talked about how you can earn more bidding per-project than per-hour.
Today, I’m going to take the rate discussion to another plane and talk about daily rates. That’s the rate you want to earn per work day in order to bring in the amount you want to make in a year.
Why is it important for you to know your daily rate? Several reasons:
1) Quick tracking mechanism. If you know your daily rate, at the end of each day you can evaluate how you did. First, look at what you billed. If you didn’t actually bill any clients that day, review how much work you put in on ongoing projects. For instance, if you estimate you’ll work parts of 10 days on a $1,000 project, attribute $100 of earning on that project for today.
Now add up the total estimated earnings for the day. Does it add up to the daily rate you want? If not, the time to take action to find better-paying clients is now — not at the end of the year, when you do your taxes and are confronted in black-and-white with the reality that you aren’t meeting your earning goals.
2) Good weekly yardstick. Once you have a daily rate, it’s easier to track how you’re doing each week and each month. I find these calculations help me schedule deadlines throughout the month so I have revenue in each week, instead of having a lump of work all stacked up at the end of the month, which leads to late nights and stress as I frantically try to keep projects from hanging over into the following month (thereby screwing up my revenue projections for that month!).
3) Another way to view earnings besides hourly rates. While I’ve often said freelance writers need to aim to make $100 an hour, not all your work may be at your goal rate. Or you won’t be fully booked every day. A daily rate can give you a better sense of whether you’re charging enough based on other factors including how busy you are, how many hours per day you’re willing to work, and how long it takes you to complete projects.
4) Quick quote ability for exclusive projects. Every now and then, a client may want to lock down all your time for a project. They want you to go cover a trade show for several days. Or they want you to drop everything and work on a rush project for them for a week or two solid. Maybe they need someone to write in-house for a month at their office. Or they’d like you to spend two months ghostwriting their e-book.
How do you know what to charge?
If you know your daily rate, you know how much revenue you would lose by being locked down on an exclusive project, unable to work your usual clients. Without a daily rate, you’re just guessing whether it’s worth it to you financially to take the assignment, so it’s easy to end up shortchanged.
How to figure your daily rate
Now that you know why you should care about your daily rate, let’s figure it up. Say your goal is to earn $100,000 from freelance writing this year. (Think big!)
There are 365 days in the year, but 104 of those days are weekends. There are also roughly 10 holidays a year where it’s virtually impossible to get much work done — Christmas, New Year’s Day, Memorial Day, etc. Family members will likely expect you to shut off the devices and pay attention to them on these occasions.
Let’s hope you’re not working weekends or major holidays, and that you also plan to take at least two weeks off a year (which you certainly should). That leaves around 240 real, viable work days in the year.
Divide $100,000 by 240 and you get roughly $417 a day. That’s your daily rate. Want to earn $50,000 a year? That’s around $209 per working day.
What’s your daily rate now? Do the math and figure it out. Then figure your goal rate, and keep it in mind when you quote jobs.
By Carol Tice
How can a writer find time in their schedule for both writing and marketing? It’s always a tricky balancing act.
Marketing your writing business is a bottomless pit! There’s always more you could be doing. A few more comments on those forums, another networking meeting, a few more query letters to send, an hour researching prospects you might send messages to on LinkedIn.
Especially if you’re getting started in freelancing writing, as Kelli says she’s doing — you could easily read all day about whether or not to write for content mills, for instance, and which ones pay better. Or research whether creating and monetizing your own niche blog would be a better way to go than trying to land copywriting clients.
Here are some tips for keeping your writing on track while still devoting enough time to marketing:
1. Remember it’s all about the writing. If you have writing assignments, meeting those deadlines comes first. Period. Keeping existing clients happy is job one. If you have no current clients, write for at least an hour a day on something — your blog, a journal, spec articles. Then spend all the rest of your time on marketing. Paying clients are essential to keep the freelance lifestyle going, so focus on lining them up!
2. Keep it contained. To keep from losing your mind, find a containable slice of marketing that you can handle within the time you know you’ll have. Perhaps have a different marketing task each day — Monday you check job boards, Tuesday you write queries, etc.
3. Reserve a specific time block for marketing. Maybe it’s at night after the kids go to bed — that’s your marketing time. Or maybe for two hours first thing in the morning. Or Wednesday is marketing day. Any way that works for you, but set up a specific time each week for marketing. That way it’ll happen, but you’ll also have a clear sense of when marketing time is over and it’s time to write.
4. Have a goal. Marketing is a lot easier to execute when you know what you’re trying to accomplish. Do you feel destined to be the next $1 million blogger? Then learn about blogging. Do you need to land a major copywriting client to provide a measure of security to your freelance writing? Then focus on cold-calling, direct mail, in-person networking, or whatever other strategies you feel will most readily connect you with businesses hiring freelancers.
5. Measure your results. Whatever the goal, try to pursue several strategies at a time. Then, after several months, take a look at the results. How have you found your assignments? The answers are often VERY interesting, and can help you figure out the most productive ways to spend your marketing time.
This post originally appeared on the WM Freelance Writer’s Connection.
By Carol Tice
It’s confession time. Recently, I made a tragic error.
I washed a pair of my husband’s pants.
No, I do laundry around here. It’s not that.
It’s that inside a small side pocket of the pants, it turned out, were about 30 business cards my hubby had collected at a big networking event several days before. It was a multi-chamber, all-county networking event at a local casino. Sort of a once-a-year opportunity.
The cards were turned into mush in the wash. Totally unreadable. I should have checked the pants more thoroughly before washing.
I felt so bad! After all, I had been the one encouraging him to get out and more aggressively network to find clients for his new Web-video business.
What allowed this mishap to occur was…it had never crossed my mind that the business cards would still be in the pants! Because what was the point of collecting those business cards?
So you can follow up right away with all your new leads!
This is the missing link in networking, the critical step so many new networkers — freelance writers and all other types of freelancers, too — so often overlook.
When I get home from a networking event, before I even put my purse down, I get out the business cards I’ve collected from wherever I’ve squirreled them away. Then I walk them straight over to my desk and put them down right next to the monitor. That way, they’ll be the first thing I see when I’m next in the office, and I’ll get straight to my followup.
Those leads are gold. They represent thousands of dollars of potential new business. Great new relationships. Fun new friends.
You’d be crazy to leave them lying around, or shoved in a pants pocket.
Without followup, networking is often a total waste of time. The people you talked to also spoke to dozens of other people. It’s all a blur! You need to make another connection and start building the relationship.
Sometimes, prospects need a while to come around to the idea of working with you. I’ve had networking connections take a full year of development before they offered me a gig.
So follow up. Get in touch. Or your networking will be as useful as that soggy stack of unreadable business cards I sadly fished out of the laundry.
By Carol Tice
You need to learn more. You might need to learn more about how to write in magazine style, or how to market your writing, or how to write an enthralling first-person essay, or how to write compelling brochures, or how to report stories for a same-day deadline. The exact area of missing knowledge will be different for every writer.
A commitment to lifelong learning is a must for writers with big career dreams. There are three main ways I know to advance your learning about the craft and business of writing. They are:
1) Go to school. You don’t have to attend Columbia and get a master’s degree in journalism (though I’ve heard the connections you get from that are amazing). When I first realized I was becoming a freelance writer, I found a few night classes I could take through UCLA Extension. At the time, I was out-to-here pregnant with my first child…but I waddled off to class, because I knew I needed to find out more about how writing worked if I was going to support my growing family! I studied magazine writing, copywriting, and journalism ethics.
I’d probably be nowhere now without those three courses. They helped me analyze what I was doing fairly well intuitively, understand why and when a story worked well, and learn how to do it better. I learned how to do a professional interview.
Besides what I learned, taking those classes gave me confidence that I knew what I was doing. That confidence helped me pitch story ideas, get published, and eventually, land my first full-time staff-writing job.
These days, you can take classes through writer’s associations, Writer’s Digest, Media Bistro, and many others, not to mention your local community college. There are classes to fit every writer’s schedule and budget. In recent months, I’m trying to catch free one-hour teleseminars whenever I can on emerging writing forms such as blogging and social media.
Obviously, you’ve taken a great first step by joining Freelance Writers Den, where you can access a lot of learning materials all in one place.
2) Get a staff writing job. Before there was j-school, this is how everybody learned how to write for a living: They got a job at a newspaper, an alternative paper, a small journal. Then they wrote, and wrote, and wrote. It’s hard to do the volume of writing as a freelancer that you are asked to do as a staffer.
I find when I talk to really successful freelance writers, it’s rare that somewhere in their past, they have not had at least a one-year, full-time gig. I worked 12 years full-time at two different publications, and that volume of work — well more than 1,000 fully reported articles filed for just one of those two publications! — trained me up as a writer like possibly nothing else ever could. Having to find four story ideas every week, pitch them, get them approved, find sources, report them, write them, and turn them in on time breeds terrific discipline, develops your news nose, and gets you hundreds of contacts.
And you just write and write and write. You learn how to write a great article when you’re totally not in the mood. How to find so many story ideas that you never, ever run dry.
3) Find a mentor. Getting someone to school you one-on-one about the writing biz can be a quick route to radically enhancing your skills. Whether it’s an editor who takes you under their wing, a writer friend who’s willing to look over your stories before publication, or a professional writing mentor, seek out someone who can help you take your skills up a notch.
This post originally appeared on the WM Freelance Writer’s Connection.
Photo via Flickr user James Sarmiento
By Carol Tice
I heard from two different writers last week who had a similar quandary: How to earn well from writing, even though English is not their first language. Obviously, this poses an additional challenge beyond what most U.S. writers face. But I know it’s still possible to carve out a successful freelance career.
Since I’m afraid I’ve forgotten almost all of my college German and have never tried to get paid writing assignments in another language, for help on this question I turned to a bilingual writer-friend of mine from my LinkedIn Editors & Writers group who has a thriving career, Randy Hecht.
She speaks fluent Spanish, and has written for such cool publications as National Geographic Traveler Mexico, the Spanish-language version of the AARP magazine, and Colombia’s El Tiempo.
The first question is from a journalism student, Aline, who is from Brazil:
I live in Maryland. I found your blog through research on Google. Here is my story: I used to be a student in Brazil and my major was journalism. I am completely passionate about it.
However, I moved to the USA and because at that time (6 years ago) I did not know how to speak English, I decided to give up journalism. Do you know when you do not feel good enough for something? That is what I felt.
Thank God that feeling passed and I am in school again, and pursuing journalism. My biggest problem is that I do not know what to do after I graduate. Should I just be a freelancer? I just want to write. Writing is what I love. Could you give me some advice? I just feel a little lost.
Even if you do not reply, thank you so much for reading. Your work is amazing and I love the way you write.
Thanks for writing, Aline! Here’s Randy’s answer:
Bilingual skills are always a plus, but Aline has an extra edge as someone who has native knowledge of Brazil’s language and culture. Global-minded businesses and the publications that cover their interests are paying close attention to the BRIC countries—Brazil, Russia, India and China—all regarded as having growing importance in the global economy. The US consumed 14% of Brazil’s exports in 2008, and Brazil in turn consumed 14.9% of US exports. That’s not as huge an exchange of goods as we have with our biggest trading partners, but it’s a good base with lots of growth potential. And that, er, translates to a big opportunity for a journalist or business writer who is fluent in Brazilian Portuguese and immersed in both Brazilian and US culture.
I speak from experience. Although my company, Aphra Communications, works predominantly in Spanish and English with a strong focus on Mexico and Spanish-speaking South America, we include a few Brazil specialists in our network to handle interest in that country’s business practices. Several magazines, research companies and trade associations have asked for our help in gathering business intelligence about Brazil, and that’s not even our primary area of expertise. If Aline is interested in business writing or business journalism, her timing couldn’t be better.
Here’s my other question, from Nisha, a writer in India:
As a Freelance writer who couldn’t even break the barrier of $10 per article, I would like to hear from you.
1 – The majority [90%] of the buyers on forums and bidding sites are not ready to make a decent [NOT a high] payment simply because I’m not a ‘NATIVE’ speaker. How can I fight back on this discrimination?
2 – When we are competing with the ‘craps’ who are more than happy to work at rates, say $2 per 500 words, tips to outperform?
3 – Do you have any tips to get rid of this ‘Nativity’ syndrome?
While I didn’t pass Nisha’s letter on to Randy, I think the advice here is similar. Like Aline, Nisha needs to better leverage her knowledge of one of the world’s largest, fastest-growing economies!
One clue to the strategy is in Nisha’s response — “Buyers on forums and bidding sites are not ready to make decent payments to non-native speakers.”
So…stay off the forums and bidding sites! That’s not where the good-paying clients are, even for native English-speaking writers.
Instead, you’ll need to prospect actively for markets where instead of a negative, your knowledge of another culture and language will be considered a big plus.
It could be publications looking for writers with an understanding of both languages and cultures.
It might be an English-language publication in India or Brazil, where they might appreciate your U.S. knowledge enough to mentor you a little on your English.
Or perhaps an American paper for Brazilian or Indian expatriates, written in their native language or a mix of Hindi and English (or Brazilian Portuguese).
Network with other bilingual writers for leads on publications that might be appropriate. Aline could also work with professors while she’s still in school to get help developing some solid prospects to call.
Or, as Randy suggests, research companies that have strong export or import relationships with the U.S. Perhaps they need marketing help from someone their executives can relate to because they speak the managers’ home-country language fluently?
Do a little research on their existing marketing and see where you might spot a void you could fill. Maybe they need a newsletter, product descriptions, some Web content in English, to help them find American buyers? Call or email them and introduce yourself and your services.
One other suggestion: Consider finding a native English speaker to team with for bilingual customers. Randy works in a team environment in her agency.
Overall, you’ll need to look for situations that turn your bilingual and non-native status into a plus, rather than a minus.
By Carol Tice
Finding better-paying clients requires radical action on your part. But if you do it, you are highly likely to change your situation and start earning a better hourly rate.
First, think about where have you been looking for writing work — on online job boards? On bidding sites? On content-mill dashboards? On some combination of these three? (Or, substitute whatever it is you’ve been doing to find writing gigs that hasn’t translated to earning well.)
OK. Here is the experiment to try if you want to find better-paying clients: Never look for work in those places. For a whole month, don’t ever go on those sites, for a single minute.
I can hear you freaking out from here. What will I do? I won’t have any money!
And maybe for one month, you won’t. But if you want to put more money in the bank between now and the end of the year, it’s time to change how you look for clients.
At the risk of stating the obvious, if you keep doing what you’ve been doing to market your writing business, you will probably keep getting the same result.
I believe the above modes of finding writing work become an addictive crutch for many. They’re the low-hanging fruit of job-hunting.
It’s so easy to just sit at your computer and browse these sites, so they’re really common forms of job-seeking. So everyone’s doing it.
So the customers placing those ads don’t have to pay much! They know they have a huge pool of desperate writers to select from.
If you are not earning well, acknowledge that the methods you’ve been using for finding writing jobs are not leading you to the prosperity you want.
Next, try something else. Try new, more active ways of marketing your writing. Go where fewer writers are looking.
My commenter couldn’t find the good-paying writing assignments on job boards, DS or bidding sites because for the most part, great clients don’t appear there. They find writers through referrals, or on natural search, or by being contacted proactively by smart writers with great story ideas or an apt analysis of how a company could improve its marketing.
They’re not interested in paying the least they can — they’re interested in getting writing work done that’s amazing.
Once the time-wasting of checking job boards and bidding site proposals and $15 article assignments is gone, you’ll have a lot of free time you can use to try new job-finding methods. Here are seven other, proven ways to consider for finding good-paying writing work:
1. SEO your writer Web site. I recently had a Fortune 500 company hire me at $2 a word after finding me through a Google search for “Seattle freelance writer.” (Go ahead, do that and see what happens. I’ll wait. Interesting, huh?) More and more major companies are simply letting their fingers do the Web searching when they need a local writer.
2. Pick up the phone. Make a list of companies in your city that you know are doing well, take a look at their existing marketing materials, come up with an idea for a marketing piece they could use in addition to those (white papers? a brochure? case studies? a blog?), and just call them. Ask for the owner at a smaller company, the marketing manager at a larger one. Introduce yourself, and ask if they use freelance writers. Everyone I know who does this says that somewhere in 20-30 calls, they get at least one client, at professional rates.
3. Meet live humans. Leave your desk and go to networking events. Go to one daily if you can find that many. Meet many people and describe the type of writing work you are looking for. Making in-person connections is a powerful way to find good clients. I’ve rarely attended a networking event without coming away with at least one good new job lead.
4. Find high-exposure writing opportunities. Get your work onto the highest-traffic, most popular, well-regarded sites you can, even if it’s for free. I get a lot of clients who call me after reading articles and blogs I’ve written previously. Write quality, and you can find yourself on the front page of big Web sites. When that happens, prospects will call.
5. Query. I know — it’s so old school! But you know what? Query letters get writers really good-paying assignments in both on- and offline publications. In the past couple of weeks, I got four article assignments worth nearly $7,000 off queries. Study your targets, and send them story ideas that are perfect for their audience. If you’re not getting results, learn more about how to write great queries.
6. Build your online networks. OK, here’s one thing you can do online — use your social networks to actively put the word out about the kind of clients you’re seeking. Make new connections and chat them up about what they do and who they know. Find every editor you have ever worked with and learn what they’re doing now. Search on LinkedIn for publishers and companies you want to target. Contact them through LI with InMail, through connections, or just by giving them a call. DM people on Twitter. I’ve met two new editors on there recently that have given me assignments.
Just as I was writing this, I got a friendly message on LI from a Seattle writer-friend — he said he’d had a project fall through and was looking for fill-in work, had I heard about any jobs that I didn’t want? Nothing pushy, just a shout-out that listed his expertise areas. I don’t know of anything this instant, but I thought he was so smart to proactively put that out there. I’m fully booked, so I might well hear of something I’d pass on and could refer him. Bet he gets a gig through that great outreach!
7. Write and market your own products. I’m prepping an e-book for sale, and most smart writers I know are doing the same. If you hate pitching editors, spend your free time creating products that could be an ongoing source of passive income for you.
If you aren’t earning well, maybe it’s time to break out of your old habits. Reach out in new ways. Change your marketing strategy. Find what works for you and brings you the writing work you really want, the kind that pays a real, living wage.
Try it, and maybe a month from now, you’ll find you don’t need to go back to your old prospecting habits, because you have better-paying work.
What forms of marketing are finding you good-paying writing jobs? Leave a comment and let us know.
This post originally appeared on the WM Freelance Writer’s Connection.
By Carol Tice
Some posters said they write for mills because of the “enormous” amount of time it takes to get paid by magazines and corporations — up to six months! And also that they felt a lot of uncertainty about whether they would get paid or not — maybe they’d only get a “kill” fee if an article didn’t work out.
I’d like to puncture these myths and say that it really doesn’t take forever to get paid from most of these types of clients. It’s also pretty rare to get stiffed, especially if you have a contract. It’s been a lot of years since I had an article killed, too — good communication with an editor can usually prevent stories going that far awry.
I have a pretty broad variety of clients, from major publications and media conglomerates to businesses large and small, and six weeks is the longest payment timeline I have, and most of my clients pay ranging from instantly on auto-deposit to net 15 days.
Still, I get the sense that needing to wait even two weeks to get paid is an insurmountable obstacle for a lot of freelance writers.
So they need to keep writing for mills. They’re kind of stuck.
Or as one of the commenters put it, “trapped on the gerbil-wheel of writing for pennies” because mills pay fast.
This brings me to my topic: money management.
To be able to move up to better-paying clients and ultimately earn more, you’re going to need to be able to manage your cash flow so that you can wait a couple weeks for a check to come. It’s the only way to break the low-pay cycle. Once you build up a stable of better-paying markets, it’ll get easier to deal with a longer wait to payday.
Here are some tips on how to get your finances in order so that you have some savings — or at least access to capital you can dip into to tide you over — and can take on better-paying clients, even if you have to wait 30 days for their check. It may involve some short-term sacrifice, but it’ll be worth it, as having more financial resilience will unleash your ability to work for higher-paying markets.
1. Read Your Money or Your Life. This game-changing book has been around for decades, and it’s still teaching people how to live cheap and retire young while enjoying life to the fullest. The authors will ask you to write down every dime you spend for months, and then evaluate the data. Usually, you can find places to cut your expenses you never dreamed of as a result.
2. Evaluate all your fixed costs. The cable bill, health insurance, cell-phone plans, Internet fees, gym memberships — when’s the last time you compared prices? See if you can find a lower-cost provider. Then start banking the difference.
3. Examine your discretionary spending. I realize many people are living close to the bone these days. But if you’re not, add up how much you spend eating out, renting videos, or whatever your favorite splurges are. Could you not do them, just for a few months? If so, you could end up with a nice bit saved up. Get your family’s buy-in that a little short-term doing without could allow you all to be living better, soon. Then:
4. Create a rainy-day fund. This is one of personal-finance guru Suze Orman’s favorite mantras. We should all have three to six months of living expenses in a savings account. That’s the cushion you can draw from and repay later if a client is a week late paying. Savings equals power — the power to say no to low-paying writing gigs and spend that time finding better-paying clients.
5. Learn to buy cheap. I belong to The Grocery Game, which can save you hundreds a month on the food bill. Clip coupons. Buy your groceries at Walmart, Smart & Final, or whatever discounter is near you. Stop buying junk food. Shop yard sales. Shop chain stores’ sales. At this point, my three kids are fully trained, and are delighted to get used stuff I find on Freecycle or my local community classifieds.
6. Clean up your credit. If you do not have access to low-interest or zero-interest credit-card offers, get a free copy of your credit report and see what’s on there. Then work on cleaning it up — call the agencies if there are errors. Make payments on time. Get a store credit card and slowly pay off your bill to build your track record of making payments. If you can improve your credit rating, you can get a bank credit line for your writing business, or a low-interest or zero-interest credit card offer that will allow you cheap or free access to money if a client is slow paying you. Another strategy: see if your bank will extend you overdraft protection to help smooth out any cash-flow bumps.
7. Manage your payment schedule. Look at when all your big bills are due, and if they’re all coming at once, see if you can shift them around. You can call credit-card companies and ask to change your payment due date. Also, look at each bill’s due date and don’t pay bills until they’re due, keeping cash in your pocket longer. Personally, I got my mortgage set so it pays in two halves twice a month instead of all at once — less difficult than making that nut all in a lump.
This post originally appeared on the WM Freelance Writer’s Connection.
By Carol Tice
In case you haven’t yet heard, content farm Demand Studios’ parent Demand Media became a publicly traded company in fall 2010.
This was not unexpected. We’ve already got the drill down — content mills pay freelance writers peanuts, and then go public or get acquired for $100 million-plus.
But there’s a difference here from Associated Content’s recent acquisition by Yahoo! An IPO requires a hefty public filing, in which the company has to disclose tons of facts about their business. (Since Yahoo is so big and AC so relatively small, Yahoo didn’t have to disclose much about the acquisition to its shareholders.)
The IPO filing is long. But here in brief are a few important things the filing reveals about Demand Studios’ business that writers should know:
DS is unprofitable. That’s right, they pay you only $15 for an article, and they still haven’t figured out how to make a profit off you! Can you believe it? They’ve got 10,000 writers creating 5,700 pieces of content a day, but that apparently isn’t enough critical mass to make a profitable business model.
If I were staking my income on what DS does, I’d be seriously worried about that. Unprofitable companies eventually go bust, for the most part. Essentially, DS needs the IPO money to stay afloat. After all their executive talk about how they’re the new media model that’s going to flatten traditional media. Yeah, we’ll see about that. A lot of print publications are still making money.
DS’s markup is 260 percent. DS pays you $15, and the filing reveals they make an average of $54 per article. Yet, they are still hemorrhaging cash. The company lost $14.2 million on $170 million of revenue in 2008; in 2009, it was a $22 million loss on nearly $200 million in income. They seem to have improved a bit in the first half this year, only losing $6 million on $114 million. Wow, I bet if you put content up on your own site and sold ads against it, you could figure out how to make a profit…and you could keep all the profit for yourself.
I’d love to know, with what DS pays editors, where the fat is in this business model that’s making it unprofitable. It’s kind of stunning that they’re trying an IPO with this profitability record, but surprisingly, about 40 percent of companies trying the public markets right now aren’t in the black. Sort of a weird return to the dot-com days going on.
DS is in danger of being branded spam by Google. They disclose this in the section on the possible competitive threats to their business. Hmm, if that happens and Google decides to screen DS out, poof! No more Demand! A lot of Internet-watchers believe at some point Google has to find a way to screen out these sites or users are going to turn to other search engines in their search for better-quality content.
DS makes much of its money from domain-selling and domain-squatting. Turns out more than 40 percent of its revenue is from eNom, not even from the content mill. People buy domain names from eNom, and eNom runs Google ads on empty Web sites to get revenue. Weird, huh?
DS’s timing shows it’s desperate. The IPO market perked up a bit last year from its dead stop in 2009, but most IPOs aren’t doing very well. The majority have gone down after issue, which is bad news for company founders and backers. The down market means only companies that HAVE to get some money right now are trying an IPO. DS could no doubt get more money if they waited a year or two. But apparently they can’t wait.
By Carol Tice
Besides simply responding to ads for freelance writers that you find on the big job boards, there are a few more creative ways to use job ads to reach out and find good-paying publications and copywriting clients. Here’s what I do:
1. Look at the ads for full-time jobs. Yes, I’m not really looking for a full-time job. But when a company is advertising for a full-time person, that usually means they have a vacancy. Which means work isn’t getting done.
Maybe they need someone to fill in until they complete their job search? Maybe they also use freelancers as well as in-house writers? You won’t know unless you ask.
The full-time job ad simply provides me with a good contact of someone who hires writers. So if it’s a company or publication that fits my expertise, I go ahead and apply. I say, “Hi there, not looking for full-time, but I have the skills you need. Do you use freelancers?”
I’ve scored several great new editor connections this way over the years, including one this summer for a terrific business-finance publication. It’s a great way to get your name in front of people that use writers, at a time when they may well need help.
2. Look at site-specific job ads out of your area. I’m selective here — if it says anything like “meet with us weekly at our Akron offices,” I move on. On the other hand, if the ad title mentions a city, but the ad text doesn’t describe anything that needs to be done in person, and it mentions my expertise, I go ahead and apply.
Just ask right up top if they’d consider someone working remotely. Play up your expertise both in their field, and your expertise in working remotely.
3. Use social media. If you’re not looking at the jobs on LinkedIn, I highly recommend it — many of them are exclusive to the site. Companies pay to list their jobs on LinkedIn, so they’re companies with money.
It’s a great place to find full-time job ads you can piggyback on, as per #1. You can also try to use your connections to get a referral attached to your application, which I’m told greatly increases your odds of getting the contact’s attention in the pile of 500 resumes they are likely receiving.
Twitter is also a growing place for freelance gigs. Not only can you tweet about the work you’re looking for, but you can use Twitter’s search feature to troll for jobs. Some of the sites mentioned above are on Twitter tweeting about listings, so you could get a jump on the masses this way.
There are an increasing number of job-related tweeters — I’m following @WritersDigest, @FSsJobs (that’s Freelance Switch), @tweetajob, and @Jobsonica, among others.
In this market, it pays to get creative when you’re looking for clients.
