The Confident Copywriter

Archive for the ‘freelance writer’ Category

I recently reviewed the new and very popular book, The Wealthy Freelancer: 12 Secrets to a Great Income and an Enviable Lifestyle, and was particularly struck by something my friend Pete Savage mentioned in Secret 1: Master the Mental Game. After discussing the many hats a freelance business owner must wear, Pete hones in on the concept of Production…you know, the typical process experienced by a freelance writer juggling lots of different projects at once.

Pete makes a rather revolutionary suggestion: view the production process like the floor of a factory.

Put aside your high falutin’ notions about the ‘creative process’ for a sec and think about it from Pete’s point of view: “Even the most beautifully crafted…Rolls Royce cars…leverage production efficiencies. Improving your productivity lets you create in a more efficient and stress-free environment, which actually increases the quality of your output and the enjoyment you derive from practicing your craft.”

I’ve been doing this for years, and have been criticized for destroying creativity in the process. Au contraire. I now have Pete to back me up when I preach that organization, efficiency, scheduling, forms, tracking tools, task lists (and, might I add, accountability) actually increase production.

Thanks, Pete. I feel vindicated.

It reminds me of the Lean Six Sigma training I almost participated in about 5 years back. Lean Six Sigma, for those of you living under the proverbial rock, is a strategy for business management that attempts to improve processes by identifying and removing flaws in the system, improving production and profits based on a definitive set of steps and specific target goals. People actually get certified in this stuff! Enjoying Project Management as I do, it’s right up my alley but, alas, the training never came to be.

Anyway, I see a direct correlation between the freelancer’s production schedule and the principles of Lean Six Sigma. Think of your typical day: customers are emailing and calling to ask for help with various projects. There are vendor issues to manage. If you work with other writers, you’ve got people issues that need attention. Some projects have long deadlines. Some are short and must be attended to now. There is always that rush project you don’t want to say no to. Some clients are flexible; others, not so much. Then there is marketing, including social media marketing; no small feat for any online business today. And bookkeeping. And I’m pretty sure somewhere in there you’ve also got a personal life to live.

In the middle of it all sits you, trying to juggle all of these tasks, make a living, keep everyone happy, and meet every demand placed on you with grace and efficiency.

Whew.

Perhaps the issue is scheduling. If you’re like the typical freelance writer, your day happens to you, instead of you having control over your day. You’ve got great intentions, but you never seem to get to everything on your list. That means someone, somewhere, is not happy. It might be a child, a spouse, a prospect, a client… in any event, not a good thing.

“But there just aren’t enough hours in the day!” Yes there is. We all get the same 24 hours. It’s not what you’ve got. It’s how you use it.

“But she’s just so much better at multi-tasking than I am!” There is a lot more to this than simply being a good multi-tasker. Efficient multi-taskers aren’t born that way. They learn how to manage multiple objectives and goals, using scheduling and excellent time management. (My good buddy Jason Womack knows all about that. Watch for the announcement about our webinar taking place on April 23th.)

“But my clients just don’t understand!” They will if you make them. This is your business. You make the rules. You don’t work for a boss anymore. It’s a mindset shift you’ve got to make immediately if you want to survive.

Let me ask you:

• Are you overbooking projects?
• Are you underestimating your time?
• Do you frequently miss deadlines?
• Are you losing clients?
• Are you perpetually short on resources or having trouble keeping up with ever-changing developments?
• Have colleagues stopped being willing to help?
• Are you consistently stressed and on-edge?
• Is email running your life?

These are all warning signs something is amiss.

Do you find scheduling to be a problem? Would you like to conquer time issues and run your business more like a ‘freelance factory’? Tell me about the challenges you’re facing.

                      As freelance writers and copywriters, we read tons of information about how to go after ‘higher quality’ clients — in other words, the client with deeper pockets who has a better grasp of what it means to work within the freelance environment. It’s the Holy Grail, isn’t it? Having access to a wellspring of loyal, Fortune 500 clients who regularly come back for more? And yet so many of us seem to struggle to achieve this goal. It’s the #2 concern of freelance writers, according to my informal February survey.

I know this is nearly a blasphemous thought but…maybe we’re worrying about attracting the wrong companies.

According to the 2010 Content Marketing Spending Survey conducted by Junta42*, and disseminated by HubSpot, the use of content marketing is growing. But not in the way you think.

33% of the total marketing budget among all companies goes to content marketing. This is up by 11% from 2009. (Is the economy recovering, or are companies risking spending more to create greater balance?)

More interestingly, companies with 99 employees or less spent 40% of their marketing budget on content marketing compared with 18% spending for companies with more than 99 employees.

Wait. What? Small companies are spending more than large companies?

Perhaps we copywriters are having a positive effect on the market after all.

Or perhaps smaller businesses are simply catching up and wising up to the fact that content is and always has been king. Engaging, relevant content in the form of website pages, blog posts, social media marketing, case studies, white papers, reports, newsletters…are now required to magnetize, build and preserve customer and prospect relationships. The client can go ahead and bang his head against the marketing wall as much as he likes…in the end, he’s got to have great content. That’s good news for writers! (And also a lesson to those of us struggling to market ourselves. It works both ways.)

Quality content gives birth to new thought leaders, raises online and offline visibility, improves search engine rankings, builds brands and positions products and services in front of the ready-to-buy B2B or B2C consumer. Small businesses no longer need deep pockets to play on the same field with the big boys. They simply need time, patience, a willingness to listen and learn… and stellar talent. (Translation: a wonderful writer like you.)

I say, go get ‘em. What’s your take?

* More than 250 marketing professionals responded to the survey.

Last week, we talked about finding time in your day to begin marketing yourself online using social media. Many of you commented, and rightly so, “it ain’t easy.”

So I thought I’d point out a few useful, free social media marketing tools to help you be more productive and efficient as you access the power of the Internet.

Free Twitter Tools

Your Twitter account is ready to go. You’re mentally ready to deal with a flood of customers…after all, stats show your Twitter followers are about 80% more likely to buy from you. So the question is: how can you keep up with your tweets and retweets?

How about Twitter.search? Just like a Google search, Twitter.search will let you search for hot topics in real time. Search by keyword, search your name or company name…filter any type of search at all, and ‘spy’ on what’s hot and what’s not.

Want to filter your Twitter searches in real time and geographically? Try Monitter to target a specific geographic radius, using sets of three keywords.

Want to keep your finger on the pulse of what people are saying about your company…or any company or topic? Then you want Trakur, a comprehensive social media monitoring tool that monitors any topic, sends alerts via RSS or email, allows custom filtering of results, tracks sentiments and trends, automates monitoring of your online reputation, gathers insights into customer behavior, tracks the effectiveness of your marketing campaign…

WHEW! Trakur is truly the Mac Daddy of free social monitoring tools.

Remember the Milk is a time management tool that helps you stay organized…not so easy when you’re managing a busy business and playing a daily round of social media marketing.

Remember the Milk helps you manage daily tasks, create reminders, share those reminders with your team and access reminders from your smart phone. You can integrate your schedule with Google Calendar, add tasks from iGoogle, plot your to-do list on a map, organize lists and notes, and then easily search anything you’ve stored to quickly refresh your memory. Awesome.

And lest we forget that what happens after you capture the lead is also important, there’s MailChimp, a nifty web-based mailing list manager that offers tracking and analyzing of email campaigns along with customized HTML templates. If you send less than 3,000 emails each month to 500 or less subscribers, MailChimp is free. But that’s not even the best part!

MailChimp can be upgraded and integrated with Twitter, Wordpress and other sites. Free training is available too. MailChimp allows you to share your email campaign across multiple networking channels via auto tweets and includes retweet analysis to determine effectiveness of your campaign. Even your clients can share your email campaign across their own social networks. How’s that for cool features?

What other social media marketing tools do you use and like?

What do freelance writers and copywriters want? How about great clients? High paying work? Satisfying challenges? More freedom? As I speak with writers each day, these are the goals I frequently hear about. After all, most of us got into this business to have more freedom, greater control over our workday, and a satisfying, challenging career that is also financially rewarding.

You know…just like all those marketing letters promise.

Oh, if only it were so easy.

I know and you know…freelancing is hard work. You’ve got to bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and be the man. (Sorry, ladies. You know what I mean.)

This is why I’ve created reports and placed them on my blog here for your…ahem…reading pleasure. I said I wasn’t going to do this. I wasn’t going to ‘sell out’ and fall into the vast boiling vat of copywriting information providers.

But I can’t help myself. There is so much information that is downright incorrect, misleading and false. Then there is an entire catalog of information that is completely self-serving. And then, there is quite a lot of really great information, but you’ve got to sell a child to afford it.

If you’ve been following my blog, you know I’m all about free help for copywriters. In that spirit, many of my reports are free. In some cases, the information is specialized or took quite some time to put together, so I unfortunately must charge for these reports, but I’ve done my best to keep the cost nominal.

As I’ve often said, I’m not in this to get rich. I’m in it to get real.

I hope you’ll join me, because it’s all about you. Simply click on Download Valuable Reports to see available titles.

What types of free reports would you like to see available here at The Confident Copywriter?

We hear so much about coaching today- life coaching, business coaching, executive coaching…and now, there is freelance writer coaching, of all things. Such coaching is not new, but seems to have proliferated in the last year as more inexperienced writers move into the freelance writing and copywriting markets.

I personally made the decision to offer coaching for copywriters, based on the sheer number of requests I get for help. While it is my passion to offer free help for copywriters, I often receive typical questions like:

How do I find work?”
“How should I price my services?”
“What did you do to get started?”
“Do I really need to learn SEO?”
“How will I ever find time to market myself?”

These are common concerns we all have from time to time. There are many books on the topic. But for some, nothing beats the luxury, convenience and heart to heart satisfaction of talking to a real person who’s been there. That’s why 30/30 Coaching was born- to fill the need for one-on-one help at a very affordable cost.

I wonder sometimes if I’m on the right track. Some days, it feels like I definitely am. Other days, not so much. Today, I got confirmation that I’m doing the right thing when I received an email from the master himself, Bob Bly, stating he too is offering a limited availability coaching program. Of course, Bob Bly’s coaching program costs $900. To some, being able to say you were coached by Bob Bly is worth $900. Those professional writers who have already received my far more affordable mentoring will happily tell you $30 goes a really long way to solving your most pressing problems and getting you back on the road to productivity.

Your choice. But if you need help, I’m here. Just check out the tab, 30/30 Coaching, right here on the blog.

A recent survey, The Creative Group Hiring Index for Marketing & Advertising Professionals, offers a surprising – or not so surprising – peek into the near future of the industry, depending on your point of view.

It is no surprise that hiring for ad jobs is flat. 13% of industry execs polled claim they will increase staff, while 12% plan to decrease staff. It’s a wash out. However, 45% of those responding to the survey cite finding skilled professionals as a major challenge.

Are all the ‘good ones’ working for the few agencies who have managed to survive thus far? Or could it be that the soft economy has caused companies to expect so much more out of applicants? 45% is quite high, so something is causing this perception.

Which skills are most in demand?

• Web design/production
• Print design/production
• Creative and art direction
• Account services
• Marketing research
• Interactive
• Public relations
• Brand and product management
• Media services
• Copywriting

Ok. So it’s not looking good for ad agencies, but we all knew that. What about copywriters, at the bottom of the potential hiring list?

Perhaps it’s not as bad as it looks. According to Donna Farrugia, executive director of The Creative Group, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based marketing and creative staffing agency who conducted the national study, “With lingering uncertainty about the economy, many companies are using freelancers or consultants to fill their staffing needs until they are confident of their ongoing business demands. Employers also are re-evaluating their personnel requirements to ensure they have the right people in place to capitalize on emerging opportunities as the economy improves.”

Hope springs eternal.

There are many books on the subject, but sometimes you don’t have time to search through a book or the money to buy books.

Try these online resources instead:

1. The Capital Community College Foundation’s Guide to Grammar and Writing, specifically this tool: http://bit.ly/b9l3Px
2. Grammar Now offers a useful search feature.
3. Grammar Bites offers detailed definitions of common grammar terms.
4. Dr. Grammar. Everything you could want!
5. The Purdue Online Writing Lab is an expert grammar site offering answers to common English usage questions.
6. The Chicago Manual of Style Online. An indispensable authority on English language usage.
7. OneLook Reverse Dictionary. Have a phrase in your head, but looking for one word to express it? Check this out.

What are favorite websites for grammar or usage questions?

If you’ve ever sought work on job boards like “Elance”, you might have noticed a strange phenomenon: there are people on those job boards pretending to be writers! And getting away with it!

Ok…we can’t stop clients from buying articles from providers who willingly charge $1 for 500 words. But there are plenty of things we can do to improve our own writing.

These five points are so obvious, they’ll make you cringe. But I’ve seen writers make these mistakes. Embarrassingly, I’ve actually made a few of them myself. They bear repeating.

1. Misspelling your own name
It happens. It’s just as bad when you misspell the customer’s or company’s names. Misspells send the message: “I’m sloppy. I lack attention to detail. I don’t care.”

2. Relying on SpellChecker
This handy tool is great, but not always. Use “too” instead of ‘to’ and spellchecker may not catch it. Miss a word that changes the entire meaning of the sentence and you might be in trouble. Spellchecker definitely won’t help you put together proper sentences. (Like this real headline: “Progress Slow in Beating Death.”) Little mistakes like these can add up and chase the customer away.

Not worried about losing one customer? How about the hundreds of potential referrals you might lose over the life of your career? There’s something to worry about.

3. The Use of Slang
Are you using slang without realizing it? Slang is part of our everyday culture, but slang is wrong for your client’s project. For example:

• They all agreed the movie was bad. (intense)
• The little town was the armpit of America. (undesirable)
• He was beat after working hard all day. (tired)
• She drove off the lot in a new Beemer. (BMW)

These slang terms are fine for a novel, but not appropriate for business writing.

4. The Beauty of Word Economy
“I think I’m qualified for this position because of the fact that I am able to write well.” Oy. Let’s apply a little word economy: “My advanced writing skills qualify me for this position.”

Dump phrases like “because of the fact”, “I am able to”, “in order to”, “in regards to”. Check, edit, check and edit again to ensure your document is tight. Get help from someone more experienced if necessary.

5. Sentences That Are So Long, the Reader Doesn’t Remember What You Were Talking About in the First Place, So They Just Skip Ahead to Something Else and, Before You Know It, You’re Scratching Your Head and Wondering Why Your Phone Isn’t Ringing.

Enough said.

Your thoughts?

If I had a dollar (inflation, people) for every time someone asked me how I manage to keep up with all my writing…well, let’s just say I’d be doing a lot less writing!

One area that causes consternation is blogging. Since you’re here, it’s a good place to start.

How do I keep up with the relentless pace of creating valuable content 3-5 times a week? And what happens as my blogdom grows? (My new blog, CopyVirgin, will be available in March. If you can’t tell who I’m targeting, drop me a line and we’ll discuss it. )

Here are some tips to get you going:

Pay Attention

Did you make New Year’s resolutions? Are you still keeping them? If so, you’re the exception to the rule. Like dieting, losing weight, exercising, quitting smoking…blogging requires commitment and attention. Don’t relegate it to the back burner. Schedule it as if a client is paying you for it.

When you stop posting as frequently, the search engines lose interest. So do all of those great groups you’ve worked so hard to attract. If necessary, trade services with another writer who can post content for you, or pay a professional blog writer to get you over the hump (last resort).

Get Organized!

To blog regularly, you’ve got to make time for it. Solving this challenge requires organization, a plan. You schedule your time to meet client deadlines, don’t you? Plan your blogging time. Set aside 30 minutes a day, or 2 hours once a week, or Saturday mornings…whatever works for you. This is Blog Time and nothing and no one is going to get in your way.

Bring the Inspiration to You

Often, the problem isn’t your ability to write. The problem is, “I don’t know what to write about.” I suggest creating a document called Blog Ideas. Keep it on your desktop. As blog ideas pop into your head, jump over and jot them down before the phone rings or the kids interrupt and you forget. Then, when it’s Blog Time, the ideas are already there.

Google Alerts are another neat little trick – simply type in your chosen keywords. I typed in ‘copywriting’, ‘freelance writers’, etc. as well as the names of companies I want to follow. Don’t forget to follow your own name – you’ll be surprised where you pop up! Google Alerts will send information matching your keywords straight to your inbox, hot off the press. Voila! Instant inspiration!

Don’t Give Up!

There will be times when you feel pressured, just don’t feel like it, or something else needs your attention. That’s business, isn’t it? But it’s no excuse to give up. Like the dieter who gives in to chocolate cake, no good can come from skipping a scheduled blog post. If you miss a post, get back on track for the next one. Be disciplined and reap the rewards!

Have blogging tips of your own? Please share!

No matter how much you love your freelance writing job, there are times when you will feel bored. Disinterested. Seriously considering a quick nap.

Mom was right. “If you’re bored, you must be boring”, she would say.

Working in virtual isolation at our computers day in and day out, it’s no wonder things get a bit boring. But giving in to boredom is how the trouble starts.

How to avoid diving for the covers, missing a deadline because boredom sent you shopping…or worse, turning in uninspired copy?

Fight Boredom!

Susan Cramm, writing on the Harvard Business Review blog, agrees with Mom. She says you might be the reason your job is boring. Susan encourages checking yourself on these points:

1. Are you on autopilot? Repetitive tasks, or tasks that go on for too long, can put your brain to sleep – what we often call ‘autopilot’. While the task may seem easier, you’re less interested and engaged and, therefore, bored.

My suggestion: When you go to your desk tomorrow, shake things up a little. Do routine tasks in a different order. Work on a project instead of opening your email right away. Drink herbal tea instead of coffee. Repeat the mantra, “Today is going to be different.”

2. How’s your energy level? It takes more energy to be bored. When your brain is busy, you don’t think about it. You feel energized by the task and fully locked in. Low energy levels make work more tedious, affecting focus and, ultimately, success.

My suggestion: Watch those carbs and get up from your desk regularly. Walk around, drink water, make a phone call. Stare out the window. Energize yourself!

3. Have you gotten lazy? Letting little things slide, rather than focusing on potential improvements, makes life boring. Stay interested by keeping your brain engaged. Seek ways to keep your mind occupied and stimulated. Take time to network and talk with your freelance writing peers.

My suggestion: Challenge yourself! Accept a project that is just a bit outside your comfort zone. Volunteer for something new. Help someone just because. Dive into a new book about writing. Join The Copywriters Business Network!

How do you conquer freelance writing boredom?