With just 15 minutes of work, I created a lead generating machine that’s brought me 1-2 leads per week and helped me land one big client. Here’s what I did and how I’d advise other writers to use the site to attract clients.
We were often told not to eavesdrop as children. As a writer though, eavesdropping is the quintessence of good fiction. It gives us a bird’s eye view of other people’s voices and their melodramas. We hear their inflections, their accents if they are from a different country, and get the chance to obtain information about their life. This adds another layer to our characters as we begin to build their profile. It also makes our fiction more relatable; fiction editors are more prone to publish and readers are more inclined to read.
Take one look through your LinkedIn connections and their profiles and it becomes increasingly clear how bad some people are in the English language. Someone should help these folks and straighten out their grammar and their, they’re, there’s.
What I’ve figured out through some inquisition and experimentation, is that most business people would gladly pay to have us professional writers rewrite their profiles and even ghostwrite their published posts for them.
I had no idea that, when I crafted these family heirloom books, I would soon be earning a decent return for my time and a stream of cash flow for doing something I love to do anyway. It all started when my mom shared her new biography with her neighbor in Florida.
For many, the phrase “freelance writing” conjures up images of famous magazines on a newsstand. Often the best-paid work, however, comes from companies that aren’t in the publishing business at all. They’re commissioning articles as part of their content strategy, to either connect with their customers or improve their website’s search traffic.
Until I stumbled into this little side gig of translating Italian poetry, my idea of poetry didn’t go much further than “Roses are red…” etc., etc. Occasionally, I read, and reread, and tried to understand some of the poetry published in The New Yorker. First of all, it didn’t rhyme, so that threw me off. Then, on many occasions, even after a third or fourth read, I was still asking: “Say what?” I must have snoozed through the poetry segment in English class because all this free flowing thought was a puzzle to me. And now, I was being asked to translate it.
In a previous article, I wrote about Metasearch as being one fantastic engine for finding hidden writing jobs on the web.
Well, Metasearch is dead. God bless the departed king. God save the new monarchs. The most meritorious successors, it seems to me, are the following…
I have been freelancing for over 20 years and I can best describe my love affair with writing as feast or famine. Freelancing provides me with the opportunities to explore the subjects I am most passionate about: women’s and family matters, education issues and the arts. The pay is steady and a nice supplement to my income as a part-time teacher.
Want to work “smarter, not harder” this year? Strategic guest posting is the ticket! In fact, Leo Babauta, mega-successful blogger, author, and creator of Zen Habits, (with more than 200,000 subscribers), states in an interview: “Guest posting is by far the best way to grow an audience.”
I dropped out of school, went back several times, and after a series of jobs and “careers,” which resulted in an extensive collection of hairnets and nametags, I finally got serious about being a writer, and figured out the first obstacle to working at home full time: money.
