Articles About Writing Better

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3 Freelance Writing Secrets You Need to Keep to Yourself

October 31, 2017 By FiveFigureSarah

I don’t have a lot of secrets online. I write about how much money I make, my faith in God, and the things that scare me. But when you are embarking upon a career in freelance writing, you’ll soon find out that there are some things that the world doesn’t need to know.

And I’m not just talking about what keeps you up at night or what you ate for breakfast. I’m talking about strategic things that 1) make you smarter when you don’t share them and 2) make you look like a newbie when you do.

In a world where vulnerability and disclosure are hot, hot, hot, here are three secrets you actually need to keep to yourself if you want to be a successful freelance writer:

Secret #1: That you can write anything for anyone

Now, I can absolutely write anything for anyone.

I’ve written tweets, slogans, white papers, blog posts, blog post intros, webinars, webinar abstracts, and data reports, and I’ve written them for my niche (human resources) as well as marketing, construction software, shipping and logistics, website design, data security, cloud solutions, medical surgery foam (seriously), and more.

But do you know what’s on my portfolio and my LinkedIn profile? I write white papers and articles for HR. That’s it. And that’s why I can propose projects and rates (and project rates) that blow my $20-an-article rate of the past out of the water.

It’s not crazy to say you can write something and be able to do it. In fact, if you’re a writer, you’re just good with words. You can make them dance in any format on any topic in any place on Earth…

But the minute you say that — the minute a client reads that on your website — they drop you in a big, bottomless cavern known as “generalist.” And generalists don’t get paid much.

The minute a client reads that you can write anything for anyone on your website, they drop you in a big, bottomless cavern known as “generalist” — And generalists don’t get paid much.

It’s far, far better to niche in both topic and format and say so. It will take a little time, and it will take a little trial and error, and yes, you will have to turn away business, but that’s the only way to command a higher rate and actually enjoy the work you do.

(Spoiler alert: Your niche will change over time! And that’s okay!)

Secret #2: That you’ve been writing and reading since you could crawl

Again, I was a writer when I was a toddler.

I wrote a short story about an iguana in elementary school. My favorite hobby in middle school was correcting my older brother’s papers. My idea of a good time in high school was taking an apple and a book, biking up the street, and reading for hours in the outdoors.

But that wholesome, beautiful story about a young woman’s weakness for word wrangling has absolutely nothing to do with marketing manager with $15,000 to spend on content this quarter. In fact, it distracts that manager from the job she needs to get done with soft, meaningless, Nicolas-Sparks-style words.

Your personal history and soft, meaningless, Nicolas-Sparks-style words distract your prospective clients from the jobs they need to get done.

Instead of talking about how young you were when you got your first red pen, talk about your years of experience and the projects you’ve worked on. Talk about the results your clients got, or the things your clients don’t need to worry about when their writer is on-time, polished, and thoughtful.

You don’t have to sterilize business and be all about the analytics all the time, but the time for sharing who you are and building a connection is after you land the work based on what you can do for them (and after they have paid you ;-)).

Secret #3: Why you can’t make that meeting/take that assignment/be their slave

Sometimes my calendar is booked because I’m going to a doctor’s appointment. Sometimes it’s booked because I don’t have nanny coverage. And sometimes it’s booked because I’m going to be eating a delicious snack. Do you know what my clients hear from me?

“I’m so sorry, but I’m unavailable at that time.”

Same goes for a project that 1) seems like it’s going to be a pain in the tookus, or 2) will conflict with my ethics, or 3) will make me roll my eyes too hard every day for several weeks as I try to schedule 5+ subject matter experts and their entourages.

Over-sharing about your calendar is both annoying to the person you’re scheduling with (seriously, they don’t need to know) and chafes at your professionalism. In fact, it’s just an example of how new freelance writers can get caught up in the negative worldview of freelancers. You think:

Everyone knows freelancers are unreliable, so I have to prove to them that I’m reliable by giving them every detail about my calendar and every legitimate excuse I can.

Or:

Everyone knows freelancers are desperate for work, so I have to explain in excruciating detail why I won’t take this particular assignment and how grateful I’d be to be considered again in the future.

Nope! Stop. Sometimes the most B-A thing you can do is sit quietly and say, “I’m sorry, that’s not going to work for me.”

What are your secrets?

So, what about you? Do you have any secrets you’ve kept from clients from day 1? And what other secrets do you think freelancer writers should keep close to the vest?

10 Mistakes That Will Completely Blow Your Freelance Career

October 10, 2017 By FiveFigureSarah

Are you shaking in your ankle boots about starting a freelance writing business?

You’re right to be afraid.

As good as it can be (and I’ve found it to be very good), freelance writing can go badly quickly and for a lot of different reasons. But in my personal experience and my research about freelance writers, I’ve come to find that what most people are afraid of — getting paid — is not what usually sinks the ship. Successful freelancing is made up of tiny wins and tiny mistakes that collectively make your business blow or grow.

Before you make these mistakes yourself, let me save you a few minutes (and a few tears and a few thousand dollars). Here are the top 10 mistakes that will stop your freelance career before it starts:

1. Trying to work every day

Blow: Much like freelance income comes in seasons throughout the year, writing comes in seasons throughout the week, not throughout the day. If you try to finish your deadlines the day they’re due, you’re going to end up sitting at your desk frustrated and blocked.

Grow: Try to finish deadlines 2-3 days in advance. Leave enough room in your week that you can have a bum day or two where the writing doesn’t flow and still come out on top.

(Pro tip: this is also how sick days and vacations work as a freelancer).

2. Not delivering on a deadline

Blow: If you’re flippant about due dates, you won’t be successful as a freelancer. Even if you’re working with the most chill customer in the world, eventually your lack of punctuality and reliability will translate into a lack of income.

Grow: When it comes to deadlines, give them and meet them always. If you ever won’t meet a deadline, communicate it days in advance. If you ever don’t meet a deadline, apologize profusely and make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Be a stickler for deadlines. Even if you’re working with the most chill customer in the world, eventually your lack of punctuality and reliability will translate into a lack of income.

3. Getting on the phone with anyone who asks

Blow: I wince when I see someone offer a free 15-minute consultation with whoever wants one. Don’t you respect your time? Don’t you have things to do? If you give away your time like that, you won’t have enough time or mental energy for paying work.

Grow: Before you get on the phone with a.n.y.b.o.d.y. ask them what they want and what kind of budget they have. You don’t have to be rude or awkward, just hit them back with something like, “I’d love to chat! To make sure there’s a good fit here, I’d love to hear more about the project and what kind of budget you’ve set aside for it. If it makes sense to meet, we can schedule a call for early next week!”

Not only does this protect your time, but it also positions you as a professional in high demand.

4. Hiding from the phone

Blow: My favorite way to make money is to get an assignment by email, nail it, and send my invoice. What’s not to love, right? But the reality is that phone-only freelancing often turns into a fight for the lowest price.

Grow: I may or may not be Internet-famous for my fear of the client phone call, but there’s no denying the fact the phone is just not optional sometimes. Getting on the horn is a powerful way to build relationships with your client, and it allows you to be a consultant and a strategist instead of just a writer bot. Be very careful and particular with who you spend time with on the phone, but do get on it from time to time.

5. Working for free

Blow: Everyone seems to think it’s normal to work for free to “prove you can do it.” That’s obscenely incorrect. If someone wants you to write for free and they plan to use your sample, it’s a scam, and you should run away screaming. The only conditions under which it is acceptable to work for free are as follows:

You don’t need any money ever
You don’t think you’re good at writing
You hate yourself
It’s a nonprofit you love and you don’t need any money

Grow: If you have absolutely no experience, write for yourself for free. Make up an assignment (perhaps for a big, beautiful brand you love) and complete it and post it to your portfolio. Don’t let someone else decide the terms for the work you do unless they’re paying for it.

If you have absolutely no experience, write for yourself for free. Don’t let someone else decide the terms for the work you do unless they’re paying for it.

6. Charging hourly

Blow: When I sent my first invoice, I was absolutely overjoyed to transcribe an interview and write a blog post for $35 an hour, making a total of about $114.

That’s amazing — especially for my first freelance job — but if I kept that up, I would have had to work 2.86 hours for every $100 I earned. If I had to do that now, I’d be working hundreds of hours every month instead of tens of hours every month.

Grow: There’s just no way to stay in the game or make a full-time income working part time if you charge hourly. Project rates are the way to go, 100%.

7. Using a Gmail address forever

Blow: Gmail. Or Hotmail, or iCloud, or anything that’s not customized. Nothing says rookie like sending an invoice from “SammyFinkle87@gmail.com.”

Grow: If you want people to take your writing seriously, eventually you will need to pony up for a real email address and URL like YourName dot com. Whether or not your clients want to see it (and they do) it will go a long way towards giving you some self-respect.

(Pro tip: Ditto for an invoice processing software. I’ve used FreshBooks since day 1, but you should find and use whatever software you jive with.)

8. Going it alone

Blow: If you’re like me, avoiding people is right behind making more money and working from home on the list of things that attract you to the freelance life. But going it alone has a way of making the lows of freelancing even lower.

Grow: Forget the office life sentence that you’re stuck with whoever’s in the cubicle next to you. When you work online, you make your own rules. Find people who’s blogs you love and send them an email. Follow someone really funny on Twitter and get to know them.

Whether you hire them or just follow their blog, go out of your way to find peers to bounce ideas off of and mentors to look up to. You won’t progress without them.

9. Working with a baby nearby

(Now that I’m a mom, I get to have an opinion on this!)

Blow: Trying to concentrate on paying work with a baby nearby almost drove me insane. At any given nap time, I could have had 3 hours to work…. or 20 minutes. That kind of irrational schedule-shifting made it really hard to concentrate or write good pitch emails (or remember what I did or had to do from day to day).

Grow: Coincidentally, when I started having a nanny come by 4 hours a day 3 hours a week, my income skyrocketed and my sense of inner calm (almost) returned. There’s no substitute for focus. My son’s nanny is the best $600 we spend a month.

(Pro tip: Plenty of moms work from home without a nanny. That may not be you, though, so don’t set yourself up to bomb at freelancing just because you can’t fit it in during naps.)

10. Writing for everyone

Blow: If you can help “anyone” write “anything,” then you’re riding the unnerving carousel horse of Freelance Death. Well-paying writing is a speciality and an acquired skill, not something you’ve “been doing since you were three” or “that your mom totally knew you’d be good at one day.”

Grow: Niche. Niche, niche. Not right away, but within a year or two of writing, you need to niche or you can kiss high-paying work goodbye. And stop saying what an early start you got as a writer unless you’re explaining why you write to your grandmother.

Now for the comments

What are you most afraid of when it comes to starting a freelance writing business? Let me know in the comments and I’ll see if I can’t allay your fears.

5 Ways To Make Your Clients Happier (& Your Writing More Valuable)

March 15, 2017 By FiveFigureSarah

Fun fact: If you want to charge a high rate for your writing, your writing needs to be worth a higher rate.

There are a lot of ways to get to this point: deep experience in a certain industry (also known as specializing); high demand for what you do in a particular format (another way of specializing); or creating an obscenely valuable client relationship.

Today, I want to focus on that last one: creating an obscenely valuable client relationship. Because even if you have not specialized and you are busy trying out writing topics and formats to see where you want to go with your career, there are plenty of things you can do to make a client relationship more valuable.

That is, there are things you can do to make each assignment you turn in a little punchier and get your clients to say “Wow!” a little more often.

Before we get started, please note that these are all things you do after you have negotiated a high rate for your work. The negotiating part is a whole separate wild cat, and that part requires you to target better clients, work on your confidence, and negotiate well.

What we’re talking about today is the “value add” that makes you worth the price — not the product description that sells your services.

These ideas will allow you to step into an assignment and impress clients so much that they have an authentic desire to keep working with you. This is how you get to a level where your clients can’t imagine life without you or that they start to suspect that the other writers they work with just don’t measure up. So, listen up:

1. Add social suggestions to the article (tweets, posts, etc)

Don’t let this get too complicated in your mind; I don’t mean to suggest that you should work for free or be your client’s social media strategist. In a situation where a client wanted to contract you to write tweets as part of their social media management program, you should charge for that.

What I mean here is that after you write an article and you’re knee deep in the topic, it might take about three seconds to add three tweets to the top of the article. But to your client — especially if it’s a small client — you just saved them a half hour of reading through posts, thinking of what to say, and writing it out.

If it takes you five seconds and saves your client a half an hour, it’s win-win.

Here’s an example: One client I work with manages the company blog and runs all of the social media profiles. She’s a busy lady. So, imagine what a relief it is to receive a blog post that has 3-4 tweets just sitting there, ready to go, at the top of the article. It took me about 5 seconds, but it brought a lot of thoughtfulness and value to her day.

Is this a professional social media strategy? Not really. But it is a small task I was able to take off her to-do list because I genuinely care about her stress level. Win-win. If she were to request to always get five tweets, or to want to get on the phone to talk tweets, I’d start talking about a small retainer. But if there’s something I can do in a few seconds to make her life easier, I’m all about it.

2. Add multiple titles with the same keyword (and use keywords)

Even if you got the pitch approved with one article title, go ahead and include 3-5 different titles that use the same keyword.

First, you never know which title will resonate with your client better or which they’ll think appeals to their audience better, so this will save you a lot of back-and-forth about better title options. Second, since every blog post you write for a client needs to have some kind of SEO value to be valuable to them, this practice allows you to show your client that you’re a professional, aware writer.

Speaking of SEO: when you take an assignment, always ask what keyword they’d like to focus the article on. If they don’t have one, it’s up to you to suggest one after you write the article.

If your client doesn’t have a keyword in mind, it’s up to you to suggest one.

If you’re familiar with the industry, the keyword you pick might be obvious. If you’re not, you can use Google AdWords to find a good one. Then include a note in the article about why you picked the keyword. (Note: You may have to create an account and pay for an ad campaign to use the keyword tool, but creating a test campaign can cost as little as $1 or $2, which is totally worth it in my book).

3. Kick off articles with statistics related to the client’s target market

There are a lot of ways to introduce an article, but by far, when it comes to professional writing and B2B writing, statistics are the best way to go.

Why? Statistics are the currency of business. Especially in the B2B world, everyone needs to validate their purchases and decisions to someone else. Since statistics allow people to see just how important or pressing a topic is to the wider world, kicking off an article with a statistical source gives the topic (and the article) an immediate sense of professionalism and urgency.

Not only does adding statistics add value to the reader, but it also boosts your client’s view of how the article will be received. In fact, this tip is so powerful that when I first started kicking off B2B articles with statistics, I would regularly get feedback like, “That was your best article yet!”

Find statistics by Googling “[your topic] statistics.” Also, read competitor’s blog posts and look at what sources they cite. You won’t want to use the same statistics unless they’re particularly relevant, but you can review their sources to see if there is anything there that works for your article.

4. Share the article when it’s posted

If you have a few contacts in your network in the industry you’re writing about (or even if you don’t), share the live article. This gives your client more views and shows them that you follow up and participate on your work — you’re not a one and done kind of gal.

This is also why it helps to eventually niche or specialize your writing. When you specialize, you can start building a network within your niche. That way, when you share a post on digital marketing with your network, a bunch of digital marketing specialists will like it, share it, or read it, and your client will see that you’re a valuable connection to their target audience. Otherwise, it’s just your mom and a few friends that will check it out (which is still viewers, so it’s not bad, but it’s not as ideal as a professional network).

5. Subscribe to industry things and let clients know when they’re mentioned

Even if you haven’t specialized, go ahead and sign up for some newsletters and industry information sources whenever you sign on a new client. For example, if you start writing copy for a marketing company, sign up for updates from HubSpot; if you start writing for a local horse riding club (?), sign up for an equestrian magazine or nonprofit newsletter.

You’ll end up on a lot of crazy, random lists, and that’s okay: it widens your perspective of the work you’re doing for your client, will give you tons of great pitch ideas, and will help you keep an eye out for mentions of your client (if they’re big enough) or mentions of things your client is interested in (which all clients have).

Sign up for some newsletters and industry information sources whenever you sign on a new client.

Recently, an industry newsletter I subscribe to linked to a client’s blog post. I didn’t write that blog post, but I forwarded the newsletter to the client and said “Great job, they featured you!” It wasn’t on her radar, so it made her day to see how her work was getting around.

This is another value add that positions you as a professional in your field — a valuable resource that keeps them informed, not just a monkey who delivers words on time. (You do deliver posts on time, don’t you?)