Whether you found yourself choosing the freelance life or getting forced into it, you probably had big visions. Being your own boss! Creating your own schedule! Earning money doing what you love! Only… a few months into it, freelancers sometimes find reality looks...
The growing field of technical writing — the work of creating user guides for new products, capturing how a business brings aboard a new customer, directing a user step by step through installing new software and thousands of other tasks — is a lucrative one. I made...
Writers rarely spit out their best copy on the first draft. If you meet a writer who claims to have the secret for doing so, please let the rest of us know! First drafts — and second drafts and sometimes thirds — exist to hash your ideas out on paper. After you’ve...
“Trying to make it as a freelance writer is scary AF.” With a subject line that bold (and accurate), I wasted no time in opening the email. It was from a young woman who’d recently graduated with a dual degree in English and journalism, asking me how, how, how to...
Whether you’re learning how to become a freelance writer or an experienced freelancer slogging through a slow period, figuring out how to get clients can be nerve-wracking. Here’s the hard truth: You have to hustle to get new writing clients. Even the most...
For freelance writers, recurring revenue is everything. One-off assignments are a good starting point, but what you really need to form a reliable income stream is writing projects that continue over time: a company that wants you to write a blog post each week or a...
As Halloween draws nigh, I’d like to introduce you to 10 monsters that haunt my nightmares. Now, these guys and ghouls don’t regularly visit me, but they are a source of fear from time to time. And what’s often most troublesome is that I can seldom tell if they’re...
There’s no sugar-coating it: The world of SEO can be tricky to navigate — but it’s absolutely doable, even for the newest of newbies. It’s so worth it, too. SEO is a powerful long-term approach writers can utilize to boost (free!) traffic to their websites or blogs....
“The headline is the most important element in most advertisements. It is the telegram which decides whether the reader will read the copy.” –David Ogilvy Ask any copywriter and they’ll likely agree with Ogilvy. The headline is what hooks the reader’s attention. If...
As writers, we know that the process of writing is composed of work and worry. The work is a grind of word counts and applied methodology, but the worry — a mix of fear, doubt, stress and resistance to the process — can be more difficult to navigate. During the four...
