When I wrote the title to this post, my finger accidentally hit the Caps button. Freelance Value-ADD is not a disorder, but man, what an appropriate Freudian slip. Why? Because we freelancers tend to have attention deficit when it comes to marketing ourselves. We jump from the tried-and-true last thing that got us hired to…
Author: lwidmer
The Freelance Grab – A Cautionary Tale
Totally different topic today, but one that some of the more established freelancers have had to deal with. Someone (a female) in my orbit is right now dealing with a grabber. The grabber in question has adjacent property to hers, and in every interaction over the last year has started with an ask. Each subsequent…
The Ultimate Freelance Marketing Survival Guide
In my travels over these last few decades of freelancing, I’ve realized there really are two types of freelancers — Freelancers who put excuses in the way Freelancers who have more ideas than time What kind of freelancer are you? Ironically, both of these freelancers can have careers that go off the rails pretty quickly…
6 Things Freelancers Should Give Up (that will boost the career)
There are so many things freelance writers can do to improve their businesses and their careers: take classes, raise rates, network more…. Yet sometimes the things we freelancers give up do the most to boost our potential. The list is a familiar one. Nothing I list here will be unique or even new. What is…
Freelance Writing and Why Rate Isn’t Everything
Here’s a freelance fact that may be somewhat unpopular (though no less true): Your freelance career outcomes are more important than your hourly rate. That’s right. I’m saying that while what you charge matters, it matters equal to what you’re getting out of that client relationship. Confused yet? Let me explain myself. Suppose your lowest-paying…
4 Ways to Build Success into Your Freelance Writing Business
Freelance writing blogs are chock full of “here’s how you’re screwing up” posts. I know because I’ve posted plenty of those myself. Just look at this, this, and this from the last month. Okay, they all had a positive, actionable message in the end, but the point is there are plenty of things around on…
Broken Website = New Theme
What happens when you mix a writer who doesn’t have the WordPress experience with updates that she doesn’t make? Broken website. Thanks to Paula for pointing it out yesterday. A few things happened: Seems my theme was retired by the company I’d bought it from. And it would have been okay to know that and…
Free Advice Friday: Tough Love, Freelance Style
You learn a lot about people by what they say and do. You learn even more by what they don’t do. But I’ll get to that in a minute. A friend of mine moderates a writing group. One of the posts in the moderation queue was asking a basic question: Does anyone else know if…
5 Freelance Marketing Fixes That Boost Your Results
On a LinkedIn forum recently, a friend of mine who moderates the forum posted the reason why the group is moderated. It was just mid-month, and she’d already filtered out nearly a dozen posts that were self-promotional. Some of them weren’t even related to writing, while others were offering work for “exposure” to professional writers….
How Pro Freelancers Score Big (& how you can, too)
Last week was a mishmash of short project deadlines, new projects to prioritize, and social media marketing. From Twitter to LinkedIn, there were a lot of writing mishaps going on. One guy misspelled the name of his own book, another writer was pushing how to improve your Fiverr client quality, yet another was singing the…