Category Archives: Freelance Writer

A Year On – Launching a Freelance Writing Business

After nearly 25 years of being a professional writer and marketing and public relations professional, I decided to hang out my online shingle and start a writing business.

Meryl Streep’s character in “The Devil Wears Prada” reminded me of a former boss I had while working in Manhattan.

But as they say, nothing worth having comes easy. It took a year to build up a clientele, plus build out two websites all while working two and three part-time jobs, but the tipping point finally came this year. The payoff for all my hard work is what energy I pour into my own business comes back to me. And working the occasional weekend isn’t all that bad when you know it’s for your own business as well as your client’s.

My idea of opening my own business began about three years ago, after taking a national consulting company through a three-year cobrand process when they were bought out by an international firm. Once the cobrand was over, there were 15 marketing directors from the acquired companies vying for the top marketing spot. I had no interest in climbing the corporate ladder once again because I had had my career success in Manhattan several years earlier. I knew how empty it could be at the top and making six figures didn’t bring happiness. I took a marketing writing position. However, I didn’t apparently share the new marketing director’s vision of how the marketing department should be run. So, I took a severance package and walked.

I truly believe in following your heart and your gut instinct. My intuition was screaming at me. Since I had left the journalism field, my career was not fulfilling me.  I had enjoyed being a reporter because I felt my stories, my writing was helping to inform and entertain the community in which I lived. I had not felt that way in a very long time in the corporate world.

After doing a year of researching business types that would fit me, my brother Bill and I decided to launch Nelson Business Experts. It went nowhere for a year, partly because my brother was still in a funk from his second divorce and didn’t want to do much of anything meaningful besides sleep and I didn’t want to go it alone. So, I let him heal and forgot about the business for a while. Meanwhile, we both worked customer service jobs to make ends meet.

I finally decided to pursue the business again at the beginning of the year, when a synchronistic event occurred. Out of the blue, I got an interview for a job in which I had not applied. I decided to attend the interview anyway. While interviewing for the creative director position, my intuition was calling out “no, this isn’t what you want.” So when the interviewer asked if I was interested I said: “may I spin this in a different direction?”

I told the interviewer, who was also the owner of the company that I didn’t see myself in this position he described but would like to write for his business as a freelancer. And he went for it!

I have since won several more clients, but winning additional work at first proved to be the biggest challenge for the business. However, there are now several online avenues in which to win work in freelancing. I highly recommend building out your profile on LinkedIn and getting recommendations from past employers and colleagues. You can also join LinkedIn ProFinder, which matches you with other professionals looking for your services. I have found work on ProFinder.

Thumbtack is another professional job matching system that works quite well. You must buy points to bid on jobs, but you get daily jobs you can bid on. But these jobs are mostly one-offs where you do a project rather than win a client long-term. Although, there are long-term offerings as well. Make sure you set your filters on the type of services you offer to receive the type of jobs you want. My brother and I have found clients from this site.

I am also a member of Flexjobs.com but with little results. Just my opinion but most of the jobs are low-paying gigs for writers who are looking to add to their portfolio or highly specialized types of writing that I don’t do.

I just joined Mediabistro, which I was a member of several years ago as a journalist in New York City. We shall see how that goes. I will give it some time before I critique it. But it seems to me with just being a member for a few days most of the jobs are working onsite and in the eastern US.

I am only looking for virtual work now. And it’s out there. I’ve talked to several clients who say they only work with virtual writers.

As a freelance writer, I am feeling fulfilled once again because I help business owners with their individual successes through my copywriting.  And the freedom to work where and when I want, priceless!

 

 

 

What is a professional writer?

A professional writer has a degree in writing, has written hundreds of stories on a multitude of topics for a myriad of audiences and in several genres.

Experienced writers are worth their weight in gold and worth every penny you pay them. Each word in the copy is chosen for maximum impact. The audience to which writers are attempting to influence is researched and understood.

Professional writers are also easy to work with and consider their client’s needs as well as the finished product. Yes, writing is a work of art. However, when you are writing for a client their opinion matters, not the writers.

One client told me that one of his writers got testy when he critiqued his copy and wanted him to change it. A professional writer may indeed explain the reasons why it should be this way or that, but in the end, you are writing for your client, not to please yourself.

Critiques from editors and clients over the years have made my writing better and I welcome feedback. A good writer knows this. No one writes in a vacuum.

Words are meant to be read and digested by the reader calling them to action or to feel a certain way about a topic. Good copy flows. It isn’t choppy. Every piece has a beginning, a middle and an end.  Each is equally important. The beginning pulls the reader into the copy. If readers don’t get past the first graph, you haven’t done your job as a writer. The middle imparts knowledge about the topic matter and the end sums up and reiterates the call to action if there is one.

A professional writer knows how to flow each paragraph into the next, knows where a quote is best placed in the copy, knows when a quote will help to further the copy and when it doesn’t.

Professional writers know their craft, have perfected their craft and do not have an abhorrence for deadlines.

Having a writing background that began with local journalism, helped me to hone my craft over several years. I then jumped to corporate communications, public relations and marketing where I furthered my business writing skills by creating brochures, websites and other marketing collateral.

Right now, I am writing SEO copy for a technology copy, but am always seeking new clients.

So, if you are in need a well-rounded writer, who knows her craft, contact me and we can talk about how I can tell your business’s story through writing clean, concise and compelling copy.

Finding your Niche in a Homebased Business

By Barbara L. Nelson

From candle making to Cajun gifts to angel cards to eBay, Bill and I did marketing research on our home based business for nearly a year before launching our freelance copywriting and content creation business.

What we kept being drawn back to was our advanced skills in business communications. Between us, we have produced thousands of pages of copy for newspapers, magazines, manuals, brochures, press releases, websites, blogs and social media throughout our careers.

However, it didn’t happen overnight or without a lot of false starts, frustration and wanting to throw the towel in several times.

Bill and I had achieved great success in our careers. Bill as a software engineer and product manager and me as a professional journalist, publicist and marketing and communications director. However, in recent years, jobs for middle-management executives had disappeared, especially for professionals in their 50s.

There comes a time in every professional’s life when you don’t want to accept that your career as a paid employee is over. However, we both reached that point in the Summer of 2015 when we didn’t find positions that were commensurate with our years of experience and “over qualified” was the common feedback from prospective employers when we tried to take a lesser position.

So necessity being the mother of invention, we sought to open our own home based business. We came up with some pretty hair-brained ideas, which were immediately eliminated.

However, for over a year, we researched viable business ideas, while working part-time jobs. We thought candle making might be fun, but the cost to produce was way too high. The materials and our time didn’t equate to even a marginal profit. We looked into repackaging and selling Cajun spices online, but after some deep discussions, we didn’t feel it represented where we wanted to go businesswise. We also tried eBay and still have our e-store open, but neither one of us like to shop or garage sale, which is a requirement to source inexpensive products to sell.

We also worked together to launch my angel card reading business and got my website Following the Light up and running in 2015. But after four solid months of creating content, video readings and Social Media advertising nothing materialized as far as paying customers. I still do readings, but by donations only now. Please see http://followingthelightangels.com/

In keeping with our overall goal, which was to be able to work from anywhere on the globe and still make a living, we thought about helping small businesses create their own websites. Although both of us could create websites, since we had already launched Following the Light, we weren’t experts at it.

After both of us feeling like abject failures at being successful business owners and not being able to find meaningful work, it just happened. One day we just decided to start working on the creation of the Nelson & Nelson website and see where it took us. We were able to pare our services down to what we both have already been successful at in our careers – writing! Voila, and when I saw the finished website, I couldn’t believe it took us that long to come to the same conclusion. This is what we’ve done all our careers, why hadn’t we thought of it earlier?

If you find yourself in a similar situation wanting or needing to start your own small business, it will be helpful to ask these questions. What do you enjoy doing? What comes naturally? And what do you lose time doing? Therein should lie your answer. It’s not something you’ve never done. It’s not something that you think is going to make you a lot of money. It’s the thing you do best and would do for free even if you don’t get paid. And don’t feel like a failure or give up as it may take you awhile to find out what it is you can contribute to the world while making a living. It will come. Trust the universe.

So there you have it, I hope you follow us on our continuing journey. And please feel free to contact us. I would love to chat and help you along your own path to fulfillment and freedom of owning your own business?