The Struggling Writer

The chronicles of a freelance writer as he tries to make a living.

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Behold the power of the Internet

Once upon a time there was a woman who needed a writer. She fired up her computer to post an ad on craigslist. Before doing so, she decided to check her RSS feeds. She saw Tom Chandler had updated his blog and read his latest entry. She followed that entry to the blog of a struggling writer. "Hmm," she said to her self, "I need a writer, he needs work, he seems to be able to string words together. What the heck." And she called the struggling writer and offered him the work.

Yay!

Some of it is keyword stuffing: taking existing web pages and adding keywords without making it look like I'm deliberately baiting search engines. Boring, but easy. Some of it will be original content, but at a better rate than I've made from past projects. If she's right about the projected workload, it will cover about half of what I need to be making every month.

When it comes to business, your strong network is the people you have direct contact with. Your weak network is all of THEIR friends and contacts. I remember reading an article long ago that people get most of their work from the weak network. You don't get jobs from your friends; you get them from your friend's hairdresser's brother-in-law's dogwalker. The Internet is the ultimate weak networking tool.

3 Comments:

  • At 12:19 PM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Glad it worked out! I wonder what you're going to do for an encore... 8-)

    Don't forget to leverage, leverage, leverage...

     
  • At 12:24 PM, Blogger Deb said…

    Awesome! Never underestimate the power of the blog.

     
  • At 7:58 AM, Anonymous Anonymous said…

    Don't you love it when that happens? It reminds me of the first time I sold something on the net, and it wasn't even on eBay!

     

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