The Struggling Writer

Dependability vs. Skill

2008-04-07T15:09:00.001-07:00

I am constantly trying to turn my experiences as a consumer into lessons as a business owner.

Early in my writing career I decided to hire someone to take care of my yard, freeing me to focus on work. Phoenix has four million people and approximately three million of them offer yard services. How was I going to narrow the field?

The first thing I decided is that I wouldn't consider someone who didn't have a web site. Huh? I hear you saying. A web site just for someone to mow your lawn? Yup. Any idiot with hedge clippers and a truck offers yard work and too many of them are appallingly unprofessional about it. It is a field that attracts far too many people who play at working without treating it like a business, something that is also true of freelance writing. Web sites are cheap and easy and there is just no excuse for any business not to have one. Even a one-page website with an email address under your own domain creates a professional image.

Despite this, I certainly still had my share of unreliable people. Phone messages to dozens of providers went unreturned. One guy showed up for the initial cleanup and did really nice work but was spotty on the follow-up work until he just stopped coming.

The one I finally used was very business-like. His wife stayed home to answer the phone and do the books. I got invoices every month rather than the pay-as-you-go most of them do. He showed up promptly every two weeks like clockwork.

It's a pity his work was lousy.

I stuck with him for about a year. I cut him loose recently because I really can't afford the luxury at this point. I went back and forth over that decision because it's smart business to outsource things like that. I would have kept him if the work had been better but I couldn't justify the cost for him to do work no better than I can do myself.

His professional demeanor got him the contract and certainly put him ahead of the competition. However without the skill to back it up, the monthly cost wore thin.

I'll still need someone to come back about once a year for cleanup. So who am I going to call: the unreliable one who does a great job or the dependable guy who does mediocre work? I'm going to go for dependability and I think most customers feel the same way. I'd rather have second-rate work done than great work not done.

Anxiety

2008-04-03T14:07:00.001-07:00

I've had a recurring nightmare lately. I'm trying to make my way through an airport. Sometimes I'm going home, sometimes I'm trying to get to a plane, sometimes I'm in the parking lot but usually I'm in the terminal. And I'm lost. Everything keeps twisting and I end up in odd places. Stairs lead up to the 2nd and 4th floors, but not the 3rd where I need to go. There are lots of people around who all know where they are going. The more I wander, the more annoyed I get, occasionally getting so angry I wake myself up.

OK, I'm no dream expert but this one doesn't seem hard to interpret. Fear of change. Or at least fear that change is getting you nowhere.

Not surprisingly, these dreams started as I changed my business plans.

As I think I mentioned before (I blog so seldom that I forget what I've said and what I've just mumbled to myself about) I'm at the point where my goals exceed my actual work. I use these unrealized goals to pay myself for non-writing work tasks such as sending queries, reading about business plans, and doing my taxes. This has forced me to make decisions about what the next step in my career is.

Until now I've been depending on a single client who gives me keyword articles to do. It's not the most fun I've ever had, but it pays a good hourly rate and is steady. She does the marketing and subcontracts to me so it's easy for me to get complacent. However I need to diversify.

My original plan had been to start offering services to non-profit organizations. I decided recently that with the economy in its current sorry state, this would be a bad time for that. Nonprofits are tightening their belts and probably not interested in hiring services.

My goal now is to send letters of introduction to a number of trade magazines. Before I do that I have a few other tasks I want to get done such as getting some clips together. I also need to rewrite my website. I've never been happy with the text there and it's not a good sign when a writer's website is badly written. I was trying too hard and I need to go back and write it in my own voice.

But as I move out of my comfort zone, I experience anxiety. I was reading a book on business plans today and my stomach was in knots. Once I put the book down, they went away. I've always been pretty transparent.

The cure for anxiety is desensitization. The more you do something, the less nervous you get. I need to keep to my goals, get some of those letters out, and get moving.

Once I do that, maybe I'll find my way through the airport.

Motivation for Freelancers

2008-03-08T10:42:00.001-07:00

Every freelancer needs motivation. Some people are just naturally ambitious but they are rare.

The rest of us need a kick to get going. Different freelancers use different methods: goals, rewards, motivational plaques, or whatever. Each of us needs to find our own way. It's great to get inspiration from other people's methods, but if something doesn't work for you, drop it and move on.

I've found two good motivators: deadlines and numbers.

Deadline pressure gets me to work, but only at the last minute. I have a history of submitting minutes before the deadline even if I've had weeks to work. Until the end is near, it's easy to make excuses. The flaw is that inevitably everything goes to hell the day before, and suddenly I don't have any time. I've had weeks that I wake up at 4 am to finish things on time. I've also rare occasions that I've handed things in late, which is inexcusable for a freelance writer.

The other flaw with deadline motivation is that it doesn't help with marketing and without marketing there are no deadlines.

The second motivational system that works for me is numbers. I'm a geek and I love charts and statistics and it's always good to use your strengths. I track my work on a spreadsheet, look at monthly performance, and set goals accordingly.

That system works well for me and has changed over time. At first I was just trying to match performance. Well that's just silly because then I never grow. So I set monthly goals to beat past performance by 10% and that worked better.

That was fine for a while. Most of my work is subcontracted web content. I get plenty of work handed to me, I get paid quickly, and it was easy to track the work performed. But I struggled with how I should track things like career development or applying for new contracts. These are important but don't pay, so how do I include them in a payment-based system?

The answer is that I pay myself my hourly rate for these tasks. Of course there's no real money changing hands, but it makes it easy to convert hours to money and keep my existing goal system.

This is the first month that I've had a goal high enough that I've had to start using it. It gives me the chance to read books on writing and business planning. It rewards me for hunting down contracts or getting involved in writing forums again. Even updating this blog has now become a paying proposition, even if that pay is all in my head.

I've said before that most motivational techniques don't work with me because I see the man behind the curtain. This method is still hand-waving and smoke, but it's a sleight-of-hand that I'm willing to suspend disbelief for. I don't know why it works on me, but it does and that's all that matters.

The curse of the lazy freelancer

2008-01-07T09:09:00.000-07:00

I’ve talked several times about my biggest limitation as a freelancer: I’m basically lazy.

I’m careful that my indolence hurts only me and not my clients. I meet my deadlines but I’m seldom early. However even this can be a problem if your client assumes you are working to capacity because you hand things in at the last minute.

This happened to me recently. My primary client had been turning away work because she assumed I couldn’t handle it. I assured her I could take more and we set a weekly goal equal to about half what I need to be making to survive.

Why half and not all? There are a couple of reasons. I think it’s dangerous to depend on all of your income from a single source. Even though I’m subcontracting so technically the work is originating with dozens of clients, it’s still all funneled through one person. If she suddenly runs off and joins the circus, all that work disappears.

Another reason to limit work from one client is for diversity. Right now all I do is web content. The pay is good, the work is steady, and payment comes sometimes mere hours after a piece is submitted.

However I can certainly see how someone could get burned out on it. If I reach that point I want more than just content experience to show for it. By limiting the amount of one type of writing I do, I force myself to get broader experience.

Hmm, I’m reading back over this and I seem to have misplaced the point I had started to make. That’s the problem with stream-of-consciousness writing. I have several subjects I’ve been meaning to post about (and I really hope to get back to posting more often) and they all get muddled together.

Now I could list my ideas and check each one off off as I post about it, but I’m basically lazy ;)

Not dead yet

2007-11-15T10:51:00.000-07:00

The struggle to get back to my life continues. Not only am I still not making the income I was back in June, I'm not going to any of the forums, reading other people's blogs, or (as you may have noticed) keeping this one up.

I keep waiting for things to calm down and get back to what they were like before July and I've finally realized that they aren't going to. This is my life now - more complicated, more busy - and I need to start getting used to it. It really shouldn't have taken me four months to figure that out.

It means that I no longer have the luxury of "writing days", at least not as often as before. I need to get better about stealing hours here and there to get work done rather than waiting for long blocks of time. For example, in the past if I had a 4-article assignemnt, I'd try to find time to write them all together. Instead, I need to get used to writing one here and one there until they are done.

This leads to another of my annoying habits. If I have a one-day project and a one-week deadline, it ends up taking me a week because it's not a priority until the deadline is looming. I still get it done but it gives the illusion that I'm busier than I am, which is a bad thing. I had my main client the other day say she was holding things back because she assumed I didn't have time to do them. I told her I could easily take a lot more work, but that just reinforces that I need to get things done faster.

For the first time in a long time, I've spent the last few days thinking about expansion. Right now I do web content that I subcontract from a single client. Not only is it not enough, it's not all that I want to do. I have been kicking around ideas for other income streams from diversified areas. This protects my income in the event of wild market changes, and it keeps me from getting bored.

Unfortunately, this blog is low on my priority list. I really would like to update it more but often by the time I finish things for the day, I'm just too tired. The focus of this blog is my own personal lessons learned, but I keep forgetting to get over here and take a couple of minutes to document them. I hope to get better about that in the upcoming months.

I'm aware that I'm getting my momentum back right before the holidays, and everything tends to drag from Thanksgiving to New Years. Last year I frittered away the time. This year I plan to use the down time to nail down plans for future projects. As I keep reminding myself, if I don't get my freelance career on track, I'll have to get a real job and few things fill me with dread more than returning to the horrors of the 9-to-5 cubicle zombies.

Slowly getting back to it

2007-08-28T09:19:00.000-07:00

I am trying to get back my momentum after my disasterous July. My personal drama has abated (for now) and it's now just a matter of getting back to it.

The situation was complicated by the fact that my primary client was going through her own stuff during this time so I had no steady workflow. I had periods over the last six weeks that I could have gotten some work done but didn't have the energy for the marketing side of things. It would have helped to have a trickle of articles to keep me focused . Still, I guess it's better that our respective personal disasters were in parallel rather than in sequence. Imagine coming out of this nonsense just to have her go through another couple months of it.

This whole situation again underscores my biggest weakness as a freelancer: marketing. When I have work, I work hard and hit my deadlines. When I don't, I make lots of excuses to avoid self-promotion. It's not insecurity; I know I'm a good writer and have a lot to offer a client. I simply find marketing tedious, which is why I like subcontracts when I can find them.

July = total bust

2007-07-26T09:01:00.000-07:00

From a work perspective, I've been a bad boy this month. Last week was the only clear week I had in July. I should have been out there pounding the pavement, but instead I caught up on non-work stuff and took a lot of "mental health" days - probably more than I really needed. This week has been a total farking nightmare and I've had to learn all kind of new medical words. I actually had to turn down the only work I've gotten this month.

The next day I will have clear will be Tuesday, which is the last day of the month. My main client thinks she'll have work for me so maybe I can make a few dollars before the month is over.

Ooh, that was interesting. While I was typing this up, I got a call about a possible ghostwriting opportunity. He caught me off guard so I already can't remember who he was. He asked about rates and I stalled a little because I prefer bidding by project. He was insistent so I quoted him an hourly and a per word rate that may prove to be completely wrong once I find out more the work. Still, it's nice to see past efforts showing some results.

No rest for the weary

2007-07-11T13:59:00.000-07:00

Freelancers learn very quickly that balancing personal and professional lives is very tricky.

Over the last three weeks, things have been quite...eventful for my niece, Maria, and therefore for me. There were good things like flying back home for a few days. There were bad things like medical tests and substantial therapeutic setbacks. There were other things like my sister getting her kitchen remodeled and the nanny dealing with her mother's brain cancer. It's been busy and stressful and I'm utterly exhausted.

We have a running gag that when I don't go along to one of Maria's doctor visits, it turns out to be bad news. Twice in recent weeks that has proven true.
I have more flexibility than other caregivers in her life so, of course, I'm always the one who's available when others aren't. However as a freelancer, I don't get paid vacation.

Here we are nearly halfway through the month and I haven't done a single minute of work. I might have next week open, but the week after that Maria goes into the hospital and the week after that I have a friend visiting. July is clearly going to be a total bust.

It's taking me ten times as long as usual to write this entry because I can't keep a coherent thought in my pretty little head.

I don't really have a point to this; I'm just ranting. Things have been hard enough recently and not making money makes it harder. I need to be out there chasing down projects but I just don't have the energy. Whine, whine, whine.

I did get one piece of good news today though. I'm trying to network with Maria's therapists and doctors. I finally got a chance to schmooze her speech therapist, who comes from United Cerebral Palsy. He is pretty sure they need someone to write grant proposals, newsletters, etc. so he took two of my business cards to pass on to people there. That's certainly not a guarantee of work, but it seems like a decent future prospect.

Behold the Treadputer

2007-06-27T15:53:00.001-07:00

I read an article in the paper yesterday about a Mayo Clinic study involving having office workers walk on slow treadmills while working at the computer. The discovered that, contrary to their assumptions, there was no trouble typing, reading, concentrating, etc. After a day or so to get used to it, they were all doing their jobs normally.

I poked around and apparently it's old news. The Mayo study is from 2005 so I'm not sure why it was in a recent article, unless maybe there have been more conclusions from the study. I don't have the paper here anymore to re-read it. Anyhow, lots of people are doing it. The treadmills run at 0.7-1.1 mpg depending on the user. It burns a ton of calories and these people are losing weight and getting healthy.

Some people build sophisticated integrated systems. Some people just slap a piece of plywood across the handles of the treadmill and put a laptop on it.

I want one.

Here are a few links I found:

I Speak of Dreams - The Walking Desk

Walking While Working

workandwalk.com

Feld Thoughts - The Treadputer

Coolest Workspace Contest: The Treadputer

Personal projects

2007-06-16T11:58:00.000-07:00

I've often heard the same lament from writers: we have to spend so much time doing projects that pay the bills that we don't have time to work on projects that are important to us.

A while back, a group of people from a neurology support forum I used to frequent decided to try writing a book on hydrocephalus. As those who follow this blog know, that's a subject with a lot of personal relevance. There is only one hydrocephalus book out there aimed at adult laymen and the market could use another.

Recently the woman overseeing this emailed me to ask if I was still on board. I had to say that I wasn't.

Part of it is that I can't devote the time it would take considering the small payout that would likely be waiting at the end. When I'm a little more secure in my career I can take a few more chances, but not right now.

Another problem is that it's a group effort by a bunch of people who as near as I can tell have no professional writing experience among them. They are doling out chapters willy-nilly among people of wildly disparate backgrounds and writing ability. The project will require extensive editing to turn it into something publishable and with a common voice. The whole "hey, kids, let's put on a show" attitude doesn't work in publishing. If they want to produce a professional piece, they will need a ghost writer and will need to come up with a hefty chunk of money for that up front.

I suspect it will end up at a vanity publisher and circulated only among the members of this support group. That's not a bad thing, mind you, but that's not the same as a commercially viable work.

I hope that a couple of years from now I will be kicking myself for bailing out. I hope they put together a good book that contributes good information to people with hydrocephalus and their families and friends. I hope the book is a huge success, widely circulated, critically acclaimed, and makes tons of money.

I also would be thrilled to hear they all won the lottery.

Opportunity knocks

2007-06-02T15:00:00.000-07:00

I've talked occasionally about my pending grant writing opportunity. My niece's ophthalmologist needs funding for a research project and wants me to write the grant proposals. It's been on the back burner for a while, but it looks I will be starting it this summer.

Recently my niece was getting fitted for new ankle braces. I was chatting with her orthotist and mentioned I was a freelance writer. She asked me what kind of writing I do and I mentioned that I'm doing mostly website content now but I'm expanding into other things such as this grant project. Guess what. She has a website she's been waiting a year(!) for content on, and she wants to start a non-profit organization and doesn't have time to do the grant writing herself.

Yay!

One grant project under my belt would have been nice, but if I can get two then I've got a solid foundation to start pursuing other grant opportunities. I guess that helps me narrow down the kind of writing I want to do.

I'm smart enough to know that casual chit-chat is not the same as a firm commitment, but at least I've got some good possibilities. I'm getting better about mentioning to people I'm a writer and following up on hints about jobs.

Consider my cousin, who is a very talented painter but doesn't have a business-oriented bone in his body. He could easily make a living but he's not willing to play the games he'd need to. OK, I respect that, but you can get silly about it. He did a wonderful portrait (on commission) of my brother after he died. At my mother's wake a few years later, I approached him about doing a companion portrait of her. He blew me off and changed the subject. He just wasn't in a business mood. I never bothered following up (nor did he) so he missed an opportunity for an easy commission.

You never know when a job will pop up. You don't have to be smarmy about it (I think of Robin Williams in Cadillac Man, giving his business card to a widow at her husband's funeral) but you have to keep your ears open.

When good (or mediocre) writers go bad

2007-06-01T13:04:00.000-07:00

Recently there's been a bit of a kerfluffle over some writers who are sabotaging online ads in an effort to minimize the competition. Other writers have been getting angry at this, which is certainly understandable, but this practice doesn't bother me. I don't even feel a little irritation. Pity maybe, but not irritation.

Why? Well, I have two reasons.

First of all, these sabotaging writers aren't real competition. People who resort to these kinds of tactics do so because they can't compete on a level playing field. I'm a lot more threatened by talented writers who act professionally and are good at marketing themselves (you bunch of bastiges). The saboteurs, I suspect, are the types who play at freelancing for six months, then go away mad complaining that a) it's all luck, b) it's all a secret society, c) it's all the outsourcing to India, or d) it's all a government conspiracy.

I firmly believe that anyone can make a living, and a very good living, as a freelance writer if they take the right steps. That includes becoming a better writer (even if you've been at this 20 years you can still improve), aggressive marketing (every writer's least favorite part of the job), treating clients with respect (if these people backstab other writers, how do you think they are going to treat their clients?), and generally behaving like a grownup.

The second reason I'm not bothered by this is that online ads, while a nice source of occasional income, shouldn't be your only source of projects. It's just like hunting for a real job. If all you do is open the paper every morning and circle a couple of classified ads, you are going to be out of work for a long time. Active marketing is a key part to long-term success.

Am I good at active marketing? Heck no. Am I getting better? Slowly. I'm not one who likes to talk about myself, but I'm getting better at dropping into casual conversation that I'm a freelance writer. Two of the most lucrative projects I have on the horizon came from having people say, "Really? Well I need some writing done. Let's talk."

I honestly do feel sorry for these people because they are missing the point. They will end up as corporate cogs someday because they blew their freelance opportunity. I want other people to succeed at writing, that's the real reason behind this blog. If my silly mistakes and limited experience can help someone step out of the crowd of writing hobbyists into the realm of writing professionals, that's great! There is plenty of work out there for all of us and we are all stronger writers when we help each other.

Cash in on cheap content

2007-05-31T13:05:00.000-07:00

I recently had a project where I had to rewrite the content of a website. When I looked over the site, I could feel the brain damage setting in. The content was...well, I can't think of a word that adequately describes how unbelievably bad it was. It was obvious to me that this site had hired one of these "half-cent a word" outfits. Every page was just keyword-stuffed, redundant gibberish.

I tried rewriting it, but there was just nothing useful there. I ended up punching out a bunch of original content. It was easy work and required no research, but I probably spent more time on it than the pay justified. And seriously, I'm pretty sure I killed off a few thousand brain cells.

My point is that freelancers shouldn't mind all the cheap outsourced material. As long as companies buy cheap content, there will be work for genuine writers as we go in and clean up the mess.

More musings on goals

2007-05-30T08:40:00.000-07:00

I set my monthly goals by submissions rather than payment. As a freelancer, I can't depend on regular payments. All I can do is put out increasing effort each month until I am earning a level I am comfortable with.

Last month it occurred to me that there is a problem with this system. I near the end of the month, realize I'm nowhere near my goal, and have to scramble to get a couple of submissions in. I added a daily tracker that gives me an increasing target over the month. For example, on May 17 I should have met 17/31 of my goal for May. My monthly goal is to at least match my previous best month.

This month two new problems came up. One is that if I keep just meeting my best month, I never grow. My long term target is to be self-sufficient by August 2008, which will be my 2-year anniversary. I need to make 4x what I'm making now to meet that. If I set my monthly target to 10% over my previous best month, then I should just about meet my self-sufficiency goal. Yes, I realize that the flaw with that is that I'm equating submission with income. I will continue to tweak the system over the coming months.

The other problem is - how do I count project bids? I've bid on several projects this month so I'm out there trying to drum up business, but how do I count that, particularly when I'm bidding on a project of unknown size, and simply quoting an amount per piece, per word, or per hour?

For May, I'm just a hair behind the 10% goal for the entire month. I won't be able to write tomorrow, so I should try and find something to pop out today. Again, that ignores my project bids so if I include those I'm well past my goal. Still, that doesn't make it OK to slack off today.

That's one of the problems with these kinds of goals. If you hit your goal for the month on the 20th, does that make it OK to take the rest of the month off? Heck no, but it's tempting.

How not to "how to"

2007-05-28T15:01:00.000-07:00

I gleaned another nugget of writing wisdom from my recent flooring project, and that is the difficulty of finding decent instructions.

I spent a lot of time looking around the web for advice on how to install laminate flooring. I found quite a bit and it was helpful, but I consistently ran into the problem of steps that weren't well enough explained. For example, you have to use spacers to leave a gap between the floor and the wall to allow expansion. However not one how-to article mentioned how the heck to keep the little buggers from falling over all the time! Every person I've talked to who has done laminate flooring had the same problem. All of us ended up just not using the spacers and hoping for the best.

When writing instructions, it's tricky to know the level of your audience. In a case like this, it is likely that the person needs explanations of even simple concepts. These instructions are generally written by people with a lot of experience and they tend to omit things that have become second nature to them.

I'm not immune to this. Once I was training a couple of employees. I was explaining that they needed to click on the such-and-such icon to start the software. This one woman looked absolutely baffled until the other one leaned over and said, "Icons are the little pictures on your screen," and the light dawned. It never occurred to me to explain the term, but it's not like we come out of the womb knowing what "icon" means.

The whole point to writing for the web is hypertext. That means you can give basic instructions with links to in-dept explanations for each step, definitions of words and acronyms, pages of tips, lists of tools needed, and anything else you can think of. That's the whole point of hypertext.

Of course, I realize these articles aren't written with that in mind. These are probably the "I need someone to write 500 words on how to install laminate flooring" types of projects with no real attempt to make use of the strengths of the web.

It's the cool thing nowadays to trash Wikipedia, but that is a good example of a hypertext document done right. Every article contains link after link, embedded in the main text, to allow the reader to explore every angle of a subject. It's great, unless you get caught up on one of those stream-of-consciousness explorations while you are supposed to be researching an article.

In a perfect world, every how-to article would actually link to a massive database of information, allowing readers to decide for themselves the depth of explanation they need. Then again, Wikipedia works because it has several gazillion people working to maintain it and most sites don't have that level of support. Still, I would think some sites dedicated to home improvement (or any other subject) would set up a more heavily cross-linked database.

Freelancers shouldn't DIY

2007-05-25T08:45:00.000-07:00

After my last liquid disaster I had to figure out what to do with the floor in my office. I finally decided to install laminate flooring because it's something I could do myself and save money.

Well, no. Freelancers don't save money by doing it themselves. If you work a normal job, you don't lose income by tackling your own projects. For a freelancer, every hour you spend doing something else is time you should be writing. Not only that but, since I have no freaking clue what I'm doing, it took me a lot longer than it would have taken a professional. So it actually cost me more money than having someone else do it.

It's still not quite done. The floor is there and turned out fairly nice, but I still need to do all the cleanup: putting the baseboards back on, rehangning the doors, etc.

I'm facing the same problem with my yard. I have spend months trying to find someone competent and reliable to come by once a month and tame the wild flora. I've been looking so long I've even given up on "competent". I just want someone who just shows up occasionally. I'm still looking for that. In the meantime I waste time (and money) doing yardwork I despise, and I hate it even more since I'm being forced to do it. And I waste time calling another round of people who won't show up. And I waste time being mad about it.

April = best month ever

2007-05-07T13:22:00.000-07:00

As I mentioned before, February was a record month for me. You may notice I didn't talk about March. I didn't do so well. I'm getting into the bad habit of coasting on this one client and that's bad. She doesn't give me enough work to live on and I want to diversify anyhow.

April was a new record month, though not by much. At the last minute I submitted an essay to Common Ties so that I could beat February. I'm now tracking a daily submission goal so that I don't have to scramble so much in the last few days of the month.

May is turning out to be great! I'm at nearly twice my daily goal so far with plenty of work over the next couple of weeks. In fact I'm a little concerned that if May goes TOO well it may set a goal I can't easily beat. Ambitious goals are great, but if they are too ambitious then you just give up. Well, I do at least.

I hope to have more posts up in the next few days, including "How Pergo Flooring Relates Writing" and "How I'm Cashing In on Low Paying Jobs".

Incidentally, you know you're a writer when the top application on your start button is Word.

"GoDaddy Stinks" and other press releases

2007-04-23T09:27:00.000-07:00

I continue to battle with GoDaddy. I sent my eighth unblock request today. Of those eight, only one received an autoreplay acknowledgement. It seems obvious they are never going to unblock me. I've scanned my server for viruses. I've checked the blacklists at robtex at least once a day and I've never been listed there. I've checked for open relays at AppRiver and I have none. Basically there is no reason for them to block me, no reason for them to CONTINUE blocking me, but there's nothing I can do. I don't have any business to take away from them. My client seems indifferent to the fact that her web host is throwing her email away without her knowledge or permission, so doesn't seem likely to move her sites. I can't threaten them with legal action because there are no laws protecting email. Basically, I'm hosed.

I'll have to make occasional use of my personal email address when I come across future clients with GoDaddy, which I dislike because it seems unprofessional. But I also need to just move on and stop wasting my time with this.

I also spent last week dealing with a non-paying client. It's not a writing client, but rather the company I work through providing respite services for my niece. I left four voicemail messages over two weeks about a missing paycheck. This morning I finally just worked my way up the chain of command until I found someone who actually answered her phone. It took minutes to resolve once I found someone who would actually speak with me. Of course we'll see if the money actually ends up in my account.

But last week wasn't all bad. My main client started me writing press releases. They require a bit more effort than articles since they have to be objectively accurate. For example in one on cell phone donations, I mentioned that you should erase personal data from a cell phone before donating. She took that out because it's subjective advice. It's an interesting new type of writing - and the fact it pays a little better is nice as well.

GoDaddy must die!

2007-04-18T10:25:00.000-07:00

I know many of you have business web sites hosted with GoDaddy. MAKE SURE YOU POST YOUR TELEPHONE NUMBER because at some point GoDaddy will block your clients from emailing you and they will need an alternate contact.

I continue to fight with GoDaddy to convince them I'm not a spammer. After I filled out their online unblock request, they emailed me several hours later asking for more information. That request should have been on the online form. I tried responding to the email but, of course, it bounced because they think I'm a spammer! I tried filling out the online form again but it won't take it because a ticket is already open on my IP address. I could call their support line (not toll free of course) but I don't think I could be anything remotely resembling civil at this point.

So I forwarded the message through my personal email and, assuming they haven't blacklisted that as well, I still hope to have this cleared up sometime before I reach retirement age.

I never considered using GoDaddy for my websites because I don't base my choice in web hosts on their ability to get busty women to take off their clothes in commercials. This incident certainly puts them on my "no way in hell" list of businesses.

Down with the anti-spam witchhunters

2007-04-17T14:55:00.000-07:00

You heard me - I'm not sick of the spammers, I'm sick of the people fighting them.

Several months ago I lost a project because my web host decided the client was a spammer. His emails weren't bounced. They weren't directed to my spam folder. They just disappeared. He thought I had flaked out and gave the project to someone else. OK, it was a piddly project, but it was still lost work. Needless to say, I moved my site to a new web host immediately.

Today I have the same problem from the other end. This time my client's host has decided that I am a spammer and bounces all my emails back. At least I'm getting a bounce so I know what is happening. I'm lucky to send one email a day so I hardly qualify as a spammer. I've checked the email blacklists and I'm not on them. I've scanned my server for viruses and found none. There is simply no reason for my email to be blocked. I've put in a ticket to get them to clear me but that could take 24 hours.

In the meantime I was afraid I'd miss my deadline since I couldn't send her my articles. I'm lucky that I had her phone number so I could call her and tell her what is happening and she could provide me with another email address. There's a lesson - always have a backup means of communication.

I will gladly take ten thousand messages about male enhancement over the loss of one dollar of business. Spammers are annoying, but the anti-spammers are quickly becoming worse in my book.

The Creative Process

2007-04-11T14:37:00.000-07:00

The creative process often fascinates me.

I sometimes get articles that are very specific, like how to get a better sale price on your home. Thatn was a pretty straightforward article that I banged out in no time, mostly based on my own knowledge so it required very little research.

Sometimes, I get more open ended assignments like, "write me two articles on Excel". I go through the "deer in the headlights" phase, where there are so many possiblities I just can't narrow it down. My favorite technique is to start poking around the web, not for research just for inspiration. Eventually I stumble across an idea that inspires me and the more I think about it, the more excited I get about it until the article just pours out of me. In this case, I came across a forum thread where people were listing unusual ways they were using Excel. This led to, "Crazy Things I've Done With Excel" and "Crazy Things Other People Have Done With Excel" (the latter were much more crazy than anything I've done).

That blank page syndrome is tough for any writer, and we each need to find our own ways past it.

Ah, liquid, my old nemesis

2007-03-27T10:20:00.000-07:00

I have once again been chased out of my writing comfort zone by a spill. This one came from my water heater, which has apparently been leaking into the padding under the carpet in my office for quite some time now. I found it only because I finally decided to try and find the source of that faint but nasty smell that's been around for a couple of weeks. Now I'm poorer by the cost of a new water heater and I need to figure out what I'm going to do about the moldy carpet padding. Plus I have a friend coming in to stay the weekend. Oh, and I need to write and earn some money, just not in my office.

I got tagged by Brian Westover for the "Habits for Success" meme which reminded me that I got tagged for another meme a while back that I promptly forgot about.

There are good subcontractors out there

2007-03-16T13:34:00.001-07:00

Yet another post I’ve had on my “blog about this” list was about subcontracting. It was directly in response to a post on another blog, but I can’t remember where it was so I can’t backlink.

This blogger was a writer who was overwhelmed with work and was debating about the merits of subcontracting. There were several comments from other writers who talked about how disappointed they had been when subcontracting their work. It is hard to find good, reliable writers. It is a problem when the primary writer spends as much time proofing the subcontractor’s work as it would take to write the article from scratch. And it’s frustrating to find a good writer then have that writer leave in three months to pursue an independent career.

Some writers, I suspect, are simply too controlling to subcontract their work effectively. When you subcontract, you are putting your name on someone else’s style. Some writers just can’t stand that, so spend all of their time massaging the contracted piece into their own personal style. Part of the art of successful subcontracting is learning to use a very light editing touch.

Personally, I love being a subcontractor. Before I started my writing, I subcontracted as a programmer for several years. It was great! This guy handled looking for new clients, collecting payments, and all the administrative nonsense. I just wrote code. Ultimately, though, it fell apart because he wasn’t very good at marketing. He was riding on a couple of big clients and when they both suffered major financial setbacks, he suddenly had very little work. We lost touch and I don’t even know if he’s still in business anymore.

I don’t want to do marketing. I don’t want to do collections. I just want to write. And I’m quite happy to let someone take a piece of the pie to handle those things.

Incentives that aren't incentives

2007-03-15T17:02:00.000-07:00

I’m always trying to find good incentives to motivate me to work more. “Paying the bills” only goes so far. Recently I thought I had one, but I realize now it wouldn’t work.

I believe I’ve mentioned my niece one or two (thousand) times in this blog. Her father is Greek (meaning here-on-a-green-card Greek) and has to go back home for several months this summer to keep his sailing credentials up to date (for some reason there aren’t a lot of sailing jobs in Phoenix). He wants my sister and my niece to go out and visit him for a couple of weeks in September. My sister is a little concerned about taking a special needs child on an international trip all by herself so she’d like me to come. She’s reluctantly offered to pay my way, but she can’t really afford it.

Aha! What a great work incentive. I set some goal about how much money I have to make between now and September and if I make it, I go to Greece. Yay!

The more I thought about it, the more I realized this just doesn’t work.

Let’s say I set myself goal of $10,000 (which would be too low a goal, but is a nice round number for this example). What if I make only $9,999? Do I really cancel a trip to Greece, hosted by a local so I get to see the “real” Greece rather than the tourist stuff, because of one dollar? OK, so let’s say one dollar is close enough. What about two dollars? Ten dollars? A thousand dollars?

This may very well be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He’s close to retirement and she can’t afford to run out there every year he goes back, so this might never come up again.

If I missed my goal, I know damn well I’d go anyhow. And I know I know that, so the incentive is gone. That’s the problem with being a cynical smart-ass like me. A lot of motivational stuff doesn’t work because I see through the psychology. I see the man behind the curtain and realize it’s all just a trick.

I read a lot of the advice on freelance success, but much of what I read just makes me roll my eyes. Obviously these ideas work because they are written by people who’ve used them, but I know they wouldn’t work for me. I keep searching because every now and then I come across something that strikes a chord.

(And I don’t know why I used so many parenthetical phrases today.)

Avoiding burnout

2007-03-14T11:28:00.000-07:00

I’ve been meaning to write this post since before my computer disaster but I haven’t gotten around to it. Recently, Deb Ng wrote her Put a Fork in Me post and that reminded me about this.

Her post brought out the usual real-writers-don’t-do-SEO crowd who are willing to use any opportunity to abuse that equine corpse. I don’t feel her post was about the evils of SEO. It was about the ignorance of clients who don’t really understand what SEO is, what keywording is, and how the web works. Mostly, though, it was about career evolution.

People get burned out in every career. Whether you shovel cow manure or do brain surgery, some people just get sick of the grind. At that point they can spend the rest of their life being miserable, or they can find a change. It could be a simple change of duties or a completely new career.

Freelancers run a great risk of falling into that trap. If you become known as a SEO writer, you keep getting offered SEO jobs. Your clients might think you could do more, but all they have is SEO. All of your job searching is focused on sites that specialize in SEO. It’s easy to keep doing it because it’s easy.

A while back I began to realize that I am getting a bit dissatisfied with my current work. The stuff I’m doing now is technically SEO, but it’s meatier articles that happen to have a key phrase in them. Generally I get assignments of 3-4 articles rather than 300. Most of what I do is basically copywriting. I just don’t really like copywriting.

Since I have at least one client who reads this blog, let me emphasize that I don’t hate copywriting by any means. It’s a solid way to bring in some money and I think it will likely be a core income stream for a good part of my career. I just don’t want to get trapped in it.

At heart, I’m a technical writer. I’d much rather write something like, “Although analytical solutions to this simple partial differential equation exist for simple boundary conditions, the time-dependent concentration boundary conditions at the inlet and outlet reservoirs in the diffusion cell experiments demand a numerical solution.” than “We don’t want you to find just a paycheck. We want you to find a career that will give you the lifestyle of your dreams.” (I’m rolling my eyes as I paste that last line, even though I’m the one who wrote it).

Right now I’m pretty much coasting on what this one client is giving me and that’s bad. I need to get out and do more self-promotion, including updating this blog more regularly. I need to find a wider variety of work so that I don’t get burned out. And, of course, I need to generate more income.