Tag Archives: freelancing

advice, Business, Marketing yourself, Sales

A Sure-Fire Confidence Builder

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Yes, you *can* cure presentation anxiety
Yes, you *can* cure presentation anxiety

By Jake Poinier

As a parent, your job is never done in correcting your kids’ use of the English language. I was reminded numerous times this morning as my high-school age son began a story with “George and me…” followed by my middle-school daughter injecting “like” into every other sentence. What I try to convey to them is that, while these are the types of things that help you not seem like a dork among peers, it’s not the way to impress teachers and (eventually) bosses.

With that thought, Joe’s post this week about being fearless triggered a memory for me on how we present ourselves as freelancers. As an entrepreneur who works with intellectual property, you are selling your skills — but you’re also selling yourself. And I can point to one single experience that was a sure-fire confidence builder far beyond all of the sales and marketing seminars I’ve ever attended.

I’m talking about Toastmasters.

I was required to attend a local chapter as a newbie salesperson back in the late ’90s. At first it seemed hopelessly contrived. The meetings are very structured, with different roles (timer, Jokemaster, emcee, etc.) assigned to each of the participants, and a very rigid timeline of what has to happen when. But even though my membership long ago lapsed, the lessons have stuck with me:

  • You get honest feedback on your presentation content and style. Having a third-party perspective on your speech patterns and gestures is an eye-opening, “do-I-really-do-that?” experience. With a little guidance and weekly practice, it’s amazing how fast you make progress and cure presentation anxiety. Bonus: If you say “um” and “ah” a lot, you’ll be cured of the habit.
  • You learn how to give honest feedback. Even when someone bombs, your job is to identify what they did well and help build on it. Yes, this is helpful when “guiding” your freelance clients to avoid or change something awful.
  • You learn how to be concise. Whether you’re telling a brief anecdote or giving a 5-minute speech, there’s a light box that signals yellow, green or red to tell you how you’re doing on time. Talking too much can be a deal killer.

Bottom line, if you have any fear about public speaking, your local Toastmasters chapter will help eradicate it in a fun, friendly, supportive environment. More important, you’ll feel far more confident presenting yourself in general, whether it’s making cold calls, pitching a new client, leading a writing seminar, or accepting a Nobel Prize in Literature.

What’s been your biggest confidence builder as you’ve started and grown your freelance business — workshop, club, personal guru? Please share in the comments!

When he’s not hanging around Freelance-Zone, contributing blogger Jake Poinier runs Boomvang Creative Group and offers freelancing advice under the pseudonym Dr. Freelance.

advice, Business, editorial, lifestyle

Do You Mean Business?

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by Catherine L. Tully

Are you in this field because you want to make a living?

If so, you need to treat it like a business, not a hobby.

Catherine L. Tully
Catherine L. Tully

I have recently seen a bunch of articles on this subject, and I have to say, it’s true. A lot of freelance writers simply throw up their hands and lament the fact that they don’t have business skills, rather than taking the time to get qualified. I read a great post on this subject at Redhead Ranting (Warning: if you are offended by strong language/swearing, skip it. If not, you’ll enjoy this very much!) that let freelancers have it for their lack of business savvy.

Here are a few tips for thinking like a pro: Continue reading Do You Mean Business? →

advice

Freelancing On the Road: A Travel Writing Experiment From Chicago To NYC

Freelance travel writingI’m writing this in a coffee shop in Cleveland, Ohio after a long day of driving, record store reviewing for my blog Turntabling.net, AND managing to do my usual rounds of freelance social media and writing work for my clients. The photo is my current work space, how do you like my temporary office? It’s cozy and the staff are friendly. Thank you, Phoenix Coffee in Cleveland Heights! You are awesome.

I took this 13-day trip (I’m on day two by the time you read this) as an experiment. How would the driving, the travel writing, AND maintaining my usual freelance agenda work out? Would I run myself ragged? Would everything go smoothly or would I encounter Mister Murphy and his damnable law at every turn?

That’s what I want to find out. It’s one thing to outsource your clients temporarily, or put them on hold, to take on a juicy assignment or even a vacation. It’s another thing to try and keep the work rolling as usual even if you shuffle your delivery times and let your clients know there is an extra factor making your time even more at a premium than it already is.

On day one, I found myself dealing with a “when it rains, it pours” scenario. Not only did I manage to make all my clients happy as per usual with the social media and writing stuff (so far so good!), I also got some e-mail today requesting MORE for new clients.

Be careful what you wish for–it will come at the time your time is at the highest premium. I’ll have more reports from the road on these sorts of issues–my next post will have plenty to say about the technical issues related to connecting while on the road and delivering the goods even when you aren’t sure where your next Wi-Fi hotspot is coming from. Stay tuned.

advice, editorial

Curing writer’s block

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curing writers blockBy Jake Poinier

Call me a cynic, but I tend to think that the idea of curing writer’s block is impossible, because the phrase itself represents an unhelpful catchall for a variety of reasons (read: excuses) for not writing. Moreover, for the freelance commercial writer, unlike the college-essay writer, it’s simply something you can’t allow to interfere with your business. There was a tweet by @MenwithPens yesterday that captured my philosophy nicely: “If you’re taking money from people, you have a responsibility not to do crappy work.” That necessitates, of course, the responsibility to do the work in the first place.

Note well, I’m not saying that there aren’t times when the words are tougher to come by. What I *am* saying is that waiting for divine inspiration is a fool’s game, and you’d sound like a goofball to any editor or client if you actually uttered the words “writer’s block.” Unless you’re martyring yourself on the Starving Fiction Novelist pike, the successful freelancer needs to be able to get the words on the page.

  • If you’re suffering from a lack of uber-great ideas…do a brain dump or mind map, use the best of what you’ve got to start, and try to upgrade and polish as you go along.
  • If you’re lacking the motivation to write about a topic that bores you…write it as promptly and quickly as you can, so it’s off your plate and out of your head.
  • If you’re not sure how to start something…look for the places that you can even get a tiny toehold, whether it’s the boilerplate “Services” page of a corporate web site or a sidebar in a feature story.
  • If your deadline is looming, and the work’s still not ready for prime time…talk to your client or editor well in advance, and politely ask for additional time to get it to the quality you want to deliver.
  • If you’ve sat at your desk till the metaphorical blood drops start to bead on your forehead…get the heck out of your chair and take the dog for a walk or yourself for a bike ride for a full hour.

At the risk of retreating into a sports metaphor: I’m a lifelong Red Sox fan, and, ipso facto, lifelong Yankee-hater. As such, I enjoyed watching Alex Rodriguez struggle for a dozen games before he hit his 600th home run this week. I’m sure he was wondering when the next one was going to come after every agonizing failure. But at the same time, he still had to show up every night and take his cuts.

As a professional writer, you’re getting a couple of at-bats every day. Not every one is going to be a home run, but if the bat never leaves your shoulder, your stint in the big leagues will surely be abbreviated.

Please drop by Jake’s Dr. Freelance blog for advice on how to deal with troublesome clients, pricing your projects, finding new freelance business, and more.

advice, Business

9 Rules of Effective Voicemail Messages

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freelance voicemailBy Jake Poinier

It’s hard to believe that a professional in today’s world would leave a THREE-MINUTE voicemail message. But that’s precisely what someone did to me yesterday. (I was bored out of my mind after 30 seconds and ready to jam an ice pick in my ear after Minute One. I don’t remember a single thing she said before I 7’ed her.)

As a freelancer and professional communicator, you need to do better than that or it will hurt your business. My co-Zoner Sigrid has done a bang-up job with her series on how freelancers can benefit from writing smashing e-mails, and the point she makes in #5—“Most e-mails can be summed up within one window pane”—has its aural equivalent with voicemails.

Unfortunately, it’s easier to recognize an awful voicemail message than it is to leave a good one. Sometimes you’re going to hang up the phone and think to yourself, “Dammit, I am a babbling idiot!” I know there’s a temptation to be thorough and tell the person exactly why you’re calling in excruciating detail.

Don’t. You’d be better served to leave only your name and number than to blab on for a minute or more. Here are the few of the rules I personally try to adhere to anytime I get sent to voicemail:

  1. While the phone is ringing, rehearse in your mind what you’re going to say if you end up in VM. That way, you’re ready for it.
  2. Be brief. (But you already knew that.)
  3. Speak somewhat more slowly than usual and enunciate as clearly as possible. It’s sort of like public speaking.
  4. Immediately after you say “hi” and who you are, say your phone number, so if the person repeats the message, it’s right there.
  5. If you received the contact information from a third party, use that as leverage by stating that “Jim Johnson asked that I give you a call” or something to that effect.
  6. State why you’re calling in a single sentence, and limit it to one topic. You can talk about the other stuff when they return your call.
  7. If you’re on deadline, say so, politely. “I’m on deadline, so the sooner you can get back to me, the more I’d appreciate it” is what I generally say. Or, if you have a specific day/time that you absolutely must hear by, go ahead and mention it.
  8. At the end of the call, state your phone number again.
  9. Say thank you and that you look forward to hearing from them.

Keep in mind, this post took longer for you to read than an effective voicemail would take to leave. There’s no such thing as a perfect message, other than the one that gets you called back. I experiment all the time, and recommend that you do the same.

Do you have a killer voicemail message tactic that guarantees a return call? Please share your idea in the comments!

Drop by DoctorFreelance.com for advice on how to deal with clients who miss their own deadlines.

advice

How to Start Freelancing Part 2

how to start freelancingby Joe Wallace

In my first post on How To Start Freelancing (part one of 1,000,000) I discussed how to properly outfit yourself to do the work. From here we’ll assume you’ve got your tools and are ready to get started. What next?

Let me start by saying there are very few hard and fast rules about freelancing that apply to all comers. The first hard and fast rule you should take to heart is this:

The freelance journey is a personal one. It’s almost like spirituality–it NEVER works exactly the same for everybody. The sooner you accept the fact that you’ll be engaging in a unique journey that won’t go exactly as planned, the quicker you can recognize opportunities that come your way as legitimate ones. Even when they’re non-traditional, unusual, or otherwise not written about in the how-to-freelance books.

Now that we have THAT out of the way, here’s some specific advice on what to do next.

Evaluate the subject matter areas you know best and try to focus your earliest efforts on writing on these subjects. What magazines are you interested in within your specialized knowlege areas? Don’t discount ANY of your hobbies, either. Take stock of the websites and mags you read that cater to your passions and consider writing for these publications first.

Whatever you do, don’t just fire off a query letter at this stage–instead, look at the mags in question and ask yourself the most important question you can ask before going to an editor. “What is this mag NOT doing that I as a reader would not just like, but LOVE to read?”

Once you have an answer to that question you stand a fair chance of getting a GOOD response from the editor of that web page or magazine. Outline the article, write a first draft and see how you like it. We’ll go over next steps in the next post in this series.

One important note–as your career develops there’s a very good chance that you will NOT be writing the articles ahead of time and trying to pitch them later. But you have to get started somewhere and this is a very good way to clarify your thinking in the early days when you’re second-guessing yourself to death. We’ll cover how to stop doing that in a later post.

joe wallace editor/writer

Joe Wallace is a full-time freelance editor, writer, and pro blogger. He has been writing professionally since 1991. His gigs include web editing for Motorola.com, social media and copy writing for FHA.com and VALoans.com, he ghost writes and runs the retro/vinyl junkie site Turntabling.net. Contact him at jwallace242 (at) gmail.com. Continue reading How to Start Freelancing Part 2 →