If you are looking to get into the world of freelance writing, I highly suggest you take a look at Ghostwriting Cash by Tiffany Dow. This is the most helpful, thorough course on the topic that I have seen on the Internet. Tiffany was once a ghostwriter herself, writing articles and reports for some of the biggest names online. Because she has been there, she tells it like it is and provides her customers with the best methods for setting up a profitable writing business.

What You’ll Learn

The Ghostwriting Cash course features an ebook that will help you set up a successful freelancing business. You will learn how to set up a website in order to gain orders from new clients. You also learn how to go out and network with those that may be interested in your services. When appropriate, Tiffany also includes videos so that you can see exactly what you need to do. Having a look over the teacher’s shoulder is always nice!

Benefits

To me, there are many benefits to following Ghostwriting Cash when making the decision to offer writing services on the web. It helps you shorten the learning curve needed to set up a website and market your services. There is no guess work as to where you should seek clients and orders. Tiffany gives you several methods for finding those that need content created. All you have to do is present them with your offer.

Tiffany also stresses the importance of eventually becoming your own client. I think this is something that most other freelance writing courses lack. They just teach you how to offer services, and don’t really cover anything beyond that. However, Tiffany has always viewed services as the “foot in the door.”

When You Have Steady Work

Once you have steady work coming in, you can begin to raise your rates. This allows you to earn more money, but with fewer clients or orders. This, in turn, gives you time to become your own client. Working for yourself should be your ultimate goal, as you will then be free from other people’s deadlines and can create passive income streams that pay you again and again.

When writing a product review, it is best to present the pros and cons of the product. However, as far as Ghostwriting Cash is concerned, there are no negatives! This is, of course, my opinion, but I think it’s a thorough course for beginners as well as experienced writers looking for more clients. I honestly cannot find anything wrong with it! I have followed Tiffany for about 3 years now, and she is as ethical as they come. She doesn’t attempt to sell you on the idea of making $10K overnight or buying that shiny Ferrari. She is the real deal, and also provides excellent customer support.

Ghostwriting Cash – The Perfect Solution for Those Beginning or Struggling with Freelance Writing is a post from: The Social Freelance Writer.

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As the new year approaches, we often start to re-evaluate.  We re-evaluate our relationships, our friendships, our lifestyles – and especially our careers. And that’s a good thing as far as I’m concerned.  Re-evaluation should be an ongoing process (not just at this time of the year!) and it should lead us to bigger and better things.

I’m the Queen of Re-evaluation.  I’m constantly asking myself if I am happy doing what I’m doing, if I want to continue working on a project, if things are working the way I thought they would (or should).  And sometimes that means that I leave something behind in order to move on to something new.

And when we decide to move on to something new, sometimes that means we need to do some learning.

I’m New to Online Writing – Should I Take a Writing Course?

Yes, yes, and yes.  Take writing courses until they come out your ears!  Well, not really.  But I do think that taking a writing  course is a great idea to get you started.

Why?

Writing courses can:

• Help you develop the discipline of writing.
• Teach you how to write right.
• Help you to develop good writing habits.
• Encourage you to write about topics you have never written about before.
• Give you a chance to discover how you really feel about writing.

A writing course at the beginning of your freelance writing career will not guarantee that you get jobs but it will increase your chances.

I’ve Been Writing Online For Awhile – Should I Take a Writing Course?

Yes. Just because you are having some success online as a writer does not mean that you should stop there.  If you wan to grow your business or become a specialist in a specific type of writing, taking a course can be a great way to do so.

Taking a writing course can help those who are already writing online by:

• Exposing you to new types of writing.
• Teaching you about the finer aspects of writing online.
• Help you become an expert in a specific field.
• Give you the skills you need to move into working with private clients more and content mills less.

One More Thing About Writing Courses…

Writing courses do not have to be formal courses that you sign up for and get grades on. There are other options for those who want to learn to be better writers.

There are books that have exercises in them (both e-books and paper books) so you can plan out your own writing course.  Read a chapter per day and then put into practice what you have learned.  This can keep you going for weeks and if you don’t mind that you are not being graded it can teach some valuable lessons.

Subscribe to an e-newsletter that comes with a e-course.  Many online marketers use auto-responders to send out emails but the emails you get can be very valuable.  Many of them even come with exercises.

What other ways can you take a writing course?

Have  you taken writing courses?  If so, what was your experience?

Leave a comment!

Should I Take a Writing Course? is a post from: The Social Freelance Writer.

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If you’ve been reading blogs about making money or Internet Marketing or Niche Marketing – almost anything to do with business online – you’ve likely come across the term “outsourcing.”  It’s almost become fashionable to talk about outsourcing or to plan to outsource.

What do you do when you come across these blogs?  Do you think, “Oh, I’m just a little freelance writer – I don’t need to outsource anything,” OR do you think, “I should read this because I know I’m going to have to outsource something at some point.”

You should be thinking the second one because unless you plan on being small potatoes and never growing your business, outsourcing is inevitable.  And since it is inevitable, you’ll do better at it if you have a plan.

Plan Before You Need It

But Danielle, you’re thinking, I’ve just gotten started as a freelancer.  There’s no way I’m going to need to outsource projects or work in the near future.

You’re wrong.

If your business is growing you might have to outsource sooner than you think.  At the very least, tax season will be creeping up on us soon and taxes are something you should definitely outsource.  I do.  Ok – I outsource it to my husband, but I still pay him (it’s a tax deduction!).

What Kinds of Outsourcing Plans Should You Be Considering?

Well, I can’t tell you what you should be considering but this is what I am thinking that I might have to outsource in the future:

• Writing – I’m hoping that in the future I’ll have so many clients that I’ll have to outsource work.
• Web Design – I’m not that great at it so I’d like to hand that off to someone else.
• Administrative work – organizing, planning, stuff like that – so not my thing.

What Should You Look For When Reading Posts About Outsourcing?

• What are others outsourcing?
• Why are they outsourcing it?
• How are they finding people to outsource to?
• Who are they outsourcing to?
• When are they deciding to outsource?  At what point in their business?

Unless you don’t want your business to grow, unless you don’t want to find ways to make your business run smoother, unless, you don’t want to make your business run smoother…

You need to plan to outsource.

I’ll always be a writer though so if you’re in some other business you can outsource that to me!

STOP! Do You Have an Outsourcing Plan? is a post from: The Social Freelance Writer.

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So you want to be a writer?

Whenever someone tells me that they are thinking about writing from home and being a freelance writer I always tell them to start with a blog.  Try maintaining it for a month and see if you can handle it.  If you can’t handle a blog, chances are you won’t be able to handle freelance writing.

Choose a Topic

What do you think you can write about for a long period of time?  When you are a freelance writer you often end up writing about the same thing over and over again.  It could be pet care or health topics or child rearing – just pick one.

Come Up With Ideas for Blog Posts

Freelance writers often need to come up with their own ideas to write about.  Sometimes they are given keywords like “pet dandruff” but how they write about it and the overall feel of the article is up to them.  So, you need come up with blog post topics.

Write out about 30 of them to start with.  This is the point when you will start to wonder how knowledgeable you really are about this topic.  When you run out of ideas (and it might be faster than you think) turn to the Internet.  Do a search on pet care (or whatever your choose blog topic is) and see what you could write about.  Don’t look at the actually posts.  Don’t steal people’s titles either – just use it as a way to get ideas.

Plan to Write Every Day

Yes, you can take weekends off if you want to but you need to get into a habit of writing on a regular basis.  Consider this your testing grounds.  If you can’t write at least five days a week on a topic you have chose you are going to have a very hard time writing on topics that clients have chosen for you.

Set out a plan (or an editorial calendar of sorts) and stick to it.  Some days you are not going to feel inspired to write about the topic you have planned but guess what?  When you’re a freelance writer you can’t say, “I don’t feel like writing about this today, I think I’ll write about something else.”  You need to stick to the topics that the client has set out for you.

Be Picky!

Make sure you edit your posts!  Act like these blog posts are really for a client.  No passive sentences, no grammar mistakes, no spelling error.  Format your posts with headings and bullet points and numbered lists.  Become a perfectionist.

Clients want perfection and the more practice you have at providing it the happier your clients will be when you get real clients.

Do It Again

Did you make it through the first month?  Great!  Now do it again.  If you can maintain a blog for two months you’ll have a better feel for what freelance writing is like.  If you can have the discipline to keep this up you will have a feel for what writing for a living is like.

And , not only have you gotten a taste of what writing for income is like, but now you have a place to direct clients.  You have quality writing on your blog that does not have whiny, “I don’t feel like working today” posts on it and you’ll be able to direct potential clients to this blog for samples of your work.

So what are you waiting for?  Go and get started!  And when you’ve gotten a week worth of posts up and are not sure if they are up to par use my comment form to contact me, give me the url to your blog, and I’d be happy to give you some feedback!

Thinking About a Freelance Writing Career? Start With a Blog is a post from: The Social Freelance Writer.

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My favorite part of teaching the Administrative Professional course at Robertson College was the Business Communications section.  But it was also very challenging for many of my students.  So, I thought it was well worth writing about how we can keep our business writing simple when I guest posted at Simply Stated Business.

Go and check it out for yourself and you’ll find my 6 point check list for keeping business writing simple as well as two ways to improve (hint: it has to do with repetition!).

Find out how you can keep your business writing simple.

By the way, if you are interested in having me guest post on your blog or if you’re interested in doing a guest post here there’s a link at the top of the blog that says “Guest Posting”.  Go and fill it out to you and I’ll get back to you as soon as I have a chance!

I Guest Posted at Simply Stated Business is a post from: The Social Freelance Writer.

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If you’ve had anything to do with marketing, online or offline, you likely already know that the best way to get the word out about your business is through word of mouth.  And how do you get people to talk about you?  It’s usually through people who have used your services.

The hard part of putting word of mouth into action is that people do not always think to say something good about a business that they have had good service with.  Why?  Because they expect good service.  That’s why bad word of mouth news tends to travel faster.

But you can encourage clients to talk about you!  Ask them for five things after you have done good work for them (which should be always!).

This video from Working Writing Happy Writer (be sure to check out the newsletter) has 5 questions (or favors) that you can ask of your clients:

I’d say that #3 and #5 are my favorites.  #3 is to ask for testimonials.  Ever wonder how other freelancers have all those great testimonials on their sites?  They asked for them!  Clients do not usually think to give them out on their own, but if you’ve done good work for them they are often more than happy to give you a couple sentences.  Make sure you ask if you can use their name and a link to their website to give the testimonial more validity. #5 is to ask them to pass your name along to others that might need your writing services.  Until you ask them they might not even think of that but once they are asked the might remember someone that could use your services.

It can be hard to ask thinks of clients other than your fee but if you’ve done a good job, clients are often more than happy to help you out.  Don’t be afraid to ask – the worst they can say is no!

5 Ways to Make Your Freelance Writing Business Grow is a post from: The Social Freelance Writer.

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Did you know that there is a 3 part writing process that is suggested for business writing?  There is!  It is taught in business communication courses but it applies to most forms of writing as well.  It’s very simple and looks like this:

I think the chart itself is pretty simple and doesn’t really need a whole lot of clarification.  The part that always surprised my students though was the amount of time that should be alloted to each part.

The Planning (or Pre-writing) phase should take up about 25% of your time.

The Drafting (or Writing) phase should also take up about 25% of your time.

But the Revising phase should take up 50% of your time.  This is perhaps the most important part of the writing process!

Does your writing process look anything like this?

The 3 part Writing Process is a post from: The Social Freelance Writer.

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Some of you may already know that I work a day job.  I teach a course on being and Administrative Professional and Bookkeeper at Robertson College.  Administrative work is what I did before so it is something that is fairly easy for me.  Not the teaching, but talking about being an admin assistant.  But teaching is only part of my job.

Our school is really looking into the ways that we can make ourselves more visible online so when I suggested a blog they were very excited about the idea.  Thus, The Admin Professional was created.  This is a blog that is written and maintained by me and I write about all sorts of things that are of concern to those who are already admin assistants and to those who are interested in becoming one.  Sometimes I feature past students and other times I talk about the skills that are needed.

The other thing that we’ve been working on is article marketing.  Not every business realizes what an impact article marketing can have on their business.  But it can be very helpful in developing your business as an expert in your area.  If you look to the right you’ll see a button in the sidebar for Ezine Articles.  This is just one of the places where you can find my writing online.

So, if you want to see samples of my writing, I encourage you to check out the blog and check out some of my article marketing.  Then, if you think that my writing services could be of benefit to you, contact me and we can work together.

The Admin Professional is a post from: The Social Freelance Writer.

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Most of us learned the ins and outs of writing, basic grammar, and sentence structure in high school.  But do you really think that your writing is good enough to convince someone to buy your product, to switch from the competition to you, or to effectively express the meaning of what you are trying to communicate?  It is possible, but the truth is that most business people don’t have the writing skills to do the job as effectively as a professional writer and that’s why they hire others to do the writing.

People tend to learn as much as possible at what they specialize in.  Athletes are in the business of pushing their bodies to the limits so that they can excel at their chosen sport.  But they don’t necessarily have the knowledge they need to find out how to do that.  That is why they hire nutritionists, physical trainers, coaches, and other professionals that are focused on bringing it all together.  Likewise, writers learn as much as they can about the art of written communications so that they can help business people succeed in their chosen profession.

Here are some of the things that writers can do to improve your written communications:

• Say what needs to be said in as little words as possible.  Let’s face it – people are not big readers these days so if something can be said more effectively in 5 sentences than in 10 sentences a writer will minimize extra words so that the reader will focus on what is important.
• Avoid grammar, spelling mistakes, cliches and other writing blunders that will cause the reader to lose faith in your business or get distracted from the real message.
• Project the image that you wish to portray to clients and potential clients.  A good writer can manipulate words so that the reader will get a specific message.
• Focus on the writing – the writer’s job is to just write.  They aren’t thinking about the customer that came in earlier with a complaint or the meeting that they need to get to in an hour.  They are focused on writing the text just the way you need it to be written.

Remember that one person can not be everything.  Any successful business person knows that part of the success of a business is knowing when to do it yourself and when to outsource to someone that is specialized.  So the next time you sit down to write a sales letter, write some text for a brochure, or write a press release, stop and think – are you really the best person for the job?  If you are, that’s great; but if not, consider hiring a professional writer.

Why Businesses Should Hire Professional Writers is a post from: The Social Freelance Writer.

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