How to Set Goals That Make Sense: A Writer’s Perspective

A guest post by Linda Formichelli of  The Renegade Writer

Twice a year, in December and June, I work on my “life plan”: It’s like a business plan, but it encompasses career/finances, health, relationships, and volunteering. Each section includes a brief mission statement, a bullet-point list of goals, a bullet-point list of obstacles to those goals, and a paragraph or two where I brainstorm ways around or through those obstacles.

I don’t check on the life plan regularly during the year — just when I feel inspired. And when I go to it again after six months, I often find that I had internalized and met many of my goals without even trying.

Except the income goals. For years, every six months I’d write out an income goal, brainstorm ways to meet that goal — and do absolutely nothing different in my career to try to earn that extra income.

Eventually I smartened up, and realized two key things about setting goals:

1. Your goals need to be something you can control.

As a freelancer, it’s difficult to control how many clients you gain, how many assignments you get, or much money you make (though you can always shoot for a range; after all, we need to eat). However, you can control how many queries and letters of intro you send out, how much marketing you do, and how many hours you work. Increase these, and you’re likely to increase your income as a side benefit.

Why not try it yourself for 2011? Instead of saying you want to make X amount of money or garner five assignments from national magazines, set goals that you can control — like how much marketing you do. For example, my plan for 2011 is to conduct a direct mail campaign to 900 local businesses for my copywriting (100 down, 800 to go!).

2. Your goals need to inspire you.

Guess what? It turns out I’m just not inspired by income goals. As long as I can support my family and we can do (within reason) what we want, I’m okay. However, I am inspired by the appreciation I get from the writers I help through my e-courses and mentoring. This morning I had a client who told me she had a big grin on her face as I outlined a new idea for her. Now, that I like — I just eat it up!

So my goal is to do more teaching and mentoring. (And of course, the more teaching and mentoring I do, the more money I make.) I also enjoy writing for magazine editors who treat me well, so another goal is to seek them out, hang onto them when I find them, and weed out PITA editors. As a byproduct, I make a good income because it takes me less time to do assignments from magazines with a low PITA factor.

These goals keep me a lot happier than working my butt off to reach some magic number I don’t really care about.

So — what do you really care about? Try to set goals that make sense for you, instead of caving under the pressure to set goals that you feel you should want to reach.

Linda Formichelli has written for over 130 magazines since 1997, from Pizza Today to USA Weekend. She  runs the Renegade Writer, one of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers 2010/11. She is the co-author of “The Renegade Writer: A Totally Unconventional Guide to Freelance Writing Success”

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I’m amazed at the wealth of information in the A-List Blogger Club. I’ve been blogging for several years but was not very savvy about it, and I immediately made easy but high-impact changes to my blog based on the advice there. I’m already seeing an uptick in readers, students, and clients!
Linda Formichelli, The Renegade Writer Blog

Categories: Business, Freelancing, Productivity

Top 10 Blogs for Writers 2010/2011- The Winners

When we called for nominations for the Top 10 Blogs for Writers  Contest, we got over 500 responses. This year’s fifth annual competition was intense. Great to see how passionate readers feel about their favorite writing blog!

We ended up with 20 finalists.

The finalists were closely examined by our panel of judges,with the greatest weight on the quality of their content. Here are the judges:

And now is the time to reveal the winners of the Top 10 Blogs for Writers. There’s some serious gold here, folks!

  1. StoryFix
    .
  2. Men with Pens
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  3. Make a Living Writing
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  4. Cats Eye Writer
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  5. The Renegade Writer
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  6. Writer Unboxed
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  7. Word Play
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  8. The Creative Penn
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  9. Victoria Mixon
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  10. Courage to Create

Congratulations to all the winners!

Readers, be sure to check out these awesome blogs.

And please help spread the word!  Click the retweet button to share this post with friends and fans.

The badge of distinction: If you are a winner, feel free to post the image you see here on your blog. Please link the badge back to this page.

I’d like to thank the judges for all their work. It’s a big responsibility and takes a lot of time to examine each blog with care. Leo, Deb, Michael, and Brian – you have lifted this contest to a whole new level.

Mary Jaksch – Chief Editor WTD

I would also like to acknowledge Scott McIntyre of Vivid Ways for his generous help with organizing this contest.


Categories: Uncategorized

How to Start Earning From Your Blog — Right Away

A guest post by Carol Tice of Make a Living Writing

Sure, you want your blog to attract a huge audience and earn bazillions while you sleep. Lots of people are blogging their hearts out trying to achieve this dream.

But while you’re waiting to hit it big, you don’t have to starve. There’s another way to earn from blogging. It doesn’t have the same strike-it-rich potential, but it’ll pay your bills right now.

You can use your blogging skills and blog for pay, for publications and corporations.

No, not for $5 a post. Ignore those ads.

There are blogging gigs out there that pay a very good hourly wage. Taking freelance paid-blogging jobs can let you earn while still leaving time to work on your own site. As a bonus, you get more practice writing blogs, which may improve your own blog’s chances of success.

Here’s how to find good-paying blogging clients and get them to hire you:

1. Make your blog posts awesome and engaging. Even if there are only a few posts on there, make them great — concise and focused on your niche. Think of your blog as a rolling audition for paying gigs. In my experience, paying blog clients want to see three things: that you know how to get comments, stick to a niche topic, and use common blogging platforms such as WordPress and Blogger.

2. Select your targets. Consider where you might likely blog for pay, based on your own interests and work experience. For instance, I was once a legal secretary, so I’ve done some paid blogs for lawyers. Develop a list of publications, companies, or Web portals that might hire you and pay well. Don’t ignore trade publications, as they are often good payers. Once you’ve got some possible prospects, take a look at their websites to see if they lack a blog, or perhaps have a blog that’s short on visitors and infrequently updated.

3. Research your targets. Next, do some sleuthing to discover who might pay well. In general, I find more sophisticated topics and target audiences command better pay and have less writer competition. So blogging about parenting or your dog will not pay well, but writing about acupuncture or business finance likely will. Next, find out if the publication is growing or the company is well-funded. Writers’ groups on LinkedIn are a great place to ask around about a prospective employer. In general, bigger companies will offer better pay.

4. Promote your blog posts in social media. Start spreading your content around. Connect with popular users of social media in the niche where you want to blog for pay.

5. Target prospects with your posts. When you have a post that makes a good audition piece, send it to your prospects (or top social-media influencers) with a note: “I thought you’d enjoy this post.” You can use Twitter, LinkedIn, or just plain email — whatever you think that prospect would respond to best. Even better: Write a post for your blog specifically tailored to appeal to your prospects, then send it to them.

6. Leave comments on key blogs. Another way to connect with well-paying blogs is to leave articulate comments on that blog. Become a regular participant and link to your own blog posts. You may get read, discovered and offered a paying gig.

7. Call on prospects and ask for the job. If the steps above haven’t gotten you asked to blog for pay, it’s time to get proactive. You might call editors and marketing managers on the phone and ask if they need a blogger, send postcards, or perhaps use InMail on LinkedIn (that last boasts an impressive 30% response rate). Experiment and see what works for you. In your pitch, be sure to mention specifics you observed about their Web site, and offer suggestions for how you could improve it with well-written, regular blog posts.

8. Gain visibility. Once you land a paid blogging gig, be sure to get your byline as a live link to your blog, so prospects can easily find you. As your paid blog gets rolling, begin the above steps over again. Make the paid blog great and immediately begin promoting it to better-paying prospects in that niche. Always be aware of how much traffic your paid-blog sites receive, and look to move up to busier — and better-paying — sites.

9. Your paying blog finds you clients. Once you are blogging on a popular site, you often will be approached by other companies in that niche with job offers. At this point, paid blogging markets itself, and you have your pick of additional gigs. I’ve found that one of my paid blogs brings a steady stream of paid-blogging offers. As a bonus, readers of your paid blog may click your byline link and discover your blog as well, giving you possible new readers.

10. Keep raising your rates. As you move up, your rates should increase. Gradually drop lower-paying blog clients in favor of better-paying ones. Think in terms of how long it takes you to create a post, and aim for a rate of $50-$100 an hour. Don’t forget to charge by the hour if the client also wants you to do social-media promotion of your posts, or needs advice on blog-marketing strategy. I’ve seen rates as high as $300 a blog post, and $100 a post is fairly common. Don’t settle for peanuts — keep looking until you find clients who understand how a powerful blog will help build their business.

Have questions about blogging for pay? Leave them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them here on the post.

Carol Tice helps writers earn more at the Making a Living Writing blog, which she used to get paid blogging gigs that earn her more than $5,000 a month. Grab her free report, 40 Ways to Market Your Writing.

Note: Carol’s blog, Make a Living Writing is a winner of the Top Ten Blogs for Writers 2011 Contest


Joining the A-List Blogger Club is like pouring accelerant on your blogging career. I know I’ve cut YEARS off my journey to monetizing my blog by belonging here.
~ Carol Tice of Make a Living Writing

Categories: Blogwriting, Business

This New Research Helps You To Stop Procrastinating and Start Writing

A guest post by Darko of FinderMind.com

Don’t just do it, just get started!
What a great name of a blog for this topic! Write to Done, implying ‘Write and get it done!’.

Procrastination is a topic commonly discussed in the writer’s community. Yet, when it comes to the evidence presented to back up specific claims on procrastination, it all comes down to opinions. No specific studies are mentioned nor the things we can learn from these studies. Maybe because people aren’t aware of them.

I hope all of this is going to change with this article. We’ll explore some of the findings from the  psychology on procrastination and the lessons we can learn from those studies.

Just do It Doesn’t Help Much

One great quote I once heard about this is, Telling a person who chronically procrastinates ‘Just do it’ is like saying to a chronically depressed person ‘Just relax! This might sound funny at first, but think about this quote for a while.

We have an entire self-help industry with a bunch of books preaching this Nike’s logo as the ultimate way to get out of procrastination. Just do it, don’t delay! I wish it worked so well. I don’t want to imply this particular motivational phrase doesn’t work at all, but it doesn’t work as well as many people (who write pop psychology books) would like to.

Timothy A Pychyl is an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He and his students did a series of studies where they determined that the participant’s perceptions of the tasks they needed to get done changed over the course of the week (many avoided doing a task on Monday). The second thing they discovered is once people started doing the task, they didnít find it so dreadful as they thought it would be.

What’s the lesson here? According to professor Pychyl, the lesson is to just to get started. I found this phrase useful to replace the Nike’s logo. You don’t have to just do it, but just get started. It only takes you a small start to see that the thing you wanted to do isn’t as scary as you thought. Do you think that new article you plan to write will be a nightmare? Try to get started and you’ll probably see it isn’t that bad. To get started is way easier than to do it.

How to Resist Short-Term Temptations

You’ve probably heard about that Marshmallow study where they determined the kids that resisted eating the marshmallow were WAY more happier/positive/persistent/successful than the kids who ate it immediately. If you haven’t heard of the experiment, here’s a short summary:

A kid is placed in a room with a table and a marshmallow on it. The kid is explained by the experimenter that he can eat the marshmallow now or wait until the experimenter is back and then he’ll get two. The goal here is to examine whether the kid is going to resist eating the marshmallow while nobody is in the room.

This is just one experiment to demonstrate how self-will and self-discipline is important in long-term success. The problem I have with all this is that nobody TELLS you HOW to NOT eat the marshmallow! I think that telling someone “resist short-term temptations” is far from enough to get him to do that. I think this is like telling a depressed person “resist feeling depressed!” It just doesn’t work well.

Two psychologists (Fishback from the University of Chicago and Benjamin Converse from the University of Virginia) have a few specific suggestions to offer on overcoming temptations.

The first suggestion is the concept of width. Temptations might seem harmless at first (should I not exercise these two days? It isn’t a big deal!) if we consider them in isolation. What we should do is to expand out view and consider other opportunities that will impact our long-term goal. Something like ‘Yes, being lazy and not exercising today might be harmless but tomorrow I’ll be in the same situation).

The second concept is consistency and it implies that we need to expect that the particular decision we’ll make at the moment will play out in the future. This is common sense if you think about it: You are more likely to do tomorrow what you did today. Or at least it will be easier to make the same thing in the future. So if you listen to your temptation today, you are more likely to do the same thing tomorrow. If you avoid your temptation today, you are also more likely to do that tomorrow. What will you choose?

The same concept applies to writing, if you avoid starting writing today, you’re more likely to do it tomorrow. So just get started and realize that the more you do it, the easier it will get and will eventually help you get closer to your long-term writing goals.

Darko is currently writing for FinderMind.com

Categories: Uncategorized

Can You Build A Business On Article-Writing Alone?

A Guest Post By Sean DSouza of Psychotactics

Imagine you were to start up an Internet-based business.
And told that to promote your business, you would not be allowed to do any affiliate marketing. Or joint ventures. Or any external publicity. No Twitter, no Facebook, no social media. No pay-per-click advertising. No goo gaa search engine optimisation. All you had was one weapon: The ability to promote your business through article writing—and article writing alone. Would that be possible? Is it actually possible to create not just a profitable, but an extreeeeeemely profitable business with article-writing alone?

You guessed the answer, didn’t you?
You instantly knew that it is indeed possible to drop all of the possible strategies you see online, and still generate enormous traffic—and revenues—through article writing alone. And you get that weird feeling of “this makes sense, but makes no sense at all”. Everyone will give you the idea that you need ten or twenty methods to get traffic to your website, and you don’t. You can use just one method—article writing—and have more than enough customers to keep you very comfortable.

But it’s not going to happen tomorrow…
Blogging or writing articles for a year probably isn’t enough to begin with. It’s like having a baby for a year, and saying “Why can’t this baby walk, talk and dance?” It usually takes more than two-three years for a business to really be walking, talking and dancing. And then the walking, talking and dancing depends on how good you get at your writing. If you continue to write crummy headlines and just run of the mill articles, then you can’t expect any one to pay attention. But once you start to write well, your ideas come alive.

And so do strategic alliances…
When we began our business way back in 2001, we had no customers. No subscribers. Nothing. Besides I was a cartoonist, not even a writer. But I sharpened my writing to the point where others started to take notice. And if they didn’t take notice, I’d, um, write to them and make them take notice. So who were these “others”? They were other websites (blogs didn’t exist in such a big way then) that were publishing good content. They’d publish my articles. I’d open my inbox and there would be 50, 60 even 200 subscribers. Can you imagine going to bed and waking up to find 200 emails in your inbox that are not spam? Smiley

But that was 2002, what about today?
Back then there wasn’t so much distraction as you have today, but even so, if your article is outstanding, and it gets published elsewhere you can get 20, 30 or even 50 subscribers from a single article. These aren’t visitors. They’re subscribers. People who come to your site or blog. People who investigate it before parting with their email address. We’re talking about skeptical folk here. And these subscribers, eventually turn to clients if you get them through a sequence—but you already know that.

What you may not know is the power of a single article.
A great article has amazing endurance. An article is not an article is not an article. It’s the starting point to an incredible journey. If you write a series of articles on a topic, it’s even more incredible. If done right, you can leverage an article almost infinitely. But infinite is a big word. So let’s look at a finite universe of why articles (and the ability to write articles) is so darned important. First let’s take the leverage tour, shall we?
How far can one article go?

Let’s take where I can possibly put a single article that I write.
• In the newsletter at Psychotactics.
• In someone else’s newsletter.
• On the Psychotactics website and/or on your blog.
• On someone else’s website and/or blog.
• In our membership site at 5000bc.
• In someone else’s membership site.
• As material at your event, or as part of training.
• As material at someone else’s event (even if you’re not showing up).
• I use it for my newspaper column.
• I can make it a report (e.g. The Headline Report is a single article).
• If I add more articles to it, it can be sold (as this report will be).
• I can use the report as a bonus to sell something else.
• I can use it as an award or prize (when packaged correctly).
• I could then make an audio out of the article.
• And a presentation.
• And a video.

A single article has enormous potential
When combined with several articles, it becomes a report. But don’t underestimate the power of a single article. Our article on headlines was made into a report. It has been downloaded several tens of thousand times and that one article has been the root cause of easily well over tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

But there are no shortcuts
You can’t just submit to some article or ezine site and hope to get these kind of results. If you look around you, you’ll find that those who succeed aren’t lazy bums. They’re hard working, and work smart too. And they don’t take shortcuts. They find a medium that works, and they work it like crazy. Which brings us full circle to the question: Can you build a business on article-writing alone?

The answer is yes.
We’ve been in business all these years with no affiliates, no joint ventures, no fancy publicity, no ga ga search engine positioning, no ad words—nothing. Yes, we’ve done the odd thing here and there, and yes we do have a so-so social media presence, but as you’ve worked out, the main strategy has been article writing.

All we’ve ever done is write good stuff and make sure that our customers pass it on.
We write good stuff and attract other blogs and websites who value good stuff, to publish our material. We write good stuff and that good stuff then gets leveraged, making us not just a very sizeable income, but also allows us to take a “three-month vacation” every year since the year 2004.

Can you build a business on article-writing alone? I guess you know the answer, don’t you? Smiley

To read more articles by Sean DSouza—and get a very useful report on “Why Headlines Fail”, go to http://www.psychotactics.com

Categories: Blogwriting, Business, Craft

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