Remember that over the last two months a select group of people picked Mark Joyner’s brains about everything he knows about becoming a bestselling author (something Mark has done 4 times now!) and that these sessions totaled over 20 hours?
They were 4 sessions lasting 5 hours each.
I don’t know how Mark kept up with it (probably something to do with Simpleology!), but here’s what’s really cool:
Each and every minute of these calls was recorded!
Can you imagine? 20 hours of the man some call “the Tiger Woods of Internet entrepreneurialism” answering every question imaginable - and you get to be a fly on the wall!
Funny, huh? These recordings are a bonus on top of something even more amazing.
Here’s the skinny, though: because of this new addition the price of the Blueprint is going up to $1,497 in a week, but you can get it at the old price now.
I highly recommend it - not only does it cover everything you’ll need to know on the road from “no book” to “#1 bestselling author of …”, but it also teaches you more about “launching” a product of any type than just about anything on the market.
OK, this is me talking now. Everything before was the pre-written sales hype from Mark Joyner. I put it in, because he is a great marketer and it seems to work.
The truth is that I have not seen the Bestseller Blueprint, so I cannot say for sure whether it is that great. However, I have seen a lot of his other work and am absolutely wrapped. Once you are past the initial sales hype, Mark is a very smart and down to earth guy. He has the uncanny ability to simplify complex things.
So if you are planning to write a bestseller one day (or have already written it), I know that this is one of the best ways to get it happening. Sure, you still have to put in the work, but every step will be laid out for you.
And you know what, as with all his products, there is a 30 day money back guarantee. So if for any reason you do not like it, just ask for your money back and they will do it. Their customer support is amazingly fast and friendly.
I know that bidding sites are not for everyone. However, if you decide to give it a go, you need to be aware of some things:
Get the First Rating
It will be much easier to gain further work, once you have received some ratings from clients. That is why it is not useful to worry too much about what you earn in your first few projects when you bid. Completing them and getting a rating (which are positive in most cases anyway) is far more important.
That is why our freelance writing job feed includes all bidding sites. Bid on every jobs that comes up, bid low so that you get some ratings.
Concentrate Your Ratings
Once you have a few ratings on one or two bidding sites, it might be best to concentrate on that one site (or maybe two). That way, you concentrate you ratings.
Many sites show the providers with more rating higher up in the results for the client.
Carve Out a Niche
Once you have completed a few projects, concentrate on specific topics. Why?
Clients will trust your expertise when they see that you have done similar things before.
You will be able to write a lot quicker with less research. That increases your hourly rate.
Marshall wrote a post that outlines why niching reduces your writing opportunities. However, there are two main approaches to making a living through writing: quantity and quality.
Think about who earns more money, the factory worker who produces widgets (quantity) or the highly specialized professor who researches atomic physics (quality).
Being a specialist will draw quality clients to you. Being a generalist makes you have to compete with low wage countries. That competition cannot be won.
I do not know about you, but listening to brilliant minds always inspires me. You’ve probably heard about the Be the Next Bestselling Author Competition (still 3 days to enter), you might also have read the Rise of the Author and now all this culminates in a teleseminar on February 26.
Mark Joyner, Dr Joe Vitale and Frank Rumbauskas talk about how they achieved their bestseller status.
All of it is in preparation for the launch of a new training that Mark puts out, but I find that there is so much information in the pre-launch material that it is worth reading and listening to that just for that information alone. (And sometimes I can resist the temptation to buy at the end).
So if you want to listen to some of the best, register your seat for the Best-seller Prep School.
Mark Joyner has now released a paper called the Rise of the Author in which he outlines how the face of publishing is changing dramatically. And why there is no better window of opportunity for authors to become bestsellers right now.
With his background in Internet marketing it is naturally using the Internet to achieve that, but the goal is for authors to publish their books with a traditional publisher and push them up through a concerted marketing effort (not any tricks or buying books themselves).
Naturally Mark does not reveal the full extend of what is necessary for this marketing effort (that is what he wants to sell at the end of this week).
The Rise of the Author is quite long with lots of history and examples of why he thinks the way he thinks. For people like me who are more into action, the summary at the end of the document probably suffices.
Just in case you are wondering what benefit a freelancer would gain from having a bestseller:
First and foremost the new status of being a recognized expert
More client requests so that you can choose who to work with
I came home late last night and did not get to bed until 11pm. At midnight, our 6 month old daughter woke up and I with her. Could not get back to sleep until 3 hours later. Why?
Because I kept thinking about this competition. I am not sure it is suitable for everyone to jumpstart your writing career.
But what was so intriguing to me, was the task: A story about your most life changing moment in life. I thought of my own birth, then the birth of our daughter, meeting my wife, making love to the first woman.
And somehow I realized that all these changes were not single moments in time, but rather developments over a few months. But then I remembered one moment.
So here is my entry to the bestselling author competition:
I just took action, wrote my thoughts down, taped it and uploaded it. If you decide to enter, too, please share the link to your video in a comment. I’d love to see it.
You can also see some other entries that have been posted in the comments on the simpleology blog.
Who has not dreamed of being a bestselling author? It somehow seems to tie back to this instinct of leaving a legacy, of leaving something behind that we will be remembered for.
Or maybe even having something now that we are recognized for.
I have to admit that I would love to see myself as a bestselling author. But I am also a numbers person. There are 950,000 books published each year. That is what Wikipedia has to offer on the subject. So being number one is almost like winning the lotto.
Except, that there is a way to influence the outcome, rather than just relying on luck, according to Mark Joyner. He has achieved bestseller status 3 times already. He says that there is an exact blueprint that will lead to anyone to be the next bestselling author.
How does this relate to a freelance writing career? Well, if you’ve got bestseller status on your profile, it should help with convincing clients to pay what you are worth.
I had my doubts about writers’ inability to overcome writers block before I actually started writing for a living. I thought it was for weak people, and wouldn’t apply to me since I was a fountain of creative ideas.
Boy was I wrong! In this article I am going to talk about writer’s block, when and why it seems to hit me, and some ways in which I attempt to overcome it.
It’s an area that I have really been struggling with lately, so any suggestions from other people would definitely be helpful!
Use proper grammar!
Before I proceed to the “meat” of this article I would like to get something quite clear. I am aware that “overcome writers block” is grammatically incorrect and that there are two different spellings in the body of this article.
The reason is that apparently it is spelled without an apostrophe as an important keyword, which goes to show a couple things. The first is that there are a lot of writers out there in the aspiring category, and the second is that I am a prostitute when it comes to grammatical values.
On to writer’s block
My standards aside, the incorrect grammar is a pretty good thing to start out with when it comes to writer’s block and writing for the Internet, because more often than not it is certain keywords or phrases that get my brain locked up for days and lately even weeks.
Some of the keywords I am required to use just don’t fit together on their own, let alone in a sentence (overcome writers block is not too bad at all). My English teachers would be ripping their hair out if they knew this was how I was using the things they taught me.
Outside Distractions
Another thing that I have found to be a big cause of writer’s block for what I do is outside distractions.
In analyzing my current dilemma, I am fairly aware that part of the problem is a possible responsibility overload. The long period of writer’s block that I am facing now comes on the heels of several major changes in my life; as of September, I had a new baby boy (and he is a MAJOR engager and very distracting).
My daughter started school with the additional responsibilities and stresses that brings, and I started to work with the youth group at my church. All this in addition to my other son, my wife, playing guitar at church four of every six Sundays and other life happenings!
So how do I kick it?
Unfortunately this answer is not so clear. For the most part, I have had to force myself to sit and stare at the computer until I get something produced, but it tends to take a lot out of me.
With the approach of the New Year, I have decided to try and combine all the problems and cover them in one or several resolutions.
I have to renew my commitment to my clients, two of whom have been quite patient with me.
Next I have to figure out which areas of my life I need to tone down in order to make room for the money (and no, it won’t be the kids!).
Will these strategies help to overcome writers block for me in the New Year? Well only time will tell and I will try and get back to you with the results in a few months. In the meantime, any help is greatly appreciated!
Many people have at one time or another considered writing for a living. Especially anyone who has received praise for their written work.
Unfortunately for most of us, writing for a living does not necessarily mean that we will get to be as creative or prosaic as we would like to be, and this is very clear once you start looking for jobs on the Internet. In this article, we will take a look at why it is important to differentiate your writing career from your writing hobby, and how to do so.
I will starve for my art!
This is the rally cry for many a writer; they refuse to compromise their work or “demean” themselves by agreeing to write pieces which fail to meet their standards of what writing should be. In other words, they are more the type to sit down and write a poem than a 500 word piece on Condominiums in Toronto.
The good news for those types of writers is that they can indeed expect to starve for their art. For every success story in the writing world who slaved away for years before getting noticed, there are a thousand who continue to starve because they were or are just too stubborn to treat a writing career as a business instead of a hobby.
Either that, or they were stuck at non-career jobs for most of their lives, receiving manuscript after manuscript back from publishers who just are not interested in their work.
If you want to make writing your career, you are going to have to work
For most of us, writing for a living means divorcing ourselves from what we would like to write and writing what other people want us to.
My big desire is to write about sports; I love sports and I can write very good biographies on athletes, summaries of games and events, even books on rules and regulations. The problem is the sports writing market is competitive and there are many writers with better connections than myself.
I could just say I am willing to serve at restaurants until that golden opportunity comes by, but having done so I know that it is much more preferable to focus on the writing part of my career and take jobs that I have a little less interest in.
That way I make money and hone my skills, and there is always the potential to have that dream job come floating in.
Get rid of the dreamy ideal
It’s fine to love your work and to want to be successful writing for a living, but you don’t have to overdo it. Many writers, whether in their profiles on bidding sites or on their own pages, will include phrases such as “writing is my life, and nothing is more important to me” in order to show how committed they are.
Unfortunately this approach just will not work for the practical writer.
The big reason is that this kind of statement really turns off potential employers. Again, you have to remember that this is business, not a hobby any longer. A web site developer who wants content written about the best diet plans does not care if you can use hundred dollar words and thousand dollar phrases in your article; she wants to see easy to read, informative content on her subject which Internet readers will grab on to.
In order to find jobs writing on the Internet and really anywhere else, it’s important to assume that editors and web developers are already aware that inside of every writer there are hundreds of stories waiting to come out. Leave that out of your pitch, and instead focus on what you will do for them.
They have practical jobs that they need filled and are willing to pay for, and they are looking for a practical writer to do them. Writing for a living is much different than writing as a hobby, and you will find that success will come once you develop a much more hard-nosed approach to the whole business.
Freelance Employment? Let’s start out this section with a frank statement: I don’t believe that the terms freelance and employment are really compatible. After all, as a freelancer I (and hopefully you as well) am not under any sort of ongoing obligation with my clients, apart from fulfilling the contracts.
I don’t depend on them for eight hours a day of work, and the other side of the coin is that they don’t have to worry about me and my pay as soon as our agreed to work is concluded. That said, Freelance Employment seemed to be the popular search term, so we will just stick with the oxymoron for now.
Freelance Writing Rates
So what is it that you can expect to find in this ill named section? Well, I will be putting up various articles about the “nuts and bolts” writing jobs freelance. It’s the place where I talk about setting your freelance writing rates, using some real numbers that I found worked as I was growing my business. I have stressed it before on this site but I think it’s worth saying again; freelance writing resources are notoriously vague when it comes to real numbers in terms of pay.
There aren’t any secrets here – I will disclose exactly the rates I started with and what I make now. Maybe you will be able to charge higher prices, and that is great, because I am all about raising the bar and making sure people understand what our work is worth!
Contracts and Copyrights
Some other important aspects of the freelance writing business that we are going over in this section are issues having to do with contracts and copyrights, probably two of the most intimidating words for a person seeking freelance writing employment; and no more so than on the Internet.
Whenever you have a freelance job writing for the Internet, you are probably going to base a lot of your research on what you find on other sites. They key is in understanding that almost everything has already been said, and the key is to say it in a different way. We will look into that a little bit deeper in the article on writing jobs freelance; understanding some of the legalities such as copyright.
And that, of course, leaves us with contracts. Whenever you find a freelance employment, it is more than likely that you will have a contract, whether it is an official contract such as the templates used by magazines and newspapers or the more informal contracts that are the typical backbone of online bidding sites.
You need to know what to include in those contracts, what certain terms mean, and most importantly what to do if something should go wrong.
Approach to Success
Finally, we are going to put a touch of the cold hard reality of freelance employment into this section. In another section we looked at what it takes to make a living as a freelance writer, and in this section we will talk about the approach you need to take if you want to be successful in your freelance writing business.
They say as soon as you have to do something it stops being fun; this isn’t true all the time when it comes to your freelance writing career, but you will definitely find that there are some days when it feels much more like a regular job than something you love to do. If you really plan on writing for a living, you will have to leave some of your pretensions at the door.
My first foray into a steady freelance job happened in the spring of 2007. I was casually browsing through the writing jobs listed at Craigslist. I responded to a job ad, sent in my resume and didn’t give it another thought.
A few days later, I signed a contract with a company that produces web content. I churn out several articles a month for this company.
I responded to more job ads on Craigslist and snagged another job, this time writing copy for a real estate company. That quickly fizzled as I handed in my first copy while running out the door to pick up a kid. I submitted copy with a mistake on it. Poof! The job was gone.
Then I received another freelance opportunity via email–a new website was forming and they liked my personal blog. Would I come and write for them? I said sure. The blogging job turned into another opportunity with bigger articles for the website. Bigger articles translated into bigger pay.
I’m still slowly trying my hand at other freelance opportunities, but I’m not at the point where I can consider this a full-time job just yet. The pay is not quite there.
I’m just happy that I have my foot in the freelancing door.
