Be a Freelance Blogger

Accounting and Taxes: A Freelance Blogger’s Cheat Sheet

So you decided to become a freelance blogger.

You know your topic and you’re well versed in WordPress. You think you’re all set.

However, as you’re filling out your personal tax forms –it’s that time of year!– you think “Oh wow, I’m going to have to keep track of the money coming in and out and fill out tax forms for this business!”

So you scrap the idea and curl up in a ball on the floor sucking your thumb, convinced that the world is against you and that you’ll never be your own boss if the thought of accounting and taxes scares the Dickens out of you…

Umm, it doesn’t need to be like that. Let me walk you through an easy way to track your finances and prepare for your tax forms. [Read more…]

By Leslie Lee Sanders 16 Comments

How Your Past Mistakes Can Make You a Go-To Blogger

We all make mistakes.

Most people learn from their own mistakes. Some learn from other people’s mistakes.

Why is this important?

This is one way you become an authority, a go-to person, an expert.

According to my Encarta dictionary, an expert is “someone who is skilled or knowledgeable about a particular subject, skill, training, or who is experienced in a particular field or activity”. We’re all experts of something, be it parenting, football, writing, or Twitter.

So where do your past mistakes come in?

Mistakes are often caused by bad judgment, ignorance or lack of care – all fixable problems.

How great would it be to help your readers by blogging about the mistakes you’ve made, preventing others from making the same mistakes and showing them the valuable lessons you’ve learned? This could be a perfect way to start or expand your freelance blogging career. [Read more…]

By Sophie Lizard 36 Comments

Avoid Getting Played By Your Clients: 5 Lessons to Keep You Safe from Rip-Offs and Fee-Dodgers

You might think getting ripped off by a client is something that only happens to newbie freelance bloggers.

You’d be wrong.

I hear from a lot of experienced bloggers who are still having bad experiences with clients, time after time. Why does this keep happening?

Often, it keeps happening because you keep trusting in people you have absolutely no reason to trust. Sometimes you just don’t spot the warning signs. Sometimes you spot them, but you keep going anyway because you don’t really know what else to do.

I’ve been played by bad clients a couple of times. I know how it feels when you’re halfway through a project and you get that sudden feeling of impending doom. Your gut tells you to run for the hills, but you’re too busy worrying about your money and your reputation to act on that instinct.

And so, you get fooled again.

Learn these lessons now, and you won’t have to suffer the same thing later: [Read more…]

By Dana Sitar 56 Comments

Be Picky, Get Paid to Promote Yourself, and Build Your Dream Career

If you’re like most freelance writers with a dream, you do one kind of writing “by day” — the kind you get paid for — and another “by night” — the kind you love and dream of doing full-time.

If that’s you, you’re doing twice the work you need to, and you may be hurting your chances of advancing toward that dream career.

Be more choosy to make your dream career a reality.

When you’re starting out, many steady blogging jobs ask you to “be able to write with authority on a variety of topics”. You become trained to believe that in order to make money blogging, you have to know how to write about whatever a client wants you to write about. You become very skilled at internet research.

But what about the reason you write in the first place?

What about those topics you love with such passion that you pour hours every week into unpaid posts for your own blog? What of the things you choose to read about in your spare time, that you talk about in days-long Twitter conversations with people halfway round the world?

You don’t have to be a jack-of-all-trades blogger to make money. You can be choosy and stick to the topics you love. Here’s how. [Read more…]

By Nick Thacker 24 Comments

Prevent Blogging Burnout With These 7 Great Writing Tips

We’ve all been there: You’ve had a long, rough day at work or taking care of the kids, then you cook dinner, clean, and spend some time with the family…

…and after all that, the last thing you want to do before calling it a day is write.

It’s not just “writer’s block”; this is something else entirely. Something more sinister.

This is burnout.

If you’ve ever written yourself into the ground to meet a deadline, then you know what blogging burnout feels like.

Yet there’s no getting around it – we’re all writers, in some way or fashion, and so it’s crucial that we learn to combat this productivity killer as soon as – or before – it sets in.

Here are 7 great tips for defeating blogger burnout before it has a chance to grab hold and kill your productivity: [Read more…]

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