Be a Freelance Blogger

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How to Show a Blog Editor You Understand Their Audience [Plus Your Chance to Win $150!]

How to Show a Blog Editor You Understand Their Audience [Plus Your Chance to Win $150!]

The theme for this Pitchfest is: Audience. More on that — and the chance to earn $150 — to come, but first, here’s a quick tip to help you get to know a site’s audience quickly and how it’ll improve your pitches.

Every editor offering pitching advice will tell you, “Let me know you understand my audience and why your pitch is a good fit for them.”

The best way to gain that understanding is to become part of the audience. Read the blog, and engage with other readers. You’ll become familiar with the topics and voice of the site, and understand what readers look for in content.

But…

That takes time. And, frankly, if you write on the subject, you’re probably already reading 800 other blogs about it. Do you really want to add another to your reading list?

Most pitchers approach this conundrum wrong. They want to pitch a lot of blogs, so they Google their topic and send a generic pitch every site on the first page of results — whether it’s relevant or not. When I ran a blog called DIY Writing, you wouldn’t believe how many pitches I got that started with something like, “Since you write about DIY and crafting…” Nope. No, I do not.

You can do better than that… without committing to reading a novel’s worth of blog posts every day before you pitch.

[Read more…]

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The Perfect Pitch Email to Get Your Guest Post Accepted

The Perfect Pitch Email to Get Your Guest Post Accepted

When you’re sending pitches to blogs big and small every day, it can feel like screaming into the wind. Most editors won’t even grace you with a response, and many of the ones who do offer little more than a form rejection.

Freelancing is a tough game to play.

Maybe you’re a great writer, and your pitch just needs sprucing up to catch an editor’s eye and garner that response you’re looking for: a big, fat, enthusiastic Yes!

Would-be bloggers and content creators send me emails all the time with generic guest post pitches for the DIY Writing community blog I manage, seeking links back to their website (or, more likely, to their client’s site). But every once in a while, I get a pitch that is so irresistible, that shows so much respect for the work I do, that is such a perfect fit for my community, that I can’t wait to get it on the site.

I received one of these perfect pitch emails from a WritersBucketList reader. With her permission, I’m including a copy of her message in this post to show you exactly why I loved this pitch so much.

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

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. 

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