Sophie Lizard - Be a Freelance Blogger

What to Do When Your Freelance Blogging Career Is Going Nowhere

You got started. Found a few clients.

Remember how it felt at first? The world was yours, the sky was blue, the good life was just around the corner…

Then what happened?

Well, kinda nothing. You’re still doing the same kind of work for the same kind of pay.

And let’s be honest, that fact makes you cringe a little. It’s downright embarrassing. Your family and friends already had doubts about your career choice — you don’t want to prove them right by admitting you’ve failed to make any progress.

So you keep running on that hamster wheel, going nowhere fast.

Problem with the hamster wheel tactic is, it doesn’t work. As long as you’re stuck in the wheel, you have to keep running just to stay upright. It’s exhausting. And you know sooner or later you’ll slip and fall.

What are you going to do?

Give up and cry?

Go back to a nice, safe job in a filing cabinet somewhere?

Hell, no.

Here’s how to break out of the hamster cycle and get your freelance blogging career in gear.

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By Sophie Lizard

Pitchfest: Win $100 for Your Guest Post!

Every pitch you ever send to a blog editor or potential client is an entry into a contest for money.

When you pitch most blogs, you don’t get to see the other submissions they received that week.

Here, you do.

Let me explain. Pitchfest is a guest post pitching contest for freelance bloggers.

You pitch us a guest post idea in the comments section, we comment back with advice and encouragement, then we choose our favourite ideas to publish here on Be a Freelance Blogger. We do it all in the comments section of this post right here, so everyone can read the pitches and learn from the process. And there’s a $100 prize for the winner. 🙂

So far we’ve done this twice: here in December 2013 and here in February 2014. Both times, we got some fantastic entries and enjoyed in-depth conversations about how to create and improve your blogging pitches.

Now it’s time for another round. Are you ready?

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By Sophie Lizard

Is This What Freelance Writing Looks Like in 2014?

Feel like maybe you could charge more for your blogging services?

Yep, you probably could. We proved that in The Be a Freelance Blogger Rate Guide, and now the Copypress Community has carried out a survey of 247 writers to create a free report, The State of Freelance Writing 2014. It’s not just about writing rates — there’s a ton of information in there about bylines, SEO and other writerly stuff.

But one thing’s painfully clear: most of the online writers Copypress surveyed don’t charge enough.

To give you a quick overview of some interesting points from the survey results, here’s the infographic the Copypress people made to accompany the report. To download the full report with all the details for free, you’ll need to go here and register for a download link.

By Sophie Lizard

Why Your Freelance Writer Website Makes You Sound Like an Idiot

Your dream client is visiting your freelance writer website right now, while you’re reading this.

They heard about you, they think you sound awesome, and their budget is huge.

But what they read on your website puts them off the idea. They don’t pick up the phone. They hit backspace, and they go somewhere else.

Do you want that to happen to you?

Of course not. But it happens more often than you’d ever like to think. So let’s do something about that, today.

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By Sophie Lizard

Let the $100 Pitchfest Begin!

If you read my emails you’ll have seen the advance notice I sent out about this a few days ago.

[If you don’t get my emails, tell me your email address and I’ll start sending them to you — then you can enjoy all the fun, insight and profanity that comes from my brain direct to your inbox.]

Last month’s pitching contest was fantastic, with pitching tips and personalised feedback from Be a Freelance Blogger’s guest post editor Lauren Tharp. Instead of talking about it in the BAFB forums or inside email conversations like we usually do, we had the whole conversation there in the public comments of that blog post and everybody could check out the winning pitches.

That one contest brought us Alicia Rades’ $100-worthy guest post, cunningly titled 5 Ways to Rock Your Guest Post After They Accept Your Pitch, as well as excellent guest posts from runners-up who might never have pitched if there were no prizes up for grabs.

The level of learning and discussion going on in the comments made me feel we’d really touched a point that people want to talk about: what makes the difference between a “works for us” pitch and a “not for us” pitch?

I think we should talk about that in more detail and with as many specific, personalised examples and tips as possible. So we’re doing it all over again this month, and we’ll keep doing it every two months for the foreseeable future.

Being writers, we couldn’t resist giving this $100 guest blog pitching contest a special name.

Welcome to Pitchfest. 🙂

Read on for the rules, the $100 guest post payment, and the all-important comments section!

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