Sophie Lizard - Be a Freelance Blogger

By Sophie Lizard 77 Comments

5 Years of Be a Freelance Blogger [Thank You!]

Today, Be a Freelance Blogger is five years old.

5 years! Bring on the “wow” emoji!

You know what was the hardest thing about starting this blog?

It wasn’t the technology, or the content strategy, or the audience-building.

The hardest part was coming up with the damn name.

Seriously. I needed a name that made it clear what my blog was about:

Freelance. Blogging.

Not freelance writing of any other kind, not personal blogging to push your own message or pro blogging for ad revenue and sponsorship money.

Plus I didn’t want it to sound like a content mill, or like a place to hire freelancers. I wanted people to know from the name alone that this is the place to learn how to be a freelance blogger.

I made a huge list of potential names, and they all sucked at least a little bit.

I’m pretty sure when I told Jon Morrow (my coach while I launched this blog) that the best name I had after two weeks of brainstorming and thesaurus abuse was “Be a Freelance Blogger”…

… yep, I’m pretty sure he was stunned into silence for a moment by my lack of originality. Would people even be able to remember a name like that?

Well, the answer is YES – most people remember it just fine, but also NO – because we still occasionally get emails addressed to “Dear Become a Freelance Blogger.” (Hey, it’s close enough; come on in. In a little while, I’m gonna tell you how you can win a prize…)

[Read more…]

By Sophie Lizard 208 Comments

Why You Should Step the F*ck Up to Be a Freelance Blogger

Do you love a challenge?

What if we call it a dare instead? You in?

Oh, you want to know what it is first. OK. In a nutshell:

I dare you to succeed as a freelance blogger.

Now let me ask you again: are you in?

If you are, I’ve got the one piece of information that will make a HUGE difference to your success as a freelance blogger. And I’m going to share it with you right here and now, so keep reading.

[If you have absolutely no interest in being a freelance blogger, feel free to leave.]

Excellent. Now that they’re gone, it’s just you and me, so let’s be honest with each other. Can we do that?

Get your business head on, and brace yourself: I’m going to be blunt. Because if I don’t tell you this, I’m not sure that anybody else will have the guts to say it to your face… [Read more…]

By Sophie Lizard 275 Comments

Feel the Fear and for F*ck’s Sake Get Over Yourself [$100 Prize!]

How many posts are there about fear on this blog?

How many about confidence? To most people, confidence implies an absence of fear, so it’s pretty much the same topic.

And, oh, you’ve felt the fear. You feel it and hurt under it and let it drag you down into this swamp of self-doubt so you don’t get as much done as you know you could. When you do take action, you take it so nervously it hardly makes any impact.

That’s why there are a bazillion self-help books and blog posts about courage and bravery and confidence and self-esteem and assertiveness and “fake it til you make it” and it goes on. I’m stopping there.

Listen, I get it. It’s kinda scary when you’re not 100% sure what you’re doing, or if it’ll work. In blogger mentoring sessions, I often spend time reassuring my students that yes, they’re doing this right, they’re doing fine, they should keep doing it and aim a bit higher next time, nobody’s going to mind, the universe will not implode…

I get it.

But here’s what YOU might not be getting:

It doesn’t matter. Your fear is irrelevant.

Freelance bloggers, it’s time to get over it and get freelance blogging.

If you have a genuine phobia that makes it extremely unpleasant for you to even think about writing a blog post or sending an email to a potential client, you’re excused. [And you should probably get professional treatment to make your phobia easier to manage.] I know if my laptop were swarming with spiders, Arachnophobia-style, I wouldn’t get any work done because I’d be too busy hyperventilating.

But if you’re just a bit scared… then you need to get past, through or over that feeling. [Read more…]

By Sophie Lizard 213 Comments

Your Freelance Blogging Plan B [How to Survive When Plan A Turns to Shit]

“Oh, holy fuck. Fuck fuckitty fuck fuck….”

That’s what my brain said. That’s probably what my mouth said too, but to be honest I can’t remember because I was too busy panicking.

Why?

Because my freelance blogging career took a nosedive from sweet, easy profit into the frozen, thumb-twiddling hell of I HAVE NO CLIENTS AND NO INCOME.

Plus I was the primary moneymaker in my little family and they were all depending on me to keep them housed and fed. So, y’know, no pressure. 😉

Shit happens

It was early 2012; Google had just updated its algorithms to stop crappy websites from ranking high in search results, and I’d been working 25 hours per week for a client whose websites were definitely kinda crappy. So when Google updated, those websites tanked and my client couldn’t afford to keep me.

I scrambled to pick up a couple of new clients, made sure this time that their websites were not crappy or grey-hatted, and kept on going. I also spent more than $10,000 on coaching and training programs to improve my business skills that year.

Fast forward 3 years to early 2015 and there I am, billing my clients up to $13,000 per month, owning a popular blog, working only part-time and only on projects that suit me, while planning my wedding and honeymoon.

So everything must have turned out just fine, right?

I wish.

[Read more…]

By Sophie Lizard 182 Comments

Win $100 and Get Published: Enter Our Pitchfest!

Most blogs have a process for choosing whose posts they’ll publish.

And most blogs keep that process hidden in private emails.

They might give you guidelines to help you write and format your pitches and posts the way the blog’s editors like, but that isn’t the same thing as letting you see inside the selection process.

Consider this post (or more accurately, the comments on this post) your window into how we choose the guest posts we publish on this blog. Use it as a place to practice your pitching, or take a serious shot at first prize — or if you’re super-shy, you can just lurk and learn. But we hope you’ll join in!

Now, the ~~million~~ hundred-dollar question:

Do you have a great idea for a blog post that an audience of freelance bloggers would want to read?

Then now’s your chance to pitch your blog post idea to us and win $100 if we choose it as our favourite to publish here on Be a Freelance Blogger. 🙂

Here’s how this works… [Read more…]