Blog Better - Be a Freelance Blogger

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From eyeball-grabbing headlines to irresistible endings, here's how to write blog posts your clients will be happy to pay for.

6 Writer’s Block Busting Tips (Banish Your Block for Good!)

We’ve all been there — the dreaded writer’s block.

One minute you’ve got ideas flowing out of your fingertips and the next minute… nothing, nada, zilch. Your words have dried up and you’re staring at a blank page.

It’s a freelance blogger’s worst nightmare.

So… what do you do next?

If your first inclination is to ignore the problem, you’re not alone. But procrastination — whether it’s with a Netflix show or a social media account — will not fix the issue at hand.

Being a freelance blogger means working for clients on a deadline. When you’re unable to write, your career and income are at stake.

The good news is there are plenty of solutions to help you beat writer’s block, especially if you’re willing to put in the work.

Some of these solutions are writing tools, some are science-based, and others are just plain common sense. But they’re all dedicated to making self-care a priority in your personal and professional life. So if you’re feeling stuck or just can’t write, try these tips to banish writer’s block for good!

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By Nicolas Ayala 5 Comments

Dramatize This: 10 Screenwriting Concepts That Make You a Better Blogger

The film industry has a massive amount of jargon terms, some seemingly created with the sole purpose of confusing outsiders and innocent newbies.

C47s come to mind, the bleeding edge technology behind the creation of a film. (This high-tech device is also known to us mortals as a clothespin.)

But you’re a blogger. How does filmmaking even affect you?

It’s simple. Blogs are stories. Bloggers are storytellers.

Word by word, we transmit a message to our readers through a journey of highs and lows in our writing. Does that sound familiar? It should.

This is where screenwriting concepts can come in handy for your blog writing.

From the first Fade In to the final Fade Out, screenwriters have an extensive lingo for a wide array of concepts that they carefully use in their stories to make them emotionally compelling and narratively effective.

As freelance bloggers, we can learn a lot from their ability to create powerful visual stories out of plain words and engage with audiences through captivating narrative devices. The conflict, however, is that the convenience of these tools often gets clouded by a dense layer of confusing jargon.

So let’s dig into 10 useful screenwriting concepts and terms today, and I’ll show you how to adapt them to your freelance blogging work.

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By Sophie Lizard 95 Comments

5 Ways to Adjust to Blogging on a New (Or New-Look) Platform… And 1 Way to Win $100

(We’ll get to the $100 prize in a few minutes — it’s all explained in this post, if you read through to the end.)

So your client wants you to use their blogging software to submit your posts.

And now you’re sweating with the fear that you won’t know how to use it and you’re gonna look incompetent.

Or maybe, like a lot of people in the blogosphere, you woke one morning not long ago, logged into your own WordPress website, and saw that — what in holy heck? — after the latest update, WordPress 5.0 has given you a very different looking new editing system… *eek*

Or perhaps you’ve never tried publishing on Medium or LinkedIn before, and you’re not sure how it all works.

Or you’ve been talking with a prospective client who sounds awesome, but they use Squarespace and you’ve only ever used WordPress?

Whatever the scenario, it’s all good. Relax and read these 5 simple ways to get your bearings inside a new blogging platform.

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By Pinar Tarhan 13 Comments

F*** Conventional Wisdom: How to Get Shit Done as A Freelance Blogger by Breaking the Rules

Conventional people don’t generally become freelance bloggers. It makes sense since most of us regularly deal with anxiety, rejection, distraction, and other problems. It takes a different kind of beast to make deadlines, satisfy clients, overcome introversion, and destroy the feast or famine cycle.

As freelance bloggers, we constantly have to be on the top of our game. We need to know what’s going on in our chosen niches, find experts to quote in our articles, research potential clients and publications we want to work with, brainstorm for new ideas, keep up with our deadlines, and always be marketing. Since we also need to find time for important people and things in our life, we naturally desire to be at our most productive at all times.

While the Internet and self-development shelves overflow with productivity advice, they aren’t all designed for freelance bloggers. They don’t necessarily keep our health issues in mind, or the kids we have to look after as we strive to maintain a sane and stable working environment at home. Then there are differences in our personalities of course.

So below are my seemingly irrational tips that can work wonders for freelance bloggers with flaky tendencies, coming from a flaky freelance blogger who has been doing this for over eight years: [Read more…]

By Sophie Lizard 75 Comments

The Freelance Blogger’s Ultimate Guide to Using Jargon [Or Not…] PLUS a $100 Prize Contest!

“Hey Brad, what’s the CTR on that omnichannel growth hacking infographic?”

“Gee, Sally, I don’t know. Is that part of the remarketing campaign we designed the storyscape for last week?”

Tell you a secret…

I fucking strongly dislike jargon.

Mainly because I can never remember it all. At meetings, I sometimes need to Google to remind myself what it means, so I’m sat there looking up business-speak on my phone instead of joining the conversation. (“What’s a vertical? I forgot…”)

Makes me feel like the only kid in the gang who has to check Urban Dictionary to find out what “Netflix and chill” really means. 😉

But I’m gonna set aside my personal issues with jargon for now, and focus on giving you exactly what the title of this post promises: your ultimate guide to when and how to use jargon in freelance blogging, and when to avoid it entirely.

Just in case we’re not on the same page yet, jargon is specialist language used by a specific group or type of person, often in a business or academic setting.

And part of what defines it as jargon is the fact that it only makes sense to the specialists who already know and use it.

In other words, most people on the planet *don’t* use it and have no idea what it means.

So, first of all, the golden rule is simple:

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