Aaaaand, Submit. Time to break open your favourite treat after you’ve sent your last piece of work to your editor.

A smile on your face, you cross the item off your to-do list and then input the figures onto your budget spreadsheet.

But five minutes later you get that email back: “This isn’t what I’m looking for, can you rewrite it?”

Nothing more, nothing less.

Now the red heat grows in your heart and head. You undo the change in your records and get ready to start over from the beginning. You’re writing the whole post again and you don’t even know if this offering will be more acceptable than the last.

You wish you understood your editor more and could get more out of your relationship, but at the moment all they want is for you to do something “right”, whatever that is. Your editor feels like a distant God, setting commandments but then not accepting the sacrifices of blog posts that you bring to their altar.

Luckily, even if you have a terrible relationship with your editor you can learn to get more out of it. 

[Read more…]

Would you listen to a song if it’s not in English?

If the singer doesn’t fit the mold of a global star, would you lend an ear?

When you think of international music icons, the celebrities that come to mind are mostly Western, right? Not anymore. The Koreans are here.

Their songs aren’t in English, and lots of them don’t even speak English, yet they’ve seduced the world. The K-pop music industry is huge, and the K-Pop invasion is undeniably a phenomenon.

What does that have to do with you? Here are some key insights freelance bloggers can learn from the K-Pop invasion…

[Read more…]

Oh, it’s not that being a freelance blogger doesn’t sound awesome to you, just like it did to me.

It’s not that there isn’t awesome example after awesome example of people doing it. In fact, this website is dedicated solely to getting you there.

It’s just that all this crap gets in the way. And by crap, I mean, my own crap. But your crap is very much like my crap. How crappy is that?

Good thing you’ve found this blog and you’re reading this post. You’re about to learn the 7 things that stand in the way of your freelance blogging career and how to get around them.

Bonus: They’re all your own fears, so they’re totally under your control. 

[Read more…]

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…]