Search Results for: get clients

The Freelance Blogger’s Ultimate Guide to Making a Killer Explainer Video for Your Site

It’s frustrating, isn’t it?

You keep hearing how quickly video is growing online, like how 80% of the world’s internet traffic will come from video by 2019, and how mobile video will grow 55% per year through 2020.

And you’ve decided you want to be a part of this party and make an explainer video — a short video that explains what your freelance business does — for the home page of your writer’s site.

But there’s so. Much. Information.

Where are you even supposed to start? Just googling the phrase “how to create an explainer video” pulls up over a million hits, and most of those are aimed at corporations that have thousands of dollars to spend on an explainer video.

You’d have to read through several of these articles to scrape out a few tips that apply to you specifically as a freelance blogger looking to make a simple, effective explainer video for your site.

Or you can just read this blog post and call it good. 😉

That’s right, this post will walk you step-by-step through creating your own explainer video so you don’t have to scour the internet to learn how to do it yourself. I’ve included the only information you’ll need to get your first writer’s site video up and running, all while keeping in mind the fact that you’re a freelancer and not some mega-business with a mega-budget.

Ready to get started? Let’s dive in.

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By Sophie Lizard

How to Be a Freelance Blogger: Make the Smartest Dumb Moves in Your Career

How many times have you mentioned freelance blogging to someone only to have them throw a shitpile of doubt on your career choice?

How many times have you avoided telling someone about your career and ambitions, simply because you didn’t want to have that depressing conversation again? You know, the one where you try to justify your desire to freelance and write blog posts for a living — but the person you’re trying to justify it *to* doesn’t believe you can possibly make it work.

That many times, huh? Hmmf. Me too. In fact, I still have that conversation with people now, 6 years into my successful and lucrative freelance blogging career.

Just the other day, someone who’s known me a long time asked, “So how much do you really make an hour? I mean, say you write something for a client and they pay you $20, how long does it take you to earn that?”

I laughed so hard I started crying. Then I cried so hard I had to laugh.

Then I explained that I haven’t written anything for as little as $20 since, ooh, fucking NEVER. And that my entire reason for doing what I do here on this blog is to help other freelance bloggers (like *you*) avoid working for low pay too.

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By Alaura Weaver

How to Land $100 Freelance Blogging Gigs Without Pitching

Not to knock BAFB’s Pitchfest, but I have to say it: pitching sucks.

It’s so time-consuming! You could spend hours each week pitching and sometimes still not get anywhere.

While I appreciate having an opportunity to hone my craft as a blogger by creating short, to-the-point, attention-grabbing elevator speeches, every time I’ve done a pitch or written up a topic sample to submit for a guest blogging opportunity, a voice in the back of my head whispers, “How much are you getting paid per hour for this?”

As a stay-at-home mom, what little time I have to write between preparing snacks, changing diapers, talking down tantrums, and neglecting housework is valuable to me.

Plus I used to be an actress and pitching reminds me way too much of casting calls where hundreds of talented people line up, hoping to outshine everyone else and get the gig. Like most actors, I spent the majority of my time in auditions, only to be judged and rejected — and not getting paid. It wasn’t a healthy or lucrative way to focus my creative energy and I promised myself I wasn’t going to do it again.

So about 2 months into my freelancing career, I decided to stop spending all my time and energy on pitching, and try a different strategy to get work.

Guess what? Once I started treating writing like a business with its own brand, target audience, and social media strategy, my freelance blogging career took off. Here’s how you can do the same.

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By Cherese Cobb

Don’t Feed the Trolls: How to Handle Haters in Blog Comments and Social Media

If you’re a blogger, at some point you’ve probably gone toe-to-toe with an Inter n et troll — “a person whose sole purpose in life is to seek out people to argue with….over extremely trivial issues.”

If you haven’t had this delightful experience yet, you will sooner or later. Technology is maturing faster than we are, so Internet trolls have become a fact of life.

When my first article was published at xoJane, e-gremlins called me a jobless, spoiled, trust-fund baby. I was pegged as a psychotic, shitty writer, who’s only ever written sub-par, self-published novels and articles.

The comments made my stomach knot like a mall pretzel. I sobbed. One minute, I wanted to crawl back into my mother’s uterus. The next, I wanted to fight — to scratch my way out of the trolls’ black and white pit of negativity. I read the soul-sucking comments over and over for six hours.

I decided I wasn’t prepared for a war with faceless, nameless, word-wielding trolls, who relentlessly stalked me on my social media profiles. So I decided to play nice, which resulted in some of the trolls feeling bad for their comments and one admitting that her reading comprehension was poor.

But Stephen King says, “If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered.”

We all know that trolls aren’t polite. They spew smoke and hurl fire. Their words leave you blistered, red, and peeling, but as you slowly heal, your skin becomes tougher and your scars fade.

My cyber-bullying experience taught me valuable coping skills. Now I can mentally clobber any troll that comes my way, and you can too.

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By Kelly Gurnett

15 Real-Life Freelance Bloggers Who Prove You Can Create a Successful Business from Nothing

Am I ever really going to make a go of this?

Why would I ever think I could be as successful as some of those other freelancers?

Should I just give up now?

Whether you’re just starting out as a freelance blogger or you’ve been doing it for a while and have reached a plateau, it’s easy to fall prey to fears and doubts like this — especially when you compare yourself against those bigger, better freelancers who seem to have already “made it.”

But here’s a little insider secret to success: There are no insider secrets to success.

Many of those bloggers you envy started out with nothing, just like you, and it’s only through a combination of skill, moxie and sheer dogged persistence they managed to get to where they are are today.

Know what that means for you?

You can get there too.

To prove it to you (and give you some super-helpful tips you can put to use today), we interviewed 15 freelance bloggers who built their own successful businesses from “nothing” and asked them how they did it, what they learned along the way and what they wish all aspiring freelancers knew about the journey.

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