If your PR and marketing folks aren’t tracking your company, brand, and competition online, they need to get up to speed to better do their jobs. If you play all of the roles, tracking your company and brand isn’t as time consuming as it sounds. Remember alert services, blogs, and social network sites. Many of these […]
Karen Putz asks how I do it — balance full-time writing and being a parent to three kids. I should be asking her how she does it — she interviews Marlee Matlin! As I mentioned in my how I became a writer story, the whole thing started as a part-time venture while managing a part-time corporate […]
Noticing another (the first being the gray text on white background) trend and it ain’t good. More and more newsletters require you to click a link for the full newsletter. To make the situation worse, some of these are in — ack! — Acrobat pdf format! I like Acrobat files, but not for e-mail newsletters. E-mail […]
Although Twitter hasn’t done much for my writing business, it keeps me in touch with friends and colleagues. It did contribute to my previous post. I decided to ask twitterville what they did whenever they become lethargic when they need to write. It worked well. As much as I’d like to regularly ask questions, overdoing it […]
Last week, my schedule contained too many appointments not related to writing work. So I planned to work whenever I had the chance to be at my desk… at least, that was what I told myself. Myself decided to rebel. Unmotivated. Uninspired. Un-everything. I couldn’t and wouldn’t budge. I spent this time clicking “Check e-mail” and […]
Recently, I lamented about the many blogging features available. I interacted with the blogosphere more than I usually do to see what works and what doesn’t. What took me so long to discover CommentLuv, I don’t know. But I did. Since I use WordPress, it was a breeze to install. The plugin doesn’t even need you […]
Frustration builds while reviewing this week’s calendar. Every day this week has something not routine and not work-related scheduled (and most of last week, too). I can only reschedule one appointment, but it’s not enough to lighten the load. So what does a lone freelancer do? To prevent myself from going crazy and sacrificing sleep (if […]
For freelancers and solopreneurs, making a mistake on a task compares to a corporate employee receiving bad performance review. Facing mistakes — no matter how small — as a freelancer comes harder than those made as a corporate employee — and I’ve worked on the other side. The other side includes working for the […]
37signals asks eight questions before, during, and sometimes after working on a project or task. These questions work well for writers and other freelancers. Those of us who work solo rarely have anyone to check with us to make sure we’re on the right track. So we need to help ourselves figure out if we’re on […]
Jakob Nielsen’s Blah-Blah Text makes an important point that web site visitors want to cut to the chase. They don’t want to waste time with a welcome message or any of that. We writers have learned that we need to have an opening, body, and conclusion. But we also know that writing for the web breaks […]