Freelance Smackdown: Week 3 Update (”Once More, With Feeling”)

For those just joining us, I called out Christine O’Kelly to put her Freelancing Guide to the test for 30 days and build a $1000-$2000 per month part time revenue stream. These are the continuing adventures …

Today’s post is going to cover:

• How To Guarantee Your Blog Post Doesn’t Get Noticed
• The Last 7 Days of Freelance Smackdown Activity
• What’s Coming Up For The Next 7 Days
• The Scary Lesson I Learned This Week
• What’s The Scariest Lesson You’ve Learned As A Freelancer?
• How To Increase Your Blog Stats And Get Backlinks

How To Guarantee Your Blog Post Doesn’t Get Noticed

I’m posting on Thursday today, because last week I made the not-too-wise decision to post on Friday night at 9pm (which alone was bone-headed), and as Feedburner doesn’t email out notifications for my blog until 8:45pm or so, it didn’t get sent out until the next day. So not much comment love. Now I know why I keep getting Naomi’s updates so damned late. Lesson learned, though - so let’s get this edition kicked out by end of lunchtime.

If you haven’t read last week’s Freelance Smackdown! update, check it out now and watch me kick the Law of Attraction below the belt and teach you to use real, actual true-to-life magic to increase your freelancing income. (And by real magic, I mean a metaphor.)

The Last 7 Days of Freelance Smackdown Activity

Two things happened over the last seven days:

1. I worked my a$$ off on that long-term contract I mentioned last week as well as a new “ASAP” rush job that I cranked on. My brain is fried (for reasons I’ll describe below) but it’s worth it - I’m going to finish out the week with about $650 in freelance writing income. That’s more than I earned over the previous 4 weeks combined. While I won’t put in nearly the same number of hours for the upcoming weeks, it was nice to start off the month with a chunk of change that I plan to use to flip my Visa card the bird. The other thing that happened this week was:
2. I received a reply to one of the emails I sent out a few weeks ago advertising my copywriting services and rates, just as Christine advised in her eBook. I sent out only 5 emails, and though just one person responded (after a long wait), it’s paying off. The SEO outscourcer was willing to bill me out for my rate of $X on one article, which makes me smile because it’s roughly double what I’m getting from the projects that are outsourced to me using a third party. But it gets better - I used one of the tips on creating ongoing services that Christine talked about and got the SEO’s client to commit to ten articles instead of one. That will help me insult my Visa balance in new and exciting ways over the coming months.

So the moral of the story is, get the damn eBook already, and if you have it, use the hell out of it. PS - that’s a straight link, not an affiliate one, so I’m not getting paid to say I dig it.

What’s Coming Up For The Next 7 Days

Unless work magically comes knocking on my door at my ideal rate of $X, I’ll continue chugging along on my 1/2 $X work that will carry me through the end of March. This is going to be a busy month for me, so I won’t be able to take on much extra at all. The N hours of writing will take up about all the time I’ve allotted for freelancing, so there’s not much leftover unless I get more efficient at writing (which I’m working on).

Since I’ve got a steady stream of work going, I’m considering taking the small amount of remaining time I have budgeted for freelancing and using it solely for shooting out more of those emails. I’m kind of juiced about how 15 minutes of hunting down SEOs and 5 minutes of emailing has netted me ten hours of work at my ideal rate. The idea of cutting my workload in half and still making the same amount in April is definitely attractive.

So at this rate, it looks like I’m going to finish out this 30-day experiment damned close to the high-end of my $1000 - $2000 goal. Once again, I thank everyone for their support, encouragement, comments, links and of course, subscriptions to this blog, and I’ll continue to post on what I learn as I dabble in this new world of freelance writing.

The Scary Lesson That I Learned This Week

I took a rush job this week that paid well and is responsible for the majority of the $650 I’ll be pulling in on payday tomorrow. But I honestly don’t know if I would do it again, given the chance, because it was more mentally taxing than I thought. Here’s what happened:

• I got an email saying “Would you like to do these 70 ultra-short writing jobs this week? The pay is good!”
• I tried one of them and timed myself. It took only a few minutes! (gets calculator) … Yay! This will only take N hours of work! I’m in!
• Then, reality proceeded to kick me right between the eyes.

Let me say it once and say it clearly: When you are writing the same thing dozens of times in a row, your productivity does not increase. It goes straight to hell.

Sure, it was easy to come up with a quick turn of the phrase to describe something … but after a dozen or so times, you start running out of different ways to describe it - especially when it’s a rush job. My brain started to rebel against me, and by the time I sent in the final files yesterday, I was burned out.

Lesson Learned: If you’ve got repetitious work, spread it out as far as you can. You don’t want to spend 2xN hours writing about the same topic, non-stop.

Whew. Glad that’s over with. And that’s what I have to report for this week.

What’s The Scariest Lesson You’ve Learned As A Freelancer?

Take a moment to relive your store of horror, despair, or passive-agressive enuii in the comments below. How bad could it be? (bwuhahahaha)

How To Increase Your Blog Stats and Get Backlinks

The secret is simpler than you might think, and oh-so-effective: Ask at the end of every post, like this:

• If you dig the Freelance Smackdown!, keep updated by subscribing to this blog via email or RSS.
• If you want to share the love, please link back to this page (or Smackdown Central) with snarky commentary on your own site. Rock it!

You know what to do,

Dave