Hey, guys. I’m gonna be eight on June 1! Seriously. I’m too embarrassed to show you what Meryl posted in her first entry on June 1, 2000. But she and I have grown a lot since the early days of blogging.

So I tell Meryl that she oughta take a vacation from blogging as a way to celebrate. But she says she can’t do that — the blog needs to stay regularly updated as she won’t take me for granted.

Then an idea comes to me. A contest! Prizes! Well, maybe I cheated a little as her friend John over a PoeWar is doing this. Here’s the deal:

• Prize donations: In exchange, you’ll get a link with a short write up of the link. Also, readers will be encouraged to link to sponsors in exchange for entries.
• Guest bloggers: Anyone who writes a guest blog entry will be entered into a contest for guest bloggers only.

Once we get these figured out, we’ll flesh out the details. In summary, the contest has two parts: Readers, prize sponsors, and authors.

1. Readers get entries for a chance to win prizes by simply leaving valuable comments and linking to this blog and its sponsors from their own blog.
2. Prize sponsors: Automatically get 10 entries for donating a prize and links to their sites. Readers gain entries for linking to sponsors, which means more linkage!
3. Authors get entries into author-only prizes for their contributions. Articles can cover any of the following:
   1. Writing
   2. Freelancing
   3. Marketing
   4. Web site design, usability, etc.
   5. Technology

Do two or three to increase your chances of winning. Sound cool? Spread the word so you get a chance to win cool prizes.

• 10 Clever Ways to Wow Your Clients
• Are You Approaching Freelancing All Wrong?
• The Only 12 1/2 Writing Rules You’ll Ever Need poster. Should get this for my office. Actually have wall space. [Link: Deb Ng]
• Four Ways to Target Online Buyers with the Right Words
• Write for Food
• Grammar Lessons from the English Chick.
• 9 Niche Carving Techniques: Even if you want to be a Jack or Jackie of all trades, you can still have a niche as this entry shows.
• 50 open source resources for writers.

Interesting:

• Is the Palm OS Dying? Should you care? I do! I have owned a Palm device since 1995 and am still hoping the company will surprise us and SOON.
• Student twitters his way out of Egyptian jail. WOW. Talk about major twitter impact. If I had done the same thing, I’d still be in jail.
• 20 things to do with nail polish. Well, color won’t work well for some of these, but good tips. Men — it’s OK to use nail polish! [Link: Deb Ng]

And because we always look for ways to save money:

• AAA gas price finder

And because I had my first job out of college at DOT:

• Secretary of DOT blog: My first job out of college was as a DOT trainee. We rotated to three different areas in one year and then permanently settled with one of the areas. I still stay in touch with many folks there — they are good people. Don’t let the FAA’s problems deter you from thinking otherwise.

I generally don’t talk about myself as I accept that people don’t come here for my personality. Instead, people like you come for the information I provide that I hope helps you in your life.

From reading other blogs, it looks like many love to hear how writers and freelancers went full-time. So here’s the full story.

In the beginning…

After kid #2 arrived, I started New York University’s online program in Internet Technology while on maternity leave. Initially, I wanted to do web design. After few Web design projects, I discovered web design was more frustrating than enjoyable.

Around this time, an e-mail newsletter for web designers had a contest where readers could submit an article related to web design. The winners received high quality software like Photoshop, so I gave it a shot. Readers loved the article, so I wrote a few more in the series for the newsletter.

The series started my writing portfolio and helped my land my first paid professional writing gig with a web design magazine. Slowly, I picked up more paid writing assignments discovering I loved working as a writer.

However, I was apprehensive about pursuing a career as a writer. I heard from many people how they wanted to be a writer. I honestly didn’t think I offered anything special as a writer. It also didn’t help with many talented bloggers and web site writers hitting the writing circuit. Regardless, I kept my eyes open for gigs and considered writing a sideline since I still had my corporate job.

Furthermore, I never dreamed of having my own business. I feared the sales aspect — getting more clients — because I couldn’t make normal phone calls. Cold calling was always awkward no matter how comfortable I was with making phone calls. Then there was finances, bookkeeping, the usual business stuff.

Returning to the Dilbertesque world

I returned to work a couple of weeks early from maternity leave on a part-time basis in hopes to convince management that I could do the job part-time. Management wasn’t receptive to the idea.

I wrote a memo with various options supported by data. Eventually, the company let me work part-time because there was another part-time employee who joined the team. We didn’t job share, however. Together, we made up one employee.

Eventually, she went with the wireless part of the business and I stayed with long distance retaining my part-time status. This let me build the writing business.

Dot com blah

I lost several clients when dot com went boom. This was a turning point because I could either scramble to get more clients or resign myself to a corporate career.

While feeling a pit in my stomach stomach I hit send and emailed people in my network including those I had interviewed for articles. I landed two new clients, one of which I met in person for the first time after working with him for six years.

I worked part-time until March 2005 when my company required me to return to a full-time schedule. By this time, I had plenty of business writing experience and a healthy portfolio.

The benefits… the benefits…

I couldn’t quit my job yet because my husband didn’t have health benefits. We had three kids, so it was important. My husband landed a job with decent benefits in June 2005. A month later, I retired from corporate America for full-time freelancing.

Just found this article on health insurance for freelancers for those who don’t have the luxury of relying on someone else for benefits.

Other becoming a writer stories…

Mary E. Lyons

Bob Younce

Many at how we became writers

Delaune Michel

Philip McCord

Catherine Shaffer

Catherine Leigh

Geoffrey Zimmerman (video)

Earl Pomerantz, TV writer

Jared Head (video)

Yours?

I admit it. For a long time, figuring out rates and providing quotes was a weak area for me. It took time, practice, and hard lessons to arrive at the point where I can confidently and calmly provide a quote. Before, I’d be figuratively biting my nails as I submitted my quotes and second guessing myself.

John Hewitt has the answer I wish I had when I started freelancing as a writer. It works for every freelancing career. Well, except the per word part. Just remove that or substitute with “per page,” “per design,” etc.

1. Start at $20 an hour or $.20 a word. This is a fairly low level. Feel free to start higher.
2. Increase your fee by 5 ($25 an hour $.25 a word) with each successful gig.
3. When your prospects start telling you that you charge too much, don’t raise your rates for six months.
4. Try raising it again.

Too simple and sometimes the best answer is the simplest one. The day before a state-wide math assessment test, my husband asked our oldest who takes algebra, “Do you remember how to add, subtract, multiply, and divide?”

She responded, “I don’t know. When I do a math problem now… if the answer is simple, I think it’s wrong because it has to be more complicated than that.”

Uh oh. Her mind is starting to work like an adult’s. We forget the answer can still be simple. It reminded me of a riddle I read years ago where kindergarteners (five and six-year-olds) easily answered the riddle while educated adults struggled or didn’t get it. I thought it was this one:

Question: What is greater than God? What is more evil than the devil? The poor has it. The rich need it, if you eat it you will die. What is it?

Answer: Nothing

But research says it was this one where the kids outscored the adults.

I turn polar bears white.
And I will make you cry.
I make guys have to pee
And girls comb their hair.
I make celebrities look stupid.
And normal people look like celebrities.
I turn pancakes brown
And make your champane bubble.
If you sqeeze me, I’ll pop.
If you look at me, you’ll pop.
Can you guess the riddle?

Answer: No.

True or not — the point is clear… we sometimes overlook the obvious.

Simple Doesn’t Come to the Rescue

I’m working on a quote for a client. The problem is I can’t determine how many articles I can write per week. Sometimes more. Sometimes less. Charge by article? Well, that wouldn’t work either as it could be 300 one time, 700 another.

Charge by the hour? I try to avoid that. What would you do?

• The Freelancer’s Toolset: 100 Web Apps for Everything You Will Possibly Need
• MindMapPedia is a library of publicly available mind maps.
• BookSpoke is a social network for readers and writers.
• Brijit: Content with 100 words or less.
• Catalog your books at Library Thing.
• Get the skinny on your zip code.
• Blog of quotation marks abuse.
• Periodic Table of Comic Books.
• Cup stacking caught on with my son and his friends. But dice stacking? Whoa.
• Three geeky goodies from TechRepublic:
  • Dirty Computers
  • Endangered Computers
  • Vintage Computer Festival

  Happy Thanksgiving to all who celebrate!

• SalesDogs Diagnostics: What type of salesdog breed are you? What kind of team do you have?
• Stationery Movie Quiz: Guess the movie from office supplies.
• Good Keywords: Free software for finding the right keywords. Also has a keyword primer for beginners.
• Get kid gift ideas by checking out Dr. Toy’s Best Products of 2007.
• We keep our lawn (front and back) as simple as possible. That way we don’t use up much water or resources to keep it in good shape. LessLawn provides tips on building a low-maintenance lawn.
• The 100 Tools Freelancers Can’t Live Without

• But they did not give up lists successful people who were told they would not succeed. [Thanks, Lifehack]
• Designing Sidekicks for Fashion Target Breast Cancer. A little wild for my taste, but a great idea and cause.
• 6 Lies about Creative Writing.
• 5 tips for giving feedback on creative work
• 101 reasons freelancers do it better. [Thanks, Freelance Folder]

Yuwanda Black wrote a two part (scroll down in both links) article sharing her 19 years of experience as a freelance writer. She shares wonderful insight that I’ve discovered in the past few years. Here is her list with my comments on some items:

1. Staying abreast of technology is crucial: Lucky this isn’t an issue with me.
2. Writing is a skill: I hear those “Duhs!” But we all write. We learned to write stories and reports in school, so that makes us a writer by profession? Sorry. No. It took me five years to get where I am today. Practice, study, learn, practice.
3. Freelancing full-time is not hard: Start doing freelance work on the side — don’t just quit your day job cold. Instead, build up your business on the side. I did that for five years before I went full-time freelancing.
4. Marketing is a skill that must be developed: This is where working on the side helps. I slowly added more clients without the pressure of wondering where my next pay check would come. I always keep my eyes open for opportunities even though I hardly have room to take on more. Things fall through. Projects end. You may want to drop a client that’s more trouble than it’s worth. I believe that freelancers who cut the difficult or incompatible clients are happier and end up with more assignments though it means losing some.
5. Employers don’t like to hire freelancers for full-time jobs: No thoughts here. Makes sense in some cases.
6. You can’t change your rates every year: Guilty. Not of changing rates, but my inability to quote projects. Some clients don’t have all the information or details of what they need me to do. I explain to them that since we can’t see exactly the work involved that I’ll have to quote by the hour. The problem is they can’t side aside a budget for writing work since hourly is ongoing. I’m still developing my skills in this area.
7. You must develop a niche: I believe this is true and spent a lot of time thinking about this. But I’m happy with my variety and lucky I have a nice amount of work though it’s not in a specific niche. Sure, I cover a lot of tech, but I also cover B2B, web design, newsletters and online marketing, education (not from a writing perspective) and games. Maybe it’s my nature not to fall into one thing. Since it’s working, I’m not going to go crazy working my way to a niche. If it happens, it happens.
8. Patience is a virtue: Definitely. Five years before I left corporate America for Meryl Co.
9. Retirement is not planned for: I’m working to change this. Investing in an IRA can help with taxes, too.
10. Longevity pays: “The longer you freelance, the easier it gets,” writes Black. I find this work easier than I did as little as one year ago. Practice, practice, practice.

Blurbs, testimonials, and quotes are a great way to promote yourself or your book as you let the clients and readers do the talking. No worries about sounding like a braggart. But there are good, bad, and tricky testimonials.

“This is a great book!”

“Joe did an excellent job on the project!”

Do these tell you anything? These are empty and generic quotes. Here’s one that’s an example of a tricky testimonial, but you wouldn’t know it:

“Jane is very reliable.”

This tells part of the story. The rest of the story… “Jane is very reliable in arriving late for work every day.” Makes it easy for someone who didn’t like the person’s work to avoid saying something bad. But in most cases, the employee wouldn’t use such a person as a referral. So referrals can’t be trusted 100% — another problem with the traditional job search process.

When reading book reviews in Amazon or elsewhere, you can tell which ones are the author’s friends. They’re short and empty. They tell you nothing about the book. It’s better not to have a testimonial than one like this, I think. What if a big name wrote this kind of blurb? The blurb is useless in terms of convincing you to buy the book, but the author’s association with the person could convince some people to buy it (that old “It’s who you know.”).

When asking for a testimonial after the person agreed to supply one, ask the person to answer this results-oriented question and the testimonial will more likely be valuable.

“What has [product or service] helped you achieve?”

The latest article from Roy Peter Clark of Poynter.com and author of Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer says it’s the 100th anniversary of the “blurb.” Since when do words get their own anniversaries? How do we know which ones deserve an anniversary?

A reader responding to Clark’s article wrote a great comment and an excellent example of a tricky blurb:

My all-time favorite came from a soft-hearted sportswriter who was asked to provide a blurb for a memoir by a washed-up and nearly illiterate professional boxer. His contribution: “Obviously a labor of love.”

You can make your testimonials more credible if you include one that’s not positive. Why would you want to include that? It shows you’re honest and human. But why would we want to show our weaknesses? C’mon. Everyone has weak areas and we might as well as be up front about them and earn credibility points.

I tried to get one from an editor on an assignment that didn’t work out. Even told the editor that I fully expected a testimonial that wasn’t positive. No luck. But then again, I understand because it would be difficult for me to point out something negative about a person’s work and then let it get published for all the world to see.