Online marketing that works
Freelance writers make lots of mistakes, especially when they’re starting out online.
Mistakes are useful. They’re fertilizer for entrepreneurial growth. They keep you learning and moving forward.
However, if you fail to make the right mistakes — and to learn from them — you may as well just keep your writing as a weekend hobby.
You want to make the mistakes that teach you how to build a better writing business or show you things you only learned because you were reaching.
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Writer’s block feels like the end of your world.
Firstly, there’s the frustration — not being able to do something you love, that normally works like a dream.
Like getting into your finely-tuned, lovingly-polished car, turning the key and hearing a pathetic splutter. Or hitting the ‘Jump to Lightspeed’ button and watching the stars just sit there while the TIE Fighters close in.
Secondly, there’s the professional anxiety. If you’re an author, will you meet that deadline? If you’re a copywriter, can you still cut it for your clients?
Last and worst, there’s the identity crisis.
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Welcome to The Lede.
Every week I’ll be digging up and linking to stories, news, and opinion relevant to online marketing and copywriting.
Email, social media, innovation, SEO, productivity, mobile, conversion, publishing, and everything in between.
No commentary, just a fast, single page of headlines that you can grab, scan, and squeeze for all they may (or may not) be worth.
All right then, on with it …
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Every writer who has ever lived has lusted after ideas.
Where are they, how do I get them, and how do I keep them coming?
If you’ve been writing long enough, you know that — like Solomon — there is nothing new under the sun.
Try as you might to sweat them out of your head or pull them gently from the stars above, there are no new ideas.
So, relax.
But the page is not going to write itself, is it? Where then do we turn for ideas that work, ideas that move, ideas that persuade?
In short, we steal them.
TweetShareGood writers should get paid for their work. It’s as simple as that.
If this is what you want to do professionally, then you should be paid for it.
A dirty little secret of this business is that many writers that earn a full-time income by putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, aren’t any better than the writers who don’t make a dime.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
Let me be clear, you’re not going to find any “get rich quick” ideas in this post. But those writers that earn do have a secret weapon …
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Imagine you’re having a discussion with a talkative, hyperactive teenager.
The conversation goes something like this …
We went to the mall, and like, there was this fire in the mall. And we went from there to the movies, but we didn’t have any money and anyway the popcorn machine was broken, and so we didn’t really want to go to the movies without popcorn. But right after that we went to have some pizza and there was this creepy guy outside the store. But listen to this — because that’s not the best part. The best part is that Sylvie dumped Josh, and like, they ran into each other in the street …
Annoying right? Then why do we so often write our web copy just like that teenager talks?
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