Freelance Writing – ArcticLlama

Earlier we discusses finding writing jobs with the vast array of job hunting websites out there like Monster.com. Specifically, we discussed finding freelance writing gigs and writing job contracts on CareerBuilder.com. However, finding good writing jobs is not the only thing professional writers need to content with. Filtering out the wrong kinds of writing jobs, or more specifically writing jobs that you have already determined are not right for you, is just as important.

Filtering Writing Job Search Results

The first step in filtering out writing jobs that are a bad fit is determining what kind of writing job you are looking for. There are full-time, on-site, writing jobs. The benefit of these type writing gigs is that they come with benefits like paid sick time, paid vacation, health insurance, and 401(k) plans. The downside is that these are very much not freelance writing. These are straight up corporate jobs with a boss, and required work hours. There is nothing wrong with that, and for many writers the stability and steady paycheck of a "real" job is as liberating as the freedom of choosing your own work and making your own schedule is for other writers.

Contract writing jobs are difficult to generalize about. Some writing contracts are basically temporary full-time positions without benefits. The writer is expected to be in the office and work on-site during regular business hours for a period of weeks or months. Other writing contracts are essentially long-term freelance writing positions. In these cases, the writer may not even get a desk or office on-site other than some temporary work space. Instead, the writer works as a freelance writer from home, but either exclusively for one client, or part-time for one client. Either way, the work is ongoing and provides a steady paycheck, but does not provide benefits.

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Most job boards and career websites will also list temporary jobs. These are similar in nature to contract positions except that unlike contracts with a defined term and end date, temporary jobs continue until the writer is no longer needed. In other words, the end of the job is not defined up front.

Finding Freelance Writing Jobs

Unfortunately, the mainstream job listing websites are not really structured for freelancers. As a result, a freelance writer has to search through all the different job listings. Manually filtering out the writing gigs that don’t fit one’s writing business model can be time consuming and frustrating. Many writers give up altogether which provides opportunities for those freelance writers who know how to properly work the main job boards.

The key to being able to find good freelance writing jobs on websites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder.com and so on is to become adept at using filters. Filters are criteria used for job searching. Again, since these boards are not geared toward freelance writers, one needs to be creative in getting good job searching results out of the available criteria.

Be sure to start by clicking "Advanced Search" or "More Criteria" whenever doing a writing job search. Beware of trying to use the standard filters for temporary, contract, full-time, and part-time positions. Just like job hunters will find these career finder websites difficult to use properly, so will those clients posting the jobs on the job boards. As such, the person looking to hire a freelance writer to work on a project over several months, but not in a full-time or even typical part-time basis, might classify the job listing as contract or temporary, since neither really fits. Or, if there is not an actual contract, and if the human resources person doing the hiring has had bad experiences with "temps" before, they might not choose either putting the project in part-time instead. Finally, a project that may take 40 hours per week or more on an ongoing, but not steady basis, might be listed as a full-time writing job.

Instead, focus on using the Exclusion Criteria fields provided. For example, if you want to search for writing jobs, but not technical writing jobs, then use the advanced search exclusion options to filter out those jobs. Be careful how you do so, however, as you don’t want to accidentally filter out a great copywriting job that requires the ability to understand "the technical details of soap."

Finally, use exclusions to filter out repetitive job posters. Lately, the website Examiner.com has been particularly prolific in not just posting, but in re-posting its writing "jobs". Once you have determined whether or not writing for Examiner.com is right for you, it is annoying to have to scroll through 18 "new" jobs from the company every two or three days. Just add "examiner.com" to one of the block keyword search fields.

Do you have other advanced job search tips for writers? If so, let us know and we’ll share them here or check them out.

Good luck finding your newest writing gig.

Can Writers Benefit From Social Networking?

It seems like the bandwagon only bangs the drum louder with each passing day. You MUST be fully immersed in the world of social networking, and/or social marketing, immediately or else your business will fail and you will have only your stone age understanding of computers, the Internet, the cloud, and the 21st century to blame. You don’t have a Facebook page? Oh, no!

That is a slight exaggeration, but not much. Do any reading online or elsewhere and you are sure to find numerous recommendations that your business start using social networking immediately to increase sales, maximize profit, and even perform better customer service than ever before.

Of course, social networking cannot do all of these things. If it could, no one would bother with all of their other communications efforts. In fact, less than 2 years ago, the same bandwagon that now beats the drum of Facebook inevitability was banging the drum of Twitter inevitability. These days, Twitter gets plenty of love, but no one is calling it the next big thing anymore. Today, Facebook is the next big thing, and all of the things that were said about Twitter over the past 18 months are being said about Facebook now. Hopefully, that gives you some idea about what life is like in the Internet echo chamber.

Using Social Networking To Promote Your Writing and Earn Money

Just because posting on Twitter or creating a freelance writing Facebook page won’t make you rich beyond your wildest dreams, doesn’t mean you should ignore them. It just means that unless you are running a 6,000 employee corporation, there is no need for you to run out and hire a full-time social marketer or even to hire a social media consultant to help build your business brand name online. On the other hand, both Twitter and Facebook, and several other social networking websites can be a great way to help promote your writing and make sure that your articles, posts, and content are seen. In turn, that drives more traffic to your articles, webpages, and web properties that can be harnessed to earn more money writing for yourself online.

As a professional freelance writer, however, lots of free time to dedicate to building my writing brand online isn’t something that I am going to get. That means to build a successful social marketing campaign, I need to tweet, post, update, and friend as quickly and efficiently as possible without harming my brand or business image by engaging in frowned upon practices or outright spamming social websites just to get as many links as possible out there.

For me, the solution is HootSuite. HootSuite is an online application that started out as a way to manage multiple Twitter accounts. Over time it has developed into a full-fledged online social marketing service that lets you post, read, re-post, retweet, as well as tweet, update, and friend or unfriend across multiple social networking services all in one place.

I have a pretty strong technical background, but even if you are just a little bit technically inclined, you’ll be up and running on HootSuite in no time. As you get used to the service, you can add more accounts so that you can manage numerous Twitter accounts, multiple Facebook accounts, and even an army of Google Reader accounts. HootSuite also supports services like LinkedIn, MySpace, and more. Best of all, it’s all free.

I’m not sure how they plan to make money, or if they just plan to build something worth a bigger online company buying out, but for now, HootSuite is a one-stop social media manager that can let you build your online presence without robbing time from your writing business.

One of the toughest things for any professional writer, whether an experienced freelance writer or someone just starting a new freelance writing business, is to find new writing jobs. Even freelancers with a full project pipeline need to keep an eye on the future in order to ensure a steady stream of income from writing lest they find themselves evicted from the comfy work at home office and back into the faux-leather chairs of corporate America’s cubicles.

There are many ways to find freelance writing jobs ranging from using job boards and writing forums dedicated to freelance gigs and writing projects, to cold calling businesses and asking if they have any writing needs. Somewhere in between is using the major job websites like monster.com. (Here is your AP Style question of the day. Web addresses, or URLs, are not capitalized, but business names and trademarks are. According to the AP Stylebook then, should monster.com be capitalized [business name] or not [website address]? – I chose not to capitalize it because I am referencing it as the website and not the business and since this isn’t the Denver Post, I can do what I want.)

Find Writing Jobs CareerBuilder.com

One of the major job hunting websites is Career Builder. Career Builder came out after the success of Monster.com (that time it is the business name) and in many respects is simply an alternative service with approximately the same features. Think Google versus Bing, or HP versus Dell, or Coke versus Pepsi. With each of those examples, there are major differences between the brands and each company targets a different niche or consumer. Likewise, there are real differences between Monster.com and CareerBuilder, not the least of which is pricing for employers. Nevertheless, both sites work on the same model.

The problem with using big job search websites like Monster and CareerBuilder to find writing gigs is that they are not really tuned to the way writers, especially freelance writers, hunt for jobs. Just click on “Job Categories” to see what I mean. See “writer” on there anywhere?

This lack of attention to writing as a career means that writers have to do more than just type the word ‘writer’ into the search box and use the drop down boxes to limit the results. After all, writers can telecommute and work from home, and freelance projects are not always considered “contract” or “temporary”. Limiting a job search for writers by using those fields is a recipe for missing out on good writing gigs. On the other hand, just typing ‘writer’ with no limits is a one-way ticket to frustration.

The best strategy is to monitor the jobs posted for writers on an ongoing basis so that they can be quickly skimmed. A pair of human eyes is always a better algorithm than any computerized filtering. However, in order to not be a time wasting exercise, the once-over has to occur at short enough intervals. Fortunately, CareerBuilder offers email alerts with jobs for you based upon your searches.

For my small business, I set up two email alerts. The first alert email comes daily and limits writer jobs to the 30 miles radius around Denver. That way, I can pounce on local gigs. The second alert comes weekly and has no geographical limit. Obviously, this is a much bigger job list. I skim it ruthlessly to keep successful time management going.

Try setting a local and nation job posting alert for your writing business and see how it works out for you.

P.S. Keep an eye out for an upcoming post about what to do about “pest” employers who repost the same jobs over and over again clogging up your job search.

As we mentioned earlier, Yahoo has taken on the task of producing a “style guide” for the Internet. Those of you who are already in the professional writing business know about the different writing styles out there. There is AP Style, which is based upon a book by AP called The Associated Press Stylebook. Then there is the MLA stylebook and a couple of others as well.

For those of you not in the freelance writing business, the point of all these style guides is to fill in some of the language gaps that exist between the grammar manuals, like The Chicago Manual of Style, and the dictionaries of the world. These gaps come from things like fast moving technology or unofficial concepts or terminology that don’t rate a listing in either the dictionary or grammar manual, but that still have an accepted usage or spelling.

In journalism, which the AP Stylebook is the referee of, one of the common needs comes from reporting comments or briefings coming from official government sources. For example, should a reporter write, “Brigadier General Smith,” or should a reporter write, “Brig. General Smith,” or “Brig General Smith” (no period), or just General Smith (no need to split hairs on what kind of general).? — According to the AP Style Guide, under the heading Military Titles, the correct answer is Brig. Gen. Smith. (That is abbreviating both Brigadier and General, and with periods.)

What Is Yahoo Style?

If you know what AP Style is, then the next question is, “What is Yahoo Style?”

The answer is that even with the AP Stylebook throwing in its two cents on topics like whether it is e-mail or email (e-mail) there are still plenty of online and Internet related terms that are not covered in any of the style guides. For example, do I have to use the exclamation point on the end of Yahoo!’s official corporate trademark name? If so, do I use the apostrophe ‘s’ like I just did for the possessive of Yahoo!? (What about question marks?)

Furthermore, there are those who disagree with what AP says – I use email, for example – and also those who have never seen the inside of an AP Stylebook, but who still write online.

There is now a Yahoo style website you can check out if you aren’t interested in purchasing the book, which is a good thing, because until I see a freelance writing gig job posting that says, “Must be familiar with Yahoo style,” I won’t be buying the book.