Freelance Writing – ArcticLlama

Actually, this is an online marketing guide for everyone, but it should be used extensively by freelance writers as well.

If you know anything about online marketing, SEO, or social networking (social marketing, to some) you know that there are tons of sites out there and even more ways to use those websites, services, and the like to market your freelance writing business online. In fact, there are so many different things that you could do that to learn about all of them would take so long that you would never have any time to actually earn money writing.

On the other hand, if you don’t do some of these online marketing things, you are taking the long, hard road to building your freelance writing business.  Worse, you are setting yourself up to eventually be passed by newer, savvier — but not necessarily better — writers who do skillfully use online marketing methods.

Avoiding this Catch-22 is not easy and doing anything with half-effort can do more harm than good.

How to Market A Writing Business Online

Right now over at the SEO website SEOMoz on is a post called The Noob Guide to Online Marketing.  It is without a doubt the most comprehensive and easy to understand look at the full field of online marketing and how the individual pieces worth and compliment each other.  As an added bonus for visual learners, it also comes with an enormous infographic (900 x 4246) that you can use to help manage the pieces that you bite off as you go.

Starting at Step 1 and marching on until you have reached the end is a good way to use up all of your writing time, so I don’t recommend blindly following through the entire way.  However, thanks to the layout of the article and the quality of the infographic that accompanies it, it makes for a useful roadmap to marketing your business online by yourself.  Best of all, these same qualities make it easy to start, stop, do freelance writing work, then come back and pick up on your online marketing plan.

Follow the link. Save the infographic to your hard drive. Use Zotero to take a snapshot of both webpages. Print it out.

Do it now.

This is the kind of article that people find out is worth something and it suddenly disappears or becomes available only to those who register or sign up for something.  That day is likely fast approaching so you want to have your own permanent copy that you can reference forever no matter where the original goes.

Happy Tuesday. Write well.

A professional freelance writer needs many different ways to find new clients.  The idea, of course, is to keep a healthy network of connections that can send prospective clients your way and keep that writing project pipeline full.  Unfortunately, that is easier said than done, which is why there are shelves of books about networking in the business section of your local bookstore.

Online networking via social networking websites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn offer easier access.  However, these networks can be much less personal, and therefore, much less powerful.  On the other hand, the volume achievable is much higher.  Either way, a useful internet based social network requires work and attention just like an offline network does.

Klout Score

I stumbled across something today that mentioned a service called Klout, which “measures” your clout on social networks.  Supposedly, those with very high Klout scores are sought out by businesses and marketers because of their high level of influence over their followers.

As it turns out, you can put your Twitter username into Klout and see what your own social networking clout is.

ArcticLlama has a Klout score of 11.

If that were on a scale of 1 to 10, I would be the greatest social networking marketer of all time.  Sadly, that score is out of 100, so I guess I have some work to do.

On the other hand, my website and my bio links at other websites where I have been published seem to drive most of my new prospective clients to me.  Either social networking is over-hyped and I should just keep focusing my efforts where I have been, or boosting up the ‘ol ArcticLlama klout score could lead to even more business.

Which do you think it is?

I’ve gotten some questions recently about setting up a home office for a freelance writer.  Truthfully, there isn’t much different about a freelance writer’s home office than most other home offices.  Basically, you’ll need a computer, Internet access, a phone, and a printer.  Those are common to just about any home office.  There are a few specialized writer’s needs that need to be taken into consideration.  We’ll discuss those here.  If you want to know about things like desks and chairs, try another Google search for basic home office setup.

Freelance Writer’s Home Office Setup

There are certain things that every writer needs.  These things are required whether you are setting up a home office or sharing a group office (aka working at Starbucks).  I’ll assume that you already have a supply of pens and notebooks that are both useful and fun to own.

Setting up a small home office for a freelance writer is more about getting everything a professional writer needs close at hand than it is about replicating the typical corporate office.  Just because you have to walk down the hallway to get something you print out when you work in a cubicle, doesn’t mean you should replicate that inefficiency for your home office.  On the contrary, you should be creating a writer’s paradise.

Most freelance writers are entrepreneurs who work alone.  If that describes you, then your office needs are simple and compact.  Don’t bother creating a space to meet people in.  As a freelance writer, there will be plenty of clients who want to meet with you face to face or to conduct conference calls with you, but there will never be anyone that wants to come over to your office.  Unlike other freelancers, it is common knowledge that writers often work alone and often from home.  There is no need to project some sort of big corporate presence to potential clients as a freelance writer.

Things A Writing Home Office Needs

The most important thing for a professional freelance writer is the ability to be comfortable writing for long periods at a time.  In the corporate world there are staff meetings, co-workers to talk to, bosses’ offices to report to, kitchens to visit, and water coolers to stand around.  At home, coworkers and bosses are an email or phone call away, both of which happen from the same desk you write at.  There are no meetings, unless you count joining your kids for lunch a meeting, and the water cooler and kitchen are quick stops on the way to or from the bathroom.

In other words, a freelance writer working from a home office sits in one chair, in one office, for the whole work day.

A work at home freelance writer sits the whole day in one chair in one office.

A writer’s home office needs a good chair.  Most people skip this and just throw in whatever extra chair they find around the house. Don’t make this mistake.  You will spend hours in that chair every day. It needs to be a good office chair.

This brings us to Office Depot, Office Max, Costco, and other places you may buy your desk chair from.  Read the description before you buy any chair. Just because it looks like an ergonomic chair doesn’t mean it is one.  Just because it looks like the chair all of the managers get at a Fortune 500 company office doesn’t mean it functions like one.

Before you buy a chair, read the description and the tag.  Before you read anything, know the terminology; it is not what you think it is.

Office chairs come in Light, Medium, and Heavy usage.  Sometimes chairs are rated based on Casual, Moderate, or Intensive use. If you are guessing that you probably need an office chair with the middle rating, think again.

Moderate use, in the context of home office supply stores, means that it is intended for people who plan to sit in it 3 to 5 hours. If you can make a living as a freelance writer working just three hours at a time, you have the highest rates in the industry.  Five hours is the minimum amount of time you will be spending in your chair each day as a full-time freelance writer.  Get a heavy duty office chair, or plan to buy a new one within a year.

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