The quaint hamlet of Scotia, nestled among Northern California’s tall redwoods, was the country’s last company town. Since 1863 the entire community was owned by the Pacific Lumber Company. After a 2008 bankruptcy, the town fell into the hands of a Manhattan hedge fund and residents weren’t pleased, but that’s another story. I used to ..
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I love buying books but I don’t like reading. Am I a hoarder? I came across that question in an online forum this morning. My first reaction was to respond, “Of course you are!” – which, by the way, was how most people had responded. Yet as the question soaked in a bit more, my ..
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- rbmanley /
- Creativity, Inspiration, Reading
With your profile and portfolio in place and signed up with an online service, you’re ready to start seriously hunting down work. Sites like oDesk, Elance and the others have fairly good ways to search for jobs. Among the writing jobs that I typically search, there are all kinds of subcategories or tags that help ..
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- rbmanley /
- Basics, Freelance career series, Freelancing, Marketing, Productivity
When you create your account with one of the popular freelance websites, you’ll be required to write some promotional copy about yourself, enter educational information, list jobs you have held and more. All of these things together, along with some work samples you upload, will comprise most of your public profile. The 80-20 rule governs ..
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- rbmanley /
- Basics, Freelance career series, Freelancing
While I don’t spend a lot of time browsing Quora, I do stop by about once a week. If you don’t know the website, it’s a place where people post questions to elicit answers from other users. It can often provide good inspiration for a blog post, like, ahem, this one. The question that pulled ..
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Once you have an online portfolio established, there are several places you can post work samples along with your resume and start bidding on jobs, the most popular and trafficked are: Elance (Now Upwork) oDesk (Also, now Upwork) Guru ifreelance Freelancer PeoplePerHour I’m sure if you look today, you may find others. However, in recent years there ..
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- rbmanley /
- Freelance career series, Freelancing, Marketing
I like to learn about the habits of very successful people and one habit they all seem to share is to read everyday. This surprises me because I picture these people being so busy that they don’t have time to read anything but briefs supplied to them by their aides and assistants. But that is ..
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/ 2 Comments.
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- rbmanley /
- Creativity, Inspiration
If you’re new to freelancing, the first thing you’ll notice is that clients have this very annoying habit: they want to see examples of your work. This means that prior to establishing an account at any of the online freelance sites, you need to have some kind of portfolio. I’m a writer, so most of ..
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- rbmanley /
- Basics, Blogging, Freelance career series, Freelancing, Publishing
Don’t ewe, er, you love homonyms? I almost made a mistake with the word rein today. Talking about a business group that wants to push back on some of the actions being taken by the National Labor Relations Board, I wrote the headline, “Group lobbies Congress to reign in NLRB.” I moved on to something else ..
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I expect politicians to use a lot of words and not say anything. But when I read an article online about something great Microsoft is doing for small business, I expect it to inform me. Back in the days of keyword stuffing, that expectation was somewhat unrealistic. But in the current Google algorithm ecosystem, writers ..
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