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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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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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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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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Every book and blog on productivity tells us to create a to-do checklist for every day. These are very important for the freelancer, yet I think a more subtle and important truth is being lost. The quality of the “person” making and executing the to-do check list is more important than the list itself. In ..
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Last month my wife and I checked out an exhibit at the First Gallery in Nashville that featured the illustrations Maira Kalman did for a new edition of Strunk and White’s “Elements of Style.” That’s not exactly a book that one would consider working with as an illustrator, is it? Kalman’s illustrations are often funny and ..
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These things drive me crazy: Two spaces after a period, and Tabs used to indent paragraphs. I do a lot of editing and unfortunately there are many who think that the folks who have developed word processing software haven’t figured out a way to code these formatting conventions that we used to have to do ..
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This one is for all the idiots who think they can get the world’s best copywriter at a pay scale that would embarrass the night shift assistant manager at McDonald’s. Check out this screen shot: Some guy in Chicago wants a copywriter who will breathe some sales life into his dead art glass website and he ..
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