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Free e-course: The Geek Blogger’s Guide to Your First $1000

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Freelance can be unpredictable. This week, I’m swamped with paid work. Last week, not so much. And since last Wednesday lined up with International Women’s Day, I decided to use my excess free time to build a new woman-created project I’ve been thinking about for months.

Now it’s here, it’s free, and it’s called The Geek Blogger’s Guide to Your First $1000. It’s part auto-bio, part how-to, of how I figured out how to get this blog to become profitable over the years, where profitable does not mean “wealthy” but does mean “gives back more than I put in.”

Get the course!

This guide is for you if you:

  • Have (or want to begin) a blog about a topic you totally geek out about. Passion is a huge part of my monetization process!
  • You want to make an income without being sleazy or alienating your audience. Look elsewhere if you want black hat or grey hat methods.
  • You’re open-minded and willing to do the work in order to get something back. Each of these methods involves effort up front, but I think they are worth it.

Mailing list members should already be well-acquainted with this course if they want to be, because I sent it out to my 500+ current newsletter subscribers last night.

If you’re not on the mailing list yet, you can get the Geek Blogger’s Guide to Your First $1000 as a six part e-mail course delivered to your inbox over a week if you sign up here.

Whither the old course, the Niche Reviewer Crash Course? You can still opt in for that. I’m using MailChimp to organize all this, so now, when you subscribe you the mailing list you can select one or both courses to receive when you sign up.

I put a lot of work into this course so whether you’re a current subscriber or new here, I want you to have it. And if you like it, be sure to let me know!

Get the course!

How I find new writing jobs

If you’ve been reading my monthly income reports, you know that I’ve seriously increased my writing output, and it’s been paying off.

Whenever I find an income stream that works, I want to share the wealth with my readers. The same way I did when I discovered the surprisingly un-scammy world of affiliate blogging. So today I’m sharing exactly how I get freelance writing work most often:

I ask former clients.

This is the number one most likely way to get new work. Former clients are people who’ve hired you before, so they know what you can do. If you did a good job before, it’s likely you will again.

If it’s been awhile since you worked with a former client, you can give them a reason, but you don’t have to. I do if it’s relevant. For example, when I wanted to start working again with a client who commissions me to write tech tutorials, I was sure to let them know I hadn’t been in touch lately because my job as a web developer, learning new tech skills, had been taking all my time! I definitely think that tidbit worked in my favor when they decided to hire me again.

I ask other freelancers.

In a lot of fields, you’ll find that freelancers are very territorial and won’t share gigs. Not so in online writing. News sites and blogs need such a massive amount of content in order to drive traffic, it’s more than one person could possibly do.

Take my work at Forbes. I am one of hundreds of bloggers there, and the company is always looking for new ones. So when fellow writers ask me how they can work at Forbes, and I think they do good work, I forward them to my editor. Asking nicely will get you far! Insulting your fellow writers, like this Tumblr anon did, will get you nowhere.

Facebook communities.

An aspiring writer who is just getting started in his career asked me where I find new writing work. I considered all my original leads, and it turned out that for all my current jobs except for anime sites, I found them through a woman-only Facebook community! It’s a community for women writers that’s invite-only, and because it’s exclusive the leads are great.

I definitely think invite-only Facebook communities are the way to go. They’re invite-only to keep people who aren’t very invested out, and if you’re serious about writing you’ll definitely pass the moderators’ vetting process. Here’s a great selection of exclusive groups for writers to start with.

Always check your LinkedIn.

When I tell people about this blunder, it sounds like I’m exaggerating. But I really missed out on a $4,000 reviewing job because I forgot to check my LinkedIn for an entire week.

I have “writing and editing” listed at the top of my LinkedIn bio. Because of that, people looking for writers sometimes send me in-mail, which I usually never check. A lot of the time it’s stuff I’m not interested in, or doesn’t pay well. This time it was the exact opposite! And by the time I checked a week later, the website had filled the position. Don’t be me. Get your in-mail forwarded to your email, or set up alerts.

Local meetups.

Sometimes I find jobs this way! But not through local meetups for writers. Writers can give you leads to jobs, but rarely are they looking to hire anybody themselves! So instead, I go to meetups in the field I want to find writing jobs in.

For me, that’s WordPress. I go to meetups for people interested in building WordPress sites, learning to manage business blogs, and stuff like that. A lot of the time, the organizers or people who are attending are looking to pay for content for their blogs. And sometimes, they’re looking for web design, which I also do, so these meetups are doubly useful for me!

But I avoid cold calls.

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten a job from just calling or emailing a client outright. So I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone.

Instead, I’d suggest returning to my second step, asking other freelancers. If you know somebody, or know somebody through somebody, who works somewhere you’d like to work, ask them about the best way to contact a potential client. Some prefer, for example, that you provide three potential pitches for topics you could write about in the first email.

Have you ever gotten a writing job in one of these ways? Or perhaps a different way, even an unusual one? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

The worst business advice I have ever received

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Last year around this time, I attended an energy healing session.

This requires some context. I had decided to put renewed effort (and capital) into my business, and I was working with a pricey business coach. Her online business model was smart and succinct, and she was doing incredibly well for herself. So when she provided a free energy healing with the coaching package, I figured I’d give it a try.

Fast forward to me on my couch, a phone to my ear while the energy healer directed me and five other women to “raise your hands to the sky and feel good vibes flowing through you.” Over the course of an hour, she walked us through breathing exercises, told us about our past lives (“Your ancestors are grateful for the career you’ve chosen,” she told me, maybe not realizing I write about anime), and cleansed our “aural grids,” whatever that means. By the time the hour was over, some of the other women were eagerly signing up for follow-up sessions, which run to the tune of $300 an hour. Me? I was vowing to never tell anyone about it.

Honestly, I got nothing out of it, and felt sort of stupid I even attended. And yet, I can’t write it off completely—my business coach, who is wildly more successful than me by every measure, swears by her regular energy cleansing sessions. Maybe focusing on your spiritual outlook first helps other people succeed at business, but not this skeptical atheist.

This may have been the only such session I’ve ever attended, but certainly not the only one I’ve heard about or been invited to. I’m not sure why, but the narrative of business success (for women especially) is tied to the spiritual. Perhaps it’s because women are encouraged to “have it all” and strive at every aspect of their lives in order to feel successful at even one thing, so mental health, “self care,” and fitness are all tied to having a brilliant career.

Now that I’m getting over my embarrassment, I want to say this is some of the worst business advice I’ve ever received. And I feel that even well-meaning, non-superstitious people believe it.

Here’s some more pseudo-psychology advice that hasn’t helped me at all:

“You can leave your work at the office”

At one meeting for local women entrepreneurs, I met a shaman. Her day job is going out to the wealthy suburbs of DC to burn candles and ring a bell to “purify” McMansions. We were talking about taxes until it became clear she was in a much, much higher tax bracket than I was.

By this point, I was almost thinking, “Sign me up!” But there’s no way I wouldn’t erupt into giggles between sutras, because I think this is all bull. Just think of how amazing this woman is, being able to do all this with a straight face. She really believes in her work.

I have no problem parting rich people from their money, but without that devotion, I would just feel like a fraud every day. We spend the majority of our time working. If you go into work that directly opposes your belief structure, you’ll be depressed even after you go home.

“Build it and they will come”

A lot of business and life advice for women centers around “putting an intention out into the universe.” Create a vision board of your dreams. Chant personal mantras. Write your goals on a piece of paper and burn it while meditating into the flames. You get the idea.

Frankly, I don’t think the universe gives a shit about what I “intend” to do. Last month I launched Asuna, my first WordPress theme from scratch, and since then have sold exactly one copy. Time to double down on daily affirmations? Probably I’d be better off, you know, advertising it.

“How you do something is how you do everything”

I heard about a woman who charges thousands to train people to run races in order to increase their earnings, stating the correlation that lots of successful people run races. By that logic, I should be rich—I ran two 10K races and four 5K races last year.

The idea is that if you can put the time, effort, and capital into running races, you’ll discover that you have renewed endurance to put into your business. But I’m not sure there’s a connection. Some of the times I’ve earned the most money in my career have been times when every other aspect of my life was falling apart. I once had a period of emotional stress in which I stopped eating. I didn’t really notice what a wreck I was until I attended a conference for work and the promotional fanny pack (long story) they gave me to wear slipped down to my ankles. And yet, I was doing pretty well as a careerist, getting lots of bylines and recognition for my work.

It is certainly easier for me to work hard when I am happy and healthy. But whether I’m good or bad at other aspects of my life doesn’t transfer to whether I’m good or bad at my career.

“Fake it ’til you make it” 

Haha, I have imposter syndrome. I will not attempt to sell a service or product until I am at least twice as qualified as I need to be.

Different things work for different people, but none of this advice has worked for me. If I had to boil down what has worked for my business is one word: persistence. I go back to my work every day. I try a variety of techniques, including some of the events and programs for women entrepreneurs listed here, which you may also find sort of questionable. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I fail, and sometimes I try something so dumb I vow not to tell anyone (except only all of my readers, a full year later). I decide if it’s for me or not, and move on.

Photo by Claire on Flickr

December 2016 Monthly Income Report

Most of the time I feel like Schrodinger’s Freelancer: I’m both doing pretty well and one step away from bankruptcy. Any time I’m working, I’m fine. Any time I’m not, I can’t relax because what if I never manage to get any work again?

This was fine in 2016, but as the new year arrives, I’m making some changes. I am going to eliminate some of the parts of my freelancing career that give me unnecessary uncertainty.

The first thing I did was spend some money. This doesn’t look like much, but I spent almost $700 on business expenses in December. It started on the 23rd when ALL my websites went down! I then spent the rest of the holiday trying to figure out why. I spent three hours on Boxing Day on the phone with Bluehost (note: this is my affiliate link!) trying every possible fix, from disabling every plugin and non-basic theme, to updating the PHP version, to refreshing the WordPress core files.

Troubleshooting with Bluehost wasn’t my first choice for how to spend the holidays, but the longer I stayed on the phone, the more I realized why I’ve been a Bluehost web hosting customer for seven years. More than anything else, I appreciate their tech support. There’s hardly ever a hold time, there’s no song and dance with a robot, and the technicians treat me like a person and acknowledge that I know my own sites best. So when we finally reached the conclusion that I needed to upgrade my Shared Hosting plan ($6 a month) to my own Virtual Private Server ($18 a month), I realized that I was actually comfortable investing this much money now. And sure enough, this was the fix I needed—I had exceeded my traffic and memory limits for shared hosting, and that was the issue.

My next expense was MUCH cheaper—Quickbooks Self Employed is having a sale right now, and it’s only $5 a month for the first six months. I’d been on the fence for a long time, but after reading Nicole Dieker’s review on The Billfold, I finally took the plunge.

Since 2013, I have tracked my business income, expenses, and estimated taxes in a Google Spreadsheet. It’s free, and I figured it was all an organized person like me needed. But Quickbooks is already eliminating the double-checking I have to do for stupid financial mistakes. With my spreadsheet, I have to deposit a paycheck, check for it to appear in my bank account, and then correctly write down the amount and date it arrived. It takes a lot of mental energy because if I accidentally wrote $450 and the check was for $475, I’d be unwittingly committing tax fraud. This is why the IRS audits self-employed people more than anyone else.

Quickbooks syncs with my bank account (it’s an Intuit product so if you have Mint, well, it works exactly like Mint) so I don’t have to worry about getting my accounting wrong. When the paycheck arrives, I mark it as business income, attach a PDF of my invoice, and I’m done. The best part is that it calculates my quarterly estimated taxes, so I can do less math. I usually spend the year wondering if I paid too much or too little in taxes, but I won’t in 2017.

This month has also been momentous when it comes to income streams. Notice I changed the legend. Now that I quit my day job, I divided my “freelance” income (formerly medium blue) into two parts—my web work and my writing work. It looks like web work is still my biggest income slice right now, even if I am back to working on projects for clients.

I’ve mentioned before that the Amazon Affiliate program pays me on a three month delay, so the paycheck that made this pie chart, around $500, was was I earned in October. In December, I finally met a goal I’ve had for a long time—I made $1000+ in one month. I didn’t know if I’d meet it, since my sites were mostly down from the 23-26 and I made about $2 that entire time! Now, my goal is to make four figures every month in 2017. If you want to start, too, here’s my free guide.

I worked really hard this December, compared to usual. I worked on my birthday and Christmas, which are usually days I’d rather take off. Ideally, this means that January should be pretty comfortable, but like I said, it’s little comfort to Schrodinger’s Freelancer, who needs to work on adjusting to living without a safety net, AKA a salaried job.

How did I do on my December financial goals? I finished launching my “business venture,” which I revealed to be my Asuna WordPress theme and my new freelance web design business. I bought gifts for everyone for around $400 which felt like a lot, but family and friends are worth it. I did not even TOUCH Gunpla DB, oops.

My January financial goals are:

  • Master Quickbooks and start making it work for me.
  • Pay estimated taxes and mail out my 1099-MISC forms to my subcontractors ahead of schedule!
  • Forget about work for just a few days. I’m taking a small vacation with some friends in late January, and I’m going to do my best not to touch my laptop during that time.

Happy 2017! What are your financial goals?

Previously: 

Meet Asuna For WordPress

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asuna-oj-border

Kicking the week off with an announcement about a brand new thing for you: my first premium WordPress theme, Asuna. Named for a generally likable character, Asuna the theme has something for everyone with intense customization features that offer three layouts and thirteen color change options for a near-infinite number of looks. Naturally, she is also mobile-ready, utilizing the WordPress Twenty Fifteen mobile menu designed to be reachable with just your thumb.

 

The story of Asuna begins in September, when I was building a new affiliate blog and realized I was going to need to code an entire child theme to establish all the new styles I wanted to add to its overall look. I thought, what if bloggers could implement a lot of out-of-the-box customization options without writing any code at all? It’s not just a plus for blogging beginners, but for people like me who don’t want to design a new site every time they want to start a blog.

asuna-illustrator

This is the initial design I came up with in Illustrator. I wanted to have multiple layouts and a mobile version out of the box. I liked bold black lines, but eventually realized that it’d be more convenient if users could change those areas to any color they liked. Check out the customization page of the demo to see how easy it is to alter the final product. And you’ll probably want to, since I am selling it with just some basic colors and no image attached—I’m not entirely sure I can legally sell a WordPress theme with a picture of an anime character on it.

Even so, I wanted first and foremost to build something for anime bloggers since I’m one myself. The result is a theme that doesn’t make you worry about its maintenance or looks. It allows for big responsive images and all three layouts have wide blog areas that put your writing first.

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Nobody codes a site alone, and I have plenty of thanks to give to the people who helped me dream up a premise and bug-test. The way these people were there for me, I’d like to be there for Asuna buyers, so definitely let me know if you have any questions or comments about the theme. I plan to release more themes after this one (all named after anime characters, of course) so your suggestions may end up inspiring my next design.

This is a really exciting day for me! I’ve built lots of theme customizations but this is my first theme from scratch. I used a very basic platform called Underscores to get started, and the rest came out of my brain. Working as a developer for a year definitely gave me the confidence to get more technical. More than anything, Asuna was a joy to build, something that had me obsessively tweaking even on Saturday night. Check it out and see if you like it, too.

P.S. I’m also taking this opportunity to soft-launch my web design business, which will launch officially in 2017. If you’ve ever been interested in working with me, here’s how to do that.