Category: Careers

Last Monday, I released a new e-course, The Geek Blogger’s Guide to Your First $1000.

The main reason I put out this guide was because I think it’s extremely helpful, and I want to give my loyal readers helpful stuff for free. But I also have an (ah ha!) ulterior motive here, and that’s to grow my mailing list. My mailing list is the best tool I have to keep in touch with you. And unlike with social media, it’s a quiet place where I can be more personal with my readers.

If you have a blog, you’ve probably considered growing your mailing list, too. Let me tell you that an opt-in incentive is the best way to do that. It’s free, but it still involves effort on your readers’ part: they need to agree to sign up for your mailing list. The result is you have a built-in audience who is willing to meet you halfway in exchange for your authority on a particular topic.

Here’s how I picked a topic, built a course, and automated it for my blog.

Survey your audience

My story really begins back in 2016. Otaku Journalist is more than seven years old now, and I know the audience now wants different things than it did back then, just like I like to write about different stuff than I did then. So I conducted a survey.

Eighty people replied, out of an estimated 400 daily readers. What I found was that readers who are engaged enough to do my surveys when I put them out are most interested in two types of content: my personal fandom experiences, and geek career advice. That told me that the most effective way to communicate would be using examples from my own life. It was around then that I started formulating The Geek Blogger’s Guide to Your First $1000. I originally was going to call it How I Earned My First $1000 On Otaku Journalist, but I eventually decided that was too specific. These are techniques I think will work on a variety of blogs, not just mine.

Write the darn course

Then, I put off actually writing the course for almost a year. “Growing my mailing list” is not as high up on my list of motivators as “making actual money.” So it wasn’t until two weeks ago, when I had an unexpected lull in my workload, that I sat down to tackle this.

The survey gave me a blueprint for the outline (five chapters each with a section on my own experiences, followed by a section on how to emulate them) so it was a matter of filling in the blanks. I wrote the bulk of the work on International Women’s Day, because I didn’t feel bad devoting most of that day to a personal project. For the remainder of the week, I devoted my post-dinner work hour to finishing up.

The resulting course is about 5,500 words and includes a bunch of screenshots, photos, and links to outside resources. It’s a little long for an e-course. My first course, the Niche Reviewer Crash Course, was only 3,000 words and has inspired over 1,000 mailing list sign-ups.

Set up automation

I can’t think of anything more irritating or inconvenient than to have to send the Niche Reviewer Crash Course, which consists of seven parts, manually to 1,000+ subscribers. That’s why I use Mailchimp’s free automation software.

First I signed into my free Mailchimp account and clicked the Automation tab. Here’s my Automation page, which has two active course series going.

First, I clicked the “Add Automation” button in the upper right-hand corner. I selected an Education → Course Series setup. Here, I clicked on a brand new one to show you how this works. By default, it starts sending as soon as somebody signs up for your list.

Only, I have two courses, and I wanted to give my readers a choice. So I made use of Mailchimp’s free List Groups tool. I set up two new groups, each named after one of the courses. Now, on my subscription page, you can select one (or both) courses in order to receive the e-course of your choice.

So you’ll see at the top of The Geek Blogger’s Guide to Your First $1000 automation, the trigger for receiving the first email is “immediately after subscribers join the grouping” of the same name. That keeps me from spamming this course to people who didn’t ask for it, while also showing me exactly how many subscribers joined to get access to this particular course.

I fed the course from the Google Doc into a seven-part email series, adding in links and photos as I went. At the end, I attached a PDF to the final email with a Google Analytics event listener in the link—now I’ll see how many people actually clicked and downloaded that PDF. In other words, the modifications I made are designed to tune me in with what readers want.

Build the odds and ends

All set? Not quite. There were still a few things I had to do:

• Add a new sign-up banner to the main Otaku Journalist page.
  
• Write the wording for the course page.
  
• Write a newsletter sending the course to existing subscribers.
  
• Write the blog post announcing the new course.
  
• Made a Facebook post, a tweet, and other small social things.
  

Finally, I finished all that, and activated the course automation on my Mailchimp dashboard early on Monday morning. I started getting subscribers right away, so it was worth it!

Setting up an ecourse definitely takes research and time. But the biggest plus in my opinion is that all the tools you use to launch it are free, so I don’t feel bad about giving it away. I hope this post inspires you to create an opt-in course of your own! Definitely let me know if it did, and I promise I’ll be among your first subscribers.

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.