Streak is an amazing, flexible (and free!) app that can be added to Gmail or Google Apps email accounts. The idea is that it lets you set up different “pipelines” (for example, a sales pipeline, or you can also set up one for tracking guest posting pitches) and then it gives you a pretty, easy-to-use interface that sorts the emails associated with particular “boxes” (with the client funnel example, a box would be a potential client name).

Honestly, at least as far as freelance usage goes, Streak pretty much takes the cake for a lightweight CRM that makes it super-easy to keep on top of potential client follow up. It’s better than anything else I’ve found to keep you organized in getting from “just pitched” to “sealing the deal.” I highly recommend it if you use Google Apps or Gmail, although I’d also still recommend using and maintaining a separate system (like Contactually) for keeping track of and following up with past clients or customers of your products/classes. (The Client Follow Up Action Kit can also help with that!)

Other notes:

• Their how-to on snoozing emails (bringing them back up into your inbox after a certain amount of time)
• Support documentation
• Download the iOS app here

Here’s an interesting confession for someone who now makes (at least part of) her living doing content marketing: I used to think I sucked at marketing. Like, really bad. 

Why did I think I was terrible at marketing?

I’ve thought about it since then and I think the main thing was that I equated marketing with sales. Both sales as in, getting on the phone and asking people for money (merciful Zeus, don’t make me do that), and sales as in, “if I was any good at marketing at all, obviously I’d be making like, six figures a year or more.” Neither of these are necessarily true for reasons I’ll get to in a moment, but first, let’s talk about my “come to Jesus” moment…

The outside perspective:

When I started interviewing for jobs last year, I got a surprise. I started out by applying to project-manager-esque jobs. Some account management, too, and I even applied for some office manager type jobs. And one of the places I had a phone interview for at an awesome company here in Austin, the HR manager pretty much changed my life. She said, “I’ve looked at your resume and you’re obviously really smart and talented, but I had one question: Why aren’t you applying for marketing jobs? That’s what came to mind for me when I looked at your accomplishments and skill set.”

Cue the record scratch.

Say what?! Someone who literally hires people for a living thinks I’m good at marketing? Well, huh. I have to think about this more.

In the next few weeks, I totally retooled my resume to focus on that part of my skill set, and soon, I had a job. Doing something I had previously thought I sucked at. And getting not only compliments from my director and boss, but getting results for clients. (Also, around six months after I originally applied to aforementioned company, I saw that they had a “marketing coordinator” position available and sent in my info for that…to be told my info would be passed along but that the position was probably too junior for me.)

As far as the idea of “sales” goes, I still hate getting on the phone and trying to do the hard sell. Honestly, I’d pretty much rather stab myself in the eye than talk to someone I don’t know on the phone. Instead of trying to force something like that, I generally go with the radiate and state the facts method, and it’s working pretty well for me.

As far as income goes, I think the main reason that I wasn’t making steady income before was a marketing issue, but not that I inherently sucked at it. I wasn’t applying myself to my own marketing and I wasn’t being consistent with marketing myself and my services. I think the main issue there is that I was so incredibly burned out it’s a wonder that I got through last year at all.

Getting better at marketing yourself: two suggestions

Believe in what you’re doing and avoid burnout

These might seem like two separate suggestions, but to me, they’re one and the same. It’s virtually impossible to believe in what you’re doing if you’re so burned out you can’t even think straight. Likewise, it’s impossible to market yourself if you don’t 100% believe in what you’re doing and the results you can bring to the table, and you can’t do anything well when you’re burned out.

I don’t have a pat answer for believing in what you’re doing. I know you do think you’re bringing value to the table, because if you’re here and reading this, you’re probably not the type of person that would try to sell someone snake oil. So remind yourself of that – save testimonials from clients, save nice things people say to you on Twitter, keep them someplace you can return to them, and remind yourself as often as possible that yes, you do rock at what you do.

Further resources for avoiding burnout: When you’re on the verge of crispy: a guide for the almost-burned out and The Kick Burnout Kit

Treat yourself as you would a client

Even if you’re not in the marketing field, I think this still applies. Why? Because you wouldn’t let a client’s projects sit on the back burner because you just “didn’t have time” for them, right? So why would you let your own business development sit on the back burner for the same reason? Give yourself and your business the same level of care and consideration you give your clients. Make sure you’re carving out at least two, and probably more like five (as a minimum), hours a week to think about your own marketing and how you can get better at it.

You might not like marketing but, fortunately or not, it’s a factor of doing business. And make sure to read the other posts in the July Word Carnival, Marketing without Marketing, which is pretty much this whole topic. Nobody likes to be “sold”. But professionals of all ilk have value to add to a product, service, or business. So how do you convey it without being a salesperson? Read the other entries here. 

There’s a phenomenon that drives me batty. I’m not sure if it’s caused by the rampant personal development market based around money blocks or what, but here’s what happens:

1. Freelancer/entrepreneur decides they want to make more money
2. They set a goal of $X/month
3. They bust their asses trying to reach the goal and…fall short
4. They can’t figure out why they fell short, so they beat themselves up and work even harder
5. …because they never did the math and realized that reaching that dream income is physically impossible

Here’s the thing: there’s only so much time in the day.

We all know that. And we all know we can only work so many hours or create so much in one day. But we don’t often think about that as it relates to our income. Here’s a few things to remember: 

• If your business is service based, you should probably plan for having 15-20 billable hours a week. (When you make your income goals/hourly rates based off of a 40 hour workweek, that’s often mistake #1.)
• If your business is consulting based and you only bill for time spent at appointments and getting to/from appointments, you should base your hourly rate off of having 10-15 billable hours a week, unless you are an extreme extrovert.
• If you base your rates off some other metric, then you still need to make sure it’s reasonable by doing some cold hard math.

For example: I don’t charge hourly for my writing services, I charge per word (partially because I write so fast that per-word tends to come out better for me, even factoring in for email and editing time). I know that 2,500 words per day is pretty much my max output. My current per-word rate is .12, so 2,500/day = $300.

What a lot of people would think here:

$300/day x 23 workdays this month = Holy crap, I can make $6,900 this month! That’s my income goal!

What is actually the truth here:

If I write 2,500 words/day, no matter how long it takes me, I don’t usually get much else done. I have one, maybe two hours of work time left. In that time, I need to: 

• keep my client funnel filled by following up with previous clients and potential clients, and pitching new potential clients
• work on my marketing by writing blog posts for this site & scheduling social media shares of said blog posts or of other useful content
• create this week’s newsletter and schedule it
• edit any pieces that need edited
• answer emails from readers and potential/current clients/customers
• send invoices and track income/expenses
• work on the content for any products and/or courses I’m currently creating/running (and for courses, answer participant questions, etc.)

And honestly, I’m probably forgetting things off this list. I could make that^ much money a month if I did nothing but work on client work all day every day…but if I did that, here’s what would happen:

• I wouldn’t have any product income coming in
• I wouldn’t have any class or course income coming in
• I’d be at the mercy of my current clients and when/if our work together came to a close, I’d be left without any interested parties to help fill that income gap (because I hadn’t been pitching or marketing)

No bueno.

More realistically, I can plan on working at max capacity for billable writing three, maybe four days a week. That puts my income cap at my current rate in the $4,000-5,400 range. (That’s gross, not net – it doesn’t take into account taxes, etc.) That also doesn’t take into account product and/or course income, which can be a pretty solid chunk of money. This means that right now, with my current business model and rates, creating the fabled “five figure month” or “six figure income” is pretty much impossible and I’m okay with that. 

“So that’s why I keep falling short. What do I do now?”

Did you do your own math and realize that, oh shit, your dream income is actually-factually out of reach? Here’s what you can do to fix that:

• Raise your rates. Obviously.
• Diversify your income streams. Make products, if you’re used to offering services, or vice versa. Experiment with sponsorship – Patreon or Passionfruit can help. Do a class (a one-off event people pay for) or a course (a longer, ongoing learning process, usually 4-6 weeks).
• Start delegating. If you look at the “all the other things that go into running a business” list above, you’ll notice that several of those items can be delegated. You can get started without hiring an assistant by delegating basic things like researching by using FancyHands (read my review of FancyHands here, one year update coming soon), and Zirtual can also help out here. Here’s some tips on delegating from the archives. Of course, delegating frees up more of your time, but it also costs money – so it’s important to keep track and make sure that you’re coming out ahead.

One of the most popular video reviews I’ve ever done (two of them, actually) were of Trello, a pretty nifty visual task manager. Given the guest posting course starting on the 21st, I thought maybe y’all would appreciate a little how-to where I show you how you can use it to manage your guest posting process (or an editorial calendar as a whole, though it’s a little harder to show that example without a team of people).

Notes: 

• Trello is free, with an upgraded plan for $5/month that includes more board backgrounds and stickers, larger attachment file size, and custom emoji
• Mobile app available for iOS and Android
• Here’s their article on how to turn on the calendar view – the “card aging” powerup might be a good motivator, too!

Not only have I been quoted at a couple of pretty awesome places as a resident expert and managed to get in Entrepreneur magazine last year, I have also worked HARO from the other side in getting quotes to use for articles at Grasshopper or KISSmetrics.

You know what I can tell you?

Most people are doing it wrong.

I have got emails (on more than one occasion) that made me scrunch up my face and say out loud to the computer, “I WANT TO QUOTE YOU. PLEASE DON’T DO THAT.”

That is probably not the reaction you want someone to have when they’re considering writing about your business.

But it’s okay, because you won’t when you know better. Which you will, when you finish reading this post. 

Want to improve your pitches and make it super-easy for people to feature your business? I’ve got three don’t’s, three do’s, and an example for you: 

Don’t give a too short answer

Answering a question is kind of an art. I understand, I do. But at the same time, people tend to reply to a query or question with either too short answers or too long answers – and too short or too vague is worse, because if a writer likes the quote, they can pull the information they need for the article from a longer quote. If it’s less than 50 words, it’s probably too short.

Another phenomenon that happens under this category is, “I’d be a great fit for this article because (reason). Email me if you want more info.” No, I will not, because I’m busy and you’re wasting my time.

(And if you’re a PR person trying to get press for your client like this, then unless your client is someone really impressive, your chances of getting a reply are next to zero.) 

Don’t give a too long answer

For the love of all things good and holy, don’t just respond with a wall of text. To write about you and your business, someone does not need to know everything about your business and personal history.

Instead, look at the question they asked. Answer that. As quickly as possible. Oftentimes there will be a maximum word count listed, because sifting through emails that look like this:

“Hi how are you my name is John and I started my business in 2005 with my ten years of widget making experience and…[insert 300 words here] …so that’s why I tried event marketing and it worked okay.”

Makes people stabby. Real stabby. And surprisingly, people can manage to write an excessively long email reply that doesn’t actually include the information requested. Don’t do that.

Don’t be slow to reply if they need more info

This is pretty simple: people are on deadlines. For the Grasshopper event marketing post above, someone replied that actually had a really interesting example of Twitter parties as online event marketing. I replied back asking for specifics and…didn’t get a reply for four days, at which point, the article was already in the hands of the editor.

Obviously, you can’t watch your email inbox every moment of every day, and you certainly shouldn’t for your own productivity’s sake, but if you’re actively pitching reporters and trying to get coverage of your business, you do need to respond in a timely manner if they need more information.

Do be specific

Writers love statistics. And they hate vague comments. If you’re vague in your response, chances are you won’t get quoted, because unless there’s something about you that is really, really intriguing (and it’s hard to be intrigued when you’re sifting through 50+ replies), it’s going to seem like more work than it’s worth to reply back with questions and then wait for answers.

Give me:

• numbers of what worked and what didn’t and by what measure it worked or didn’t work
• industries you’ve worked in or helped clients in
• specific tactics you did (see below)
• the how of your inspiration or strategy

Do give actionable tips

Readers like takeaways. They really, really like them. When you put actionable takeaways into your quote, you make it that much more likely that you’re going to get quoted, because any writer worth their salt would much rather quote someone who says, “Our business hosted a local meet and greet for people in our industry and then followed that up with an educational webinar. Doing this monthly as a marketing tactic raised our revenue by 120% in one quarter,” than someone who says “I used event marketing to grow my business 120% in one quarter.”

There’s a big tie in here with specificity, obviously, but you can be specific without being actionable, as the above example shows. Both things are crucial for a great quote. 

Do include everything they need in a copy-and-paste friendly format

Not just the quote, obviously, but include:

• a link to your headshot
• your Twitter username if they request it (honestly, it can’t hurt to include it either way)
• a short bio
• if applicable, a link to where they can find out more about your take on the topic (assuming you didn’t write a grievously short reply, it’s totally acceptable to say “I wrote more about this here” and include a link)

Assuming you sent them a quality pitch, this gives them everything they need to go ahead with the article without any further input from you, which is ideal from their POV.

An example:

For the marketing automation post at KISSmetrics, I put in this query to HARO:

Has marketing automation hurt or helped your business?

Do you use tools to automate your marketing? Has that helped or hurt your business? Looking for firsthand stories from business owners that have either experience a rise in profit and customer satisfaction after automating their marketing, or experienced those same benefits after stopping automation of your marketing. The article will have an emphasis on customer satisfaction and retention, so I’m specifically looking for stories dealing with those facets of business/sales. Please include details – statistics, if possible (i.e. a 25% increase in sales or retweets, a 55% increase in customer satisfaction), what kind of business you run, your name, and what site you want linked back to.

I got a lot of crappy pitches on this one, but Jordhy‘s was great:

Good morning, 

In response to your HARO query:  Marketing automation has increased my company’s sales by at least 60%. At first, I was very opposed to automating our direct mail efforts. I wanted to hand craft each letter for our potential business clients. However, after running some test campaigns the cycle became very clear to me: you start by sending industry-specific communications and then, when interested parties contact you, the pitch can be hand-crafted just for those clients. 

All and all, we now reach more clients and have better conversion rates. Customers are more satisfied because they don’t have to talk to a salesman over the phone when they don’t want to. It all boils down to picking the right type of automation for your business. 

(name, site, and contact info was here)

This is what he did right:

• he gave a specific statistic
• mentioned a way that they used it specifically (which had a clear tie in with my article) that could be turned into an actionable takeaway
• everything I needed to attribute was in his signature
• when I replied asking 1-2 follow up questions, he replied in 24 hours or less

It’s basically everything I mention above in action. That, my friends, is how you get quoted.

In case you’re new around here, one week from today is the two monthaversary of me returning to self-employment/freelancing/whatever. I got super, super burned out on working for myself, got a “real job”, spent almost exactly six months (closer to 6.5 months) working at a real job, and then returned to self-employment for a myriad of reasons.

To my surprise, I found the break incredibly energizing and it was easily the best thing I’ve ever done for my business. I went back to my hustle to find things taking hold a lot faster than I expected.

I’m not the only one who’s had the that experience:

Chase Reeves has talked about it on the Fizzle podcast (which btw is absofreakinglutelyawesome) and Liam at FreelanceLift also had a similar journey. Based purely on anecdotal evidence, I’m guessing it’s way more popular than the “job = failure” mindset would let on.

I’m not sure how universal the reasons are, but here’s why I’m really grateful I decided to get a job:

#1. It forced me to ruthlessly prioritize

I struggled a lot with not only some of the aforementioned mental health issues (more on that in #2) but what I found out later was a severe vitamin D deficiency (I know, it’s funny, you can make all the D jokes you want!) until April-ish. Basically, it meant I was FUCKING EXHAUSTED all the time. I was sleeping 12+ hours a night and still so tired I could hardly focus. I remember more than one point of being so exhausted that I just wanted to sit down and cry out of sheer frustration, like a toddler or something. After dealing with an 8-9 hour workday and a sometimes 2 hour commute, I didn’t have anything left; I was lucky to get 15-30 minutes of work on my own stuff done.

After the deficiency started to get corrected, I still didn’t have a whole lot of time, even if I had more energy. I would do the typical “steal a few moments here and there” thing – work on the commute, typing the  newsletter on my iPhone in Evernote and then adding it to MailChimp during my lunch break, but still, I had mayyybe 90 minutes a day to work. So you bet your ass I did work that mattered and actively moved my goals forward. I was a lot more likely to set and stick to both systems and priorities when I already had most of my day taken up.

#2. It got me out of a rut I wouldn’t have got out of on my own

I am a very stubborn, very independent person. I like to do things on my own, I hate asking for help, and if I can manage to slog through something the long and hard way without anyone else ever knowing I’m struggling, I most certainly will, thankyouverymuch. But that wasn’t working this time, with this problem (facing the worst bout of depression I’ve ever had in my life), and I recognized that.

Because here’s the thing: you can’t bootstrap yourself out of depression. It’s like trying to beat yourself to death with arms you don’t have. And then you keep running into jackasses who give you a hammer and say, “Come on, you can fix things if you just use this hammer!” And you’re like, “I DON’T HAVE ANY FUCKING HANDS TO USE THE HAMMER WITH, BRO.”

Anyways. I was in a bad spot. Looking back, if I wasn’t a suicide risk, I was probably pretty close to it. (And I hate saying that in public. I really do. But I think we need to talk about this shit. So I’m saying it anyways.) I didn’t even realize how bad it was until the worst of it had passed (which I think is fairly standard in those situations).

Either way, I had to get very, very far removed from the clusterfuck of stress about my business and stress about my life and depression and anxiety and so on, before I could:

• See how bad it was
• Figure out what to do to fix it

If I had stuck with a business model/service set/etc. that was clearly not working very well for me out of some misguided sense of “getting a job means you’re a business failure, man,” then I don’t know what would have happened. I seriously might not  be here today.

I had the exact amount of energy and motivation it took to realize how bad the situation was and take action to remove myself from it, but it was 110% up to me to get out of it, I wouldn’t have. The job did that.

#3. It reconnected me to my motivation

This one is easy: when you’re in a work environment that is not motivated by the same things you are, it’s surprisingly motivating. You want to not be there any more, so you can do things that are aligned with your motivation. And you’re really clear on what you’re motivated by and how you want to run your business when you’re around the opposite. Ta da. 

#4. It gave me a whole new view on the disconnect between my what and my how

Shenee wrote an amazing post about this – running our businesses isn’t just about what we do, it’s how we want to live. This is one reason that I know that an actualfax speaking career (as in, a career that is solely speaking), is not for me, because y’all? I’m kind of a homebody. I mean, not really, but I don’t want to travel 2-3 weekends a month. I have a dog and now a kitty and I’d rather be watching Doctor Who with them and my boyfriend instead of sitting in an airport somewhere.

This specifically relates to the day job because, for the last year at least, every time I do that “ideal day” exercise, it looks like writing, teaching, and speaking. Every. Single. Time. That’s what I want my day to consist of, in slightly different doses on slightly different days.

The way I had been focusing my business and money-making efforts, I was basically trying to subsidize the writing and speaking by doing project management and/or consulting work – which can be draining and is often a hard sell, since people know they need a project manager but they often ask for a high-level admin assistant instead and it’s certainly not as concrete of a set of tasks as being a writer. The idea being that eventually teaching and speaking would be the bulk of my income and I’d be able do away with the 1:1 services and write without worrying about making money.

My role at the day job was marketing focused and quite a lot of it was writing. One of the main reasons I was hired was because I’m a good writer. And of course, there’s always room for improvement, but I continued to get positive feedback both on the quality of my writing and on the speed of my turnaround time. Even though I knew that how I wanted to spend my day was writing and speaking and teaching, somehow I never thought – gasp – that I could like…get paid for the writing? With money? And basically have two sides to my business, the writing and the speaking/teaching?

Part of it is that ages ago when I first started freelancing, I did freelance writing, but I was working with not-great clients and content mills. I didn’t realize that I could write things I enjoyed writing and get paid to write them. I probably wouldn’t have figured it out without the job.

#5. It reset to a lot of bad patterns

This basically falls into two categories:

Money. Having consistent income – “you show up and we pay you every two weeks” (what is this magic?!) – got me out of a lot of bad money habits. It also let me know what it feels like when I have consistent income. Which honestly, isn’t something I was very familiar with before. It gave me time to know what it feels like to be regularly pretty much caught up on bills and to not feel like I immediately have to buy something nice (or, you know, food) if I make money, because for all I know it’ll be the last payment I’ll get for three weeks.

It also gave me an ironclad sense of what I’m worth. I knew what the agency’s rates were, that people were paying those rates, and that I was contributing to that. When I left, I was offered a crazy raise (166%, seriously) and not only did I turn it down (which felt really good and affirming), but it just confirmed knowing that I can get paid what I’m worth. My realization was, if I bring enough to the table that a very savvy profit-conscious business owner is willing to pay me that much to stick around, there is absolutely no reason I can’t make an awesome living on my own.

The second category is work. I never realized before how much work I can get done in 4-6 concentrated hours until I worked at the job. When I had work at home days, it wasn’t unusual for me to knock out a full day’s worth of work (for the job) in 2-4 hours. The day job also got me back into the habit of actually tracking my time, which thus far, has been really useful, and I think will continue to be useful in measuring progress against goals, my hourly rate, how long I’m working, etc.

#6. I learned to shut up and take the money

This ties back into #4 but isn’t totally the same. It also sounds really super unethical, so let me explain:

When I realized that I did want to go back to full-time freelancing, I thought I’d probably go back to the PM/consulting/classes/products business model. I started looking at marketing oriented gigs – because I did love most of what I was doing at the agency, just not necessarily everything else that comes with having a full-time job – and came across some writing ones. And I pitched them. And I started getting them. And I was somehow surprised.

When I set up my portfolio site, I imagined that I’d be getting work that’d be split roughly 50/50 between marketing work that included writing, and pure writing gigs. Two months in, everything is writing. I wouldn’t be averse to marketing work but I’m probably going to retool my portfolio to focus almost exclusively on writing, with mentions of marketing work and speaking coming very secondarily.

And the thing is, I haven’t been applying to just writing gigs. I pitch myself for marketing gigs, too. But while I hear back on roughly 40-60% of the writing gigs I send in my info for, I hear back from maybe 10% of the marketing oriented gigs.

It’s interesting because even though the results are so obviously disproportionate, I still have some hardcore resistance to calling myself a freelance writer. I still really want to throw in “and content/social media marketer.” I didn’t want to be “just” a writer. Initially, I was like “ew that market is so saturated and it’s going to be so hard to find gigs” and blah blah blah and yet, my experience has been the opposite.

I think the takeaway here is:

• If people consistently compliment you on something
• If something is easy to you
• If you hear “you’re such a good _____”
• If you do a couple of things but find that it’s a lot easier for you to get paid for one of them
• If you’re surprised that something is such an easy sell

Just shut up and take the money for it. Stop fighting. Work doesn’t have to be difficult and draining for you to get paid for it. You don’t have to spend ages convincing people that you’re worth what you charge. Sometimes it really is as simple as saying “I’m a writer, here’s my samples, let’s talk” to get paying work.

All in all, I’m really glad I “gave up” and got a job.

I had to do that to get to where I am now. It wasn’t always fun or easy, but it was definitely worth it. I have no idea why but I’m having a really hard time closing this post and I want to go eat dinner, so here’s a Teen Wolf gif to celebrate its return to TV:

MICHELLE OUT.

The summary of SumAll:

(see what I did there?) 

• It’s an analytics dashboard that doesn’t provide analytics on its own, but instead aggregates data from multiple other places (including Google Analytics, Paypal, Stripe, MailChimp, Twitter, and Facebook, just to cover the basics). This lets you see all your data in one spot.
• There’s a very full-featured free version, or you can pay $9/month for the upgraded version, which includes custom alerts, priority access to new features, and an account manager/expert to help you reach your goals.
• You can use SumAll to set goals, combine metrics, and use the mobile app to view your data, among other things.

Watch the video review to get a breakdown of what it looks like and how you can start to use it for your business.

The main way I use it is to spot patterns. In the video, I match my site hits to my daily number of tweets, and there is a clear and obvious pattern between the two. Of course, it’s always important to remember that correlation is not exactly the same as causation, but you will notice patterns when you look at your data in such an easy to use manner. You can then investigate the patterns further to see what factors are actually causing them, and learn how to leverage those factors to increase the important metrics in your business (namely, money).

You’ll notice a few clear outliers to look into: 

One of the days in June that was a clear anomaly, I was tweeting about my post on FastCompany (and one of the summer slump series posts, and the summer of systems bundle, and Instagramming on my trip *cough*). On another major outlier, I had buffered up several posts from others to share and was live-tweeting as I got caught up on Game of Thrones. So, you know, makes sense I wouldn’t necessarily be driving traffic to my site either of those days.

This is an example of why actually drilling down to the data is important, because sometimes the statistics won’t be related. You could happen to have a guest post at a high-traffic site go up the same day you decide to binge-watch Orange is the New Black and tweet about it, and then look at the dash and be like “Obviously I need to tweet 50x/day every day, because damn look at that traffic spike!”

Getting a clear view of the data gives you takeaways that you can use in continuing to build your business.

For example, here’s some of mine:

• There is a clear link between Twitter usage and site traffic. Which means that if I want to keep that link strong and/or increase it, I need to keep sharing my posts on Twitter and probably go out of my way to make sure there are specific tweetable lines in the post (like I did with this one) so that I can share the same post without just tweeting “[headline] [link]” over and over again.
• But at the moment, there isn’t necessarily a link between site traffic and sales. Before I spend a bunch of time working on strengthening the link between Twitter and site traffic, is there something else I can be better spending my time on, like oh say, pitching ideas that are going to lead to more work? Probably so. I could also work on making sure that traffic coming through Twitter converts to email subscribers at a decent rate by tweaking and testing the location of my opt-in boxes and the copy used in them.

I’d really like to be able to see the link between site traffic & email list signups, but I can do that via my other analytics tools. It would be really useful to overlay new email signups onto that same chart, so that I could see if the traffic that came from Twitter actually correlates to more email list sign ups or not.

Some kind of integration with Harvest (the tool I use for time-tracking, using that link gets you $10 off your first month) would be awesome too. That way, I could see if there was actually a correlation between working more or working more on certain tasks & making more money. For example, in the week or month after I log a ton of hours on pitching, do I make more money than the month or week previous? I can track all of this on my own (and I have been), but having it laid out in SumAll’s awesome interface would be great. I’m betting that probably won’t happen because it’s a pretty freelancer/service-based-business specific metric to track, but it’d still be awesome.

That said, SumAll is an incredibly useful tool with a great interface, and you certainly can’t beat the price-tag. I’d recommending signing up and setting up your dash, if nothing else, just so you have usable data to go back to in a month or two down the line.

As you may be aware, in mid-May I had the last day at my full time job and I went back to being a full-time self-employed person. Given that this came with fresh eyes (I’m going to do a post on things I learned by getting a job, eventually), and also came with a pivot in the services I’m providing (writing whereas before I was doing mostly consulting & project management work), I’ve had a few questions about how it’s going and I wanted to answer them.

I definitely feel like there isn’t enough Really Real Talk (TM) in the online business world, and I always love it when others do it – so even though it’s a bit nervewracking, here’s the no-holds-barred breakdown of my first month back at full-time freelancing:

Extenuating circumstances this month

Before we get into the data, it’s important to talk about anything that may have skewed the results of this month. The main thing is that I was either traveling or recovering from traveling for about half of this month. During the time I was traveling, I was spending my time writing the summer slump series and keeping up on client work, so I didn’t spend near as much time pitching.

This definitely meant that not only did I get less work done overall, I wasn’t moving people through my sales funnel as actively as I could have been, or spending as much time working on things like guest posts or my other marketing activities – so I’m guessing it had an overall negative impact on income.

How I spent my time:

I use Harvest to track my time. Even though I don’t bill by the hour, I track time spent on client projects (because I don’t bill hourly but I still have an average hourly goal to hit, and if I find myself not consistently hitting it, something needs to change), and as an experiment, I’ve started tracking the time I spend on my business, too, to make sure that that I’m not spending too much time on things like administration, email, etc.

I was pretty lax at time-tracking during the 10 days of travel, so these numbers are definitely not 100% accurate, but they broke down as roughly 14 hours of client work and 34 hours of work on internal/business stuff.

The internal tasks broke down as: 

• Just over nine hours spent on pitching projects, and 2.25 hours spent on meetings
• About 15-16 hours spent on working on my website and blog posts
• Just over five hours spent on email and administrative work (which would be great except I’m still horribly behind on my email, so let’s see if I can maintain that after getting caught up)
• About an hour and a half on social media (which I know is under-tracked because I usually forget to stop the timer for “writing” and start it as “social media” when I finish a post and go to schedule it)
• And then 2-3 hours on either biz-dev or project management

How I made my money:

• Products/classes, counting the guest posting class sales: $891
• Amazon Kindle income: $27.69
• Services: $1,313.50
• Total: $2,232.19 (my income goal was $3k, so I fell pretty short – but I’m not too worked up about it for reasons I’ll cover in the last section)

I had some unexpected money in the format of a gift, which was definitely helpful but isn’t counted in here.

Also notably, I did the math for my business expenses and they came in at a whopping just-over $500 – holy shitsnacks, Batman:

• Just over half of that was either spent on service provider fees (to the wondrous Nathan Briggs for some shop page template tweaks), on WordPress plugins, or on office supplies (a laptop stand, keyboard, etc. so I can work at a desk without turning into a 90 year old).
• About $90 of that was spent at coffee shops while I was working – which is still less than a coworking membership (although it doesn’t come with all the benefits that are associated with a coworking space).
• And the remaining $150 was spent between web hosting, SAAS-es (*deep breath* Improvely, Contactually, Google Apps, SendOwl, Coschedule, and Harvest), and my now-defunct Flexjobs membership. (I had paid for three months at once and let it expire as of Sunday.)

I’m probably going to be switching to another analytics program (Clicky or Piwik combined with Google Analytics) just because I know I’m not using Improvely to the fullest extent of its capabilities and at $30/month, it’s the most costly out of category 3 spending. The rest are pretty non-negotiable, though I haven’t been using Contactually nearly as much since installing Streak – but I still see it being useful for post-sale client/customer follow up, and will probably keep it around for that.

The summer slump series: breakdown

This deserves its own aside as it was largely an experiment in two things: 

• whether a post series is worth the effort (if it gets more shares, etc. than a standalone blog post)
• what kind of content gets shared the most with my audience

There were four posts:

• How systems save my business from the summer slump – a how-to post that covered 3-4 pointers in-depth
• Everybody hates dry spells: experiments in profitable planning – a “behind the scenes” type post
• Thirteen things you can do today to beat the summer slump – an action-oriented list post (which was just as long as the other posts, but more bullet-pointed & skimmable)
• Sixteen business owners sound off about how they avoid the summer slump – a “quotes from multiple people” post

In order of shares and traffic driven, they rank (shares via Coschedule, visits via Google Analytics):

1. Post #4, with 91 total shares and 96 visits
2. Post #3, with 20 shares and 65 visits
3. Post #1, with 18 shares and 57 visits
4. Post #2, with 12 shares and 22 visits

But, notably:

• I really hated pulling together the quote post. Holy bajeezus, it made me want to shank a unicorn. It was a lot of work.
• And although I was right in my theory that the people who were quoted in post #4 shared it, it only got 40 more hits than the first post (which I actually enjoyed writing), and if I’m reading my stats dashboard right, it was the only post that didn’t actually cause any email signups or store purchases.
• Post #3 was the best balance between something I enjoyed writing that still got shares & visits.
• I think the value in the post series will probably be more evergreen content than anything else.
• That said, the post I wrote last week got more shares and has driven more traffic than the whole summer slump series combined (181 shares, 215 visits), which leads me to believe I’m better off working on one-off posts (that do tie back into my larger content strategy) than doing another post series like this.

Which leads me to:

There doesn’t appear to be a hard and fast rule with my site where “XYZ content always performs better than ABC content.”

(I honestly guessed that the results from #4 would be about what they were, that #3 would perform really well, and was unsure how the other two would do.)

All in all, I didn’t get the kind of results I expected to get from the series experiment, but that’s still incredibly useful information to have going forward.

The forecast moving forward

The lessons I learned this month:

My low tier income goal ($3k) is very reasonable – which is great because in the past, I’ve made my lowest income goal too low, and wound up scrambling for money for bills at the end of the month even though I met it. This month was a little tight, but reasonably so, given that I spent a lot more money than I normally would have because of the trip (eating out pretty much every meal and splitting gas costs, etc.).

I need to lower my business expenses – but that’s doable, as discussed above.

Diversifying income streams is good! My product and class income was a solid chunk of this month’s income, so I’m very glad I’ve put a focus in my future marketing plans on creating more income that way.

The trip threw me off more than I thought it would. I don’t think my income goal was unrealistic for a normal month (and given June’s circumstances/my plans for this month, I fully expect to meet or exceed it), but it was a bit much for a month where about half of it was spent either traveling or trying to catch up after traveling and where I was also still ramping up my freelance practice.

Not really a lesson learned, but I already raised my rates for new clients, because I figured out by the rate at which I was getting pitching and accepted that I’d be working at an unsustainable rate. And I already got my first client at my raised rate!

I can’t find a spot to mention this but also: holy crap I was on FastCompany last month! That was awesome and definitely a highlight. (And that post got shared over 450 times. Woo hoo!)

Whew. That’s my exhaustive behind the scenes breakdown of June. Not sure if I’ll do another one of these next month but I hope it gave you some real insight on how my business works, and functioned as a bit of an antidote to all the smoke’n’mirrors that comes up when we talk about online businses.

Photo Credit: mayrpamintuan via Compfight cc

“I can hardly keep up with my own blog, why should I write for someone elses’ site?”

“I have to send in original content for a guest post? Why would I write something new?”

And my personal favorite, as discussed last week: 

“Why should I work for free? I have to put money in my hands now!”

Sound familiar?

Here’s my quick answers:

• Because it’s going to send future clients & customers your way, and also make you look like a total BAMF.
• Because the fact that they want original content means that you’ll be introducing your best shiz to a whole new audience who will be duly impressed by your post and turn into fans (and clients/customers).
• You should probably read that aforementioned post, but in the meantime: that attitude is what keeps freelancers stuck in the feast or famine cycle, and guest posting isn’t free work, it’s marketing. (And if you don’t have time for marketing, you need to revisit your business model and/or how you’re spending your time, ’cause honey you ain’t got a biz without marketing.)

I understand writing doesn’t necessarily come naturally to everyone. I’m lucky in that writing a 1,000-1,500 word blog post usually takes me three hours, tops, with editing and research included. Which is one reason I’m a writer. If writing a blog post takes you 6-8 hours or more (as it does for some people which is totally okay and nothing to be ashamed about), then it seems natural for you to take that time and effort and put it into your own content, instead of creating content that won’t even go on your site.

Of course, building your own outpost (by which I mean your brand, your site, and content on said site) should come first – always. That said, if you’re blogging semi-regularly, there is no reason you can’t be guest posting elsewhere as part of your marketing efforts.

Why give someone else (original) content?

I’m going to address this issue first, because it is far and away the biggest problem people seem to have with guest posting. There’s two answers here:

The fact that they want original content means they’re a site worth posting at.

In general, sites that republish content on a consistent basis are not very good sites to guest post at, and won’t be worth your time (no, not even the time to send in a piece of content that’s already been written). There are some decent site aggregators, but mostly, places that republish the bulk of their content aren’t going to drive a large amount of traffic or interested people your way, because they tend to not have large, dedicated communities or brands of their own. It’s always better to post at a place with an active community than one without, and most places that republish a lot of content or accept unsolicited requests to republish content don’t have large or active communities.

Yes, you are contributing to their site, blog, & business…but you’re also contributing to your’s.

The main reasoning behind this objection seems to come down to scarcity mindset. People feel like they only have a finite number of ideas and by giving one of those ideas to someone else, they’re actively damaging themselves. This is not true because: 

• You will always have more ideas for content. Creating things gives you more ideas for more things. I’ve written more the last month than I had in the previous six months and I have absolutely no shortage of blog post or guest post or video ideas right now. I have been blogging semi-consistently since 2008 (I’ve written very nearly 150,000 words on this site alone) and yet, I still have ideas.
• You are giving someone else (whoever runs the site you’re guest posting on) something of value (your high-quality post) but that’s okay because you’re not doing this in some sort of hippy-dippy gifting thing or even as part of a haphazard “well somebody told me I should guest post so heyo! let’s do one here!” way. (Right? If you are, well, I have a thing to fix that.) Instead, you’re guest posting as part of your larger content marketing strategy, which means that you’re getting something of value (email list subscribers, industry street cred, clients & customers) in return. 

Three ways to create better guest posts in less time

Now that we’ve covered the groundwork, let’s get on to three ways to make guest posting easier on yourself:

#1: Revamp your older content.

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you’ve got content that you can revamp. Didn’t I just make a big ol’ stink about sending in original content? I did, and with this suggestion, I’m not talking about doing light editing on a post and then sending it in somewhere else. Rather, I’m talking about taking a post of your’s that’s done well in the past (which usually means it’s a pretty solid premise) and repurposing that content in a way that makes it more suited to a different site or audience.

This post that I wrote for Puttylike is a do-over of this post from the archives (2012!). I took the business-specific tips from my post and turned them into more lifestyle-oriented tips for the guest post. I already had an outline to work off of, so the writing went quicker than normal, and the post went over pretty well with Emilie’s audience – I’d call it a win!

#2: Turn video or audio into a post.

If you don’t have any blog posts, do you have podcasts or videos you’ve done before? I turned this video into a blog post at Sarah von Bargen’s business blog (going up later this week). I hadn’t published that content before as a text post, so it’s still an original post, and it turned out quite nicely, if I do say so myself.

Also, if writing takes you an inordinately long time, you can ask a friend to interview you. They don’t have to know that much about your subject matter – just tell them what audience you’re writing for (or pick a person that’s part of that audience!), what you do, and let them fire away with all the questions. Record for 15-20 minutes, listen back over it later, and you’ve probably got enough content and ideas for two posts or more.

#3: Look at their archives for inspiration.

Have a place in mind that you want to post at? (You should, as a part of your plan, cough cough.) Take one of their top 10 posts and…

• Write a follow up post. (“Thirteen more things to know about XYZ”)
• Write a rebuttal post. (This one can be tricky, because you’re at risk of offending the blog owner. So instead of writing a post in direct opposition to a previous one, you can write it with a different spin, from a different angle, from an industry specific angle, etc.)
• Write a post covering the latest research, on that same topic as the popular post. (“What the newest research on XYZ tells us and what that means for your ABC”)
• Use it as a general jumping off point for content brainstorming!

The fact that it’s based off of a popular post shows the blog owner that you’ve done your research, and it makes your post more likely to be successful (because other posts on the topic performed well, your’s should too). Definitely a win-win, especially since it can decrease your content creation time drastically if you’re always getting stuck in the topic/headline/brainstorming phase.

And there you have it – I hope it makes writing your next guest post easier!

If you want to create your own results-getting guest post strategy, check out the class that starts July 21 – we’re going to cover the entire process and write a post together in class. Not to mention, you can get hands on editing & pitching assistance. Check it out & sign up here! 

Today I’m beating the business community’s favorite dead horse: working for free.

TL;DR: Never try to get free work from people. And don’t work for free. Except for on rare occasions, when you actively choose to. Confused? It’ll all become clear: 

Uncomfortable truth #1: If your business needs free labor to grow, your business model is broken.

If you, as a business owner, need someone consistently working for you (I’m not talking about a one-off service trade, I’m talking about 10+ hours a week, every week) at a rate that doesn’t even cover their basic necessities, then one of two things is happening:

• You don’t really need them working at that low of a rate. You just don’t want to take a cut to your own payment or your profit margins while they learn the ropes – which is what a good leader would do. If you don’t believe in your business enough to take a pay cut for it, why should someone else? 
• Your business model is fundamentally broken. Period, full stop.

I see a lot – a lot – a painful amount, really – of people posting contractor positions that require an ungodly amount of skills, talents, and experience, and the expected pay is $10-15/hour. When called on it, sometimes they cite tight budgets, sometimes they just get belligerent and say it’s better than minimum wage.

But that rate, for a non-employee, is effectively minimum wage (or lower), because after taxes, insurance, and work expenses are taken out, you’re looking at roughly half the hourly rate (maybe a little more), which translates to a take-home pay of $5-10 an hour. For an educated, skilled worker.

(Not to mention that a lot of these postings actually cross over into employee status – see this post for more info. Also, read this post on interns, because unpaid interns are another pet peeve of mine. This also doesn’t even touch on the fact that minimum wage, for most areas of the country, isn’t a livable wage in the least, but that’s a whole ‘nother ballgame for a whole other stadium.) 

I recently listened to a great interview with Simon Sinek (the “Start With Why” dude) where he talks about leadership styles. He mentions Jack Welch, CEO of GE, who is apparently a Wall Street business idol (and sounds like kind of a douchebag). He contrasted Welch’s leadership style (cut the “bottom” 10-20% of employees every year, whether their performance over the last several years had been good or not, generally putting a lot of pressure on employees, etc.) with the leadership style of James Sinegal (former CEO of Costco).

Costco is well-known for their stance that the minimum wage should be increased, and its average employee pay is $21/hr – almost three times the federal minimum wage. Sinegal was often criticized by Wall Street for putting good treatment of employees & customers ahead of pleasing shareholders, and his whole management style was based around the belief that treating employees well creates a culture where customers are treated well – thus, business growth.

The kicker? During Welch’s tenure, GE’s value rose 4,000%; during Sinegal’s tenure, Costco’s value increased by 5,000%. Proof that ethical business can pay off.

If you need to hire someone to grow your business: pay them an ethical rate, take a pay cut in the meantime if necessary, and train them to bring more money into your business. If you can’t do that, you need to evaluate your business model, because something needs to be fixed.

Uncomfortable truth #2: If you don’t have time/energy for marketing, your business model is broken.

One of the common contributors to the “I can’t pay, but…” phenomenon are sites looking for regular (read: weekly or more) contributors. They say you’ll get exposure by writing for them, and that should be payment enough, thank you!

Two pertinent facts:

• At least 95% of the people who approach you (or are actively sourcing workers) and say “we can’t pay but…” or “we can’t pay much, but…” are going to be huge honking pains in your ass until you get frustrated and give up.
• I have had some actually-converting-to-mo-sales-mo-money exposure that’s come from essentially working for free.

The freelancer-slash-self-employed community loves to condemn working for exposure. And it’s totally valid. Especially because, as mentioned, people who have that attitude are almost always entitled assholes. I would certainly neverever tell someone who was a graphic designer to design things for free, or tell a web developer to code a whole site from the ground up, all in the name of exposure.

But here’s the catch: marketing, done right, is essentially working for free.

Good marketing gives people a taste of what you have to offer and how you can improve their lives. It takes time. And energy. Illana spends what must be hours a week in her Facebook group (sign up on the sidebar here to get access). Halley does the same thing with her group. I have no doubt that their time has a measurable ROI (the main reason I decided to work with Illana was because of her group), but they’re still doing some free consulting every week – every day, really – in those groups.

Sometimes, the lines between “marketing” and “free work” are blurry. And sometimes, we’re so jaded by all the assholes looking for free work, that we refuse to do anything remotely resembling free work, even if it’s actually marketing.

Which is where this issue intersects with the “your business model is broken” issue.

I’ve heard people sniff dismissively and say, “I don’t have time to do free work [i.e. marketing] – I need to be working on things that put money in my hand!” That mindset is what keeps freelancers stuck in the feast or famine cycle. If you literally do not have the time in your day to market yourself and still meet your income goals, then you need to raise your rates, because marketing is a part of being a business owner and/or freelancer, whether you like it or not. 

I’m a writer by trade. It’s what I do. I could easily view writing guest posts as working for free, but I do it anyways – because I categorize it as marketing and I see very clear, tangible benefits as a result of my work there.

This post has already resulted in paying work (not even three weeks later) and having written at FastCompany is a huge credibility booster that I’m fairly certain has been the tipping point in another two or three clients deciding to work with me (again, not even three weeks later).

When it comes to marketing, look for your highest leverage activities, and do what feels good.

(More often than not, those two are the same.)

If you have less-than-no interest in marketing yourself, you’re honestly (and I say this without snark) better off getting a job – whether that’s remote work as a full time employee or being a full-time contractor (just make sure you’re actually a contractor, and not an employee – here’s that useful rundown again). But whatever you do, please don’t look at a marketing opportunity and pooh-pooh it as working for free, and don’t encourage others to do the same.

If you’re ready to come up with a marketing plan that incorporates a results-getting guest post strategy, check out the class that starts July 21. If you’re curious about guest posting as a marketing tactic and want to learn more, keep checking back – I’ve got two more posts queued up for ya!