Well, I know you’re probably not ready for another list post after that mega list of writing links I posted yesterday, but I’ve been meaning for a while to share with you some of the tools I use online. You probably already know that I’m a knowledge collector and experimenter with shiny new web stuff. In my bookmarks, I include a ‘tools on test’ folder, which is all the stuff I’m trying out. What’s more important, however, is my ‘tools I use’ folder and I’m sharing some of those tools with you today.

Five Top Tools for Writers and Bloggers

Every Time Zone

Every Time Zone tells you what time it is in every time zone in the world. I work and collaborate with clients and bloggers in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, South Africa and more and I’m hopeless at working out what time it is in different places. This tool does it for me. I also take advantage of the multiple clocks functionality in Windows 7, so I can see at a glance local time, Eastern time and European time (those are the ones I need most often.

Online Stopwatch

Online Stopwatch is a simple way of timing a job. I like the fact that I can pause it if I take a break to make a phone call or look something up online. Sometimes I use it to make sure I’m keeping to the time I’ve allocated for a job. Time is money, after all, and I need to make sure that when I quote, I am accurately reflecting my time investment.

Workflowy

Workflowy bills itself as a ‘brain organizer’ and it’s true that it works well with my creative process. It’s a planning tool. I outlined one of the ways I use it in Book Planning with Workflowy on the Authopublisher blog.

Copyscape

Copyscape. I really couldn’t do my job without this plagiarism checking tool. It’s a good way of checking that posts offered to me haven’t been plagiarized or that content written by a new team member has not over-relied on research sources. (Believe me, that has happened, and Copyscape allows me to send it back for revision before it gets anywhere near a client). I’m an honest person and this ensures that anything that leaves my desk (even if not written by me) or is published on my blog meets my ethical standards.

Trunk.ly

Trunk.ly is a great way to save all the stuff I share. I know people rave about Evernote, and I have flirted with Springpad, but Trunk.ly makes it easy. I just link in my blogs and social media accounts and it aut0matically collects the stuff that I share and presents it in an easily accessible format. There’s a bookmarklet, too, for on the fly tagging and saving of research sources. Update: Since I wrote this, Trunk.ly has been acquired by Delicious, so I’m on the lookout for a replacement.

One Trick Ponies

There are a few other tools I use that do one thing well. I probably use these a couple of times a month.

• Replace smart quotes with straight quotes – useful to avoid that ugly Microsoft Word gobbledygook in posts.
• Remove line breaks
• Strip HTML tags
• Aspect ratio calculator – useful for working out how to resize images or videos to fit a particular height or width.

So these are some of the tools that support my writing. I hope you find them useful, and if you have any favorite tools, please share in the comments. I’m always ready to try something useful.

(Image: scjody)

As part of my never-ending quest to learn new things, I recently signed up for Enhanced Freelance, a new course/forum run by Thursday Bram and Jennifer Kentmere. I asked them both to tell me more.

Jen, Thursday, can you give us a snapshot of your background?

Jen: I trained in management, specifically project management, in the public sector in the UK – I did one of those shiny graduate development schemes where you get parachuted into different departments and thrown head-first into projects. I learned a lot but it wasn’t for me. I started my own business in 2008, and marketed myself to small business owners who needed help organising their businesses. Now I mainly write, but I still put my ‘consultant hat’ on from time to time.

Thursday: I freelanced all through college, but after I graduated from college, I figured that I had better get one of those real jobs that everyone seems so enthusiastic about. I started searching for a job that would let me keep using my writing skills. I actually found one of those jobs after just a few weeks of looking. But I hated every minute of it — I lasted less than a week before quitting.

So I went back to freelancing. It took me a little while to ramp up to a full-time income (maybe eighteen months to match what I would make working full-time for an employer), but I’ve been so much more happy without having to deal with an employer.

What’s your logline/elevator pitch?

EnhancedFreelance gives freelancers the help we need to up our game.

What makes Enhanced Freelance different from every other writing course and forum out there?

Thursday: EnhancedFreelance is different from the forums that we’ve used and participated in over the years — first of all, we’re geared more towards freelancers who have been in business for a little while. We’re not here to get people started as freelancers so much as help freelancers move forward. We’re also geared very much towards building better marketing and business practices. We’re open to all freelancers, not just writers, because there isn’t a lot of intermediate or advanced level information available for freelancers in general.

What’s the one thing you hope an experienced freelancer will get from Enhanced Freelance?

Thursday: One of the big things that I want experienced freelancers to get from EnhancedFreelance is the ability to implement a lot of these strategies a lot faster — it’s not impossible to go out and try out each of the strategies we talk about on your own. I know that because for the past several years, I’ve done exactly that. But trial and error can be expensive in terms of both time and money and I know I would have loved resources that would have let me skip that.

Jen: I’d like it if members felt they had a new focus for the way they do business, particularly if they’ve felt a bit stuck in a rut, which will either allow them to make more money in the same amount of hours, or to be able to get back some work/life balance.

Do you have a vision for Enhanced Freelance? What is it? 

Jen: I love the idea of a community where we can all get together and inspire each other. I already have a handful of freelancing friends who do this, I’d love to be able to replicate that with our members.

Why are you limiting the numbers/closing applications so soon?

Jen: We want to focus on the members we have and make sure we can give them all the attention they would expect. We’re a new site, so we want to ask for feedback from existing members to make sure we are doing things right before opening it up again in the future.

Thursday: We’re planning to reopen on a regular schedule to add new members as we can integrate them and support them. That, of course, has to be balanced with adding new content to the members’ area.

I’ve been a member of Enhanced Freelance for a few days now and can confirm that it has great articles and worksheets on several aspects of running a freelance business. These help you to work through the issues you face so your business will improve. The course will be closing to new members on October 21, so if you want to be in at the start, check out Enhanced Freelance now! (Yes, I signed up as an affiliate because I know Thursday’s work well and have followed her for years. Here’s my disclosure.)

Do you want to have a location independent business, but have no idea where to start? Would you like a sustainable business that lets you help others and see the world too? If you’ve been waiting for something to help you make the leap, then you’re in luck. Brooke Ferguson of Business Backpacker has launched the Business Backpacker Video Course  to help you do just that. Here’s what Brooke has to say about the course:

This program is different than anything you’ve ever seen.  The program you’ll learn here is 100% Sustainable, Repeatable, and continually builds upon itself.  The knowledge you will gain in this program will help you attain everything you want right now, and show you how to continually redesign your life to get better and better results.

Sounds exciting, doesn’t it?  But it gets better! One lucky reader can win the whole course for FREE! (Thanks, Brooke.)

Since I like to keep things simple, all you have to do to enter is leave a comment below saying why you’d like to win the course and how you think it can help you to achieve your lifestyle and business goals.

In seven days’ time – on October 8 – I’ll randomly pick one person to get the course. So don’t wait. Check out the Business Backpacker Video Course and leave your comment below to win!

Update:  We have a winner – Allena Tapia – congrats!

I’m always a bit sceptical about tools that claim to improve your grammar and, as a result, your writing. Maybe that’s because I’m a professional writer with an excellent command of the language and its rules. (I even know when it’s OK to break them.) But I couldn’t help but be intrigued by Grammarly, which claims to be ‘the world’s most accurate grammar checker’, so I decided to check it out. After all, it couldn’t possibly be worse than Microsoft Word’s tool, could it?  According to the site, 300,000 students as well as international business people and bloggers are using it to provide:

• 150+ Grammar Checks – Check your text for the proper use of advanced grammar rules. Get accurate error explanations.
• Plagiarism Detection – Find borrowed text before it gets you into trouble. Automatically generate references.
• Vocabulary Enhancement – Use words that make an impact. Liven up your sentences and improve readability with context-optimized word choice suggestions.
• Contextual Spell Check – Spot correctly spelled words used in the wrong context. No more embarrassing typos like then-than, to-two-too, lose-loose.

It can also check citations, and features an in-line editor.

Grammarly in Action

Here’s what happened when I put it to the test.

I pasted a 900 word blog post into the checking window, selected ‘blog post’ as the type of content I was checking, pressed the review button and waited a short time. It found 53 issues, each of which had a pop up card with short and long explanations of the grammar point being flagged. You could even vote on whether the information was useful before moving on. How many of those did I agree with? Here are the notes I made as I was going along.

• Incorrectly saw the ‘in’ in LinkedIn as a preposition at the end of a sentence – perhaps that needed to be added to the dictionary.
• Pronouns – though I didn’t agree with the error it highlighted, it indicated that I could have omitted one pronoun.
• In one sentence, it didn’t pick up that picture was being used as a verb and flagged it incorrectly.
• Grammarly correctly found one missing comma around the phrase ‘of course’.
• Then to the spell check – it didn’t recognize blogging ( in this day and age, come on! ) but at least it offered the option to assume the word was correct.
• Did plain text need a hyphen? Perhaps!
• It didn’t pick up my bullets on copy and paste so incorrectly flagged lower case letters.
• Some people might find the tips on word choice helpful, but didn’t do much for me. When I described something as beautiful, that’s what I meant, not beauteous, divine or lovely.
• Perhaps where I used good, I could have replaced it with brilliant or nifty.

Out of 53 issues, I agreed with 3 or 4, and I loved the ability to save the grammar report as a PDF.

Testing Academic Grammar

My second test was with a dissertation excerpt ( the other categories are academic essay, report, book review, research paper, presentation and business document). It found very few errors, disliked the use of square brackets and ignored Harvard referencing which is common in UK academic institutions. However, it did give examples of how to fix the references using three forms of referencing common in the US. This would be extremely useful to students, who often struggle with this area.

I performed the test again on a piece of writing I knew was flawed (I won’t say who it came from) and it correctly identified spelling and punctuation errors (though I would have loved to see some word choice suggestions. For this person, who struggles to write clearly, Grammarly definitely has some potential benefits.

Good Grammarly Features

Things I liked about Grammarly included:

• being able to see a summary report with one click – there’s a link at the top of the screen
• as much or as little explanation of errors as you can cope with
• the plagiarism checker – I checked this with a post I knew had been scraped and correctly identified it as 100% plagiarized, though it didn’t find the original source
• the fact that you can choose from several different types of documents.
• the ability to ask questions about grammar points from the review screen via a pop up form – answers appear on http://answers.grammarly.com/
• the online grammar handbook – http://handbook.grammarly.com/
• the grammar checker is better than the one in Microsoft Word, in my opinion

Who is Grammarly for?

Most of the writers I know write too well to need a tool like Grammarly, but as a teacher, I knew plenty of students and beginning writers who could have used the help. Like other tools of the type, Grammarly isn’t a substitute for knowing the rules yourself, but if you’re a poor writer, it can help you improve. A year’s subscription will set you back $7.95 a month, but there are 20% increases for quarterly and monthly plans.

Don't let the summer affect your writing - or vice versa - by planning properly.

I’m sat writing this at 7.00pm on Sunday evening and it’s sweltering. At least for the UK, it is, anyway – it’s 24 degrees centigrade outside at the minute, a drop from 28 degrees a few hours ago.

Although I was away this morning and unable to do any work at all, this afternoon I’ve put things off and put things off, primarily because of the weather.

It’s not so much that it’s too hot to work – hey, I’ve holidayed in Turkey at least half a dozen times in the last few years and it’s between 40 and 50 degrees centigrade – but that we don’t often get the chance to sit outside in the sun, so I’ve been making the most of it.

This got me thinking about the coming weeks and months, as well as summers from previous years and I realised that there are three steps every freelance writer needs to take to ensure that they are fully prepared for the summer.

1. Have a money reserve you can use

A substantial amount of business see a decrease in traffic / footfall and sales during the summer months, due largely to the fact that there are less people actually looking to make purchases due to people being on vacation and just generally spending more time in the sun relaxing.

Due to the summer being a slow period, it’s important that you have a type of money reserve that you can use, as chances are you’re going to either see a temporary drop in projects or you’re not going to get paid as promptly as you may have hoped or even as you had before – if there’s just one person who signs off business expenditure, you may have to wait until they return from their break, for example.

I’m not saying that this is going to happen every time and to every freelance writer, but it’s always best to be prepared should it happen to you.

2. Spend more time pitching and networking

As summer is very often a slower time of the year when it comes to business, you are more likely to have to step up your pitching and networking efforts to secure new projects.

You don’t have to spend hours extra each day trying to find new clients, but if you rely on a regular turnover of clients, you may find it difficult get any type of confirmation from a pitch or networking method due the person being on vacation.

3. Ensure you have enough time to deliver

While I would recommend that you increase your efforts to secure new clients during the summer, it’s important that you understand it could backfire and you could be left with a number of projects all with a similar completion date, resulting in you spending more time than you had initially planned working throughout the summer.

It’s because of this why, although things might seem slightly more relaxed during the summer, it would be advisable to ensure you are more organised than normal, making sure that you give yourself enough time to complete every project that you believe you have a good chance of securing.

What’s also important to keep in mind here is the fact that you’re likely to head off on vacation at some point yourself and so you need to be certain that you’ll be able to meet any deadlines set that occur during your time away.

Personally, I try and not let going away have an effect on my clients and although I do tell them I won’t be around, I ensure that all projects are completed before I go away, as well as giving myself a few days after I return to not have to meet any deadlines, simply so I can ease myself back into work.

However, I do know that other writers work differently, not taking on any work at all for a few weeks while they have a break and this works fantastically for them.

The summer can be a great time for anyone and a particularly inspirational time for a writer.

I love doing as much as possible outside during the summer, but I do now understand that unless you plan properly, it can affect your work and it’s why I make every effort, by implementing these three steps, to ensure that the delivery of the writing services I provide is unaffected – but also fits in around my own needs – during the summer.

Image:  Ed ward (Flickr)

We all use or have heard of Twitter and blogs, but what other online resources do you use?

I’ve talked in the past about how important it is to be actively using various online resources, such as blogs and different social media websites and that by contributing regularly, you’ll do nothing but bolster your online presence and further yourself as a freelance writer.

Take Twitter as an example of an online resource.

Both Sharon and I are on Twitter (@SHurleyHall and @itsdansmith) and both of us use the resource regularly.  Sharon may be the more active member and the one who engages on a more frequent basis, but I know that we have both seen the benefits – as I mentioned a few weeks back, the way I came about writing for Get Paid To Write Online is because I saw Sharon was looking for a blogger via Twitter.

Whilst I don’t use Facebook for business purposes myself, I do use it for business for several clients and I know that if it’s utilized properly, it can be a particularly useful resource for any business.

Couple this with my interaction on several blogs, a love for LinkedIn, Digg and StumbleUpon and a relatively new discovery of the joys of Reddit and I like to think that I use a good, varied amount of online resources to engage with others and promote my services as a freelance writer.

And then I realised the other day that I’m actually only using a tiny percentage of what’s available out there.

One of the problems with being self-employed is that your finances aren’t secure and you tend to always work towards that elusive point in your career where you’re earning a sum of money on a regular basis that you’re comfortable with.

Doing what you can to reach this point, when you start to get close, you begin to focus intently on what you’re currently doing, with the thought that if it’s worked getting you this far, a little bit more time will see your efforts push you towards your goal.

Although I’m not at my current ideal monthly income goal just yet, it is getting closer and over the last few weeks I’ve found that I’m focusing more on resources such as Twitter and LinkedIn to help me bring that income goal closer.

Whilst good in one sense, the issue with this is that, to a certain degree, I’ve started to ignore what other resources are available for me to utilize, somewhat naively, as although it might take some time to be able to implement these new resources initially, it could bring my income goal within reach a lot quicker than if I just carried on as I was.

And it’s for this reason why over the last week in particular I’ve started to look at what else I could be using.

I’ve come across Quora, the question and answer website; Tumblr, a blogging platform and I’ve rediscovered Technorati and del.icio.us – I used to use them a lot several years ago, put them to one side temporarily and never restarted their use.

Assuming that you already use the primary online resources that we talk about regularly, most notably Twitter and blogs, what other online resources do you use and more importantly, do you find that they help you as a freelance writer?

Image:  alanagkelly (Flickr)

by Courtney Ramirez

Successful content writing is about two things – using the right keywords and creating engaging content. And the second part is where research can really stump you. There are dozens of ways to find the right keywords and in many cases your client is providing them. But where do you go to find great research to create engaging, compelling and (most importantly) accurate content?

The truth is – it can be hard. With websites like ehow.com and other content farms paying writers a pittance to produce keyword rich content, even the simplest of keyword searches can produce poorly written, barely researched and inaccurate information. It’s gotten to the point where the first page of Google is completely unreliable for some keyword terms.

In addition, it can often be hard to get information from the right perspective that fits your client’s needs and individual perspective. Take global warming for instance. If you’re working on an article from a client that is coming from a conservative point of view, how are you going to find the right resources that support that view?

Fortunately, there’s a new search engine that has solved both of these problems for me, and I hope you get a lot of mileage out of it as well. It’s called Blekko.com and despite the funny name (it reminds me of trying to give my kids medicine) it has some great features that make it an excellent research tool for writers who care about accuracy and perspective.

Blekko.com is good for search for two specific reasons. First, it is being heralded as the world’s first “spam free” search engine. The team at Blekko actively works to eliminate spam from their results. In fact, they have completely banned a list of 20 sites from their search engine results that are considered to be content farms (see the list). This reduces my search time significantly because I don’t have to wade through dozens of results from AnswerBag and other similar sites. If you see a site in the listing that isn’t appropriate, you can click the “spam” link and it will be removed from your personal search results.

On top of this, Blekko categorizes results with what it calls “slashtags” – these take a little getting used to but are really helpful when you get the hang of it. A slashtag is a way of classifying information within the search. So for our “global warming” search, we’d use “global warming/conservative” and Blekko pulls up a list of results from websites with a conservative point of view. The same goes for /liberal or /ecofriendly.

Slashtags can also help you organize information by date, which is critical if your content is related to a specific event and you need to get the latest. Other slashtags can be used to narrow down your results to specific websites (like /youtube if you want to see videos on the topic).

Finally, Blekko makes search easier for me because I can create a customized list of my own slashtags with websites and resources that I prefer to use. While I haven’t used this feature as much, I look forward to exploring it more.

There’s a lot of bad content online – so it’s important to choose your sources wisely for creating the original and engaging content that your clients are looking for. Give Blekko a try and it might make your writing process easier. Be sure to watch the intro video and you’ll be using slashtags like a pro in no time.

Courtney Ramirez is owner and head copywriter at Six Degrees Content, where she blogs about content marketing and connecting with search engines and readers. Follow her on Twitter @CourtneyRamirez or @6DegreesContent.

Google rocks my freelance writing world and I love them for it - is that such a bad thing?

I love Apple. I love Microsoft. I love Google.

I’m probably what you’d call a corporate…ahem, right?

Don’t get me wrong, I do my bit to support smaller organisations and I steer clear of any company that I truly believe isn’t providing a benefit to their customers or is in some way impacting in a particularly negative way on others, but when the big guys make things so easy, it’s difficult to not get sucked in – and to a certain extent, be in awe of them.

Of all of the large organisations that I use, Google is arguably the one I spend most time with.

Most people know Google as simply being the world’s most popular search engine, but the truth is that they offer over four dozen primary products, all of which are available for free – and that’s without looking at their more specialist ones.

The reason why I love Google is that ever since I discovered that they are so much more than a search engine, my freelance writing career has gone from strength to strength. It might just be a strange coincidence, but I like to put some of my success to date down to the following five products that are offered by Google.

1. Gmail / Googlemail

Simply put, I don’t think I’d be able to work without my Gmail account.

It might sound like a bit of a melodramatic statement, but I organise my whole day, week, month and year through Gmail, including both my personal and work lives.

What I like most about Gmail, aside from the fact it seamlessly integrates with a lot of the other products I use, is that I can set it up so that it retrieves my e-mails from my other accounts and allows me to view and reply to them from my Gmail inbox.

Some might think this isn’t a major selling point, but for someone who has three or four different e-mail accounts with various providers, I can safely say that the fact I can check them all in one place is a massive plus for me.

2. Calendar

To be a success as a freelance writer – or in fact in any vocation – I strongly believe that you need to have your working life in some type of order and for me, Google calendar meets my needs exactly.

I know plenty of people who live out of their paper calendars / diaries, but it just never works for me, largely because it means I have to carry around a diary with me wherever I go, along with everything else.

With the online calendar, I can schedule things whilst I’m actually at my computer, sync it to my iPhone and keep up-to-date with what I should be doing wherever I am.

3. Reader

I love reading blogs and getting involved in discussions and whilst I’ve got a small number that I visit regularly, there are dozens that I like to check in with when I get the opportunity.

To keep on track of all of the blogs that I follow, I use Google Reader, a service that not only allows me to see which blogs I’m subscribed to, but which gives me the title and a snippet of the text every time a new post goes live from the blogs that I’m subscribed to.

Plus, it gives me recommendations of blogs that I should follow, which is a fantastic feature and one that’s allowed me to discover some particularly useful and interesting blogs.

4. Alerts

The Alerts service that Google offers is one of the most recent ones that I’ve come to use – I didn’t even know it existed until I read Dana’s post here on Get Paid To Write Online about how Google Alerts is a great freelance writing tool.

The way the Alerts service works is by allowing you to setup an alert for a specific phrase and receive an e-mail every time that phrase is mentioned online.

Some people use it to track their own name and others to see if any of their work is being plagiarized. Whilst both are great ideas, I use it primarily to help me with ideas for articles and blog posts, as one of the clients I work for sees me deliver pieces each month on roughly the same topics.

It’s easy to think up a new idea or two by yourself, but when you’ve got to deliver two dozen different pieces, using a service like Google Alerts makes the whole process that extra bit easier by providing you with the one thing you need first and foremost – inspiration.

5. Images

I like to use images in most of my blog posts. Whether it’s for my own blog or a client’s, the use of the right image can enhance the post and compliment it perfectly.

Whilst in some instances it does require for a stock image to be purchased, more often than not there are suitable royalty free images available to use online – it’s just finding them that’s often the problem.

Fortunately, Google Images makes the process so simple that you can be presented with a screen of suitable images in a matter of seconds and all you have to do is go to the ‘Images’ section of Google’s search engine, click on the ‘Advanced Image Search’ link and then choose ‘labeled for reuse’ from the ‘Usage Rights’ dropdown box.

Enter your search terms, hit ‘Google Search’ and every image that’s returned has been marked by the author as being suitable for reuse (as long as you give credit to the author in the piece in which the image is used).

There’s no doubt that the above five Google products are the ones I use first and foremost – perhaps even more so than the search engine itself – but whilst writing this post I’ve realised that I actually utilize more of Google’s products than I first thought and Docs, Picasa, Trends, Translate, Earth and iGoogle are all used on somewhat of a regular basis.

And I can’t go without mentioning Chrome, my browser of choice, either.

I know it’s not particularly the right thing to do, declaring your love for such a major organisation, especially when companies of this type appear to be trying to dominate various industries, but am I the only one who relies so heavily on the wonder that is Google?

Image:  Alvar Lopez (Picasa Web Albums)

Have you checked out my recent post ‘It’s Time To Give Something Back To The Freelance Writing Community‘?  I’m answering your questions on freelance writing and business development – for free!

As a new freelance writer, it can take a while to find good sources of writing work. If you’re new to the game, how can you tell the difference between sites that offer below-minimum-wage gigs and those that give you a great chance of earning a living from writing. Even with the best search tools, it can take time to wade through hundreds of job listings, so why not save yourself the hassle and check out this list of the five best places to find writing work.

Writer’s Bridge

The Writer’s Bridge aims to bridge the gap between freelancers and the publications they are querying, helping them by providing a regular idea bank of possible stories and even helping with the pitching and querying process. I don’t know another service like it, which is why it’s at the top of my list of top writing jobs sites. For a measly $10 a month, you get all that plus a daily list of job leads collated from a range of writing newsletters, saving you the trouble of reading them yourself.  As a final bonus, there’s a growing Writer’s Bridge writing community on Facebook and a blog providing writing advice.

Freelance Writing Gigs

This award winning freelance writing jobs site, now owned by SplashPress media, sifts through the jobs on offer to find the ones that are likely to be genuine. There’s also a minimum payment threshold for jobs posted on the site. That means writers who get gigs this way are much less likely to get scammed and much more likely to pick up paying, long term gigs. Anything that looks too ridiculous or scammy is weeded out before you get the list, preventing you from wasting time. There are hundreds of writers who make this their first port of call each day, not only for the job listings but for the valuable advice on running a writing career that’s available from a talented group of writers.

About Freelance Writing

Anne Wayman has been collating lists of writing jobs on About Freelance Writing for years. There’s a daily update on what’s available and somehow she always manages to have a couple of opportunities I’ve not seen anywhere else. Anne’s approach is slightly different. Instead of weeding out the low paid jobs altogether, she lists them separately, so that people who don’t mind taking jobs in that category – or new writers looking for experience – can check them out if they want to. Anne’s site also features advice for writers – and she’s a veteran in the business, so is worth listening to.

Freelance Switch

If you are into other types of freelancing, such as designing the stuff that you write, then Freelance Switch may be more your style. The site has a job board featuring opportunities for all kinds of freelancers. The only catch is that it costs $7 a month to subscribe. On the plus side, jobs available through this site pay pretty well, so the cost may well be worth it. While you’re on the site, don’t forget to check out the Freelance Switch blog which has posts from a huge team of experienced writers.

Problogger

You might be wondering what this well known haven for professional bloggers is doing on a list of writing sites, but bloggers are writers too, and the Problogger site has one of the best job boards around. Almost every blogging job worth having seems to show up on this site at some time, and it’s absolutely free to access the opportunities, which are updated regularly.

With these sites alone, you could soon have a well paid writing gig – so what are you waiting for?

How do you feel when you receive negative feedback?

I recently received some feedback from a client about how a piece of work I had submitted had a few typos and grammatical errors in it.

When I received the feedback, my first reaction was to be protective of my work and think that the feedback must have been wrong or I’d used a British word which wouldn’t have been understood properly by an American audience.

Then when I checked the piece and realised I had made some errors, I felt annoyed and to a certain extent, embarrassed.

But, in all honesty, I wasn’t overly surprised – I’ve been writing for 3 years now and this was the first piece of negative feedback I’ve received. I’ve produced work for a range of different clients in a variety of different styles and I’ve managed for over 3 years to not receive a piece of negative feedback.

That’s not to say I wasn’t angry, upset and embarrassed.  Plus, there was a bit of worry in there, too – as soon as I received the feedback, I started questioning my work in general and myself as a writer, worrying whether the mistake I’d made was going to have such a negative effect on my relationship with the client that they were going to stop hiring me as a writer.

Although the feedback hit me quite hard, I was surprised with myself at how I acted.

I was expecting to be a little irrational, but I managed to keep my head and put into practice the 3 steps I’d researched and put together for when a time like this occurred.

First, I let myself have a few minutes being annoyed and feeling down over the mistakes

As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m a positive person.  When you get told you’ve made a mistake, though, you naturally feel annoyed and upset and although you can mask these feelings initially, they’re going to come out sooner or later, so just let them out straight away.

Don’t go spending days worrying about a typo or two, but allow the negative feelings to get out of your system before you do anything else.

I then looked at why I’d made the errors

Was it because I was busy and didn’t have time to check or edit properly?  Was I just being lazy and couldn’t be bothered to double check my work?  Or was it because editing isn’t my favourite part of being a freelance writer?

I came to the conclusion that it was a combination of the first and third reasons.  Things have been particularly hectic for me over the past 6 weeks and I think I let the things that I don’t particularly enjoy slip somewhat.

The final step I took was to look at how these mistakes could be prevented in the future

My initial reaction in this instance was to simply take more time proofing and editing.  It’s not something I particularly enjoy, but it’s part of being a writer and so I should dedicate more time to it.

However, I then considered hiring a professional editor to look through all of my work before I send it to clients.  I researched this a little more and realised that it’s a fantastic option and whilst I’m not going to hire a professional editor at the moment (I want to know that I can effectively edit my own work, rather than ignoring the fact it’s one of my weak points), it’s definitely something I’m going to look at in the future.

What’s more, as discussed in my recent post ‘Are You Writing In The Most Efficient Way Possible?‘, I’m going to stick with editing after writing each individual piece.  Proofing and editing a large batch of work at once might work for some, but it really doesn’t work for me.

I think what every writer has to realise is that they’re going to make mistakes at some point throughout their career. No matter how much you check your work or how proficient you become as a writer, chances are you’re going to make the occasional typo.

The point you have to remember is that you’re only human. Mistakes are never good and if you make them regularly, they’re going to have a detrimental effect on both you as a writer and your relationship with your clients.  But no one is going to hang you out to dry over the occasional misspelled word or grammatical mistake, no matter how much it may feel like they will at the time.

Do you find proofing and editing a difficult thing to do?  Have you ever been in a situation where making a mistake has had a big effect on your career?  Has poor proofing cost you client or have your excellent editing skills landed you a gig?

Image: Samat Jain (Flickr)