“Don’t wait until everything is just right. It will never be perfect.
There will always be challenges, obstacles, and less-than-perfect conditions.
So what. Get started now.
With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident, and more and more successful.”
—Mark Victor Hansen
I checked the NAIWE website stats for the first week in July, and member Noelle Barrick’s blog post, “Adventures in Freelance Teaching, or How to Use Cuss Words to Your Advantage” is the top post among the linked NAIWE blogs.
The second highest post in traffic is a NAIWE blog announcement, “Poem-a-Day Challenge,” and the third highest is my post on “What do you value most about the freedom to work independently?” Together, these posts have brought hundreds of eyes to the NAIWE site in the past seven days.
The numbers are interesting all by themselves, but why should you care? You should care because traffic means eyeballs. Noelle’s post has attracted 186 sets of eyeballs to her site in the past week. From the blog post, visitors get an idea of her writing style, and they can click right over to look at her professional profile. Noelle’s chances of being contacted to quote on a job increase every time someone visits her site. Every single time.
By taking the time to write an interesting and creative post, Noelle has accomplished far more than she’d ever achieve by a boring and static “brochure about me” post. Her post will be there for as long as she’s a NAIWE member, and it will continue to draw visitors. Those who enjoy it enough to bookmark it and return will build her traffic, and when they need a copywriter, who do you think they’ll think of?
The best part about traffic-attracting posts like the three mentioned above is that, ultimately, they bring visitors to all of us. A reader may first stop at Noelle’s post and profile, but from there, they may click on the NAIWE logo to visit the home page and the rest of the site, and perhaps browse through the searchable database to visit your profile and read your blog. The site is designed with search engine optimization in mind so that each post is quickly indexed in the search engines and can begin bringing in traffic within hours (occasionally even minutes).
Is your NAIWE site ready? Are you making the most of your biggest NAIWE benefit? Or will visitors to your site find the original welcome text that is designed to help you make your first posts? If you joined NAIWE just to have an association membership to enhance your professional credibility, having an empty site may be fine. However, if you’re hoping to build your professional reputation or attract new clients, you need to have something on the site to introduce yourself and your books or services. Posting to your NAIWE blog doesn’t take long — just log in to your blog today and get started!
Janice Campbell is the former executive director of the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors. She has been a freelance writer, editor, coach, and speaker since the late 1980s.
By the time you hire a copyeditor, academic evaluator, or proofreader, you may be eager to be done with your project and feel like dumping it directly on the editor’s desk without any sort of self-checking. After all, the editor’s job is to catch errors, right? It’s true that your editor will catch errors, but when you are paying by the hour for an editor, there are some simple self-checking steps you can do before engaging the editor so that the editor can focus on the specialty service that you are paying for. Some self-checking steps include the following:
An editor can bring out the best in a book or manuscript, but for this to happen, you must choose the right type of editor for the job. Although there is some overlap in the specialties, many editors have a specific focus. As you search the NAIWE database, you’ll want to look for a specialist whose experience matches your needs. For example: