Experimentation is Your Freelance Writing BFF
Are you a writer who's still resisting the idea of trying stuff just for fun or don't even want a plate of spaghetti near you to throw at the wall? I used to put my foot down so hard against experimentation in my business...but just like all things you push against, once I embraced it, my business rushed onto the course to profits and wonderful clients. In this video we'll go over how to embrace it, how to experiment in your business, and why the experimentation mindset is critical to growing a profitable, sustainable freelance writing business.
________
If you're like me, I used to often resist experimenting in my freelance writing business. It was something that I found really difficult, and I just kind of had this attitude of like, just tell me what to do and I'll go do it. And then it'll work for me. And the truth is that that's not exactly how it works. Even if someone gives you exact steps, sometimes you have to, you know, move those steps around a little bit to work better for you. So for me, what I often ended up doing was putting on the brakes and just being like, Nope, I don't want to experiment. I just want to do the thing. Just give me the directions. I can follow directions. But the truth is that your business really expands a lot and it gets to a much better place when you embrace, you know, kind of that throwing spaghetti at the wall, or just kind of tossing out random ideas and trying them out and seeing how things ended up going, oh, I never do very well with this.
With this. I can see that as crooked, you know, when you wear stripes, you can always tell that it's crooked. There we go. I think it's straight now. All right. So we're going to talk about how to experiment in your freelance writing business and why it's important to do that. So the other thing is it's Friday, and we're going to start with a little pup date. So we're going to see if we can get everybody on their Hobbit hole. We only have, we only have the back half of Bo in the Hobbit hole right now. So we're going to see if we can get him in.
Oh, we have a curious friend. Oh, here we go. All right. Very, can you put your face on camera? Good job, buddy. Oh, Charlotte. You're in your Hobbit hole. Can you back up? Good girl.
Good. The job we're working on it. Everybody's sort of like in the hop a whole lot of the Hobbit hole. They're doing great. Hey, Hey Vicky. Welcome in. Hey, Linda. Welcome in. So we were doing a little pup date. We're doing a little petting
Time. Oh, she's like,
I don't want your pets. She's like, I want the tree dos. Maybe we can move this down so we can see you a little bit.
Well, this up this down, whoop. There we go. That's a little bit better.
Still don't have Barry on the screen, but we're working on it. All right. Let's talk about experimentation. So when I have notes too, so we're all good with the nuts. So what we want to do is kind of embrace experimentation in our business. So that means that we need to just try stuff just to try it. And I know that sometimes what ends up happening is that's a really frustrating experience. I know it was for me. When I started out as a freelance writer I made all the mistakes I made every mistake that you could possibly do. And I just like man, everything, everything that you can think of as a mistake and freelance writing, I did it. And I just thought that if I could just find the right set of steps or if I could just just like, have someone tell me what to do and like, oh, just do this.
It's not really like that. It's just like writing a story. If someone says, write the story this way, it usually comes out your own way. Right? Like even if someone gives you very like detailed directions and say like this sentence, do this and this sentence do that. You still kind of put your own personality into it, right. It's not just like your robot copying pasting. Cause otherwise if you know, you just did a hundred percent of what they said, it wouldn't really be writing the piece would already be written. Right. So when you're experimenting in your business, that means kind of like just trying stuff out to see how it happens and kind of releasing yourself a little bit from all of those expectations. So what really held me back and maybe this is holding you back too, was like, I thought that you had to do all these things and get some sort of magical result.
Like every time you put an effort, you needed to get a very specific result or otherwise you wasted all this effort, but the deal is that the results, sometimes it's surprising when you try things, what ends up happening is you get stuff that you didn't expect. And you're like, oh, I learned a lot from this because X, Y, Z happened, you learn a lot more stuff that you don't, you know, the results. Aren't like I did 67% of this and I did this number of this. Like the results are sometimes like, oh, I hate that. I never going to do it again. The results are sometimes, like I thought I would really enjoy having a podcast and I hated it. Sometimes the results are like, I started targeting these types of companies and it turns out I hate it. Like I got a gig and I did it. And the work itself, like the topic is boring or I have to cough.
So sometimes what ends up happening is you get these results that you just can't get and less you do the experimentation. You have to end up trying things, because if you don't, you end up with this business that doesn't feel like you, you end up with this business where you're trying to build someone else's business, or you're trying to force yourself into all these little square pegs or, you know, it's, it's, it just feels very, you know what is it? Square, peg round hole. And experimentation also gives you a lot more possibilities. Like there's a bunch of different things that I started as experiments and ended up turning out as like things I really like to do. So one of those big ones is real estate. I didn't think I would, you know, I was always interested in real estate. I was always interested in learning more about the home buying process or investing or how it kind of just all came together.
And I never really thought it was going to be a niche for me, but I just tried it out. I had an editor who was like, Hey, you know, do you want to write for real estate? You know, let's try this out. And I was like, sure, you know, let's try it out. And that was an experiment. I was like, sure. I'll just, you know, I live in Austin, let's talk about Austin real estate. Let's see if it works out. And it turns out to be one of my best dishes. I love it. I love writing about estate. I love interviewing real estate agents. I love interviewing all the people in the home buying and home selling processes. I like talking to investors. Like I love it all. People who sell land I find it so interesting and fascinating and all of the tech stuff.
Like I also write about prop tech and just writing about all the tools and the technology and how things get done. And I find that whole thing really, really interesting. And if I hadn't done that experiment, I wouldn't have had my real estate niche. I wouldn't have gotten into PropTech. I wouldn't have been able to talk to some really cool people who have done some awesome stuff. And like I just kind of was like, sure, like why not? You know? And I think that kind of a better mindset to have then like, well, what am I getting out of this? And like, how has this real estate thing could help me? And like, I don't think I want to do this. Like sometimes you kind of have to try it out to see what works and what fits sometimes when you're in your business as a freelance.
Right. Just kind of like, imagine it as a barf draft. So like, imagine your experiment is just like a bar draft. Right. All the time we write Barth drafts, I write them. I'm just like, you're just like, all right, we're going to put this thing together. We're just going boil it. We're just gonna write it, put our barf draft together. It doesn't sound good. And then we're going to fix it in editing. We're going to make it light, like readable, understandable. All the crucial things will be fixed in editing. So sometimes if you think about experimenting in your freelance writing business, as it's just a barf draft, we're just trying it out. We're kind of like putting every piece together that we think goes together within the article puzzle. And sometimes, sometimes you have to remove things and sometimes you have to put things back.
Sometimes you need a little editing and you're like, oh, I hate, you know, maybe it's not real estate. It's that you really like, just writing about just home buying for first-time home buyers. You know, maybe it's not all real estate there, but you have to kind of experiment to get there. And I think that you kind of lose out on a bunch of opportunities. When you don't kind of like give yourself a why not moment. Those why not moments really open up a lot of things. So it's also kind of how we end up getting different types of work. This is something that I talk to my core students about and my coaching students about it's like, they're like, well, how do you get a case study? Well, how do you move up to this type of writing? How do you get content strategy?
Sometimes what ends up happening is you have a client who loves your work. And they're like, we know you wrote all these blog posts, but how do you feel about writing a case study? And you're like, yes, let's do it. And that's just like a, why not? Why not? Let's just try it out, but it's not always that you go in, right? You don't always go in to the client and pitch a case study. You don't always go in and say like, well, let's do this thing. Sometimes you just have this nice organic flow where it's like, Hey, like what do you think about trying this? And then you're like, yes, I've been dying to get into that. And let's say, you go in and you're like, you know, guns a blazing. And you're like, let's write this case, study I'm down. And then what ends up happening is you're like, oh, this case that is terrible.
I hate everything. I never want to do this again. Right. But at least you had that experience. You tried it out, you experimented, you saw how the process worked. You put it together and you realize like, it may be the result. Wasn't that, you know, oh my gosh, I'm going to love case study as I am and do all the stuff. Maybe what ends up happening is you're like never again. And that's a really important lesson. There's a bunch of things that I've written about where I was like, never again. And there were things that I thought I would really like, but it turns out that when I wrote about them in that way, like I realized I'm more of a reader in that category, in that industry or niche than I am a writer. I like to read about it, but I don't want to go write about it.
It's one of my things where I just like, I liked that over here for somebody else to write it. And that's part of the experimentation process. So when you're going through stuff, you kind of have to try different things. Like yes, we have templates. Yes. We have specific foundational steps to follow in our business. Yes. We have a bunch of things that can do that can work to make things go right. But there also has to be this thing where you just have to try stuff. That's part of owning your own business. It's part of putting your personality in your business, building something you love. And what I often, like the example I use all the time is like, I have writers who are like, what are the niches that make the most money? I'm going to write in those. And it never works out.
It never works out because you can say like, yeah, here's the niches with the most potential clients. They always have a flow of clients because they always need stuff. You go off and you tell them that, then they go get some clients. They do some work and maybe it works for a couple of years, but then they get burned out and they're like, I hate it. I'm going to quit freelance writing, freelance writing isn't for me. And it's not that it's not the freelance writing isn't for them. It's that they chose that based on like, oh, well this makes money. I'm just going to do this. They didn't experiment. They didn't find out what worked for them. They just were like, what makes money? And it never works out when you go in there and you're kind of like, what steps do I follow? Just like, make some money and do this thing that never works out.
You end up with a business. You hate, you end up quitting, freelance writing and you end up putting the onus, like the bad stuff on the freelance writing rather than your approach. If you had gone into the business being like, cool, I know about these topics. I'm interested also in these topics, right. Niches let me go see what I can do for clients. And that's a thing where, when you see those articles about freelance writers where they're like, yeah, she has a really random niche and she makes all this money and she has all of these clients. Yeah. Because she really likes it. Right. There's times where like people make really random niches work for them. They end up with a six figure income on solely like one niche or they end up with a six figure income or crazy money. With this really random niche that doesn't really work for a lot of people it's because they're interested in it.
They tried it out. They didn't just say like, I'm going to do health care. Cause they always have money. They were just, I don't want to do healthcare and I don't want to do FinTech and I don't want to do, you know, whatever, it, it like real estate. They were like, I'm interested in these four topics. I'm going to go gung ho on those. And it worked for them. They tried it out. So I think a lot of times when you're thinking about your business, you have to think about the things that you kind of want to like stretch yourself a little bit. The experimentation part is also about stretching yourself outside of your comfort zone. It's just like that little bit that's like too far, you know, like when you're stretching your legs and you're like, oh no, that was too far.
Like that was too much. Or you like try to reach and you know, you, you like hold on for too long. Yeah. It's kind of like that. You kind of have to have that feeling of like, it's uncomfortable. It's going to be uncomfortable, but it's worth it in the end. The experiments that I've done in my business, some of them have been huge failures, but I learned a lot from that. I learned that that's not what I want to do and I hated it and that I would never try it again. Maybe I'd try it again. Who knows? But most likely not. But a lot of times it was experiments turned into really good things. They turned into things that I really enjoy and things that I really like to do, like this live stream, I was just like, I'm going to try it out.
We're going to see how it goes, you know? And I'm still doing it. I like coming on here. I like when people show up and we have comments and questions and I like when people drop comments below. So if you have just like, so now we're talking about comments. If you have comments or like, how do you experiment in your freelance writing business? Like drop that in a comment below, like, I'm curious about other types of experimentation that happened in freelance writing businesses. So pop that below and also let me know if you have questions. So if you have questions and you're on live, pop them in the chat. If you have questions and you're watching this as a replay, pop them down below, I find that experimentation, a lot of times ends up being this kind of like weird nebulous thing. And I think that kind of makes it fun.
I think it's better when you kind of approach the experimentation part as a fun part of your business. It doesn't always have to be monetarily based. It doesn't always have to be with like the best clients ever. It doesn't always have to be with the most ideal project. It's something that you're just trying out and seeing how it kind of shakes out. So that's one thing. I want to make sure that we go over the mindset part. So the mindset part here within the freelance writing business, I think most of the time it's really critical. Like you, it's very hard to grow a profitable, sustainable freelance writing business. If you're not trying things, if you kind of stay in this one square and you never kind of go out into different niches or you never get a random project and try it out and you never really push yourself beyond your comfort zone and you never try to pitch a random magazine that you thought you'd never get into, you never try to like reach out to a super high level client.
You never try to like go out there and you know, you get a random assignment, like I said, with real estate and you're like, yeah, let's just try it out. You never just send an LOI like this is of the stuff where like, sometimes people just send mark Cuban in email and then he responds, right? Like mark Cuban gets, I don't know, thousands of emails a day, probably more than thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of emails a day. And he responds to really interesting ones. Sometimes. It's just about kind of going out of your comfort zone and keeping that experimenter's mindset. It's about kind of going through the different pieces of your business. Like whether that's marketing or your mindset stuff, or how you run your business, like the tools you use to run your business or the attitude that you use to run your business or your website or LinkedIn, how you do kind of the mental health part of your business, right?
Like sometimes maybe you need more rest. Maybe you, haven't kind of integrated that. And you're just like, you know what, I'm going to start only working four days a week. And I'm going to experiment with that. I'm going to take Saturday, Sunday, Monday off, or I'm going to take Friday, Saturday, Sunday off, or I'm going to take Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday off and work Friday through Monday. You know, sometimes those experiments ended up working really well for people. I know that some writers are really fast writers. I am not those people. So I, I know from my experiments that I am not a fast, like it, it takes me a while. Like I've gotten faster over time. I my first article that I ever wrote, my first reported article took me a month to do. And now it's like, but shorter, you know, like between getting interviews, depending on what it is, you know?
I crank that out pretty quick, but the big difference was like, I experimented with all these different things to figure that out. So when you're thinking about like rest time, or when you're thinking about something with mental health, or you're thinking about something with money, you kind of have to try these things out. Like money sometimes is like, like I said, there's been writers where I've talked to them and they're like, yeah, what niches make money? I'll just go do that. And it's like, Nope, that's not how it works. You can try it. You can experiment with that. You can go out and see if you can make some money and then switch niches. But a lot of times if you're building credibility in a niche or you're trying something out in terms of just money, it's usually going to end up biting you at eventually.
So I think the best approach is to experiment with different things, but kind of know where you want to go. Right? In terms of that, in terms of when you get started as a freelance writer, picking niches, that make sense for you. So what you want to do is kind of experiment with the whole gamut of everything in freelance writing. And I think that kind of, I'm going over my notes. I'm making sure I have my stuff on my notes. So we want to experiment with everything in our freelance writing business. And like I said, there are certainly templates. Like I have templates or below if you're interested. They're also at,
I haven't been here
Do do do. They're also manuals.com/bundle if you were interested in templates, but there's templates that we can use. But even when I give people templates, I tell them like, these are templates. These are things that you can use to build your business, but you need to customize them to you. I'm giving you basically the framework, right? I'm building the frame of the house. You need to pick pink colors, you need to pick like, you know, you've picked the design, right? Like you're going to design it and I'm going to build the framework and say like, here's the thing, but you need to pick out all the other details to actually make your house home. And I think this is really important to, to learning the foundation of freelance writing. Like you have to have specific things in order, but it doesn't mean that you have to do that forever.
And like, when I get emails in my inbox from people who are like, I'm so bored of my marketing, I'm so bored of this thing. And it's like, when's the last time you experimented? When's the last time you took an assignment? Not for the money, not for the niche, not for the client, but you just have the assignment just for fun. Like, like for me, one of those assignments would be pets. I would talk about dogs. Like I could talk about my dogs all day. There's only one of them right there and his only his, but of course, like we just, for some reason we just can't get ourselves together to all stay in the same place. Charlotte's like under my desk, somewhere being a troll, Charlotte, go to your Hobbit hole. You have a whole troll shadow. Do you have a whole
Liquid buddy? Charlie? Did you have a hole? No. You got to go to your Hobbit hole, go to your Hobbit hole. Charlotte, come on. Work with me. No, you got
Part of it. Yeah. What a SAS. Anyways. So basically what I'm saying here is like, I could talk about dogs all day long. Even my troll that's under my desk right now and she's not participating and she'd probably be scared if I just dropped that off bag on her by accident. But the whole point here is that when I'm writing about dogs, this is an experiment. It's something where I just do it for fun. And I think a lot of writers kind of like miss that, you know, I kind of missed that piece. They start doing things only for this reason or only for that. And they're like, well, I already have this business. Nope. We're writers like at the very heart, we're still writers. And most of us started as readers. And sometimes we need to kind of enrich those things. Like the things we like to read about in our off time, or did you just wag in front of the light?
You're so funny. The things we read about in our off time can sometimes be pieces that we just write just to like feed our writer soul, or like that just feed our creativity or there's something interesting that happened that you want to write about and make sure other people know. So I think a lot of times when you're thinking about, you know, where to experiment and keeping that experimental mindset, if you end up thinking about hopping into someone's inbox and saying like, I'm so bored with this, what do I do? First question to ask is like, am I keeping the experimenters mindset? The other piece is like, am I keeping the learner's mindset? Those things kind of go together. Experimentation leads to learning. Sometimes you learn that this is great. And sometimes you learn, it's not so great for you. But the whole point is that the experimentation and the learners mindset make sense together in terms of growing your business, making more money, doing the things that make your business fun.
A lot of people end up quitting a writing business because it's not fun anymore. It's boring. They aren't excited to like put all the puzzle pieces of an article together. They don't have other projects to work on. Like for me, one of the things that makes my writing business cool is like, I have my writing business, but I also have my coaching business. And I also have my templates, you know, my like one-off product business. And I also have my courses. I also have like, or my course course for now. But I have all these other things. I can stick my fingers in all these different pies. Right. I get to like dive into different projects. And that's really exciting for me. That means I get to work on some projects over here and some over there, but I get to experiment in my business.
I get to try different things and see how it works out. So did we just repeat the hellos? So we just repeat, like everybody's saying hello. Okay. So when we're doing this stuff, I think it's really important. So that's one last thing I wanted to say I have in my notes here is that I think that when we talk to other writers and when we are in a community high teach, they give for your comment. When we talk to other writers, I think it's important to encourage them in their experiments. I don't think it's helpful to go into some like two, one year writer, friends, or like maybe you're in a community or maybe you're in a Facebook group and say like, that's dumb. I don't think that's a good idea. Or like, no, don't do that. Like, no, just because it didn't work for you doesn't mean it will work for them.
They can ask for advice. Right. They can say like, Hey, have you tried this? Like, and you're like, yeah, it didn't work for me. You know, here's what went wrong. Right. You can do that. But I don't think discouraging other writers from experimenting in their business and telling them like, no, that's down. Like, you know, that's not productive. There's a lot of things that don't work for me that work really great for some of my friends. There's a lot of things that work really well for me that never worked for my friends. Like th that's kind of these like little quirks that we have in our business. And I think that what's really important is that we cheer each other on, we give each other the motivation to keep trying and keep trying new stuff. That's how we kind of like push all other freelance writers ahead.
Right. If we're all kind of like, this is the way it's always been done and we do this forever, like that doesn't work that doesn't, that's not longevity. That's just like, it works right now. Do it this way forever. The basically like the molting process of freelance writing where we, or like the, you know, when the snakes sheds its skin, like, that's what we kind of want to keep doing. We want to keep trying new things because as we move along that betters our feelings, writing community, right. It means that all freelance writers now get to learn from these new experiences. And if we all just kinda like sit around and we're like, yes, I do this thing forever. I'm a robot. And I did it. You know, that doesn't work. The whole point is that we're kind of forwarding the industry that we're kind of making it like, oh, well, let's try this.
And we're keeping ahead of things like, excuse me, now that there's a lot more videos. Right. We're kind of saying like, how do we do that in terms of content? How do we help support that? Do we write scripts? Do we do interviews? Do we set it up? Like, how do we do that? I think that kind of stuff is really important. And if someone were to come to me and they said like, what? Like, this is something I get often is like, what about Instagram for writers? And I think like right now, it's just like really early. I've had a few people contact me on Instagram to write for them and talk about that. But I think a lot of times, like Instagram is still in its infancy in terms of finding clients. I think that's still kind of a thing, but I would never discourage someone from using Instagram.
I'd be like, yeah, in my experience, like, here's kind of how it's gone. Even if I share a bunch of clips or all this stuff on Instagram or on LinkedIn LinkedIn for me, I think that's the jam right now. But I think when you're kind of looking through these different things, don't discourage people because it didn't work for you cheer them on and say like, Hey, maybe this is gonna work for you. It didn't work for me because of these reasons. But cheer them on. And also something that I've learned over many years is that when you're talking to your writer, friends, like if they ask for advice, give them advice. If they don't ask for advice, don't give them advice. Like, if someone says like, I'm going to try this and I think it's really cool. You'd be like, yeah, it's really cool.
Cheer them on. You know? And I still struggle with that. I'm like, oh wait, let me tell you some things like, let me, don't make this mistake. I still have that. But there's, for me, I think that's really important when someone comes in there and says like, I'm excited about this. And you're like, cool, awesome. You know, that kind of stuff. Instead of just being like, that's terrible. That's I don't mind being, I don't know the aunt, you know, like that kind of stuff doesn't work. Yeah. You like that? I just, that's the voice I hear in my head. Like when I'm, when I'm telling someone like, even after I've experimented with something, right. I've spent like months or years experimenting and like, this definitely works with non experimenting more, this is legit. And someone said like, yeah. Then I'm just like, okay, we're just not a fit.
This is not working. Like we, we, I don't think we can be like as close friends because like, we're, you know, you just like, won't get on the boat. So I think the important thing here is when a freelance writer, a friend or someone else is trying something out, be supportive of that, that could lead to a big break for our industry. It could be something really interesting where like, you know, they're like, oh, they tried out this like a lot more writers are having podcasts now. And they're using podcasts as a way to get clients. That's a new thing. We should encourage that. Instead of saying like, why aren't you putting all this time into a podcast? You know, like that kind of stuff, like leave it alone. I think that there's a lot more things we can figure out we can learn from.
And especially when we have someone kind of go first, right? We're like, all right, the luck, you know, and they go off and do it and you're like, oh, it can be done. It shows you, it can be done. It shows you that it may work for you. It shows you that, like they were willing to take that risk, like good for them. There's a lot of times where we don't want to take risks in our business. Right. And that's what experimentation is, right. It's risk in our business. And I think that we kind of have to embrace that a little bit more. And part of embracing that is supporting other people when they're trying stuff and being careful about when you give advice and as someone who gives advice, like that's very hard for me to do. So I know it's tough not to just be like, wait, don't do that.
Cause like, you know, that kind of stuff. But when someone's trying something out and they say like, Hey, I'm just going to try it out. I'm thinking about this, like, blah, blah, blah. And then they say, what do you think? Give them your thoughts, but definitely share them. So I think that we're, we're closing in on time, but if you have questions, if you're on here live, you have questions, pop them in the chat. If this has been helpful so far, give it a thumbs up. If you feel like you want to learn more about running a profitable, sustainable freelance writing business, make sure to subscribe. And I'm also interested, like tell me in the comments, like what types of experiments you plan to do, like pop them in the comments? Like what types of experiments do you plan to put into your freelance writing business?
Just for fun, not experiments where you're like, I need to make some cash now, 5, 5, 5 cash. Now. Like that kind of thing. Not that cool experience, fun things that you just want to try to see how it goes in your business and see if you like it, like pop those in the comments. I'd love to hear that. Cause I honestly, like I would love to cheer other freelance writers on like, that's my thing. I loved hearing other people being like, go try it. And, and I really try not to like discourage people too much unless I'm like, this is a serious dead end. Like I've seen this happen too many times. And usually that's very rare. That's a very rare thing that I do, but I think, you know, I think just like, if you see other people in the comments or you see other people in the comments listing cool experiments, cheer them on, make sure you pop in there.
Yeah. I don't see any comments coming in. I think we're okay. Like, you know, having the high stuff. Cool. So yeah, this is kind of what I was saying too, is like someone else might figure out a process or might figure out something neat and then they can share it with you and you can learn from them. That's a really important thing. When you get to the point where you have people who have enough stability in their business to like try really big things. That's really neat. When you have enough stability in your business where your friends, like I'm going to try this really random, like huge thing. And you're just like, okay, cool. You know, not little stuff anymore. It's not like, well, I'm going to send this one LOI to this big company. And it's like really big stuff. You can learn a lot from their trial errors. You can learn a lot from their experience. I have to cough.
I just have a little bit of a dry throat today. Sorry about that. So you want to make sure that you're like, you really kind of like get the learning experience, but you're the mom. So I see there's a couple of things. Yeah. I mean, it's basically when, what Linda's talking about, like we basically want to experiment with all different parts of our business. We have to kind of find the things that work best for us and, you know, see kind of like, what's kind of going to work for us. So the experiments would be like how you do things. So Tracy says, I feel better about how many weird topics I've tried nexus very well. Yes, Tracy, just for fun. It is cool to try like weird topics. I think it's fun sometimes to write about random stuff, but yeah, just do something for fun.
Just see how it happens. Just like, do I dunno, just do something random, like like if you like horses right. For a horse magazine or if you're just like, oh my gosh, I had the worst dental experience. Let me write this like personal essay about my dental experience and like relate it to this other story and, you know, try that. I, I don't know. I think it's just fun sometimes to do things just for fun in our business. That's what keeps it lively. Right. So yeah. New processes, new mindset. Oh, Vicki says that she's joining an agency. So yeah, like try that out. Maybe you want to try working for an agency. Maybe you want to be a sub writer. So basically like you want to be like one writer goes out and gets the work and then you write it. Instead of doing the agency, maybe you're just like one of the sub writers, but yeah.
I mean, try it out, try out agencies, try out different things, try out new niches. Like sometimes what ends up happening is you have like your set standard of like five niches. And then you're like, actually, I'm going to try these things over here. Or like you have, you know, these are stable. I know these dishes worked for me. Let me just try this random one. And that can help too. Okay, cool. So you can try. Yeah. So yeah, I think it, even if marketing, like Linda says her marketing, isn't going well. I think that sometimes, like you have to kind of try stuff like you want to send your LOAs out. You want to kind of like make sure that you have something that works and send that out. And then you want to kind of like try different things and poke holes.
And this was something that I read an article a long time ago with this writer who was super afraid of in-person marketing. Like she was really afraid of networking events and she like went to two and she was like, this is my thing. Now I love this. And and I, it was just like an immediate change. He was like, I always thought it was going to be terrible. I had all these like, basically preconceived notions about how horrible in person networking was, because I think her story was that she went to them like a decade before and they were really bad, but now the new kinds of networking things are fun. So I think those types of experiments, like just kind of put yourself out of the box, the experiment would be like, you have a process or you have a process and you're kind of like verging off that process a bit.
Or you have something where that feels stale or you have something where you're just like, I'm just going to try this and see what happens. So, okay. Let's see. I mean, yeah, you can re Linda says, she's thinking about rewriting her website and yeah. So, but I mean, those are kinds of things like refreshing your website copy. Sometimes is, is an experiment. If you totally change your direction of your business or totally change your niches or totally changed the type of work that you're doing. So I think sometimes that can help. There's all these different things that we can do. Like sometimes what ends up happening with experiments is you end up having different calls to action on your website. You end up having all these different things where instead of just saying, like, contact me, you have a call to action that says, like, want to increase your revenue by 67% or whatever random, you know, something that you have a testimonial to back up, you know, like get in touch here, you know, get in touch at blah, blah, blah email.
Sometimes that stuff can really help. So, you know, I think it just matters like in terms of experimenting with all the little things in your business, of course we have processes, of course we have a framework, of course we have a way we run our business, but sometimes you kind of have to get out of the box. You kind of have to just like, this is how I always imagined is I'm like, Ooh, does that work? Like, oh, I kinda throw some glitter at it and be like, oh no, like, does this actually work? And that's kind of like, that's kind of part of it. I feel like that, that mindset where you're like, all right, let's try it out. Like that's where the fun stuff happens. And it's supposed to be fun. It's not supposed to be stressful if you start experimenting and it becomes very stressful.
I don't think that's going to work. That experiment obviously should be over and it's, you know, that okay, that experiment was not good for me. Let me try something else. So let me check the chat real quick. So Linda, I dunno. I mean, I don't know about the focus thing, you know, if, if you're feeling like you need a little break, like maybe take a break. I don't know. I mean I don't know if the focus part is experimentation. Like what I said before was kind of about rest. So maybe try some rest and see if that works or maybe change up where you work or how you work or your work schedule. Sometimes that helps. I know for me, like I go through different experiments with work schedules of like time I get up and time I go to bed and sometimes the experiment is forced upon me based on like what I'm doing.
So yeah, I think, you know, try it out, so. Okay, cool. All right. If you have comments, drop them in below, like make sure you pop them in the comments below. I'd love to hear how you're planning to do a fun experiment in your freelance writing business. If you want to hear more about how to build a profitable, sustainable freelance writing business, make sure to subscribe, give this a thumbs up. If you found it was helpful and yeah. Oh, Tommy made a great comment. Yeah. Sometimes when we have burnout or feeling our mental health is like not great, I've always been a big fan of therapy. It has helped me kind of like, you know, instead of being so anxious and instead of like and I, I find that therapy is for me therapy, like working with a therapist is way different than counseling itself.
Like there's, there's kind of different things. So like when you go to therapy, you're working on a bunch of different issues. And sometimes I find that it's just really nice for kind of rebalancing. A lot of times things can get really out of focus. Sometimes you kind of get obsessed. Like you can fixate on things. I fixate on things. Or sometimes what happens is you're just like, I'm so tired, you know? Or you're feeling burned out or you're feeling like you're just not interested in things or your just kind of like losing focus, like what Linda said, like sometimes therapy really helps with that. And therapy also helps you dealing with client situations or frustrating things in your business, or, you know, giving you ideas for experimentation. I I've always been a big fan of therapy. So if you're ever dealing with mental health or burnout, like I think finding a good therapist who is a good fit for you really matters.
Sometimes people get a therapist and it's not the quite right fit. And then they're like therapy sucks. Yeah. You got to get a therapist that really understands. You get to go to a few sessions, you got to kind of work it out. So Tracy says something and I applied for full-time jobs and offer yes, Tracy, this is such a good idea. So there were times where people hop on LinkedIn and they go to the full-time job postings on there. And they say that they find who posted the job. And they say like, Hey, so-and-so I saw that you posted this job. Is there any, you know, would you ever consider freelance and like you know, blah, blah, blah, and send them like a quick LOI about it. So that's a good you don't necessarily have to apply, but the best bet there is to find some, like, if that's what you're trying is your experiment is to find some full-time job listings and then find the person who posted it or find the content marketing manager or the editor or the marketing, the head of marketing or director of marketing, or whoever runs marketing or content and send them an LOI saying like, Hey, I saw you post this.
Was, would there be any chance that you'd consider freelance or would you consider this thing? That can work out sometimes I know some people get gigs that way, and sometimes those gigs are for a long period of time. Like the company just decides not to hire someone full time. And sometimes what happens is that gig is like three months until they hire someone full-time. So it's still a good contract. Yeah. Yeah, definitely logical Tracy. Yeah. It's definitely like a good thing to try out. So let me know how that goes. Tracy, make sure to update us. So once you kind of like so start sending LOI. So the person who posted the job, like instead of like, cause when you apply just in the regular application pool, sometimes it gets lost. It's way better to just direct contact the person on LinkedIn and send them an LOI. So let me know how that goes, like pop it in the comments or send me an email. Let me know how that goes. All right. So we're going to hop off. We're going to do one more pup date. We'll do one more pub date because it's been a while. Oh my gosh. We're still with just like the Otter. You just have your Otter butt over there. Just like a little Otter, but just hanging out on camera.
You had to go to your Hobbit hole, young lady, go to your Hobbit hole.
All right. But can you sit up, sit up all the way. Oh, good enough. Good job. I Charlotte, can you go to your Hobbit hole? Go to your Hobbit hole it this way. Charlotte, go in your Hobbit hole. It's over there.
Okay. You don't want to participate today.
I got where'd you go, Julie, Charlotte, over here. Here we go.
Go to your head. The whole good girl. We did. We did it. Maybe everyone will get extra treaters now because we actually did. Yeah. Cool. So Tracy, if you find, yeah, the
Recruiter, there you go. The recruiter
Is one thing, Tracy, but always like the recruiter. Isn't as direct as the content person or the marketing person. So try to switch to the content or the marketing person and see if that kind of helps. So yeah. All right. Well, I hope this was helpful. I hope everybody has a good weekend and a good Friday. And I will see you next week at our normal live stream time at noon central. And I hope everybody's writing experiments go well, bye.
________
Trying to figure out how to price your work for what it’s worth? Check out my FREE Pricing Guide!
Need some fantastic contract and marketing templates to make your freelance writing biz run as effectively and efficiently as possible? See my Templates!
Want to stay in touch for weekly detailed advice plus updates on new freebies and courses? Join my email list!
Want to follow me for inspiration, tips, and to stay connected?
So psyched you’re joining me on this livestream adventure!
