When Your Freelance Writing Business Feels like an Anchor Weighing You Down
After about a decade of freelance writing, with all its ups and downs, there are times when you start falling out of love with your business. You feel held down or held back…it’s not exciting or enticing…and keeping up with the marketing, client calls, interviews, and deadlines takes their toll.
But, I’ve also realized that with a few mindset shifts, experiments, and steps back, you can move from feeling like your business is an anchor to seeing new opportunities that breathe life back into your everyday. Don’t forget: that freelance writing business you always wanted still exists…you just have to take a different path than you thought at times.
________
Welcome in to this week's live stream, where we are talking about when your freelance writing business weighs you down. And I think this is an interesting topic because a lot of times what happens is we start a freelance writing business with the hopes of making it, um, more flexible, giving ourselves a work schedule that we like, where we can work when we want and pick, pick, and choose which jobs we have and make more money than we would normally on. Are you having trouble over there? Uh, make more money normally than we would at a full-time job. We get to build our own business, have more of the stuff that we want to have in our business and in our life. We've got some raking going on over there guys. Yeah. So she's, she's preparing for newness and raking. So today we're going to talk about what it's like when you're freelance writing business kind of way you squeak. Did you rake it? Just how you like it?
All right. Okay.
So this is not a, an uncommon thing. We end up with a business that's different than what we thought it would be. So it ends up feeling like we're spending a lot of time doing all these things that we didn't want to do in our full-time jobs or in whatever kind of position we had before. And now we're doing them in our business. So what ends up working out is that our freelance writing business weighs us down emotionally or physically, like not physically, like the computer's too heavy, but kind of like, it just weighs on you, you know, maybe you're at the computer too long and you're getting a lot of carpal tunnel syndrome, or you feel like your posture is suffering, right. Or maybe it's mental or emotional, you know, there's a lot of things that happen when your business weighs you down. So I wrote down some notes of things that we're going to go over.
So I just want to say for the first thing, is that when you're doing this, when you're kind of going through this for your business, when you're feeling like your business is weighing you down, like number one, this happens, this is normal. It's not that everybody else is just like magically going through their business and everything's working out for them. If they're really pushing themselves, if they're really getting to a place where they're working to make their business better, or they're working to really grow their business over time, they're going to get to a place where it feels really heavy because they that's the point where you have to kind of shift things. That's where the point where you have to kind of move the bricks around. And I think that there's this idea sometimes with freelance writing is like, you get this business and then you just like make money.
Like you like work really hard for like six months. And then, you start making five K a month or 10 K a month. And, and you just keep going along and it's, it's not true. Um, all the writers that I know, including myself, have their business shift and change and go through these different kinds of metamorphosis. And it's not just the business. It's like they think about their business or it's their mindset, or it's how they change their skills or how they try new experiments. It's not just about like you hop on the train and everything works. Um, it's a different kind of beast. And I think that's kind of like the wrong assumption. Your business is always this like ever evolving animal. I know I've talked about this before, and I know that, um, I have gone through kind of like how your business shifts and changes, but when it feels like it's weighing you down, that's really a sign that you probably should have made a change a while ago.
You've now let it get to the point where you just like, you're tired of working on it. You don't want to do you're anything that's on deadline. You're burnt out. You're just kind of like over it. And I think a lot of times what happens is we have to kind of like let go of that idea that it's supposed to be easy or that everyone else has it easier than us or that we look at these other writers and they're not struggling with certain things. And I've kind of found that that's like everybody struggles with different things. When they're a freelance writer, everybody struggles with different parts of the process. Maybe they struggle with marketing. Maybe they struggle with deadlines. Maybe they struggle with finding the right editors at magazines. Maybe they struggle with finding higher paying clients. Um, maybe they struggle with, um, Hey, Getty, welcome, welcome in Getty.
Maybe they struggle with, you know, uh, getting their work done. Maybe they kind of overload themselves and they end up basically, you know, burning out a lot. It just depends. Everybody has their own thing. But when your business is kind of weighing you down, what ends up happening is like, you start to hate it. And instead of getting to the point where you hate it, you want to make some shifts and make some changes along the way and start going on your own path. So this is something that took me a long time to figure out. And sometimes I still fall back in the hole of being like, why isn't my business? Like everybody else's. Um, but the difference is like, you have to build your own business. And that means that when you get to a point where your business isn't working for you, you feel like it's holding you back or holding you down, then you need to make your own shifts and adjust it and adjustments to that rather than being like, oh, this worked for this person.
I better go to often do this thing. And there's of course certain things that, um, we can use for that. But there's a lot of little business things that we have to change, like how we go about our marketing. Maybe you've been doing a certain type of marketing and it's just not working as well as it used to. Or maybe you've tried. Like, it's been a while since you've tried a few experiments, you've just been kind of going along the way in the same way, every single time. And now you're bored of it. Or maybe it's that you're working too much or that you're working on assignments that don't excite you, or you've made a bunch of money. And now you're at this stage where you're just like, yeah, my money's nice. But like none of this stuff is challenging. It's boring to me now.
Cause like, you know, all it is is kind of the same thing over and over again. And I think that man, when you're shifting your business and you're paying attention to all these things, like this is a normal part of the process. And I think a lot of times that there's this thing with other freelance writers, that, that it shouldn't be that way. Like every year we should be growing and if just making more money and doing all this stuff and it doesn't really work that way, um, I've always kind of held this concept that like you don't just like magically become something else. Like you have to make choices. Everything is a choice. So no matter if you're choosing to take the safe route or the challenging route, or if you're choosing to stay where you are with your clients, like everything is a choice.
So being where we are, right, where we're struggling with our business, we need to make new choices because obviously the choices we're making right now, aren't going to help. So what we need to do is kind of get on a new path. So I wrote down some notes of things that we're going to go over. So, um, when we're talking about mindset shifts, so when it comes to mindset shifts with our freelance writing business, we need to make sure that we're paying attention to really what's going on. Like, do we hate our business because it's boring cause we're not working on the right projects. Do we need to add some more fun in there? Do we feel like our business is really a pain in the butt because, um, it's just a lot of long hours and we're not really getting paid as well as we should.
Do we not have the flexibility in our schedule to handle that? Do we kind of have a schedule that's just packed with deadlines and stuff, um, and meetings and calls, um, where, where is it kind of, you know, holding you back? The mindset part is like, we have to kind of start thinking about our business as this silly putty. Almost like it kind of fits the container it's in. So when you give it the wrong container, right, you've been working in this container, the container isn't there forever. You have to switch your silly putty and put it in a new container. So it can start evolving and adapting to that. So when you're thinking about your mindset, you have to kind of shift into this experimentation, adding more fun, looking at where, where you can kind of make some changes in your business and remembering that, um, the shifts that you're making in the changes with your mindset isn't that you like are going from hating your business to loving your business.
It's like, why am I tired? Uh, why, why am I looking at this thing and finding it boring? Um, why is this feeling tiresome? Like how can I kind of refresh my mind? Or how can I kind of shift the way I look at my business to get a better picture that looks like something I want to go toward. So when we're talking about mindset shifts, is it like that you're drained physically, emotionally, mentally? Like where are the little things that you can pick up and then how can you kind of shift that? So, um, a good example for me is that when I get bored of my business, that's a big sign for me that that there's like an issue going on. So if I keep doing a lot of deadlines or I keep doing the same kind of projects over and over again, and I start getting bored, that's where I'm like really need to work on my mindset because I know that I'm getting bored because like I'm doing too many repetitive things and that's making my mind bored.
Uh, I'm doing too many similar things, so I need to spice it up. I need to add a new project or add a new client or, um, add a new thing to work on. Um, I have my freelance writing business. I, I basically always kind of joke with people that I run basically like three businesses. I run my freelance writing business. I run my, um, freelance writer course business and I run my freelance writer, um, coaching business, and then basically three businesses. And for me that kind of helps me keep my mind sharp. It helps me moving around, seeing different problems and issues. And it helps me kind of like find fresh stuff to work on. It kinda like gives me, gives me a little bit of a mindset reset of like, oh yeah, I remember this is fun. Like I remember that this is, this is exciting.
And when one part gets boring, this other thing happens. Um, and even when I was just doing freelance writing, a lot of times, it meant I needed to talk about different topics. Like I needed to write, I was writing too much in the restaurant space and it was becoming boring. Like I needed to kind of take a break and then come back to it with fresh eyes. I needed to kind of give my mind like basically a flush, like, okay, let's go work on something else for a little bit. Then come back to this. And I find that people who write in one niche or two niches, this, this happens often. They're just like, I'm bored of it. Like, I feel like I've written about everything I could write about. You're so far deep in the weeds in that niche or in like, let's say, all you do is case studies and you're just like, oh, I'm just so bored with case studies is because you get too deep in the weeds.
You can't like your mindset is basically just like robot. Right. Um, and we kinda need to like take a step back and do some other things to get fresh eyes again. And that doesn't only impact us that impacts our clients as well. Right. So as we kind of go along, if we're kind of just doing this repetitive process, that we're not really refining and not really adding to it, it becomes boring or becomes this thing that we feel weighed down by or held back from. It means that we're not getting a better picture. We're not like taking a step back and getting some new, fresh ideas in the mix. It's kind of the reason why a lot of freelance writers end up getting hired. Right? A lot of times I get on calls with people and they're like, excuse me. And they're like, we just need a fresh pair of eyes.
We've looked at this for so long. We're just not really sure what's going on. And we're, you know, it's not really working. We just need a fresh pair of eyes. And this is kind of how we have to look at our business is shifting our minds to thinking about it as fresh pair of eyes. I need a little break from this topic or this niche or this content type work on something else and come back to it. So when you're thinking about your mindset in terms of like feeling held back and feeling like, like it's, you know, squishing, you take a break, good. There's something else for a little bit like this is something that I struggled with for a long time, which is like five business days, like taking a week off, right? Let's say it's weekend a weekend, right? So nine days taking five business days off from your business is not going to kill your business.
It's not going to change like a major thing for your business. And if you're bored and you're tired and you're burnt out and your mind just doesn't want to participate in your minds, like we suck at everything. Ah, take a break five business days is not going to make or break your, your business. And if you're really feeling like your schedule is packed, plan it out and really stick to it. Say like a month from now or six months from now, you're going to take a week off and I can tell you that five business days is not going to do anything. And it really gives you a nice refresher. Like it, it kind of feels like everybody's not asking for something for a week. Right. It kind of gets you this place where you're like, oh, there's no meetings and no calls. And, um, I don't have 800 emails to get back to, or I don't have to work up all these things or you kind of get to take a breath.
It really helps your mind kind of like filter through a lot of the things that you've been working on and the things you've been working through. And for me, like a lot of my great ideas come to me in the shower or like during my time off, like the time where I'm just kinda like not thinking about anything. Um, I have these really great ideas that just come to me and it's always like, it's just like that time where you get to turn your brain off. Right. So I always encourage people. Like if you're feeling like your business is holding you back, sorry, I have allergies and the allergies are pretty rough right now. And so my nose is itchy. Uh, so when you're feeling like your business is holding you down and holding you back, or your mind is like, basically like a burnt marshmallow, take a break.
It's okay to take a break. And five business days a week off is not going to kill your business. I know that there's some writers who like to, um, like take Fridays off all through the summer. So, um, they ended up taking like three months of like only working four days a week. And that works for them. For me, I need like condensed time off because I ended up working in condensed chunks. So I ended up saying, okay, cool, I'm going to work. You know, here's my next projects for the next three months I work on those. And then I'm like, I need some time off. So I kind of work in chunks. So I take chunk time off. So that's the mindset part and the vacation part. And then the other part is that, um, what you want to do is basically, um, use your time coming back to your business.
Or when you're looking at it is you want to take some steps to kind of like brainstorm some things. So I find that writers often lose track of where they want their business to beat. They don't spend that time going back to pen and paper or to like a little dry erase board and writing down what they want their business to end up being. They just kind of let go along. And then they're like, now I'm bored. Or like my business, everything sucks. Ah it's because you kind of like lost the big picture. You're just like focused on the granual granular details. So spend some time writing down, like what would your ideal schedule look like? What would your ideal day look like your ideal month, your ideal year? Where are you actually going? Like where do you want your business to be in five years?
What do you want it to look like? Do you want to work 20 hours a week? Do you want to cut from full-time to 20 hours a week? Do you want to take vacations? Like every quarter? Do you want to just spend more time with your family? Um, do you want to work a ton? You're just like, I'm willing to put in the time and energy to grow my business to like 250 K a year over the next couple of years, there's a lot of different steps that we can take, but we need to kind of have a planning session when we're feeling like, oh, like what is going on here? Right. We do some analysis. We kind of work on our mindset, but we also need to figure out where are we actually going in the future? Like, what steps can we now take?
Now that we did our brainstorming session, we sit down, write down all our stuff. Um, writing down our ideal schedule. Um, our ideal clients sometimes, like for me, my ideal clients have changed so much over the years. Um, I've been a freelance writer for almost like basically 10 years. And I can tell you my ideal client in the beginning and now are like two totally different ballparks. They're playing. They're not even sports. Like one's playing football. And like one is, uh, like owning the football team. It's like totally, totally different ballparks. And I think when you pass it down and refresh on that, like where are you actually going? Do you really want a flexible schedule anymore? Do you really want to work for these types of clients? You really want this type of work. I think when you sit down and look at all those things, it makes it a lot easier to map out how to kind of get under the, like, get out from under the rock of your business.
Like your business starts feeling like more like a pebble than like a Boulder. That's crushing you. You're like, oh, cool. Like now I see all the possibilities here. Um, you, you kind of, I guess like think of it this way. Um, your business is like a block of marble, right? And you start like chipping away at it and you're like, Ooh, this isn't turning out that great. We still have time. We haven't actually finished the sculpture. Right. The marble could fall over and crush us and then we'd be miserable. Right. But a lot of times I kind of think of it as like those sculptors that were like, I don't know what it's going to be. Like, the marble is going to tell me what the, what is going to be. Right. Some sculptors show up and they're like, give me a block of marble.
I already know, like I I'm going to build this thing. Like they conceptualize before they do it, but there's a lot of sculptors. It's just kind of like chip away. And then they're like, oh, it's actually this. So I think when we're building our businesses, that kind of experimentation, right. We kind of wrote it. We wrote down our things, right. We have kind of a concept, but that experimentation of like, maybe I'll try this or maybe I'll do a little bit of that. I think that kind of adds some freshness back into your business. Um, it doesn't always have to be about making money either. There's a lot of times where I've taken, uh, client work or I've a specific magazine article just for something fun to do. Or just for something that I wanted a clip or I was taking my business in a new direction.
You know, I sat down, I wrote my little list and I chipped away at my block of marble. And I was like, okay, I'm now I thought it was this. Now I'm actually seeing it's this. And so that kind of helped me change directions. But without that experimentation and adding fun back into our business, we lose a lot. We lose a lot of cool things. Um, it just becomes this kind of formulaic, basically nine to five job. This is like one of the dirty secrets of freelance writing is that a lot of freelance writers end up turning their freelance business into another nine to five job. They just don't realize it until it's like too late. And then they're like my business thoughts, help, you know, like that kind of stuff. The dirty secret is like, yeah, people make money. People will make huge piles of money.
Like there's people who make high six figures, seven figures as freelance writers and or copywriters, they could be freelance writers or freelance copywriters. Right. But the dirty secret is there's plenty of them who have just turned their freelance writing into a nine to five job. They don't treat it like a business. They just answer to their clients. And instead of having one boss at their regular nine to five, they have like two or three bosses and they just answer to them. They don't actually spend the time making it fun. They're just like, it just turns into a nine to five job. And they're like, yeah, I make money. And I sit down at my desk every day at 9:00 AM and I get up at 5:00 PM. Like, and I think that that kind of rigidity makes your business boring. It makes your business feel like it's crushing you, that it's the Boulder and not the pebble.
And that you're feeling like, tell me what to put in this marble. You're not like looking at the marble and seeing like the potential or what it could be or where do you want to take it? You're basically just like, Hey, tell me what to do with this marble. Okay. You know, and that following that direction, right. Um, that works for some people that works for some freelance writers. So just turn it into a nine to five job. But my guess is that if you're here and watching this video or that you're here on the live stream, my guess is that you might be one of those people who accidentally turned your freelance business into a nine to five job. You made that kind of like weird thing where you're like sweet. Now I'm making money. And then you're like, oh, this is boring. Or like, you know, there there's no, um, there's no difference in the day to day.
Like you get up, you do your marketing, you do your client work, you go to sleep or you get up. Um, you do some client work, you get on some calls, you do this thing or that thing you, um, deal with freshening up, maybe some website copy or changing your LinkedIn profile, whatever. But it becomes this thing. That's sort of like every day is kind of gray instead of everyday being fun with experiments and color. And, and, and I think that when it comes down to it, like the piece about experiments as they should always be fun, that's why we're kind of refreshing re livening up our freelance writing business. We're not here always to make money. Money's nice money pays our bills, who pays for all, all the kibbles for these dopes over here. Right. But the key is also that, like, if you're bored at your business, if you don't like it and feel like it's crushing you, my guess is that you don't really want to continue on like that.
You don't really want to keep doing that. And you have to do these little experiments, like forget the money part. You have to do these little experiments to see how things will turn out. And this is, this is kind of this concept that I go back to with a lot of my coaching students is like, when you come to me and you ask like, which niches make money? That doesn't mean they're going to make money for you. Right. There's a lot of people who get into finance or who get into Bitcoin or who get into, um, SAS or all these different or tech and then a year in they're like, this is boring. And I hate it. And I can't, I don't want to write in this anymore. Right. But they only got into it because it made money. They didn't think of it as like, you know, something where they're like, oh, I could keep writing about this for years and not get bored of it.
Or I could let you know, they only get into it because it makes money. And I think that's kind of an issue when you start thinking of your business as just a way to make money and not a way to experiment or try new things or do cool stuff. I think, I think it just becomes this trap. I think it becomes this thing that just like slimes all over you. Right. So when we're thinking about our business, right, we think about our freelance writing business. We don't want to get into a business where we're just making money. And we're just saying like, I need a niche that makes money. I can write about anything. The problem is that once you start writing about it in bulk, it becomes really like quickly obvious that that's not the right fit for you. This is why a lot of times people get confused when they're like, well, why would I go into food and travel?
It's so competitive. Or like, oh, I would love to do that. But it's so competitive. It's like plenty of people make huge piles of money, only writing about food and travel it's because they get excited about it. They're really good at pitching. They're really good at thinking of all these things. Cause it's a fun experiment. They're like, oh, let's try this and try that and try this. Um, and it's, it's easy. That's something that they get excited about so they can make money. Cause they're always kind of popping with ideas and this kind of thing, where if we only focus on money, right. We only focus on like, does it make money? Then your business will eventually end up being like really boring. You can make all this money. And I've seen it with so many different freelancers. They end up making a bunch of money in a certain niche and then they hate it.
And they quit freelancing because they're like, freelancing is not for me. It's like, no, you lost the experimentation. You lost like the big picture. You lost all the fun parts you like, we're only in it for this. Um, and I think when you try to like, you know, like for example, a different experiment could be pitching a random idea to a random magazine. Um, a different experiment could be that you speak, you start speaking instead of always writing a different experiment could be, you start a podcast or a live stream, a different experiment could be that you decided to take a month off. Like you have enough money, you take a month off. And you're like, I'm just going to let myself kind of like do whatever. I'm just going to kind of see how this goes. And um, you know, see what I want to do when I come back.
There's a lot of different things that we can do to kind of revitalize our business and put a lot of different things in. But I think if you go into it being like, how can I make this go away? Or how can I like throw some money at it and make it go away? Or how can I pick a different niche that makes more money and maybe that'll make me happy. I think the issue there is that ends up being this thing that eventually you just come back to the same place. You come back to the same place where you're bored or where, um, your business just doesn't feel exciting where you feel like it's dragging you down. It's just like mentally, emotionally, physically, just like, oh God don't make me. No, don't make me go back to the chair. Um, it's kind of becomes that.
So that's kind of my thoughts on this right now. But if you have questions, you can pop them in the chat. Um, I'm happy to answer them in the chat. So if you have questions about this, pop them in there, it can be about anything. We don't even have to talk about this topic. If you have a question about freelance writing, I'm happy to answer whatever it is. You can pop it in the chat. I'm going to give you guys a quick update. Let's see if anybody wants some treaties. It seems like everybody wants some tree dose. Good job, buddy.
Hi, dark girl.
You guys look great today. You guys look great. All right. Sweet. Right. So any questions you can pop them in the chat, a few more things I'll chat about since we're you. So the last couple of things is, um, when we're thinking about our freelance writing business, I think it's okay that your business changes over time. So the reason that you got into freelance writing may always be the reason you got into freelance writing, but the way you run your business will change over time. I don't think I know that many freelancers who've been around for quite some time who haven't changed the course of their business. Um, they didn't get different clients. Like they didn't switch from writing for magazines to writing for businesses or vice versa, or, uh, they ended up writing for a bunch of different niches. They thought they wouldn't write for, or they ended up adding a blog to their website because they just wanted to talk about, you know, knitting or some sort of topic all the time.
Uh, or they didn't start an email list or a podcast or start posting on social media more or, um, doing some other kinds of fun projects to liven up their business. So I think what's a fun thing is like, if you could think of like a wild, crazy project that would push you out of your comfort zone, maybe that's part of your experimentation. Maybe that's something that adds some uniqueness to your business. Like the cool thing about this. Like I used to be really nervous on camera. If you go back and look at my early stuff, like, just from when I started this last year, this live stream, I was way more nervous and way less comfortable on camera. And I kind of did this as a way to kind of get myself comfortable, like get comfortable, talking to a camera and talking to an audience and getting to a place where I spoke better than I know I still make mistakes.
Right. I still say, um, and I still make weird smack noises sometimes when I'm thirsty and I probably should get a drink with my mouth dry, right. All that stuff. I still do that, but it's just much less frequent. And this was one of my projects that I think helps me as better as a writer. It helps me with clients. It helps me grow an audience of freelance writers who are looking for help. It helps me add to our community of freelance writers to give knowledge away that I've gotten for the last 10 years. And it's a way for me to kind of add to my skillset. I understand video and live streaming and a lot of other different elements that really helped me with my clients. And just being able to sit there, not sit, but stand here and speak and not make a lot of mistakes or make less mistakes.
Trains my brain better for writing. I make a lot less mistakes when I write, I don't, I don't get in these points where, um, the, like I really feel like the quality of my writing has gotten better because of my talking. Like there's a better way for me to kind of think through my thoughts because I do this live stream and pushing myself out of my comfort zone to do this. It feels a lot more comfortable just to hop on here every Friday at noon and talk and talk about these cool topics and answer questions or help other freelance writers that feels more natural. Now. It used to be really, um, really rough for me. It used to be really uncomfortable and I used to talk really fast. I probably still talk really fast right now, but I used to talk really fast. And I just, I don't know.
I feel like over this time period, not only has it helped my writing and just me being on camera, but it's kind of just added to my general skillset, which I think is important. I don't really feel like my business weighs me down. I don't really feel like my business is stagnant or that it's, um, this thing that's become this Boulder. I have so many different projects that I get to do that I kind of get to put my hands on a lot of different pies and it helps keep everything fresh. And I won't, you know, I'm definitely gonna say that, um, there are times where my business feels like it's too heavy and that's when I knew I needed to take a break. So there are times where I know, like, even though I have a ton of different projects going on there's times when I just kind of like need some time off, sorry, my grumpy dog just laid down behind me.
So I know there's times when I need to take a break. And I know there's times that pop up where, um, I just like, I know that I'm getting annoyed or I'm getting irritated just cause I need more sleep and I need a break from stuff that's different than me finding my business boring. So I hope that kind of makes sense. I see Getty's got near Getty. I I'm going to have to disagree with you. I I know maybe it feels like I've been sharp on camera. Um, I really appreciate you saying that it has been struggle on this end. Um, like I would just get so nervous and I just would talk super quick and it was rough, but I appreciate you saying that. Um, thank you getting this so nice to say. I prefer standing up and speaking rather than sitting down. I always, I get this weird feeling.
I know this is probably, this is definitely my own issue, but I feel lazy when I sit and talk on video. Like I feel lazy sitting and talking. I feel like since I'm such a hand talker that standing and talking with my hands makes a lot more sense for me. And, um, it allows me to kind of move around and pet my dogs or give them [inaudible] or, uh, it allows me, I don't know, I just feel better standing and it helps my posture. So I like that. And then spun T uh, like with spontaneity, that's something, I think I've kind of just like worked on over time. It's kind of just, um, you know, just being more comfortable on camera and then also being able to answer things more like while thinking on my feet about them. And also like, I have been a freelance writer for a long time.
So there's a lot of things that come up pretty often from freelance writers that are like, oh, what about this or this? I'm like, oh my gosh, I've been there so many times. Like, don't make these mistakes. Oh, welcome Marie. You did. You found me, Marie, did you have questions? So Marie is one of my core students. We just finished our wrap of the first, uh, group of course students. So the next course will be opening. Um, it will be going in the fall. So it'll probably open for enrollment in late September, early October range. And then it'll go to the end of the year till mid December. So welcome, Maria, if you have questions where you can pop them in the chat, I'm happy to answer them. So Marie's doing all this stuff from the course. Um, and so far, I think she's really liked it.
So I've been really happy to hear that. Um, Marie Marie says she loves by format. Yay. That's good. I'm good to hear that, Maria, if you have questions, you can pop them in the chat and I'm happy to answer them. Cool. So she's going to pop some Marie is going to pop some questions in the chat and then we'll go over them. So, um, is you're so nice. She says the course is awesome. Thank you, Marie. So we basically I'll just give a quick synopsis of the course. Isn't just to have it on here. So the course is a 10 week course, but we have about seven weeks of material. So we have a few weeks. Then we have an implementation week. Then we have a few weeks implementation week and we go over everything from inbound and outbound marketing to mindset, um, to how to actually work with your clients, how to scale your business, how to make more money, how to find bigger clients, um, how to basically just run your business, like get it, get it set up with the right foundation.
Cause there's a lot of people who have been freelancing, but they don't have the right foundation to actually scale their business. Right. And scaling means that there's like, you can actually make these processes go beyond just you. You don't need to touch everything, right. It needs to be automated. You can set up systems and processes to kind of do it for you. And so you can actually get back to writing and making more money. So for me, the course has been this really cool, uh, thing that I built. That's not only teaching you how to kind of get the basics. It's not necessarily the basis, but how to build the right framework for your business. Um, and how to take basically the grocery store of options I give you because, uh, I've known all different types of freelancers in all different types of ways. I have my own business and I've kind of amalgamated that into like pick and choose options.
Like you could do this or this or this, then it's like, all right, now that you've chosen, what's in your grocery store from the grocery store. What you want, figure out how to scale it. Here's some things that you can do to scale. Here's how you can get into the idea and content strategy spaces. Here's how to move into like market messaging and positioning other projects that are just, not just writing, but using your value and your skills over time. So that's going to open back up in the fall and it will be if you want to join the wait list, I think you can just go to Mandy ellis.com/course. So you go to Mandy ellis.com/course that'll bring you to the wait list and you can join that. Um, okay. So Maria says, how do you find hashtags? She said, I just connected with someone who said, if you'd like to use any of my quotes, all you need to do is click on hashtag credible quote and you'll find at least a hundred quotes I've created.
So, okay. When I, when I find hashtags, there's a couple of different things. So you use them differently on different platforms. So on LinkedIn, you just click hashtag and it gives you a bunch of suggestions based on like a whole bunch of things. So LinkedIn is different than like Twitter and different than Instagram. So on LinkedIn, I try to pick hashtags that make the most sense for the posts since they don't tell you the same things, it's Instagram and Twitter. So on Instagram, when you pick a hashtag, it tells you how many people follow that hashtag and you don't want to pick a giant number because when people follow the hashtag, that means that so many people post in that hashtag your stuff gets buried. So you want to make sure that you pick something that has like a reasonable number, like maybe like a hundred thousand, 200,000, maybe as many as 500,000, but probably like less.
Um, because you want your stuff to get seen. You're using these hashtags. So that eventually gets seen. That's the problem. When people start using big hashtags, it gets lost because there's, there's so many people hashtagging that it just, it gets messed up. So when I'm looking for hashtags, it depends on where I'm looking. So LinkedIn, I do most of the stuff that just makes sense. And I don't even know if you can follow a hashtag on LinkedIn yet. I don't think that's a thing, but people can search by hashtag and see content. So maybe you can follow hashtags on LinkedIn, but you can follow that. I'm on Instagram. Hold on one second. I need to, so, um, so LinkedIn, I just use kind of the stuff that makes sense and Instagram, I haven't done it in a while and I need to, but on Instagram I make sure I collect different hashtags that have basically the right amount of followers to actually find, um, like actually see my posts.
Like it doesn't just live for one second and then get flushed out by everybody else posting a hashtag. So, oh, Marie also says, so the implementation weeks, which you said the downtime was, were just as important as the coursework. Yeah. So with the course itself, the implementation weeks are meant so that you can actually take action. That was something that was really important to me when I was creating this course was I don't want to just give you information like this. Isn't a course where it's like, I tell you what to do. And you're like, look, I got to fish. Now this is like, I'm teaching you how to fish. And then your ability to get fish is like infinite. So this whole course is about teaching you how to fish. And in order to teach you how to fish, we have to have weeks where you actually take action.
So then we can figure out how to make changes. So for me, the implementation weeks, which Marie is calling the downtime weeks here are really important. This is where we actually put everything into play. It's where we are. We take action. We do the marketing. We do. We figure out how to get clients. We make our lists, we start changing our LinkedIn profiles and our websites. And we make really big shifts. We make those changes. That was really important to me. Um, because what's a course of, it's just information that you don't use. That would be a big waste. So Marie, so with the quotes, you'd have to click on the hashtag. So like when someone says, all you have to do is click on that hashtag you just click. It should be linked. So if you see hashtag credible quotes, you should just be able to click on that hashtag and then it should pull it up.
So for example, if I go to Instagram and I go see someone's post and they have a bunch of hashtags, I can just click on one of those hashtags. It's like on the screen, on my phone and it'll bring up all of those posts. Um, so it should just pull them up. Like you should just be able to click on it and do it. Or if you're on a platform, you can search that hashtag. So you can just search hashtag what was it? Credible quote. So you can just do hashtag credible quote in the search bar and search it and it'll, it should bring that up. So that should make it a lot easier. I think your talking, I don't know if you're talking about on Instagram or Twitter or LinkedIn, but on, you have to search within the platform. If you search on Google, that doesn't work.
So anytime you have a hashtag, you need to search that hashtag within the platform to bring it up. But usually what happens is someone says like, Hey, you can just go to hashtag this. You can just click it like an Instagram. You can just click it. It's just linked to that, all of that stuff. So you should be able to find it in there. Well, let me know. Um, all the places the forms are different, right? So all the platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter and Instagram, Facebook, they're all different. So it it's best to search within the platform just for any hashtag stuff. But using hashtags matters on it, changes on the platform. And like I said, I don't know if you can follow a hashtag on LinkedIn. I know you can like look stuff up on the hashtags. I don't know if you can follow a specific hashtag, like you can on Instagram.
So I hope that was helpful. Marie, do you have any other questions? Anybody? If anybody has any questions, feel free to pop them in the chat. I'm happy to answer them. I'm happy to go over anything with freelance writing. It doesn't even have to be about your business being a huge bummer right now, which has happened to me many times. Just want to put that out there. Like I am speaking on that topic of your business weighing you down because I've been there so many times I haven't had this like magic road of my business where like, everything is great. My, my business is basically like, I'm always missing a tire. Uh, I'm rolling on a donut somewhere. Like, you know, I'm always, something's always, always messed up and it's been this kind of like Rocky journey where I had to learn a lot along the way.
And um, I never try to make topics for these live streams that I haven't been there or I haven't done them myself or, um, I try to talk from a place of like, I know how hard this was when I felt like I was the only one really struggling along. And I felt like I was the only person who was like, feeling like my business was weighing me down. Everyone else was like, everything's great. I have all these clients. And I'm like, I don't know what the F I'm doing help. Um, and I just wanted to make sure that, you know, we have these conversations about sometimes your business sucks. It just happens. And it's happened to me many times. It's just a matter of, kind of like shifting a few things around it's it's like, uh, any kind of puzzle, right? Shifting it around.
Oh, Marie or computers, mess it up with a keyboard. Is it your cat? Is it whisper? I bet it's whisper. All right. Any other questions? And then we're going to hop off. So Maria, if you have any other questions and your computer is not having a meltdown or whispers, not on the keyboard, we can answer those. We can do a pup date, but I only have one pup in the, in the puppet view. So only have one, one act. You have to go to your Hobbit hole. You you little weirdo mine. You have to go to your habit hole, go to your palpable, go to your, have a hole. There we go. Good job. Good girl. All right. You guys are great today. You guys look great. You look shiny. You have a few little eye goobs, but you know, we all have allergies. That's what happens.
Good job. Good job. All right, cool. Merissa she felt supported in the course. Great, awesome. That's thing that I think is really important for me with this course is that we're not just doing the course where you just buy information and then you're like, go on your Merry way. The whole point is to have a process and a community that supports you as you make changes, because they can be really hard sometimes to making these shifts in your business or taking your business where you thought it wouldn't go. And you're just like, oh no, I don't know what I'm doing. Like, and you're nervous and scared about that. The whole point is that we kind of do that together. So for me running the courses about that, we have community and we have a bunch of people there that can kind of work through all these things together.
They can implement the lessons, they can ask questions. We have live Q and A's twice a week, um, for an hour. So where we have live Q and A's Tuesdays and Thursdays for an hour. So two hours a week, we're on live, ask answering questions. Those like, those are great fun time. And the whole point is that, um, we support each other. It's not just me supporting you as a student, it's that other students support each other and encourage each other. Um, and it becomes this really nice thing where we're all kind of like, yeah, like celebrating each other's wins and, um, really kind of like dealing with the things that come with Billy and freelance writing business, like whether that's celebrating things or dealing with the hard stuff or coming over these kinds of like mindset, challenges and roadblocks. Cool. Any other questions? Any other things, any other things that we can go over?
Oh, if you feel like this has been helpful so far, make sure to give it a thumbs up. If you feel like you want to learn more about the course, or you want to learn more about how to become, um, how to make more money as a freelance writer or how to build a better business that works for you as a freelance writer, make sure to subscribe below. Let's see anything else. We have cool updates. Everyone sees it really loved the pup dates just because they hang out in here. And they're mostly sleeping while I'm talking, come on here, but
All right, great.
I don't see any more questions. So I think I'm going to hop off, but I will see you next Friday. I'm here every Friday at noon central time. Um, if you want to hop back in here, you just have to go to Mandy ellis.com/live, and it'll shoot you right here. And if it doesn't show that I'm live yet, just refresh the page and eventually the live video will show up. So, uh, I will see you next Friday at noon. The easiest way to find me is just go to Mandy ellis.com/live. Uh, I'm always open to questions. Any questions that you have about freelance writing? We can always talk about them in the chat. It doesn't have to be topic specific, but I hope this was helpful. Give it a thumbs up. Subscribe. If you feel like you want to join in and you know, have more videos about freelance writing and I will see you now it's Friday. 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!
