Sounds lovely, right? I won’t lie to you and tell you it’s as easy as clicking a button or signing up with some worthless content mill because it’s not. But if you’re looking for webmasters willing to pay decent amounts of money for content, you need to find them and then convince them to hire you…subtly.

Sadly, so many writers still haven’t actually figured out how to do this smoothly. So I’ll give you a big hint – it’s not by selling your soul in the Buy/Sell/Trade section of the forum! No free samples required here, people!

Forum Basics

Let’s start at the beginning to be sure we’re not leaving anyone behind here. A forum can be on any topic and can involve any number of professionals. Webmaster forums (and there are many – do a quick search, you’ll find them) are plentiful and a nice place to start honing your skills. But if you know enough in a particular area to be useful in finance, DIY, technology or any other topic – find the forum that is most active in that area. Writer’s forums are a great place to visit with other writers, but find some client-based forums first – while some do, most writers aren’t hiring other writers regularly.

Once you’ve found a forum you like, make a membership account right away. The membership has to age a bit to give you credibility, so go ahead and get a username established before you start reading.

 
And you must read.

The worst thing you can do on a forum is jump in to posting and chatting and offering services without getting a feel for the place. Think of a typical webmaster forum like a bar. You don’t just walk in, hop on a stool and start drinking and selling things to people around you. You need to stand at the entrance awhile. Check things over. Walk around a bit. Take a seat in the back and pick the wrapper off a beer while you observe to see if you like this place or not.

That’s your first step here and it should be a big clue that this is not a “get rich quick” scheme. You actually have to invest some serious time and energy in the forum you’ve chosen to make this pay off.

Become One with the Forum

Forum marketing takes time upfront and requires ongoing maintenance, but has a nice payoff if you invest wisely. To make your time pay, though, you’ll need to become a valuable member of an active forum.

Being a writer offering $5 or $1 articles in the Buy/Sell/Trade section does not make you an exceedingly valuable member of the forum. You’re like the shoeshine boy – the customers come by, pick someone selling cheap stuff and throw a few dollars your way. No respect in the long run. You want to avoid that.

Don’t make a sales page on the forum. Don’t start a thread about your writing.

Instead, start contributing. When someone asks a question about something you know about, give them a real answer. When someone asks for advice on their landing page copy, respond with some thoughtful advice. Your goal here is not to give away your skills, but to instead invest knowledge by sharing it with those who need it.

What site owners want most is someone they can trust with professionalism and knowledge. After your introduction period ends on the forum, make a simple signature with your name (real names and bylines count for a lot in the writing industry – it gives you real credibility), your title and a link to your professional website. Leave some space in the sig to offer some specials later.

Now just keep posting. You don’t need a thread in the forum. Making one makes it look like you’re competing with the shoeshine boys down there in BST. You have a web presence to do your selling for you. When someone looking for advice on press releases or how to install a new program reads your killer advice, he’ll naturally look to see who you are. Then, he might click on your site link to see what you do.

And suddenly he remembers that he has that project he’s been putting off – and wouldn’t you be perfect since you already know so much about writing press releases! He saw that in your carefully crafted posts that were so helpful! Finally, someone “real” online who he can trust! So the potential client sends you a private message or contacts you through your site and you’re off and running!

How long does it take? It can take days or it can take months. But the longer you invest in a community, the greater the results tend to be. Don’t just tell potential clients they need you in a sales page so much like other threads or pleas for work – show them with your well-written comments, posts and responses.

Include prominent, classy contact information and the serious clients will ultimately come to you. In a tight-knit community, as many of the inner webmaster forums are, recommendations start to fly between other members and soon you’re doing very little but posting about things you know to help others and answering private messages about paid work.

It’s a nice gig if you’re willing to invest in it.

The day continued in the usual way – six hours of teaching teenagers, stop by the gas station, a full round of grocery shopping and then back to pick up the kids. Put groceries away, make dinner, type in codes for Moshi Monsters and get kids fed. Apparently I ate at some point before bathing kids, reading books and celebrating when a tooth came out five minutes after the oldest was supposed to be asleep. (That delayed the schedule a bit, but it’s fun to watch your kids get older.)

Now it’s 9:32 in the evening, I’m rather sluggish, and I’m going to do what I do best – motivate myself to get back in gear. I’ve discussed a few favorite methods for waking up in another post, but there are only so many things you can do when the rest of the world is sleeping a room away – there’s no jamming out to music and power walking with mosquitoes and possums in the dark isn’t especially appealing. Yet despite this deadlines loom, so here’s my plan to kick my sluggish butt back in gear right now:

Do the Easy Stuff First

Long ago, I realized that stacking the deck in my favor makes Monday nights far more tolerable and productive. So I do the fun stuff on Monday. I have some blogs to write for a site catering to ‘tween girls and a couple of regular, small projects. None of it involves serious research, and I actually enjoy the topics on Monday. It’s like a (profitable) warm-up for the rest of the week.

It helps that I’m in my sixth or seventh year of working with these particular clients as well, so there isn’t much stress here – this is the easy night, and that’s highly motivating. (For the record, the hard stuff waits until Tuesday night when I’m most motivated and must be done by Thursday night when I start to drop off again.)

Stare at My Calendar and Move Stuff Around

I live by my calendar, and I play a game with myself almost every week. I put some projects on the calendar in a moment of highly productive drives. At some point last week I was convinced I was going to write some guest posts tonight.

As I spent five minutes staring at my calendar a bit ago, I realized that those posts aren’t likely to happen after all – plus they aren’t the easy, routine client work I count on for my Monday. So I drag those guest posts down a few days to an empty slot on Thursday. Presto! I have a lighter workload today, which feels good.

Be careful with this trick or you’ll get addicted to moving things around and fail to actually get them done. Since I know I’m playing mind games with myself and that the posts will get done by the end of the week (even if I move them to Friday when I actually need to finish them), playing around with the schedule doesn’t hurt anyone and makes me feel better about my workload.

Force Myself into the Zone

I only have a couple hours to work before I crash, rinse and repeat tomorrow. So I can’t afford to waste time or I’ll lose any edge I had. So I turn on music (softly) to keep me motivated, I minimize email and social media and I put my cell phone far away on the charger. I grab a drink, sit down and put myself in the zone.

There comes a point when you just have to force yourself to get started. Pull up the easy stuff, put some words on the page and focus exclusively on what you’re doing. The more intense the focus, the easier it gets to zone out into work. Short of a crying or vomiting child, nothing is going to knock me out of this zone for at least another hour or so. And that will be a productive hour at least.

Declaring Arrogance

I’ve known it for years, but I’m going to just get it out there in the open. You might consider me stuck up. I’m not conceited about my great beauty. Two kids, thirty-two years and that’s pretty much a write-off. I’m not arrogant about my superior writing ability. I think we can all agree that there are fabulous writers out there who far surpass just about all of us in ability. But I am cocky about my ability to make my career work out the way I want it to, and I think we can all celebrate some variation of that same theme.

Does that make me annoying to others? You might be annoyed reading this, but we’ll get through it together. To the person on the street, I’m just another schlumpy mom with two kids and too little sleep. To the clients online, however, I’ve been around long enough to be a true asset. I can sell myself and I don’t have to lie to do it.

It’s heady stuff demanding hundreds of dollars for my time. The fact that they come back means I’m not the only one who thinks my time is worth that much. As well all know, I’m not the only one able to claim these bragging rights – you are, too. And so is that guy and the one working from home a few houses down the road. It’s a right of well-paid freelancers and small business owners to be just a wee bit arrogant, and surprisingly that bit of cockiness is respected by clients.

Being Loud and Being Proud

There are a few things working against us in the arrogance department, however.

• The word arrogance has a negative connotation. Haughty, conceited, stuck-up, cocky, etc. All of those are insults.

• Don’t shoot the messenger, but there have been more than a few studies that claim women aren’t proud enough of their achievements. If they were, they’d be more competitive in various careers and there wouldn’t be a significant pay gap for the same job between women and men.

• Humility is a virtue. Okay. It’s hard to get around that one. The exact opposite of arrogance is a good thing, meaning excessive pride is obviously bad. Hm. But without pride how can you utilize your talents? An argument for another day perhaps.

So what do we do? If you’re uncomfortable being arrogant in your successes, why not use a word with a positive connotation? You can be proud. You can be confident. I dare you to find a distinction between being confident and being arrogant when it comes to self-made success. It’s just splitting hairs.

Demonstrate Confidence

Hairs, definitions and denotations aside, the take away here is simple. Often it’s not your abilities selling your writing services. It’s your confidence. It’s not your amazing grasp of the subjunctive that is going to make clients pay you lots of money to write a blog post. It’s the seemingly arrogant way you carry on discussions of your abilities. You know what to do, and you can explain it to others.

You understand how to be successful. And believe it or not, many client’s greatest desire is a professional who is exactly that – confident, assertive (there’s another good pride word) and independent. A lot of my clients are relieved they don’t have to virtually hold my hand – it’s actually a huge selling point.

Maybe you’re not there yet. Maybe you never have any desire to be so sure of yourself you’re able to argue a rate with a client or let him know when he’s looking at a business idea that needs serious rethought.

You may be disgusted with me for saying arrogance in business is a positive attribute, and I truly think it is so long as you’re not blinded by confidence to your own shortcomings. But I have to wonder if every successful freelancer isn’t proud and confident to the point of arrogance – even if he or she isn’t actually comfortable with it yet.

Consider the following:

One of the boys jump over the fence.

One of the boys jumps over the fence.

Which one is correct?

Let’s dissect them and see:

The subject in the two sentences is the same. It’s “One”. “Of the boys” is modifying the subject.

So the actual sentence using just the simple subject would be:

One jump over the fence.

One jumps over the fence.

Take out the prepositional phrase and you get:

One jump.

One jumps.

You subject is singular so you use “jumps”. The second one is obviously correct when it’s broken down to this level.

If the sentence changed to:

The boys jump over the fence.

Your subject would be plural and it would be appropriate to use “jump.”

Consider a longer sentence where things aren’t quite as obvious:

Coming home from the race, every one of the track team members want to get an ice cream cone.

For the record, Microsoft Word didn’t flag that sentence as being written incorrectly. There is no green squiggly line underneath it, but it is most certainly wrong.

Take the sentence down the subject and verb: “One want” or if it’s easier “Every one want.”

Wrong!

It should be “One wants.”

If the problem is complicated enough to fool Microsoft Word (which we all know we shouldn’t and can’t rely on, but so many still do), it’s no wonder mistakes get past writers who aren’t proofreading or who aren’t as strong in the language.

Speaking very generally, a multiple subject gets a singular verb. (Boys jump.) A singular subject has what appears to be a plural verb. (Boy jumps.)

This isn’t always true, of course, since like so many things in the English language, the rules are always changing.

Bottom line: Check every sentence you write to ensure that your subject and verb are in agreement. If you can’t tell easily, take that sentence down to the simple subject and verb and compare. Soon you’ll be comfortable with even the most convoluted sentences!

WAHM Baggage

Okay, here’s the scoop. If you don’t already know, work-at-home moms, or WAHM as we are often labeled, aren’t taken very seriously as business people. We’re considered flakes who raise kids full-time and play around making money during naps or whatever. There, I said it.

If you don’t believe me, check out some of the meatier webmaster forums that are almost entirely populated by men or “professional” women. When other members go looking for cheap content or services, members tend to recommend that others “ go find a WAHM looking to make a few bucks” on other forums. There are even e-books created and sold as a “special offer” that outline how to exploit WAHMs.

The general impression from the more “serious” website owners is that moms – especially those who write – are just sitting around watching their stories and eating bon-bons most of the time, but when they decide it’s time to make a few bucks to buy some new scrap booking supplies, they wait patiently for the webmasters to hand them a few quick articles to write for any amount the client is willing to offer.

It makes you shake your head, of course, and presumably you realize that this isn’t true for most of the serious writing moms out there regardless of where they choose to work. But even sadder than the general perception is the fact that there are some out there who encourage the stereotype be being exactly the type of WAHM the rest of us hate to be classified as.

It creates a nasty contradiction within the moms-who-work community.

The Mom Community

Anyone who is a mom knows that there are tiers and levels in the mothering community. Any woman who has given birth is given a free pass into the motherhood club. From there things get a little trickier. You have to earn your stripes if you’re going to be in the ‘exclusively breastfed’ club or if you want to be part of the ‘stay-at-home mom’ niche. You get another notch on your belt if you’re a ‘homeschooling’ mom or if you’re a serious ‘PTA’ or ‘Soccer’ mom. The categorization of the moms is endless, and it’s almost exclusively done by other moms.

Fortunately, while we may pick at each other over formula feeding and soccer leagues, moms tend to unite and support each other when things get a bit hairier. We can forget labels as quickly as we create them. As far as I’m concerned the WAHM title is just one of those that should probably be swept away or reclassified as non-combative.

Embrace WAHM-isms

Do I like being called a WAHM? Eh. I honestly don’t really care. I can fall into virtually any category of motherhood depending on the time of the year and the mood I’m in. But I know that it bothers others and I’ll hazard a guess that it’s the stereotype that is getting under their skin.

I don’t like being labeled anything I find offensive. I would hate to be called dumb or lazy. I would hate to be called a bad mother. I would hate for someone to slap me in a category where I don’t feel I belong, and that applies to all of our sensibilities. Otherwise why would so many professional-level writers feel the need to explain our business model and why we are different than the cheap writers? Why do we get offended when we see newspaper articles claiming that writing articles online is an easy way to earn money for those looking for new career options?

But in the grand scheme of things, this is just another layer of a very complex cake. There are some WAHMs out there grateful to pick up a few bucks while baby naps. These are essentially the same as the hobby writers or the college kids who want a little beer or Christmas money. Big deal. Leave them be.

Then there are the WAHMs who run full-scale businesses that enable them to provide fully for their families. I’ve been fortunate to know a nutritionist with her doctoral degree who choses to work from home as well as a full-time professional employee of Microsoft who also works from home. I know working moms who write part-time (like me) and those who write full-time (like others here.) I know moms who are full-time CPAs and award-winning professional photographers who travel to clients and need only a home office.

Professional or not, Tupperware or corporate accounts, we are all moms and we all happen to be that dreaded term: WAHM. Like so many others, this is a stereotype that holds no water.

Or does it?

“All hell breaks loose.” It’s not very hell-like if everyone is doing it. I’ve seen “all hell break loose” countless times in everything from children’s fiction to adult romance to spy and mystery novels. Enough already! If I have to read it one more time, all hell’s gonna break loose! For the record, when “all hell breaks loose” it means things are about to get really bad, really fast.

“Batten down the hatches.” The only time I ever want to read this again is if you’re writing a story about a ship lost at sea, because that’s the only place this particular expression belongs. To “batten down the hatches” means you’re fastening things on a ship that may fly around during a storm. Normally, however, you see the expression used to indicate something bad is going to happen and one person is warning another to prepare for a jealous wife or an angry boss or something equally cliché.

“Between a rock and a hard place.” You have a tough decision to make and you’re being pressed from both sides. If you’re being squeezed between a rock and a hard place, you have two unfavorable decisions to choose between and usually you’re under pressure to pick the lesser of two evils. (Which means you’re supposed to pick the one that hurts the least.)

“Think outside of the box.” Once upon a time we were all boring, non-creative people who colored in the lines and didn’t have an original thought in our pretty heads. Then we were told to get creative and start “thinking outside of the box.” Apparently this was where all of the good ideas had gone while we weren’t thinking of them. Now that we’re all “thinking outside of the box”, which means getting away from the normal though pattern or way of doing business, we’re bringing back creativity every day. Unfortunately, all of this “out of the box thinking” has me wishing a few of us could just crawl back into the box again and get away from tired idioms for a while at least.

This is by no means an exhaustive list – just a few idioms that we’ve seen too often of late. What idioms make you want to crawl back into your box?

And just what is the difference? If you don’t know, you’re certainly not alone. Even Spell Check doesn’t know the difference. It’s a trivial thing, and most people don’t care. But I do.

Let’s review:

“Yeah” – Yeah, it’s, like, teenager talk. “Yeah” is pronounced yah-uh. This is not a celebration word. This isn’t something you’d say when a friend has a new grandbaby born on her birthday (as the email I received told me). It’s slang. It means “yes” or “whatever.” Sometimes we even use it with “so” to make it even more casual (or obnoxious), “Yeah, so, I was bored.” Big freakin’ deal.

“Yea” – Hey, everyone, let’s vote. Do you vote yea or nay? “Yea” sounds like may, hay or even yay (which we’ll get to in a minute), but it means an old-fashioned “yes.” It is the oldest of the collection and was the root of all versions of yes words today. “Yeah”, which means yes, definitely derived from “yea”, which also means a more formal yes, but then so did an exclamation of excitement that is almost never used correctly.

“Yay” – Yay! We’re finally using “yay” correctly! Ironically as I type this, Microsoft Word is trying to correct me. It doesn’t think that “yay” is a word. Apparently I should use “yap” instead, but I won’t. I think we all know Word isn’t right all the time. If you’re excited, “yay” is the word to correctly use according to what we consider “proper” English. “Yea” gives you a vote and “yeah” is just agreeing – only “Yay!” can really convey true enthusiasm.

My challenge to you: Pay attention to just how often these words are mixed up, flipped around and blatantly misused. At the same time, you might try to avoid misusing them yourself.

Yay! Yeah and yea are finally sorted out!

Markets aside, the way you write does make a difference in how you relate to your client and to your audience. In short – spelling counts, but it doesn’t always count against you.

Purposeful Misspellings

Most of us would look at a sales page and immediately critique the writing. Any misspelled words would jump out at us and bother us just a bit. But then, if it’s very possible that the wrong “your” or the missing comma are intentional rather than oversights. It really just boils down to the target market that sales page is trying to reach.

I would hazard a guess that most of you reading this are well-educated. You likely read on a post-graduate level. Sadly the average buyer does not. Newspapers are written somewhere between a fourth and sixth grade reading level, and that might be aiming a bit high for the majority of internet buyers who can’t be troubled to read the paper (or even real news) at all.

Savvy sellers who are marketing to this demographic know this, and they do their best to make the sales letter or landing page approachable. A casual grammatical or spelling error might just be the thing that makes the reader think, “Hey! I can never figure out how to spell that either – this must be a real story from a real person!” Does it happen? Sure. How often does it happen? That’s more debatable.

Typos and Misspellings

Go back through my posts and you’ll see that I make plenty of typos and have more than a few spelling mistakes that I haven’t caught despite by best efforts. I’m not perfect and I fully realize that I would benefit strongly from a live-in editor. Like most of us, I can find your mistakes much better than I can find mine.

I work hard to catch my mistakes, however, because I know that there are implications to poor grammar choices and bad punctuation. I usually go back and correct things I’ve overlooked if I find them later, because there’s always something I can improve. Usually I just hope it’s not silly typos I’ve overlooked more than once.

The “average” reader might not care if I use the wrong word or forget a semi-colon, but the educated reader will care a great deal, and they will lose faith with the material as a whole. This is true not just with copywriting materials, but with articles, blogs and even simple forum posts as well.

Writer Standards

When you advertise yourself as a writer or editor, you’re opening yourself up to constant criticism and observation. Every sentence you write that carries your signature or your byline is subject to scrutiny – as much as we wish that wasn’t the case. If you’ve been around for any length of time on a forum, you’ve probably seen writers called out on bad spelling or bad punctuation – not by other writers, but by would-be clients.

Sadly I had a fun typo on in one of my very first sales posts and was immediately called out on it by a potential client. Fortunately I was able to use a bit of professionalism and humor to dig my way out of the mess quickly and still land plenty of new gigs with that post, but that moment of embarrassment has stayed with me. As writers, we’re supposed to be at the top of the word game. Does that mean we can’t make a mistake? Of course not. You might even join the throng of copywriters who make mistakes on purpose.

But it’s always important to remember that intentional or not, the quality of your writing is always sending a message. If you’re going to goof – be sure you know you’re goofing up and always be sure to own any mistakes or revisions gracefully.

 It’s and Its

Yes, English is a confusing language. Yes, we have endless exceptions to the rules. But this is one exception that should be straight forward – its. When you make a contraction or a possessive, you add an apostrophe. “Should not” becomes “Shouldn’t.” “The chair of the girl” becomes “Girl’s chair.”

But, when it comes to the word “it” however, the rules change, and it’s actually supposed to make it easier to understand the word when you use the apostrophe correctly. “It is” rightly becomes “it’s.” That’s easy enough. Something that belongs to “it”, however, is not “it’s.” The proper usage would be “its”, as in “The cat licked its tail.”  That’s right – no apostrophe to show possession. Please stop adding one. It’s annoying.

 Advice and Advise

I’m not sure why these are mixed up so often, but then I’m an English teacher, so what do I know? “Advice” is a noun – it’s something you’re offering to other people. “Let me give you some advice.” You can give it away. The process of giving away that advice, however, is to “advise.”

“Advise” is a verb – it’s an action word. You can’t give anyone “advise”, but you can “advise” them, much like a resident advisor would in the old college dorm. When you ADVISE you’re offering ADVICE. Simple. It’s probably just a pet peeve, but these words drive me bonkers when I see them misused.

 Effect and Affect

Finally, the words that seem to boggle the mind of the average bear. And I’ll readily admit I have to think about them each time I use them, too. Shhhh…don’t tell, it will spoil my rep around here.

Effect is like a special effect. It’s something happening – you can see it, hear it, smell it the gunpowder when it goes off.

Affect is the response to something happening around you. How does it affect you?

This is very tricky since the two are similar in meaning as well as spelling, much like advice and advise, but there you go. Special EFFECTS may AFFECT you adversely. If you don’t like my memory tool, feel free to make up one of your own, assuming you don’t have one already!

Scenario 1: The Email for Past and Passed

I was asked via email about the words “past” and “passed.” The writer wanted to know if you “get passed” something or if you “get past” it. For example, I might complain that I was so irritated last week, but I got “passed/past” it and moved on.

It goes without saying English is a tricky language and this was not a casual question – it had been driving this writer nuts for some time and she thought I might know the answer. I put on my English teacher hat and gave her the best possible answer I had.

“Getting past” something is an idiom – it’s an expression that doesn’t make much sense outside of our casual language in America. So it doesn’t really have to follow the most specific grammatical rules. In this case, the best check is a substitution. You’re trying to be ahead of something when you “move past it,” so “past” is the correct usage.

You can make a great case for “passed” though since to “move passed” something would be in the act of physically passing it, like you passed a slow car in the fast lane, but thanks to the random idiom nature of this particular beast, we’re going to have to go with “past.” So let’s move past it now to the next scenario.

Scenario 2: The Handout for Accept or Except

I was in a training to work with kids at a church program next week. I have worked this particular camp a total of four years so far – this will be my fifth. So the trainings that are required every year are a bit repetitive. To try and stay engaged (this was a small group and I didn’t want to be rude) I read every line of the handout.

One of the lines was this: “All children must be signed in and out each day by an adult. (Do not except children from another crew unless [Name] personally instruct you to do so.)”

I’ll be honest with you – I struggled for a minute to decipher that line. Of course, I was still wearing my English teacher hat from the email earlier in the day (see above), and now I was supposed to “except” children from other groups once I had permission? Wasn’t that illegal in 48 states?

As it was explained, the crew leaders (of which I am one), are not supposed to ACCEPT children from other groups unless we’re given permission.  Accept, not except.

Accept – to welcome with open arms.

Except – to exclude, i.e. I want everyone at my party except you. Ouch.

That’s one hell of a typo, and nobody even mentioned it or laughed about it – and that training needed a laugh. I had to laugh alone in my head, but then I’m used to that. I spend a lot of time laughing at my own typos when I find them – usually after running 40 copies at school.

Any other inane or humorous grammar mistakes out there this week?