Sorry I didn't mention this before, but right now I write/edit for everything I can get my hands on, but my true passion and skills lie in editing fiction manuscripts. I've been looking online for writing websites that offer (reasonably cheap) advertising. I've found one that offers a 125x125 ad space for $50 per month. It's a super small ad, but it's cheap and won't be a big deal if I don't get any return on it. I have that one in mind, but I'm still looking around. If I don't find anything else, I'll probably go with that for a month and see how it goes.

And Samantha, thank you for that tip! I'll focus on redoing my advertising to focus on my portfolio. Thank you!

I hold off on paid advertising unless there's a dry spell or other marketing tactics aren't working. In most cases it isn't necessary and it won't last (like an ad in a targeted trade pub). I'm not sure of the exact client base you're targeting, but if you're thinking about local classifieds, I'd guess you're targeting business clients rather than publications. In that case, you might be better off with cold calls and direct mail campaigns than classified ads. You can always start small for testing and scale it later.

If you do want to stick with traditional ads, make sure they're in places where your target market is. The local paper might help a bit if you're limiting yourself to local clients. But otherwise I'd opt for trade publications and related websites first.

I just graduated with my English/Writing degree this past December and am applying it to my own freelance business. I've been in business for 5 or 6 months now, and ONLY advertise via Craigslist. Based on what I've read so far in the Marketing section, it doesn't seem like anyone else advertises CL. Any particular reason?

That said, I'm looking for other ways to advertise. I'm thinking about taking out an ad in the classifieds section of my local newspaper, but not sure if it would get any attention.

My Craigslist ads get quite an amount of feedback but I'm looking toward advertising elsewhere in order to truly start making money.

Any tips for a newbie on how best to start out with advertising?

Thank you!

For example, if you'll mostly work with clients online, it doesn't matter if they can pronounce the name easily as long as they can spell it. And I think they can handle five letters. If you'll be making a lot of cold calling pitches to local companies (in an area where there isn't a large Spanish-speaking population), you might opt against using your name. On the other hand if you plan to target both English and Spanish-language publications or clients, it could be to your advantage to set up your business under that name.

Feel better.

Jenn

Secondly, the first thing I did after getting resettled at home was take down that content and replace it with "coming soon" notices. I saw that it was still up yesterday and contacted my domain host. Some sort of technical issue arose with their servers, apparently, and no one's hosted site is rebooting with new content. They claim to be able to fix the problem by 6 PM EST today. I can't even access the website at the moment.

Thirdly, I don't steal, in any form. As I said before, it was genuinely coincidental on my part. I visited Jenn's site once or twice before starting on my own, along with about ten other professional freelance websites, to get a firm idea of the basics that clients expect to see when visiting such sites (i.e. types and numbers of pages, amount of detail, etc.). Yes, I saw Jenn's homepage header and loved it. That, I admit, I took too much inspiration from and I do apologize for that. It was the only thing I took directly from her site as direct inspiration for my own. As for the design and color scheme, they are my own entirely. I designed and copyrighted them long before I found Jenn's - or anyone else's - site. Everything was blue and black before my husband suggested red as being a stronger color. The design of the website is a standard Wordpress design. Thousands of people are bound to have a similar setup. When my business is bigger, I hope to get a professional designer - until then, I work with the freebie design as I can.

Last, I have written all my blog posts completely from scratch. I read hundreds of blogs monthly to educate myself and spark ideas. The concept for all of my blog posts might have come from something I read along the way, but the content is mine. I've long had the habit of writing all my blog posts longhand before transcribing them into an actual post.

You all don't know me personally, so you can't know the things that have happened in my life that make me abhor any type of theft or misrepresentation. So let me take this opportunity to tell you: I do not and have never stolen even a post-it note from someone else. Honesty is one of the most important things in my life. When accidents occur, I always rectify them. I would have done so at once with this had not my health gotten in the way.

The content is down. It should show sometime today once my host has the problem fixed. The color scheme and logo are mine and are copyrighted in my name. The blog posts are mine. I will attempt to change the design as I can within what my own abilities and the basics allow. Though I did not purposely infringe on your site or content, I do apologize for anything this has done to your business. It was unintentional and my solutions as immediate as I can make them.

http://dreamthemedesign.com/themes/u-design/

As you can see, and as I've mentioned, I highly customize templates I use on important sites, turning them into unique branding pieces for my business. My business site looks very little like the base template I built it upon. And that's why I'm so upset to see that this still hasn't been resolved.

Jessica, I sincerely hope that you're in the process of getting this ripped design and content taken care of. This is the longest I've allowed any instance of content theft to go on without filing official take-down notices, or worse. And I'm hoping you don't put me in a position where I have to take further steps to protect my work.

Things like this do put my own hard work at risk. And as Lori points out, if you want to write for clients, you must be able to write for yourself as well. Parroting someone else does nothing to show clients why they should hire you.

I can understand being new and trying to figure things out. But this is getting beyond the point of naivete. I can see that even after we talked about the issue here, you put up a blog post on the same site where you basically took an old post of mine from 2011, re-worked the points a bit, and spun it into your post. While basic topic ideas aren't protected by copyright, how they're presented is. And that pushes a line.

That also tells me the previous discussion hasn't sunk in if you're still turning to the same site for ideas because you don't have your own. That time would have been better spent overhauling your site to make it something truly your own, as I thought you said you were doing. You'll get to the point where you don't feel like you have to turn to the same sources for inspiration anymore. Focus on building a list of ideas of topics you'd like to blog about for example, and you'll be ready to go when the urge to write a new post comes along.

I don't want to keep pressing this issue, so this is the last I'm going to speak about it here. But I do need to see all rewritten work (which is copyright infringement) removed by the end of this week. There is very little on that site that doesn't look like a clear re-write -- the home page, the about page, the FAQs, and even things like policies for the business. Otherwise you really aren't leaving me with any choice but to send take-down notices to have your site de-indexed from search engines and to have it removed from your host's servers if you don't do it willingly on your own. I'd hate to have to do that or take things even further in a worst case scenario, and I'd much prefer to see you keep an active site (uniquely your own). But I do very actively protect my trademarks and copyrighted works, and I've let this sit unchanged much longer than I should have already.

I really didn't want to be a hardass about this, because I was trying to give you the benefit of the doubt and the chance to fix things. But that really needs to be taken care of asap so the site stops infringing on mine and stops hurting both of our professional brand images.

Best of luck in getting sorted. I hope the changes go smoothly.

Jenn

I'm just going to come out and say it and hope that in the spirit of camaraderie we can discuss this openly..... Jessica, your site is nearly identical to Jenn's site. While your intention may not have been to do any harm, the outcome is exactly that. Harmful.

Here's what I see:

1) the design is identical
2) the wording, which appears to be reworked off of the original, is too much like Jenn's site
3) the layout is identical
4) there's nothing there that distinguishes your site from Jenn's site
5) the site is not different enough from Jenn's to even consider being original

The problems are multiple, I'm afraid. While it's great to emulate someone you admire and base your ideas on someone else's ideas, it's definitely not okay to take the entire design, color scheme, wording, and arrangement, rework it, and call it yours. Yes, you rewrote. However, what many freelancers do not understand is that rewriting is not creating an original document. It's bastardizing someone else's work and watering it down. That does harm to the original author, and it kicks the hell out of your own credibility. Your work HAS to be your own. If it isn't, there's no point. And it's a huge liability to you as that opens you up to copyright and trademark infringement. While your information on your site -- about, services, clients, contact -- will be similar to what other writers are presenting, in no way should it be a carbon copy of someone else's information.

I would highly suggest you dump what you have and start new with your own ideas and your own design. Either opt for a template design from a web host or pay a designer to give you something uniquely yours. Otherwise, you'll never stand out from someone else, and that means you open yourself up to litigation, and you can't differentiate. Not only that, your site sounds like Jenn, not you. I get no sense of who YOU are. That has to be in your site or clients won't really know why they should hire you. And lord forbid they go from Jenn's site to yours! That would kill your credibility, and I daresay Jenn's might take a huge hit as it looks like you've both used a template, which I know in Jenn's case is not so.

I hope this helps.