Remember when you were a child and you attended a birthday party where they hung up a piñata filled with goodies? You couldn’t wait to hit that piñata and scatter those glorious goodies at your feet so you could scramble to pick them up, right?
Do you remember how it felt when it was your turn? When everything went dark, you were spun in circles, and then handed that stick?
Cold emailing or pitching for freelance writing clients is a lot like swinging blindly at a piñata.
A lot of gurus will tell you pitching freelance writing clients is a numbers game. In fact, you may have heard the only way is to send out hundreds of pitches every week on the chance you get a response from a client who will want to hire you. …
In a press briefing on Monday, November 17, 2020 Governor Mike DeWine reported good news coming from Moderna and Pfizer who are working on making COVID-19 vaccines available.
Unfortunately he also reported the cases of Coronavirus continue to rise, calling for the need for a plan to get Ohio through this “bad spot” we’re in.
DeWine shared that the number of COVID-19 cases reported have been running between 7,000 to 8,000 diagnosed new cases over the last week compared to about 1,000 cases six weeks or so ago.
He shared slides indicating Oct 13th, Ohio had 1,000 people in hospitals throughout Ohio with COVID-19. By November 5th the number hospitalized due to COVID-19 doubled to 2,000. …
When I first started freelancing in 2003, I spent a lot of time writing blog posts and other content for small business owners via Odesk (now UpWork). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) was fairly new back then, the term is believed to have originated in 1997.
All the internet gurus were advising businesses on how to “rank on Google” and how to do it quickly. Back then, the algorithm was much more mathematical and it was easy to “trick” the search engines and get your content on the first page of Google.
As a result, I was often asked by my clients to hit a specific keyword density (number of times the keyword was mentioned.) Clients back then told me it didn’t matter what I wrote, as long as the keyword density was at the level they wanted. …
Have you ever seen the American hidden camera show, on ABC called “What Would You Do” created by Chris Whipple?
In the show, the host, John Quinones, uses a hidden camera and actors to portray a scene for unsuspecting passersby.
The idea is to find out how people will react to various situations. Will they step in or mind their own business? Will they be tactful or adamant? Will they fight for the “victim” or back down?
A lot of times how someone reacts to something they experience or in this case witness on the show, depends on what they’ve been through in their past. …
When I first thought about working from home, it was when my oldest two children were little. This was the early 1990s and there weren’t a lot of choices then.
Most people worked in the office of their employer or, in the case of salesmen, from their car while traveling through their region.
Sure, there were C-suite executives, like the CEO, Vice President, or Chief Financial Officer (CFO), who got to “work from home” as a perk of being top-level management. …
Do you ever feel like there’s got to be something more to life than what you’ve got now?
I’ve so been there.
For me, the time that stands out was right after my third child was born. It seemed life was just passing me by. I was just going through the motions of work, sleep, and single parenting without any real plan. Each day was a lot like the next.
The job I loved, teaching job skills to homeless veterans, the one I’d moved to the “city” for, had gone sour a few years earlier due to an unethical boss.
I took advantage of that change to get some experience in the for-profit industry. The best way to do that quickly was temporary jobs as an administrative assistant. The assignments were all short-term, typically 8 to 5 p.m., and I was able to move around doing work for different kinds of businesses. …
Already late, I pulled into the drugstore parking lot, jammed the car into park and jumped out. God, I hated being late all the time. Nick’s parents would be mortified when I arrived late again for Sunday dinner, and he was going to kill me. I entered the drugstore at a half trot and ran smack into someone just coming out.
“Seems we’re both in too much of a hurry….” I bent and picked up the rectangular box of condoms that had dropped to the ground. “Wow, the mega pack, you must have a hot da…..Lauren?” …
I fell in love with writing almost forty years ago.
I’d always been an avid reader. But it was my seventh grade English teacher who introduced me to the idea that I could write my own stories. From that year on I wrote short stories, plays, and I even wrote a serialized novel and carried it around with me in my Trapper Keeper.
I rarely showed my writing to anyone. I was writing for me. It was never presented as a career, a way to make a living.
Later in life, as a single mom of four, I needed a way to pay the bills and put food on the table. And to me, and it seemed to everyone else back then, that meant working a 9 to 5 job in the brick and mortar world. …
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