Today, we’re going to do our best to answer some questions left by Susan Payton from Sparkplugging’s own Marketing Eggspert blog. She is interested to know how we use Guru.com, as she can tell from our monthly freelance income reports that we get a fair amount of business through that bidding site.

Here’s what Susan had to say:

“Wow, you guys do a lot from Guru! Are you Guru Vendors? I just signed up as one (gulp. $250 is a lot of $$)! I’d like to learn more about how you use Guru to get jobs and beat the cheapies that bid on projects (as I’m sure your readers would too).”

Choosing to be Guru Vendors

To answer her first question, yes, we are at the vendor level on guru. We decided the first time that we signed up (we’ve now renewed for a second year), that we were going to take ourselves seriously as a business, and that was one way we did so. Susan’s right, as the $250 was a bit of a pill to swallow, but we made $10,000 through Guru in our first year, so that was a pretty good return on investment.

Fortunately for us, we were able to afford the enrollment fee at the time. If someone else can’t then it could still be worthwhile to sign up at the basic level. Of course, you’ll be competing with even more freelancers, and a lot of them are probably bidding really, really low because, hey, they didn’t even have enough money to get a vendor account – they’re obviously strapped, and a couple of bucks for an article sounds great.

How We Use Guru.com

It’s probably safe to say that we look at guru.com as sort of a “necessary evil.” I know, that’s a little harsh, but we are plenty annoyed that they take such a big percentage of our pay, in addition to the annual fee. Not only that, but if the client pays with a credit card, the freelancer has to eat the service charge. I still can’t figure out how that’s fair.

On the other hand, it’s been one of the best places for us to go to find new clients. I will admit, however, that when we’re busy, bidding on jobs on guru.com quickly gets pushed to the backburner.

I don’t know that there are any special tricks to how we bid for jobs. Tamara does it more often than I, but each of us tends to bid on jobs we find personally appealing. For example, she’s more interested in ad copy than I am, and I’m more interested in environmental topics than she is. We each have templates created that we use to bid for certain types of jobs. However, we personalize every single one that we send out.

That means that we pay attention to what the potential client has asked about, and we address those issues. This gets mixed in with our usual spiel that says something like, “my bid of $50 for this article represents a very reasonable rate of 0.07 per word.” We bid based on the job description and on what we think we should get paid. Then we usually lower it a bit.

Beating “The Cheapies”

Tamara did an experiment a few months ago in which she bid what she really felt she should get for jobs, and we didn’t get a single bite. So, we do bid lower than we would like. We don’t bid ridiculously low, however. There are no $5 articles for us.

That was not always the case, though. When we first started our business, we were just desperate for clients. Any amount of money coming in was proof that we could do this thing. We did some dirt-cheap projects in the beginning. As we did the projects however, two things happened.

1. We got really sick of selling our time for so little.
2. Our ranking kept improving on guru.com.

Both of these factors played into us getting more money for jobs. First of all, we started asking for it. Secondly, clients began to realize we were worth it. Our client feedback rating averages five stars, and we work to keep it that way. As of today, we are ranked at number 43 in the Writing/Editing/Translation section of Guru.

I suspect that the third thing that helped us along was presenting ourselves as professionals. We have a pretty good profile on Guru, although I suspect it could be better. We also have a link to our Berry-Brewer web site, which we happen to think looks pretty professional.

Any More Questions about Guru.com?

We’re really enjoying posting our freelance income reports each month. We think it’s useful to our readers, and it really gives us another way to be accountable for our work. It’s great fun to watch the numbers from month to month. As it turns out, those are also the posts that seem to spur our readers to ask questions. If you have any more questions about Guru or how we use it, feel free to ask in the comments.

If there’s one thing that Tamara and I truly believe, it’s that the quality of your writing matters. In our opinion, better writers are worth more money.

Of course, being able to run your writing business—marketing your services and networking within the industry—is incredibly important, as well. Tamara recently mentioned the idea of “keeping Shakespeare in the basement.” If your writing isn’t selling because of your lacking business skills, you’re effectively keeping the Bard in the cellar.

This month, several of the biggest names in copywriting are teaming up to offer a unique learning opportunity by presenting the 2008 Copywriting Success Summit. This event consists of 12 virtual presentations throughout the month of October, and they promise to be extremely valuable. Here are some of the presenters and their credentials:

• Bob Bly – Bestselling author of Secrets of a Freelance Writer (Ha, weren’t we just ripping on Bob Bly a little bit the other day?)
• Peter Bowerman – Bestselling author of the Well-Fed Writer series
• Brian Clark – Founder of the award-winning Copyblogger blog
• Casey Hibbard – Principal at Compelling Case Studies, Inc. and author of the blog Stories the Sell.
• Jon McCulloch – Irreverent marketer in the business of “kicking the ass of bad marketing.”
• Michael Stelzner - best-selling author of Writing White Papers: How to Capture Readers and Keep Them Engaged
• Steve Slaunwhite – bestselling author of Start and Run a Copywriting Business

According to Michael Stelzner, here’s what you can expect:

“Attendees will learn the secrets of the top experts in the field, how to attract the right kinds of clients, how to turn prospects into clients, how to sidestep your competitors, pricing strategies to boost income, discovering the right niche, and a lot more. Plus, they’ll get to ask questions live and get answers on the spot.”

So, if you’re interested in rubbing some elbows and really taking your copywriting to the next level, the 2008 Copywriting Success Summit might be just the event for you.

It’s been a pretty hectic month for us. In addition to taking a weekend “off” to travel to Las Vegas for BlogWorld 2008, we had quite a bit of excitement here at Freelance Parent as we made the top ten list for writer’s blogs and also decided to start outsourcing some of the projects we have long put on hold.  But, wait, that’s not all!  Lorna also took a real vacation for a week at the beginning of the month, and we put quite a bit of effort into our two-part SparkplugU class on choosing the right freelancing niche.

Yet despite what sometimes felt like a whirlwind of activity, we still managed to meet our goal for this month’s income. I’ll be honest – we were near nervous breakdowns on more than one occasion – but at the end of the day, we feel really good about where we’re headed.

You will notice a new “passive income” category in this month’s freelance income report.  It’s pretty small right now, but we’re excited to watch it grow over the next several months as we put more and more of our ideas to work.

We’ve increased our goal substantially for this month in addition to starting some new marketing campaigns, so we’ll see if our pattern can hold!

Total Income for September: $4,047.60

Percentage of This to PayPal/Guru Fees: 6.73 %

Total Number of Clients Served this Month: 13

Number of These Clients Who are New: 3

Original Client Contact Point

Guru.com: 9

Subcontracted work: 1

Referrals: 3

Total Number of Projects Completed: 20

Project Types

SEO and web-based article writing: 7

Website content: 4

Blogs and blog-related work: 2

Nonprofit: 2

E-books/E-courses: 1

Copywriting: 4

Passive Income: $23.00

Finding a fine balance

Lorna and I are really great at meeting deadlines for our clients. We really are. However, we – and most work-from-home-professionals that we know – constantly put our own work on the back burner and fly past self-set deadlines like we haven’t a care in the world. We have a separate blog for our business that is utterly neglected, we have really good marketing plans that we’ve yet to put to good use, and we have a number of small personal projects that we never seem to have time to even work on, let alone finish.

Oh, and we’ve tried to work around it. We have a “business account” that automatically receives 15 percent of everything we make, so we tried paying ourselves from that account as a way to get motivated. Basically, we hired ourselves to write blog posts for $10 each. I wrote zero. Lorna wrote two. That was a month ago.

We also sat each other down and put on our stern faces. “We need to get more posts up.” “You write two articles for the marketing idea, and I’ll do three. No backing out.” Of course, we backed out.

Finally, after much painful deliberation, we decided to outsource them to other writers.

Now, I’m a pretty logical gal. I know that paying someone else to write a $15 blog post for us is a big fat waste of money for two reasons:

A) I could write it myself at any point of almost any given day. It’s 30 minutes of work, tops.
B) We are paying out money that we earned (i.e., the $15 I made writing an article of virtually the same length has to be taxed, and is therefore actually only about $12 – so I am essentially losing $3 in addition to spending the same amount of time working anyway).

Still, it feels like the greatest idea ever.

The question of outsourcing has been plaguing us in more ways than just this. Lorna and I have both – completely independently of one another – been toying with the idea of hiring someone to come clean our houses. My house is a mess. There are dust bunnies under the couch larger than my daughter, my sink is full of dishes, and I believe we each have one clean pair of underwear left (which means I’ll probably buy some more when I’m out and about tomorrow rather than actually do the laundry).

Basically, we are willing to have complete strangers enter our homes while we sit at our computers, clean around us while trying not to let us see their faces of disgust, and charge us more than we will actually make in that same amount of time to make our environments livable.

Again, the logical Tamara comes out to play:

A) I will pay the equivalent of two hours of my working time to have someone else clean my house in one hour.
B) I will probably also take the time to make her some cookies and kiss her feet.

Again, I’m really starting to feel this idea.

I once came across an article by a freelance writer discussing the ever-present question of how much to charge (I can’t find it anywhere now, and believe me – I looked). Overall, he was really pompous and irritating. He talked about how his time is worth $100 per hour (or something like that), and that he never spent time on activities he deemed “less worthy” than that $100. So he didn’t mow the lawn because he could hire a lawn company to do it for $35. If he went outside and did it himself, he’d be wasting $65. He went on like this for awhile.

I had a few problems with this theory:

1. Once you start quantifying your time like that, how do you stop? If he’s having dinner with his wife and she starts discussing inane topics, is he going to cut her off and go take his plate to the computer instead? “Sorry, honey. You just wasted $50 with that stupid story about your yoga class.”
2. There is more value to an activity than just the time investment. For example, I wondered if this man belonged to a gym (insert: gym fees, gym clothes, gas to get there). Going outside and mowing the lawn would be excellent exercise, especially if he got one of those old push mowers. He could essentially save himself money in gym costs if he mowed his own lawn twice a week. Plus, there’s the simple benefit of going outside and enjoying the air. He could listen to some catchy tunes, meet some neighbors, or simply enjoy being alive rather than attached to his computer screen.

He would probably have a problem with my outsourcing idea – not because it is asking other people to do things that I can do perfectly well myself, but because I’m not making the wisest financial decision.

So where does the balance lie? Do my distaste of cleaning and my inability to self-motivate secondary projects qualify as enough of a cause to make outsourcing a good idea? Or am I just being lazy and financially irresponsible?

Proverbial foot in the door

Estimates say that it costs 2 to 40 times more to find and secure a new client than it does to simply retain your old ones. Most of the time, these figures have more to do with actual customers (as in retail) and clients (as in law firms), since these types of businesses have to rely on advertising as their primary means of new client acquisition.

Freelancers get a bit of an “out” because so many people post jobs looking for certain types of work. Although many of us rely on social media networking, traditional marketing, and word-of-mouth – all in addition to the good old-fashioned query letter – to get new clients, we also have the option of freelance bidding sites or postings on Craig’s List or job boards. In truth, it is a combination of all these types marketing that really make a freelancer successful.

That being said, I am fully aware that most new freelancers rely primarily on the bidding sites and job boards to find work. There’s nothing wrong with that – in fact, it’s how we’ve been able to grow to our current level of success. At the same time, though, many of these job boards look for a single project to be completed. A freelancer finds the job, makes a bid, communicates with the client, makes a contract/project agreement, communicates some more, and may or may not finally land the gig. This is a time-consuming process that isn’t always fun, so if you can keep this client for future work, you’re in a much better position to make money and be successful.

Here’s where I’ve discovered something a little different: of all the project types that I have worked on as a freelancer, press releases are the ones most likely to end in repeat business.

The first few times it happened, I thought maybe it was just a fluke. I would bid on a single job for a press release, land the gig, and do the work. However, as I did this more and more often, I realized that there was something rather magical about the whole thing.

Right now, about 90 percent of my press release clients turn around and immediately ask for additional quotes. And I’m not talking about just doing more press releases – I’ve been asked to work on everything from rewriting the web content on three of a client’s websites to taking on a rather large SEO contract. To this day, these are some of my best – and most recurring – clients.

So what is it about the press release that gets me these incredible results? I have some theories:

• Clients are comfortable hiring new blood for press releases. They are quick, one-time projects with pretty set rules. If a freelancer doesn’t pan out, it’s typically not a catastrophe.

• Clients may not realize how much benefit comes from a good freelancer until they see it first-hand. Some of them are looking for help with press releases because they know that they need to be written professionally. Then, when you turn in quality work with no drama, it boosts their overall image of freelancers. They think, “that was easy, and the writing is great. I wonder what else I should be outsourcing?”

• You are building relationships from ground up. When I write a press release, I always communicate directly with the powers that be in order to find a good angle and get some great quotes for the text. This kind of activity imprints you on the brain of the company, since you are showing an actual interest in what they do.

• Press releases are a great place to shine. As I’ve mentioned before, most press releases are written according to a prescribed format. But if you go the extra mile to incorporate a little research or make it into a story that others will actually want to read (not just another website launch), you end up making yourself look pretty good. Clients respond to that extra effort.

While this is hardly a scientific study, I can’t help but feel that these patterns of repeat business aren’t just a fluke. Considering that press releases are always in need of being written and that you can make some pretty good money on them anyway (in addition to their magical repeat-business properties), they might just be the foot in the door to a successful freelancing career.

If you read Freelance Parent—or even the blog’s title for that matter—then you realize that it’s not just about how to start and run a freelance business. It’s also about how to combine that with parenting; how to juggle both aspects of your life. Freelancing is an amazing career option, and a big reason for that is because it does allow us to be home where we can parent.

Attending BlogWorld Expo last weekend was sort of an eye-opening experience. While the actual BlogWorld leadership was supportive of the fact that I needed to be in close proximity to my baby for nutritional purposes, the Las Vegas Convention Center was not.

Now, I understand the arguments behind not having a bunch of kids at a professional conference. In my mind, it boils down to responsible parents. Had I actually been allowed to take my baby into sessions, I would have only done so when she was sleeping or quiet, and I would have sat in the back so as to leave quickly should she start to be disruptive. That’s just common courtesy.

The weirdest reaction I received probably came from the “gentleman” who informed me that children should not be allowed in Las Vegas. I got the distinct impression that he thought I sucked as a human being for having Dot there. I stuck up for myself, though:

The best reaction was from one of the BlogHer bigwigs who assures me I should come to their conference where they once had a session delivered by a presenter while she was breastfeeding.

One of my biggest concerns was that she might disturb other people by crying. Fortunately, she did me proud, and if you added up all the time she spent crying all weekend, it might have totaled about four minutes. Trust me, that is way less time than many of the attendees spent whining about how slow the internet connection was. Considering it was free and there were thousands of people using it, I found their fussing to be more inappropriate than hers.

The longer I spend dwelling on the subject, the more bothered I am that people feel that a baby (that they are not even expected to care for) is an inconvenience. Sure, if she’d been crying a lot, I could see how that would be quite frustrating. But for people to be annoyed just because a baby was in the room…that’s really their problem more than mine and Dot’s, isn’t it?

In some ways, breastfeeding is a sacrifice on the mother’s part. In other ways, it is more than its own reward. Still, I think it’s appalling that I should also be expected to sacrifice my career because I need to physically be close to my baby. I find it insulting, as a matter of fact.

In a manner of speaking, I really did feel somewhat discriminated against, and I’m not quick to jump on that bandwagon. It felt to me as if I was expected to choose between being a breastfeeding mother and being a professional woman. How is it possible that in 2008, we still don’t see that it is possible to be both?

When Epson gave us the opportunity to cover BlogWorld Expo, one of the big ideas was for those who couldn’t attend to get a feel for it as if they were actually there. For me, one of the biggest parts of any conference or convention is checking out the vendor booths. This one was no exception.

Tamara and I didn’t want you to miss out on the experience, either, so head on over to the Sparkplugging Media blog if you want to check out some of the vendors we interviewed.

Last year when we were nominated for Michael Stelzner’s “Top 10 Blogs for Writers,” on his Writing White Papers blog we were more than a little surprised. I don’t think “flabbergasted” is too strong of an adjective, actually. Freelance Parent was still brand-new, and we thought perhaps it was a fluke.

That fluke has bolstered us for an entire year. We were so proud of the award that it even got mentioned in our anniversary video. It became a staunch goal of ours to make the 2008-2009 edition of that list.

We are absolutely thrilled and beaming with pride over the fact that we again placed in the top ten.  Here is the entire list, for your consideration.

1. Copyblogger: As the undefeated champ, this blog has held the number-one spot for three straight years!  The baby of Brian Clark, this blog keeps winning because of its excellent and educational articles.
2. Men With Pens: James Chartrand and Harry McLeod are the dynamic duo who continue to deliver rich content and community discussion.
3. Freelance Writing Jobs: Founded by Deb Ng, this site is the first stop for freelance writers seeking new work and great articles (and it remains a top winner since this contest began).
4. Write to Done: This blog delivers a steady stream of excellent articles for all writers and is the product of top blogger Leo Babauta.
5. Confident Writing: Looking for encouragement? Joanna Young will help you take your writing to the next level.
6. The Renegade Writer: Linda Formichelli and Diana Burell, authors of a book by the same name, help freelance journalists find inspiration.
7. Remarkable Communication: One part writing, one part marketing and one part selling, this excellent blog by Sonia Simone will help any writer succeed.
8. Writing Journey: Looking for a great stop on your writing journey? Bob Younce’s blog will refresh and energize you.
9. Freelance Parent: Two moms, Lorna Doone Brewer and Tamara Berry, provide excellent perspective on writing while balancing time with little ones.
10. Urban Muse: Susan Johnston covers a wide range of excellent topics that all writers will enjoy.

Congratulations to all of the others, as well as to the other 27 finalists.  We are so grateful to our readers, not just for nominating us, but for inspiring us to continually strive to make Freelance Parent the kind of blog that can make this list.

Don't keep Shakespeare in the basement.

Overall, BlogWorld was a pretty great experience for us. Although we weren’t able to do as much as we’d hoped, we did meet some wonderful people and learn some valuable information. We’ll probably be talking about and offering up videos of our experience there for the next week or two, so I thought I’d start out with what has become one of my favorite analogies ever.

This one was brought to us by SEO expert Michael Wolf (aka GrayWolf), and the imagery has yet to cease making me laugh. In a nutshell, he said that no matter how great your content is, you have to take advantage of and pay attention to SEO; letting your product or service just sit there is like keeping Shakespeare locked in a basement. (Considering the fact that I have no basement – just a creepy crawl space oozing with spiders and things that go bump in the night - this is particularly ominous. I don’t think he would have liked it down there. Poe, on the other hand…)

The session I saw him in was all about using SEO to get your blog a bigger audience and higher page hits. Although quite a bit of it was related to the tech side of things, and was therefore way beyond my comprehension, a lot of what he (and the other panelists Brian Clark and Lee Odden) said made sense. Here’s a brief and paraphrased overview:

• If nothing else, always put your keyword in the title.
• The best keyword use in the world won’t help unless you have interesting, relevant content.
• Keyword stuffing techniques are NEVER a good idea, because Google will figure them out.
• Links in remain the best way to raise your page listing (i.e., be interesting and interactive enough to get people to link to you).
• If you don’t understand how to put the right plugins into your WordPress or tweak the technical stuff to optimize SEO, hire someone who does.
• Controversy sparks interest; there’s no such thing as bad publicity.
• Create a 404 Not Found page that is unique to your site and has your branding.

Although much of this information reiterates what many of us already know, it’s good to hear it from a group of professionals who are pretty much the experts of the experts in the field. Blog writing is fun, but we also have to remember that a successful blog is one that pays attention to page hits, views, and links. You may not be Shakespeare, but you certainly don’t deserve to be kept in the basement, either.

In light of the no-baby situation we’ve been experiencing at BlogWorld thus far, Lorna and I have been tag-teaming our approach to visiting sessions and meeting other bloggers. We were fortunate to run into some other parenting/mommy entrepreneur types. Here are just a few of the blogs and sites the parenting side of our audience might want to check out.