As you might have noticed, I took a break from blogging over the Memorial Day weekend. I was part of a friend’s wedding and was out of town for that. However, quite a lot has been happening, and before my regular post on Sunday, I want to announce a few things.

1. New Exclusive, Free Content

You may or may not have noticed or read in a past post that I started a newsletter. Through the newsletter, I give announcements about new posts, but I also provide occasional bonus tips and stories, and as promised, I am about to create a series of free email courses (which I may later turn into ebooks).

I ran a poll through the newsletter, and thanks to that poll, the first course I’m going to provide is How to Edit Like a Pro. This will be a more in-depth version of my blog post: Copy Editing Tips and Tricks. It will cover two kinds of editing (proofreading and copy editing), tricks of the trade to ensure you stand out as a pro, and lists of common errors that most people overlook (and how to spot them). I will break down my tricks and talk about how I compile style sheets for my clients.

The next courses will be:

1. How to Break Into Books: This will be a freelance kickstarter course aimed directly at folks who want to make books their niche. It will outline the best places to look for jobs, how to build your reputation, how you can get started faster and at a higher income level than I did (starting without any sort of guide or freelancing insight whatsoever), how to understand and pitch to your target client, understanding the industry, etc.
2. How to Ghostwrite a Book: This will break down my process from the first client interview to the completion of the project. It will also include writing tips, advice on how to keep a busy client on track, how to pace yourself, how to handle different types of clients, etc.

These courses will only be sent to newsletter subscribers, but they will be entirely free, to remain in the spirit of why this blog was created in the first place. These courses will be much longer than could be contained in a blog post, which is why they will only be accessible through the newsletter. I plan to get the first course out in about a month, so if you want to take part in any of the courses, you can easily subscribe to the newsletter using the opt-in on the right side of the screen.

2. Inside Look at My Personal Career

I recently had the privilege to be part of fellow freelancer Wendy Vasquez’s blog series, “Women Who Work.” Wendy has multiple articles in this series that showcase different female entrepreneurs. She sent me a list of questions to answer about what I do, what my day-to-day looks like, and my advice for others looking to do the same. You may already know a nice chunk of it if you read this blog regularly, but if you would like to check it out, I think there might be a few new tidbits to discover there. You can find it here.

3. Opportunity for Cheap Hosting

Having a stand-out, fully customized website is essential as a freelancer. I’ve covered how to craft your own in this post. One of the first things you need to do is set up hosting so that you can own and have full control over your site. Good hosting also means your website can handle heavy traffic and that if you have any problems, you have an excellent customer service team to help you out. I chose Siteground as my host (you can read more about why in this post), and they are currently running a 70% off extended Memorial Day Sale for 1-year subscriptions. The sale runs until September 11th at 2pm CDT. 70% off means you can get hosting for $2.95 per month. That’s damn good, so if you’ve been holding off on owning your own site because of budgeting reasons, now is the time to take the plunge.

I have never had any issues with my hosting, and I’ve been using Siteground for a year and a half now. Whilst hanging out in freelancer Facebook groups, I’ve come across many people who recommend Siteground above other hosts based on their customer service alone. In answer to beginners’ questions about which host to choose, numerous folks have responded that though Bluehost is a bit more powerful than Siteground, they ran into lots of problems and switched to Siteground as a result. If you’re having trouble with your current host and want to switch, I have it from many mouths that Siteground’s team will make the process as painless as possible for you.

Talk Soon

I apologize that things here have been so scattered lately. Things should be mellowing out soon, and I will certainly chat with you Sunday. Until then. Thanks for reading.