Conference Successes!

This past weekend, October 11-13, was the fourteenth annual Be a Better Freelancer conference, and the first one that NAIWE co-hosted!

The first day of the conference, Friday, began with registration and a delicious breakfast, sponsored by ProWrite Ink.
 

Friday morning's education sessions were headed by two excellent speakers. Rose Jonas enlightened a group of freelancers about how to improve their resumes to better reach their potential clients. The group discussed each person's goals and came up with one way for each person to be more effective in obtaining their goals.
 

Dick Margulis led a presentation on finding and working with independent authors. He discussed how to structure effective, profitable working relationships with this type of client.

Many thanks to our sponsors!
 
                   

October Webinar: Content Marketing on LinkedIn: The Post Types That Attract Your Ideal Clients

We wanted to get to know Carol Tice (NAIWE's Content Marketing Expert) better, so last month we sat down with her. Here are some thoughts she shared with us.

Why bother with content marketing on LinkedIn—what’s the upside here?

LinkedIn is THE social platform for connecting with prospective clients all over the world—it’s the only place where you can overtly state you’re looking for clients without getting blocked or banned. It’s also an easy place to quickly build authority with posts on LinkedIn’s blog, a/k/a Pulse. In my mastermind program, I’ve coached students for several years on how to attract clients on LinkedIn, and these students have seen reliable success in a fairly short time.

You can join in this conversation on October 23, at 2 pm ET, when NAIWE will host a webinar on what you can write in your status updates or in your articles section to build your authority and attract clients. The cost for NAIWE members is $10 and $30 for non-members.

To register for this webinar, please send an email along with your name and telephone number. An invoice will be sent to you for the amount owed.

Earn More While Working Less

I don’t know about you, but while I greatly enjoy writing, and I love to re-read my finished work (plus I metaphorically glow every time I hear the occasional “you changed my life”), I have never forgotten that under the capitalist system there’s always the component of money.

As a result, I have spent a good deal of my professional time and effort thinking about, and finding ways to increase, my income from writing.

Here are some of the methods I have used to accomplish this simple but important purpose:

1. Raise Your Rates

This is fundamental to increasing your income. In part, I’ve always thought of this process as a simple scenario: Suppose you’re in a room or on the phone with a relative stranger, and you ask them to give you $10. Chances are, they’ll scoff and brush you off with a forceful “no.” That’s a natural reaction. But when you are in a room or on the phone with someone who is negotiating to buy your work, you can ask them for that same $10 (extra) with a much greater likelihood they’ll say “yes.”

To read the rest of this article, please visit NAIWE member Robert Moskowitz's blog.

November Webinar: Pick a Hill to Die on

In November, we will be chatting with John McIntyre, NAIWE's Grammar Expert, on the very important topic of grammar.

We know that split infinitives are okay, sentences can begin with conjunctions, sentence-ending prepositions are perfectly good English, and it’s okay to use hopefully as a sentence adverb. We know this because grammarians and linguists have been gleefully exploding shibboleths and bogus rules. But what rules or usages are worth maintaining? In this webinar, John McIntyre of The Baltimore Sun will examine some defensibles. Should we maintain the imply/infer distinction? Is the traditional sense of beg the question in logic hopelessly lost? Is whom dead to us?

Sign up, take part, and work out where you want to stand your ground.

John Early McIntyre has been a professional editor for nearly 40 years, more than 31 of them at The Baltimore Sun, where he has headed the copy desk. John earned an undergraduate degree in English from Michigan State University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and a master’s degree in English from Syracuse University, where he was a university fellow. John has taught copyediting at Loyola University Maryland since 1995. A charter member of the ACES: The Society for Editing, he served two terms as its president. John has presented workshops on writing and editing at conferences and publications in the United States and Canada.

The cost for NAIWE members is $10 and $30 for non-members. To register for this webinar, which will be held on November 19 at 2 pm ET, please send an email with your name and telephone number. An invoice will be sent to you for the amount owed.

September's New & Renewing NAIWE Members

Candice Bellows (Winston-Salem, NC); Michele Chiappetta (Tulsa, OK); Diane Fanucchi (Arroyo Grande, CA); Alyson Folse (Baton Rouge, LA); Ashley Henyan (Smyrna, GA); Deborah Hilcove (Gilbert, AZ); Kathi Laughman (Spring, TX); Sarah Liu (Hamlin, NY); Ronald Searl (Westmont, IL); Amelia Smithers (Gentilino, Switzerland); Alexandra Uth (Chicago, IL).