I met an entrepreneur friend for coffee last week. I’d wanted to chat with him so that I could get some advice about my business. The one question, the only question I had really, was how the heck do I make more money with this thing?
I gave him the numbers for what I’d earned so far this year with the business and my target for next year (double) and then asked him if he could give me advice on how to get from A to B.
We discussed a number of things that got me extremely fired up and that I will be implementing in the coming days, but when he looked at my site and saw my book The Freelance Writer’s Guide to Making $1,000 More This Month (Just released! Buy it!), his eyes immediately lit up. “Let’s talk about this,” he said. “Let’s talk about the ways in which you can market this.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” I said. “I already have a list of 50+ items on my computer on how to market it.”
He sat back. He folded his arms. And he said, “You came here to ask me how to make more money. There’s a list of fifty things on your computer that tells you how to make more money. Why are you not doing it?”
Touché.
This is where all the logic fails and the practical bit comes in. The part where you have to move beyond your fears and do the things you know you should be doing, the things that will get you from where you are to where you want to be. Sending the queries, negotiating the rates, writing that email asking for the marketing opportunity.
You know, the work. The tough stuff.
It’s interesting that my book is actually about making more money as a freelance writer or journalist because this is something I’m very good at. I have absolutely no qualms asking a corporate or a publishing company to pay me $100 an hour or find another writer because it’s not personal. But the entrepreneurship, the marketing of books, the launch process—all of this seems more personal, more connected, because I’m talking to my readers, people who are like me and who trust me.
So marketing is what I’m learning (and often resisting) and it’s interesting to see this in myself because I’ve seen this in my students so many times and helped them move beyond it. It’s the reason I wrote The Freelance Writer’s Guide to Making $1,000 More This Month, in fact. I want to show you exactly how to get from making $1,000 a month to making $2,000 a month and beyond. I’ve done it. A month in which I earn $3,000 now constitutes a very bad month for me.
My students do it all the time. They start at making very little money and suddenly find that they have careers. Read the 30+ five-star reviews of the book—these people have or are doing it, too.
Knowledge is the first step, but it’s far from the only one. I know I should tell people about the book I just wrote. But the next step—applying those lessons—is a lot harder and that’s where most people fail. It’s where I failed with my book launch and why many of you on this list don’t even know that I have a new book out.
So I decided to get take that action today and apply the lessons I’ve learnt to tell you all about it.
Here’s the hard sell:
In The Freelance Writer’s Guide to Making $1,000 More This Month, award-winning freelance journalist Mridu Khullar Relph, who has written for The New York Times, TIME, CNN, ABC News, The Independent, GlobalPost,and more, shows you simple and effective techniques that you can implement in your freelance writing business to put more cash in your pocket today.
Here’s the soft sell:
“She combines the forcefulness of a personal trainer and the spunkiness of a longtime BFF to challenge writers to break out of their comfort zones and seek new markets in new and unusual places.”
“I’ve been freelancing for more than 20 years, and try to keep abreast of the best and most current freelancing advice and resources, as well as occasionally refreshing myself on the classics. So I was surprised at how many of the tangible, actionable nuggets of advice in Mridu Khullar Relph’s guide to making a grand more a month were things I hadn’t considered, or hadn’t considered from her angle.”
“There are so many fantastic ideas within these pages, that implementing ideas from only one chapter into my day to day marketing strategies would easily increase my income. But implementing the ideas from every chapter, and that’s freelance writing gold.”
Here’s the very soft sell:
It’s $3.99.
The great thing about having control over your work is there’s no timetable, no fixed timeline by which things need to get done. I screwed up my launch massively, but because I self-published it, I get to give it another go. There’s no first week sales number that’s going to make or break my book.
So I’m re-launching my launch and I’d love your help in spreading the word. I’m available for interviews and I’d love it if you told your freelancing friends about the book on Facebook and Twitter as well.
And, of course, I’d be thrilled it if you bought a copy. Follow the steps, put in the work, and you will make $1,000 more this month, guaranteed.
I’m putting what I’m learning into action today.
Are you?