My how the months do fly by! Time for another month-end roundup of tasty articles for writers that I’ve spotted online in recent weeks.

This time, I find many folks doing a great job writing useful posts on their very own blogs.

Remember, these are just in alphanumeric order, not in order of greatness. Note the appearance by copywriting great Bob Bly — his piece has some great tips on how to get the most marketing mileage out of writing an article for a client.

They’re all great reading! Enjoy.

1. 7 Secrets You Should Know About the Craft and Business of Writing Fiction by Kath and Therese of Writer Unboxed, on Courage 2 Create
2. 10 Simple Keys to Becoming a Better Blogger by William tha Great on WeBlogBetter
3. Can You Write an Article Like This One? by Bob Bly on Constant Contact
4. Doing Nothing Wrong? by Lori Widmer on About Freelance Writing
5. Everything Will Conspire to Stop You…So What? by Robert Bruce on Copyblogger
6. How to Create an Instant Yes by Goddess Leonie on Problogger
7. How to Easily Write Brilliant Blog Posts by Stanford Smith on Pushing Social
8. Make Money Blogging: If I Can Do It, So Can You by Barrie Davenport on Live Bold & Bloom
9. What to do When You Don’t Hear Back From Potential Clients by Angie Atkinson on WM Freelance Writers Connection
10. Writers: Why It Doesn’t Matter if a Marketing Tactic Works by Jenn Mattern on All Freelance Writing

What’s the best article about writing or blogging you read this month? Feel free to share links to some more useful posts in the comments below.

Did you like Stanford’s post that made this list? He’s the co-presenter on my free teleclass coming up April 6, Top 10 Reasons Why Your Blog Isn’t Earning Money. Come check him out! Seats are filling fast — register now.

Photo: Stock.xchng – dchapell

Today, I bring you good news about freelance writing:

There has never, ever been a better time to be a writer.

I know what you’re going to say: Haven’t I noticed the daily-paper world is in collapse? Magazines have folded. Many online sites pay squat.

So how can I make this claim?

Here’s why the golden age for writers is now

There are three reasons why things have never been better for freelance writers. They’re all things the Internet has made possible:

1. It’s spawned huge numbers of new, paying markets and made existing magazines and companies need a strong online presence
2. It’s now possible for writers to get these gigs even if the client is based half a continent or half a world away
3. It’s handed writers the freedom to make money from their own blogs, websites, ebooks and print-on-demand physical books

Compare this with the supposedly wonderful days of last century. There were a fairly set number of major magazines, major newspapers, major corporations, and major book publishers that paid well. If you couldn’t crack some of these, you didn’t earn so great.

In the case of books, your novel often never saw the light of day, or if it did manage to get published, your royalty rate was usually pretty small. Now, you can self-publish and keep every dime of revenue over the modest cost of creating your product.

The Internet has introduced new business models that scads of startups are trying out. These online markets are attracting venture capital and in some cases real revenue…which is opening up many new opportunities to earn.

It used to be difficult to make connections with companies or magazines that weren’t in your town. Either you wrote awesome query letters and then waited two months or so for a mailed response, or you got on planes and went to trade shows in hopes of meeting editors. Now, Twitter, LinkedIn or just a simple email can instantly connect us to new editors wherever they are, and help us land gigs.

Here’s the amazing opportunity

But really, nothing is as life-changing for writers as the ability to have unlimited earnings by writing your own products and selling them online.

Let’s pause to fully appreciate the empowering moment we are living in right now. If you have an idea for a how-to book, or a novel, you can shop it to a traditional publisher if you like. OR…you can just write it, build an audience for it on your blog, and sell it to your readers. And keep selling it, over and over, for years to come. No gatekeeper can stop you from publishing now.

Instead of earning $100 from an article, or $1,000, you can earn from it indefinitely. You can repackage a blog post into an ebook, which gets bundled into a course, or gets you consulting work. The possibilities truly are endless.

Your earnings are limited now only by your imagination, and your willingness to dive in and master these new methods of making your writing pay.

But then there’s the tricky part

If everything is so fantastic, what is holding so many writers back from earning a good freelance living?

I believe it’s change.

Things have changed a lot for writers in the past decade or so. It can be pretty boggling. Many writers I’ve talked with are still in mourning for a writing ecosystem that is gone and never coming back — one where they didn’t even have to know how to write headlines, much less how to use blogging platforms and Twitter. Today, writers have to know how to market their writing more actively than before.

While there may be more opportunity today — boundless opportunity, really — two things have to happen for writers to take advantage of it.

The first one is a mindset change: Writers have to not only accept, but embrace the new reality of our lives. Throw off your black clothes and realize these are the good old days.

The second one involves learning: Writers who want to take full advantage of the opportunities online need to learn how to create a powerful blog.

Commit to constantly seeking more information about how you can improve your online presence. Take it from me, every small change you make will make a difference. Even if you aren’t getting many readers, comments, or subscribers now, you can learn how to grow your audience, improve engagement, and use your blog to get gigs and sell your work.

One problem with learning how to create a great blog is that it’s easy to spend a lot. I’ve seen coaching programs that cost $8,000, courses that cost $2,000, and I know writers who’ve spent thousands on designers for their blog.

But I don’t believe it’s really necessary to spend a fortune to succeed online. I certainly haven’t!

Sure, there’s a lot of information available for free, on this blog and many others. But at some point you need a successful blogger to break it down for you and show you specifically what pro bloggers are doing in the design, layout and content of their blogs that attracts an audience and makes readers want to come back again and again. Having started from nothing myself, I can tell you there are simple tricks you can learn that will improve your results right away.

I’m going to be teaching people dozens of those tricks on March 15 at the Webinar 30 Design & Content Secrets to Skyrocket Your Blog, which I’m presenting with my fellow Top 10 Blogs for Writers winner Judy Dunn of Cat’s Eye Writer. We’ll be looking at participants’ actual blogs and showing exactly how to make them better. You can ask us about your blog and get answers — live.

If you’re just getting ready to start your blog…here’s a chance to avoid many common mistakes of new bloggers. Learn exactly what needs to be on your blog — and what doesn’t.

Start your learning March 15, for less than the price of one decent dinner out. Just click the big button to register.

Sometimes, you find a copywriting client, and it’s like a dream. They love you! You love them!

You create awesome copy together…until one day, it all goes wrong.

This happened to me recently. I found myself in a situation where I needed to tell a client — a big, Fortune 500-type client — that their ideas for an article sucked.

I was writing for a newsletter the company sends to millions of customers. We had set a very conversational, friendly, first-person tone in previous articles for this newsletter. Then we wrote another one that for some reason got passed over to the legal department for a final check.

Weeks later, I was sent the piece back for another look.

It was a disaster.

The legal department clearly had no idea what we were trying to achieve in terms of tone. They had turned it into the equivalent of a corporate memo. There were dozens of sentences that had were now laced with Official Company Phrases — written just like that, with initial capitals everywhere.

It was ghastly. Really, it was about unreadable.

I decided I had to do something.

I wrote my contact an email. This is what it said, word for word:

“I want to point out that the addition of these many capitalized terms greatly changes the tone of this piece. It is now clearly an advertorial, and no longer has the feel of an article. No reported piece in a magazine or newspaper would repeatedly capitalize these terms — they likely wouldn’t even capital them once. So the repeating capitalization really distracts the reader and pulls your eye out of the narrative.

If that’s where we want to go, then great — but people working on this product should be aware that we aren’t where we started anymore in terms of the premise in creating this piece.

I don’t know why we can’t define these official terms once and then refer to them colloquially through the rest of the piece…but obviously that’s [the company's] call to make. Just my two cents about it.”

After I sent this, I thought, “I hope I haven’t screwed this relationship up by opening my big mouth about this.” But I didn’t really have regrets.

I felt like I needed to say something about what had happened to the piece. I was going to feel embarrassed by having my byline on it if they went with it as is, so I had to give it a shot.

It’s hard to stand up for your little old freelance-writing self against a great, big corporation that could give you tons of freelance work in future. But if what we did turned all to mush, that probably wasn’t going to happen anyway.

So I hit send. Bit a few nails.

The next day I got an email: “Would you be available to talk about this piece?”

We set up a call, which had a whole team of people from the company on it. I took a deep breath.

And here’s what I heard: “We looked at this article again, and we agree with you — it’s lost the friendly tone we wanted. Can you help us figure out how to rewrite it?”

So that’s what we did. Somebody wrestled the legal people into a corner, and the fun, friendly article was reborn.

That’s my story about how you tell a copywriting client their content sucks.

How do you tell a client their ideas suck?

Very, very diplomatically and respectfully.

If you take the right tone, you just might get your way. You’ll also respect yourself in the morning for being true to your standards — and often, so will the client.

Have you told a client their ideas suck? If so, how’d that go? Leave a comment and let us know.

Photo via stock.xchng user windchime

By Stefanie Flaxman

Have you ever thought about adding proofreading services to your repertoire?

One of the smartest things that you can do for your freelance business is diversify. If you’re a writer who has a knack for catching errors, put it to use.

Yes, Little Miss Aspiring Carrie Bradshaw, I know this sounds depressing. Your writer-life fantasy probably includes contemplation in a cozy office that smells of rich mahogany, followed by a ritualistic sipping of five-dollar lattes as captivating words waltz from your fingertips onto your keyboard.

By now you should know that a freelance writing career is no fairy tale. Marketing and expanding your services are always part of the mix.

Here are five tips to help you increase your income by offering proofreading services.

1. Impress your current clients.

Chances are that you don’t write all of the copy that an existing client produces. Browse Web content that you didn’t write, and make suggestions for improvement—you even may spot a glaring error.

Does the client need some writing just proofread? You can do that! After you’ve demonstrated your meticulous editing ability, the client may assign you more writing gigs.

2. Charge per word.

Metro PCS advertises that the total price of a wireless telephone plan includes all taxes and fees. Their slogan is “Not $40-ish. 40.” I dig the “no surprises for the customer” attitude.

Figure out an appropriate per-word charge depending on how fast you work. A client can quickly determine her fee with this model.

I offer three levels of proofreading services ranging from $0.01 to $0.02 per word. Since I specialize in fast turnaround for small business documents, I also charge an additional fee for turnaround time. Clients calculate cost with the formula, “total fee = (proofreading service fee + turnaround time fee) x word count.”

3. Use PayPal.

People trust PayPal, and the established payment transaction company helps you address a prospect’s fear of giving you her hard-earned money in exchange for services. Let a potential client know that you understand this apprehension by making a refund (if warranted) simple.

4. Meet deadlines.

I recently edited a 160,000-word novel and returned it by my deadline. An email reply from my client read, “Thank you very much for being the first person to get the book back to me by the time you said you would.”

I would never miss a deadline, but tardiness is common and oftentimes tolerated. Stand out by demonstrating punctuality.

Also, when a client wants a piece of writing edited, it is essentially perfect from her perspective (no matter how many mistakes you do find). Don’t make her wait for the final product.

5. Love it. Live it.

Find clients with complementary personality types and writing styles to create a powerful team.

I love working with writers. The best editors passionately enhance and perfect raw copy with an intuitive sensibility. The collaboration makes the writer’s intentions shine.

Although the writer is the “star,” consider “behind the scenes” work to contribute to the writing process, utilize your proofreading skills, and boost your freelance income.

Stefanie Flaxman corrects business, marketing, and educational documents in 24 hours. She’s a professional proofreader and the founder of Revision Fairy® Small Business Proofreading Services. Connect with Stefanie on Twitter.

The Webinar is coming up next Tuesday! Congratulations to Elizabeth, who is the winner of Wednesday’s free-ticket contest with her question about the best way to find better-paying clients.

Don’t miss out. Get your freelance-writing questions answered — live!