How To Choose A Freelance Writing Niche You Care About

Entrepreneurship

07/22/19

Whether you’re interested in working from home, starting a side gig, or are just considering a secondary form of income, freelance writing is a great option to consider given its potential to be incredibly lucrative and the relatively low level of skill required to start. As long as you understand how to write in a way that’s grammatically correct and are willing to improve, you can begin your path to becoming a successful freelance writer. Of course, to break into this game, you need to become privy to some of the industry’s fundamental questions, such as how to pitch to clients, what and how you should charge said clients, and perhaps the most important question: how to settle on a niche. And that’s just scratching the surface. If you’re seriously thinking about starting a freelance writing gig, there are a lot more details you’ll have to confront. But this post isn’t here to overwhelm you with all the granular bits and details you’ll have to unpack as a freelancer. Rather, the goal of this article is for you to gain a general idea of what you’ll be getting into at the onset of this journey so that, by the end, you’ll feel more comfortable when deciding about what you want to write about. So, what are you waiting for? Let’s dive into it! Nailing Down Your Niche As a freelancer, you could attempt to write about every niche and industry out there, but that isn’t an approach I would recommend. If you go down that path, you’ll inevitably spend more time researching topics you’re unfamiliar with than actually writing. Less time spent writing results in less content being put out, and to freelance writers, content = money. On the flip side, you could narrow your focus and become an expert in a particular niche. The deeper your expertise in your niche, the more valuable you’ll become to your clients—and get this—the more valuable you are to your clients, the more you can charge. How do you choose which niche to focus on? If you’re only interested in freelancing as a way to make money, your best bet will be to write for more lucrative industries like Saas (software as a service), Tech, B2B (business to business), or Finance, among others. If, however, you’re more like me and want to write about something you’re genuinely interested in while still pulling in some hard cash, here are three things to think about: Experience: What industries do you have experience in? Ideally, you’ll want to begin by writing about something you already know about. That way you don’t have to start completely from scratch. When I was beginning my journey as a freelance writer, I had a number of different professional experiences, but when it came to what I wanted to write about, I managed to narrow it down to a list of three things. If I were to start that list from scratch today, it would look like this: Digital Marketing Personal Development Creative Writing Passion: What are you truly passionate about? Can you imagine yourself writing on the subject consistently week over week, maybe even every day? Whether you’re a foodie, a coffee connoisseur, or a Master Builder in Minecraft, make a list of your passions/hobbies. You may not find clients who need help writing about your passion specifically, but having them clearly laid out will give you a general direction to go in. And who knows! One of my first clients actually had me writing short stories about Minecraft, and I don’t even play that game! Today, my narrowed down list of passions that I’d write about looks something like this: Storytelling Traveling Personal Development Market Validation: This is the part where you discover whether the topics you listed as experiences and passions have the potential to be profitable niches. There are various ways to do this, but the simplest route is to go onto different job listing sites, search for gigs in your chosen niche, and see if any jobs are posted about it. Some good sites to start out with are: Problogger.com/jobs Indeed.com Ndash.co I’ve Chosen a Niche. Now What? Once you’ve decided on what niche to going to write about, you’re going to need to compile a portfolio of your writing. Why? Because potential clients are going to request samples of your work to decide whether they like your writing enough to hire you. If you don’t have any samples of your work, don’t worry! Just write a couple of articles related to your niche. You can never have too many good samples of your writing, but you should only need around 3-5 to begin. You can also write guest posts for blogs in your niche to get your name even further out there. You’ll probably end up writing these for free, but that’s okay because you’re still building your brand! And the bigger your reputation, the more you can charge for your writing. If you aren’t sure what kind of sample articles to write for your portfolio, just remember that list posts, how-to articles, and ultimate guide articles are generally always in demand. And remember! Just because you hone in on one niche initially doesn’t mean that you have to stick with it forever. Feel it out. See if one niche fits you better than others, and if it doesn’t, try something else! If you’re going to become an expert in a particular niche, you might as well make sure it’s one you can thrive in. *Header photo credit: https://samedaypapers.com

Three Easy Ways To Improve Communication In The Work Place (And How To Implement Them)

Achieving Goals

06/24/19

Yitzchak Young

Healthy and productive communication in the workplace can be difficult to nail down, especially when you’re working in a fast-paced environment. But the difference between getting it wrong and getting it right are like night and day. In the former scenario, miscommunication runs amok; few people feel heard and just as many feel misunderstood. Good ideas never get the consideration they deserve, leading to rising frustrations and drops in moral. If no one takes responsibility to fix communication then, at best, your organization loses money. At worst, you lose your people. Or you can take it the other direction. In this scenario, your people don’t simply feel heard—they feel understood, valued, and they aren’t afraid to give their opinion, even if it contrasts your own. In fact, it’s encouraged, because in a work environment where communication is thriving, your team will believe they are safe, acknowledged, and competent. Not sure how to improve communication skills in your workplace? Don’t fret! Communication can be as complicated as it is useful, but by starting with these three habits, you can play an active part in shaping a healthier company culture. Stop Talking and Start Listening It’s easy to assume that communication is all about talking, but below the surface, there’s much more going on. When developing effective communication skills, an often-overlooked skill is the art of active listening. What does this entail? For starters, if someone is speaking to you, stop what you’re doing. Turn away from your computer screen. Put down your phone. Whatever you need to do. Be face-to-face to them your undivided attention, make eye contact, and make sure you’re facing them. While they’re conveying their idea or story or question, don’t be thinking about your response. That’s something that gets a lot of people. Instead, bring your attention to what they’re saying. If you’re confused about something, ask a question. For extra credit, paraphrase what they said back to them to see if you listened well. Although it sounds simple, this exercise can be difficult. It’s going to take some practice before you get it down to a habit. Luckily, you’ll have lots of opportunities to practice at your workplace. Personally, I practice every day when I get to work by asking my coworkers how they’re doing. At first, they’re responses were curt and to the point. But when they realized that I actually cared about what they had to say, they began to open up. And you know what? Everyone feels better for it. It takes more time, but it creates rapport and reinforces relationships. When you get down to it, that’s what business is about. Use Your Body Most people understand that the way you carry yourself leaves a lasting impression on people, and yet, everywhere I go, I still see individuals making simple communication errors that could be fixed with a few tweaks to their body language. I already mentioned some of the basics above: make eye contact. Be face-to-face and avoid your screens when you’re speaking with someone. While these are some easy and straightforward ways to improve communication, if you’re looking to become a communication expert, you’ll have to learn to use your body. Body language isn’t just about avoiding the crossing of your arms and keeping your back straight. It’s also learning to consciously balance your stance, rigidity, and posture until it becomes habitual. It’s expressing non-verbal cues during conversation that allows the speaker to know that you’re actively listening. Things like: Gentle nodding. Raising your eyebrows. Smiling. Leaning forward. When you fail to give conversational feedback with your body language, people may take it as a sign that you don’t care about what they have to say, or worse, that you’re supercilious or condescending. Don’t give the wrong impression—look and behave like someone who cares. Tone It Up Out of all other areas of communication, tonality and articulation are the ones I’ve struggled with most. In high school I once had to repeat myself so many times that the person just told me to drop it. Pretty bad, right? I could have just berated my previous self’s general communicatory awkwardness, but instead, I learned from him and rounded myself out in that area. You can too by following a few simple principles that include but are not limited to increasing your volume, slowing the pace of your speech, and moderating your tone of voice. The benefits of speaking louder are pretty straight forward. If you raise the volume, more people will hear you, and they’ll be more likely to understand what you’re saying. Doing so also increases the likelihood of you coming off as confident. Here’s another thing: don’t end your statements with question marks. What do I mean by that? It’s when your pitch rises with a sharp upward curve, a tendency that typically occurs when the speaker is uncertain about what they’re saying. Why does this happen? It happens because, while the speaker is articulating their thought, they feel the need to ask questions to fill in gaps of missing information, or when searching for approval of an idea or choice. Is it wrong to do this? Not at all. But it does convey a sense of uncertainty, which doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. Another technique you can use to improve tonality is to slow down your speech and enunciate your words. No one enjoys getting bombarded with thought after thought after thought—instead, give your listeners and yourself breaks. Take time to breathe. Doing so turns your ideas into bite sized Hors d’Oeuvres that end up tasting much better now that they aren’t being forced down their throats. And if you really want to step up your communication so that people listen more attentively to what you’re saying, spice things up. Don’t speak in a dreary monotonous voice—be playful. Give it some color. A lot of people speak with sentences like these that go on and on and on, not really going anywhere, or even if they are, they lose the interest of your listeners like an hour-long broadcast of C-Span. In

How To Overcome Your Fear Of Public Speaking

Achieving Goals

04/30/19

Yitzchak Young

Let’s say you’re a bit like me and you agreed to speak at a public event because you’re ambitious and have something to say. You also have no experience to fall back on when it comes to presenting yourself on stage, so the only thing you have to guide you through this public speaking endeavor is your ingenuity and sheer will. What do you do? The Don’ts Don’t expect this to be easy Public speaking is a craft, dare I say an art. It takes tons of experience for it to become like second nature, so if you aren’t so good at it yet, don’t bang yourself up about it. But you should certainly meet this endeavor with an air of seriousness. After all, you’re serious about giving this talk, aren’t you? Don’t consume a bunch of self-help videos Such content is good click-bait and easy inspiration, but it improves your speaking skills as much as reading a bicycle manual teaches you to ride a bike. At its best, it’ll give you an abstract idea of what it looks like to shine on stage. At its worst, it’ll provide you with false expectations regarding what it takes to deliver a good talk. The Do’s As I said, public speaking is a bit of an art, and all creatives create in their own distinct way. I can tell you a bunch of generalized tips that can apply to everyone, but your situation is unique to you, and generalizations don’t help so much on that front. What I can give you, however, is my own personal account on what I did when I found myself in such a predicament. It’s Okay To Be Afraid. I freaked out because I’d agreed to do something difficult with no prior experience. Yes, I had watched YouTube videos and read articles about it, and even gave presentations in grade school. But this was different. I imagined emulating great speakers like Simon Sinek, Sir Ken Robinson, or Oprah. Imagining is great. It inspired me to do well—helped me believe that I could do well—but inspiration lacks substance. In my fantasies, I could be my ideal and make no scarring mistakes. Real life didn’t feel so safe, and no amount of internal hype would magically make me a public speaking black-belt. In real life, I get nervous. In real life, I’m afraid that if I make a fool of myself, it doesn’t go away by the mere act of waking up from the nightmare. It feels like I’ll have to live with the memory of how badly I did, and depending on the degree of my debacle, I may never wish to go on stage again. So it was critical that I didn’t screw it up because I wanted to do well, and if I did well, maybe someone would benefit from my talk in some meaningful way. If I dropped the ball, they’d never get their wasted time back. It was imperative that I make the talk worth their while, so eventually, I stopped reading about it, stopped watching guides, and started practicing. Practice Practice Practice! Practice won’t make perfect because perfection is impossible, but as the old saying goes, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars.” And that’s better than nothing, right? People go about practicing in different ways. Some go straight to Toast Masters events with a rough sketch of a speech to hone their skills. Others like me began with making a statement that I believed to be true and ought to be said aloud. Why? Because my background wasn’t in public speaking, it’s in writing fiction. Any talk worth remembering tells a story, and to me, any good story will say at least one true thing (thank you, Hemingway). When I gave my talk, that statement was this: “When we try to change people against their will, we’re attempting to force them to adopt the standards we hold to ourselves—i.e. unconsciously attacking a weakness of ours that we see in them.” It took me a whole day to come up with that statement, but once I had it, I was able to outline the rest of the talk around it. From that outline came a rough draft, and from that first draft came . . . a second, slightly less rough draft. It was at this point that the time for writing had come to an end. The next part was to speak. Over preparing is better than under preparing. I read my talk aloud and recorded it with my smart phone so that I could listen to it whenever I wasn’t able to rehearse, like when I was riding the bus, doing a monotonous task at work, exercising, etc. To anyone with any sense, I’d have probably looked obsessed—and you know what? They’d be right. The more obsession, the merrier. I was, after all, on a deadline, and I wanted to be able to recite this thing in my sleep. How often did I rehearse? Whenever I had the chance, really. I’d rehearse to myself multiple times a day, and when my wife got home from work, I’d speak in front of her. I called up a few friends who were willing to spend an hour listening to my talk, and when they weren’t busy, I got my siblings to listen, too. One of my friends even went so far as to coach me on stage presentation—to “stop wobbling back and forth and stand firm with your shoulders back; to not shake and pace too much, because any odd movements will distract the audience from what you’re trying to say.” Things like hand gestures and acting out scenes was fine so long as they were done well, so I practiced that, too. There were times where my co-workers thought I might be losing it given my constant muttering to myself, so I gave them some context for my behavior and told them about the talk.

How To Start A Podcast From Scratch in 2019

Achieving Goals

02/19/19

Yitzchak Young

Do you love hopelessly skimming through radio stations on repeat to find something—anything—to listen to? How about never having enough sit-down time to focus on learning something new? If you answered with a concrete ‘NO!’ to both, then rest assured, you’re not alone. To fill that void, podcasts arrived at the scene, seemingly sweeping through the nation in recent years with hit shows like Serial, This American Life, The Joe Rogan Experience, and too many more to count. In fact, there are now over 500,000 podcasts available on iTunes, and the number of weekly podcast listeners went up by 6 million last year. It shouldn’t really come as a surprise, of course. Podcasts serve a variety of functions. Whether you’re in need of entertainment for long commutes or are looking to keep your mind sharp with educational content, podcasts have your back. And if you’re a creator (like me) then you can utilize them as an outlet to share your big ideas in greater detail that engages your audience while solidifying your voice in your given industry. So how do you do it? It isn’t as easy as pressing a button, but it’s not calculus, either. At the end of this post, you’ll know not only how to launch a podcast, but also how to avoid the walls that I ran into when starting out. Choose a topic This step is straight forward, but you may want to give it extra thought. You don’t want to pile a bunch of ideas together followed by picking one out of a hat; if you’re serious about starting a podcast, the topic must be something you’re willing to commit to. When I was at this stage, these were the types of questions and answers I found myself with: What are you interested in? Stories, psychology, living purposely in a practical manner… Why make a podcast about those things? I’m curious about them and want to understand them on a deeper level. The truth that I unearth from my intellectual digging will enrich my lifestyle, and sharing said truth with my audience might do the same for them. When deciding on your topic, you want to begin with ideas you’re passionate about, but afterward, try to filter those with topics on which you have some knowledge. Once you’re there, consider whether your topic’s niche is over-saturated because, if it is, you’re going to be fighting an uphill battle for people’s attention. Decide on your podcast’s name If you have a blog or a business, giving your podcast the same title would make a lot of sense, but you’re also allowed be creative. The process for deciding my own title looked like this: What are you doing with your podcast? I’m considering ideas, human behavior, and the relationship between the two. How do you do that? By asking ‘why’ when confronted with perplexing concepts until I get to the core of what’s going on. After thinking it through, I took a step back, poured myself a 3rd cup of coffee, and decided that Considering Why was good enough for me. Another important note to consider (one that I didn’t at the time) is that iTunes is a search engine. When you’re hoping to get your podcast found, it’s not a bad idea to include relevant keywords in your title. For instance, if you were making a podcast about Life Coaching, a good search engine optimized (SEO) title might be Empowerment: Learn to Grow Your Best Life. That way, if someone were to open iTunes and search for “learn to grow” or “best life,” your podcast would be more likely to show up. Figure out your format and style What should you do about format? Is an interview set up the best to use, or would a solo or co-hosted show be better? Interviews are popular and great for acquiring a ton of new listeners (especially if the person you’re meeting with is a thought leader), but remember to consider all your options. Some people say that there’s a strict format for how you should structure your podcast. When it comes down to it, I say do whatever works for you and run with it. You can always revise as you go along. Personally, I opted for a mostly solo style, much of my inspiration coming from a little-known show called Let’s Know Things by Colin Wright. Design your cover art Your cover art dictates the first impression people will get as they browse through different podcast apps like Stitcher, Apple Podcasts, or more recently, Spotify. What I did for my cover was, firstly, going to this website to obtain a free, high-quality image. Some of my best thoughts have been had over a good cup-o-joe, so I decided to go with this: a minimalist picture of coffee. After that, I took the image to this free online photo-editing site and, after making some subtle changes, slapped my stylized title on the image. Behold, the finished product: It was that easy. Of course, I’m a minimalist, so I wasn’t looking for anything too fancy. However, should you require something with a bit more zest (and have a small budget to invest in cover art), I’d advise you to check out the services offered at 99designs.com. Get a microphone This step is important. One of the worst things you can do to your listeners is force them to strain to hear what you’re saying. Do yourself and your audience a favor by getting a decent microphone. If you don’t have one built into your computer that produces a quality sound, then a good one to start out with is the Audio-Technica ATR 2100 USB. You can get it for less than $100 over here. Record your first 3 episodes Why the first three, you ask? When you find a show on Netflix that you like, do you prefer to watch just one and be done? Or do you prefer to go through the entire