This is a guest post from Anne Wayman, who is a freelance writer, ghostwriter and blogs about writing at aboutfreelancewriting.com, a blog for freelance writers. She’s also taken all three of Yaro’s programs, Blog Mastermind, Membership Site Mastermind and Become A Blogger Premium (yay Anne!)

So You Want To Hire A Writer?

Until you’ve actually worked with a writer you have no way of knowing how well that writer will write for you. Even when you’ve checked every reference, and read every sample, a writing project can still go wrong.

As a writer who has been hired by many clients, I have developed five questions that when answered clearly almost always result in a satisfied customer.

It boils down to this…

 The writer needs to know exactly what you want written.

Sound obvious? Good. I have, however, found some clients don’t understand what they need or how to communicate it. These rules will help you get clear with your writer:

1. Where/How are you’re going to use the piece?

Let your writer know where and how the piece you’re commissioning is going to be used. It makes a difference.

For example, sales letters sound much different than those aimed at academia. An article for the publication The Atlantic is dissimilar to one written for Woman’s Day or Wired. Your writer needs to know exactly how you’re going to use the work.

How the content will be used generally controls the length. For example, blog posts and other web writing tend to be short because people scan rather than read deeply onscreen. This article you are reading now has about 870 words. It’s often harder to write short pieces than longer ones.

Length for a print magazine article will generally be in the neighborhood of between 1,000 to 5,000 words, depending on the publication. Books generally run 50,000 words or more.

Giving the writer a range of the words or pages you expect helps frame the project.

2. Does the piece need to read like you wrote it?

Good writers can make a piece sound as if you wrote it. This is ghostwriting and usually takes more time because the writer needs to work in your voice. If it is important to you, find out how the writer wants to learn your voice – through interviews, or samples you’ve actually written, etc.

On the other hand, if you simply want it written and it doesn’t need to sound like you, the writer will have an easier time and the project can probably be done more quickly. Make your real needs known.

3. How or where will the writer get the information?

Generally, the writer will look to you to provide the information needed to do the writing. This could come through conversation face to face or over the phone, by email, through written material you provide, or some combination.

Sometimes you’ll want to hire a writer who already has the information or knows the area you want written about; the writer will need your spin on the topic to get it right.

How you provide the information will influence the price. You probably don’t want to pay writer’s rates for transcriptions. If you want the writer to travel to you, expect to pay all their expenses. Writing is not research. If you expect the writer to do any research at all, expect to pay more than if you provide the information for them.

4. How and when will the writer be paid?

Prices tend to be established by bid or by negotiation. There really aren’t standard or established fees for writing. In writing like so much else in life, you’ll get what you pay for. The higher priced writers have earned their way there by being good.

Writers are usually paid either a flat fee for a piece or by the hour.

Generally writers expect some sort of good faith deposit up front. It’s totally okay to break up the project in small bites so you’re not investing a ton of money without seeing results. Occasionally you’ll want to put a writer on retainer so you know they are available to you at all times.

No matter how you and your writer reach a price it must be clear to both of you how the writer will be paid – cash, check, PayPal, credit card, etc. and when that payment will be made. For the most part writers expect to be paid when they invoice, not net 30, 60, or 90 days later. If you need to pay net 30, etc., make it clear up front in your original negotiation. Make sure the amount and the method are spelled out in your agreement with the writer.

5. The best agreements

Yes, you need a written agreement with the writer. An email that spells out the specifics is fine, and often it makes sense for the writer to generate the agreement subject to your approval.

The best agreements spell out the goal or purpose of the project, the specs, how the writer will get the information, how quickly the writer will get draft to you, the number of revisions, how the project is to be paid for and what happens if the project goes awry.

With these elements in place you’re apt to get exactly the writing you want. Good luck!

Anne Wayman
www.aboutfreelancewriting.com

In the previous article on living the 2-hour workday I introduced the concept of travel buffers, cash created either through saving or selling assets that is designed to give you a buffer of capital you can comfortably spend if you need to while you travel.

Travel buffers are mostly for piece of mind so you can relax while you travel or use in case of emergencies, but ideally speaking it’s better if you don’t dip into your capital while you travel. In order to facilitate this, you need some form of consistent income streams that are greater than your total expenses, including costs to travel.

What Is Event Independent Income?

My largest source of income has come from significant events, either selling an asset or conducting a launch for a new product.

There’s an inherent weakness with this type of income – you have to do something, often significant work, to get the result, or once you do it’s difficult to repeat, for example once you sell an asset, it’s gone.

Conducting a launch is definitely NOT two hour a day work, it takes a lot more than that. Depending on how you travel it’s quite possible to integrate periods of time where you conduct a launch, for example I did a reopening campaign for Blog Mastermind while traveling in Toronto, resulting in well over six figures in income. However to complete the work required to conduct the launch, I had to settle in Toronto for a summer, renting a house and effectively living there as a local.

You can choose to travel, stop and work, then travel some more, if you depend on event income like launches, but if you really want true flexibility and never want more than a two hour a day work commitment, then you need to develop some event independent income streams. In other words, you need money that is either completely passive, or nearly-passive, consistent as a result of working only two hours a day or thereabouts.

The challenge with this sort of money is keeping it consistent. So many systems for making money online are fantastic as one-hit-wonders, and they work again and again in different niches, but the problem is the amount of ongoing work required to keep things going or to get started in the first place.

Sure you can outsource much of your work (I’ve got a couple of great podcast interviews about outsourcing coming up soon), which is a great strategy especially when you have a system that is already making money, but it takes time to do this and still you have the challenge of always staying one step ahead of the market or finding new markets to enter once one dries up, or the competition catches up.

In my case I’ve always had a solid independent income stream that’s served me well for almost ten years now.

So what is it? Read on to find out…

The Magazine Model

My very first source of online income was selling things on eBay, a short lived experiment that I had no desire to continue once I ran out of things I wanted to sell (you can read more about my early days making money online in my four part series starting here).

The next income stream I created has served me well for years, even before I was a blogger, but it works great on blogs too. I’m talking about website sponsorship.

I’ve always been a fan of magazines. Back when I was a kid I spent a heck of a lot of time reading magazines about video games, during the Sega vs. Nintendo days (for you 80s children like me, I’m talking about the Master System, NES, Megadrive and Super Nintendo). I actually enjoyed reading about and anticipating games and new consoles more than I did playing them.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my love of magazines very likely translated into a love of web publishing, as owning a website is a lot like owning a magazine. This idea can carry all the way through to today, as owning a blog is a lot like owning your own little fanzine about a subject.

My first successful website, about the card game Magic: The Gathering, was my first successful case study of running a magazine, although it was a bit more interactive than paper, one of the wonderful features of the world wide web. I wrote the content myself and eventually brought on volunteer writers and integrated user-generated content tools like forums and chatrooms.

In the Blog Profits Blueprint I introduce the concept of the magazine model for making money online and dissect it further inside the Blog Mastermind coaching course. As I explain, most bloggers begin using the magazine model as it is the simplest to get started with.

The magazine model simply means you make money from advertising. Your job is to create an entity that has enough attention that you can translate that attention into an income source. This is exactly what I did with my first successful site, and later did with my blogs and other websites I have owned.

In a way, the Internet is just one massive magazine shop, or like a free newspaper funded by advertising income. Understand this and you will understand one of the oldest business models in the world – the publishing model – and it applies just the same, at least in principle, to the online world. It’s the same model, just with new tools and formats, with the same goals – getting the attention of, and influencing people.

Staying Power

I’m not going to break the magazine model down too much in this article as I’ve talked a lot before about the elements in previous articles on this blog. If you really want a detailed description, check out my archives (in particular read my series beginning here – Is Professional Blogging A Sustainable Business Model?), study the Blog Profits Blueprint again and if you’re really keen, join my coaching program Blog Mastermind.

Simply put, selling banners and text links and other forms of sponsorship media on a website or blog is a great independent and consistent income stream, providing you are willing to do the work to keep publishing new content so people read your “magazine”.

My Magic: The Gathering website taught me this. During the five or so years that the site was in my charge and big enough to make money, I had banner sponsors, some of whom sent me cash month after month for YEARS.

It was because of this experience that I later developed a near-passive income stream on my blog, although it took a bit of tweaking to come up with something completely hands off for me.

So how good is this income stream?

Well I can say that I’ve been writing to this blog for almost five years, and for almost four years of that time I’ve made at least $1,000 a month, every single month, thanks to sponsors.

For the last three years it’s been somewhere between $2,000 and $3,000 a month, and that’s only from banners and text links, no sponsored reviews, no affiliate marketing, just advertisers paying a monthly fee for exposure to my audience.

Consistency is impossible to judge without time passing, so I’m confident now when I say that unless some major shifts occur online, either to my business or the industry it operates in, the Internet or society itself, this money will continue to come for as long as I keep blogging. It’s stable, independent and consistent, and has been for years.

What Is A True 2-Hour Workday?

When people challenge me that there is no way I can work just two hours a day, I agree, I don’t work those few hours if I counted up the time I spend on projects that have the potential to make me money.

Although defining what “work” is invariably becomes important if you want to get semantic about a true 2-hour workday, what I can say to you is that I have made enough money to live off quite comfortably just by writing my blog.

You could take away my products, the income from assets I’ve sold and even the affiliate revenue and leave just me, my blog and my sponsors, and I’d certainly only need to spend two hours per day to keep it running, and generate what most people in western culture earn in a year.

You could live like a king if you chose to do this outside of the wealthiest countries with the strongest currencies, for example if you lived in Asia, or Eastern Europe or South America.

In Australia where I live, if I earn $3,000 US dollars a month, I’m not rich, but that’s enough to get by. The challenge of course is what would you do with the rest of your time if you only need to work two hours a day, and I expect like me, you might choose to use at least some of that time for more business projects and increase your earnings, or you might just keep doing what works and increase the return you get from it.

There’s no reason why you can’t double your traffic to get a similar increase in advertising revenue, if you keep giving people what they want in terms of content (your magazine becomes more popular).

Stress Free Living

Imagine this: You’ve saved up a nice travel buffer, perhaps $20 or $30K, enough to live on for a year. You’ve got an income stream that’s consistent and keeps coming month after month as long as you spend a little time each day doing something you love (in fact, the money is a by-product of doing what you love, you don’t actually have to do anything to “create” the money, it’s passive as long as you keep creating value for other people).

You’ve got ample time, you enjoy the work you do although you don’t have to do it for long, and you have countless opportunities in front of you.

Sounds good doesn’t it? Yeah, I know it is because I’ve been living it (and then sum) for the last few years.

Making money from sponsors is not the only way to develop an independent income stream, but in today’s content-drive Internet, it’s one of the best ways, especially if you’re passionate about something.

If you really understand what I’m saying here, advertising income isn’t really the “answer”, it’s just one of the options available to you, if you choose a model that results in you becoming noteworthy in your industry.

As Ed Dale recently told his Seth Godin), is the key.

This method is so much easier than any other way of making money because it rewards you for being passionate. It doesn’t focus only on the money, or the system or trends that are changing. It’s about you and how that something about you can translate into value for people who share your passion or have a need that your passion can meet.

The reason why you can make money from an income source like advertising, be confident in your future because you know it will be consistent, and work very little to keep it coming in, is because you’ve established status that can’t be easily taken away. That status results in consistent traffic, and thus revenue, because you’re willing to do a small handful of things (create content) to maintain it.

Sponsors may come and go, but if you are a leader, there’s always another company who wants to be associated with you and willing to spend money to do so. What’s important is what you’ve built and what you continue to accumulate day after day, even though it only takes a little time to do so.

This is yet another reason why, as I traveled for 8 months of 2008, I was financially secure. I have an income source that covers all of my expenses as long as I write a handful of articles to my blog each month, which I love doing of course. This income stream means that most of the other money I make becomes capital as my expenses are covered. It’s all gravy from there.

How Can You Create Independent Income Streams?

If you want to develop some kind of independent income stream, owning a website – which a blog is a great option – and then selling advertising from it, can work really well. Hopefully since you read my blog, you’re already taking steps to achieve this outcome.

If you don’t make much money from advertising right now on your websites or blogs, don’t worry too much, everyone who has ever made money from advertising grows through this period. When I first wrote this blog I didn’t make a penny from advertising for a good six months, and even after that it took a long time to get things going.

The challenge with advertising is that it’s relational to traffic. If your blog has low traffic, it’s harder to get sponsors and you can’t charge much. Once momentum kicks in you can charge more and it becomes easier to get more sponsors, in fact you may not have to do anything at all, they will come to you. Just as you do with your target audience/customer when you develop an avatar, consider your target sponsor and their motivations (a “sponsor avatar” if you will), and you will understand what it takes for your blog to be worth spending money on in their eyes.

Your job, is to focus on value creation and marketing. You must blow people away with what you give them, asking for nothing in return and then, and this is work, put in above average effort to get out there and use the marketing tools available to show people what you offer. Doing this every day, provided you are operating in a market with enough people, will work, I guarantee it.

If you’re looking for more specific advice regarding selling advertising on your website, including how much traffic you need before you start making money, have a read of one of my earlier pieces (May 2005 – this blog really is getting old!): How to make money from your website selling advertising and once again, if you are really serious about making money from a blog, taking my Blog Mastermind coaching program is definitely the fast track option.

So now you have two components that can help you lead a 2-hour workday and travel the world if you so choose. Travel buffers give you piece of mind and independent income streams keeping you going. It’s not easy, but this lifestyle is available to ANYONE who wants to go after it. The first step is to commit making it a reality by taking action every day.

Good luck!

Yaro Starak
Blessed To Work

Click here to download the audio-only MP3 [ 64 MB ]

Andrew Warner is passionate about entrepreneurship and loves talking with his fellow entrepreneurs. He came to my attention when he recently interviewed Gideon Shalwick on his current blog, Mixergy, which features tons of great video interviews with leading entrepreneurs.

Andrew has a great story to tell as he, in partnership with his brother, created an eight figure online business (topping $30 million in annual sales at one point), which he later sold. I was naturally curious to learn more about him, what his business was about and what he is currently focused on, so I approached him about doing an interview.

In this interview Andrew explains how he first became an entrepreneur and then dives into a detailed breakdown of how he started and grew his multi-million dollar business and what his current Mixergy project is aiming to achieve.

The concept of leverage is especially important for any company to grow towards eight figures, so I was interested to hear Andrew’s take on how to get real leverage in your business. If you want to push towards a million dollars or more a year from your online business, have a listen to what Andrew had to say.

Click here to download the audio-only MP3 [ 61 MB ]

Katie Freiling is an up and coming internet marketer who currently focuses on social media and blogging, however she came to my attention after watching a video she did about Eckhart Tolle.

She’s only been on the internet marketing scene for a couple of years, but is already earning six figures and just recently did a blog related launch and made $30,000 in a couple of hours.

I’m a big fan of personal development and how important YOU are to your business, which is why I asked Katie to feature in my first video interview.

In this interview Katie explains how important changing her mindset has been to finally finding success online after some rough patches in the past, and also some of the common mindset challenges that her students have faced and how to overcome them.

If you’re currently experiencing any kind of fear regarding your Internet business, this video is worth a watch.

You can find out more about Katie at http://katiefreiling.com/