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

All the evidence I’ve seen shows that positive thinking and confidence improves performance. In anything.

Give someone an easy math problem, watch them get it right and then they’ll do better on the ensuing standardized test than someone who just failed a difficult practice test.

No, positive thinking doesn’t allow you to do anything, but it’s been shown over and over again that it improves performance over negative thinking.

Key question then: why do smart people engage in negative thinking? Are they actually stupid?

The reason, I think, is that negative thinking feels good. In its own way, we believe that negative thinking works. Negative thinking feels realistic, or soothes our pain, or eases our embarrassment. Negative thinking protects us and lowers expectations.

In many ways, negative thinking is a lot more fun than positive thinking. So we do it.

If positive thinking was easy, we’d do it all the time. Compounding this difficulty is our belief that the easy thing (negative thinking) is actually appropriate, it actually works for us. The data is irrelevant. We’re the exception, so we say.

Positive thinking is hard. Worth it, though.

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.

The local youth theatre troupe recently put on a performance of Grease. It was a high-spirited outing, with terrific performances and it was a great way for them to spend a month or two over the summer. I was amazed to discover, though, that the budget for the rights to the play were $3,000. That’s pretty steep for a high school production of an old, not particularly wonderful musical script that was only going to be seen by the local community. Should it really cost $7 for every person who watches the play?

The reason fees for licensing plays are so high is that almost all plays and musicals are licensed by just a few firms and the purchasers have no power whatsoever. The sellers have signalled each other and created an artificially high pricing floor. “Take it or leave it” is their motto.

Here’s the opportunity that the net provides (in this case and so many others): someone should organize the customers and negotiate on their behalf.

Imagine contacting 3,000 high schools and finding 500 willing to join together and agree to act as a buying cartel. Now, the organizer can poll the directors at these schools and find thirty plays they’d be willing to put on next year. Go to the rights holders of these plays and say, “We’re going to pick six of these plays. Each of the six will get a huge number of customers as a result, perhaps twenty times as many as you usually get. But to be among the six, you need to lower your price by a factor of ten.”

Now, if you’re the rights holder, you have a dilemma (but not a huge one). You can agree to lower your price and thus double your annual revenue on this dusty old play, or you can stay where you are and make zero.

Hmmmm.

Over time, the cartel will only grow more powerful. Word of mouth will spread, because news that joining this cartel cuts the cost of renting a play or musical by 90% is noteworthy. More will join. The benefits to the rights holders who agree to play along will go up because they’ll have the play reach more audiences. The only losers will be those that are stuck on the old model of taking advantage of independent communities with no purchasing power.

While this has been tried in markets where it’s very difficult to make it work (like consumer electronics where the margins are small) I think it can thrive in business to business, service and intellectual property markets where market share can easily make up for lowered profits. Universities can join up to push down the price of textbooks by agreeing to adopt the one of the six acceptable ones that’s the cheapest–and all the others get zero. The key is frequent communication and solidarity as you go through the dip that will happen when providers resist your initial offers. That’s why the net (and free online coordination and messaging) are so critical.

Think of all the tiny vertical markets where this can really pay off.

And of course, the organizer deserves (and gets) a piece of the savings.

Enormity doesn’t mean really enormous. It means incredibly horrible.

The problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn’t work. Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down.

Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies and you won’t get a bigger donation, you’ll just get averted eyes.

If you’ve got a small, fixable problem, people will rush to help, because people like to be on the winning side, take credit and do something that worked. If you’ve got a generational problem, something that is going to take herculean effort and even then probably won’t pan out, we’re going to move on in search of something smaller.

Not fair, but true.

New media isn’t the perfect marketing medium, and it won’t be until we find the magic beans.

TV had magic beans for forty years. For forty years, anyone, even a complete moron, could make a lot of money using TV ads. Buy enough ads, don’t screw up, you’re rich.

The hard part was buying enough ads, but once you did that, victory could be declared.

On the web, there are countless marketers just standing around waiting for someone to hand them the magic beans. And that’s the problem.

Marketing online takes too much measurement, patience, creativity, technical knowledge, flexibility, speed and authenticity. It requires too much thinking and not enough going out for dinner with clients.

Perhaps there will never be magic beans again. Perhaps marketing is about to transition to a new kind of profession, one that requires insight, dedication and smarts.

Or maybe someone will find some magic beans.

When George Washington was a teenager, did he really, really, really want a car?

Unlikely.

In order to want something, you probably need to know it exists. But my guess is that it surely helps if you’ve been marketed to.

One definition of happiness is wanting the things you’re likely to get (or, conversely, not wanting the unattainable). One definition of marketing is persuading the world it wants what you have, regardless of whether they can afford it or not.

We don’t hesitate to motivate employees by marketing them the benefits of being promoted, even if they all can’t possibly get this. We don’t hesitate to tease kids by marketing every conceivable unattainable Christmas gift at them, relentlessly.

Teenage girls are taught what to want by magazines and by peers.

Patients are taught what to want by doctors who prescribe new tests. And doctors are taught to do that by lawyers eager to sue if they don’t. Imagine going home and saying, “the doctor wanted to give me another test, but I said no…”

This cycle of assigned wants is going to get a lot worse before it gets better. The game theory demands it.

And so, once again it seems to come down to a personal decision. If you decide what you want (instead of letting someone else decide for you) perhaps you could choose the things that would actually bring you and your loved ones the satisfaction you can live with.

The following does not appear in the Star Spangled Banner:

“Babe Ruth through the night…”

When you do something by heart, it bypasses some of the common sense processing we use to navigate our day. Of course Babe Ruth wasn’t even a sparkle in Mrs. Ruth’s eye during the War of 1812, but if you’re singing by heart, you don’t think about it.

I walked into a cheap noodle joint in Soho last month and decided I wanted tofu with vegetables. They had a little plate on display (a special, I guess) and I asked for tofu, vegetables, no sauce. The cashier pointed to the display model and said, “like this?”

I said, “with no sauce,” because the gloppy stuff didn’t appeal to me.

So, after asking, clearly, twice, I sat down. Four minutes later, they called my number and handed me an identical copy to the display item, oozing with fluorescent sauce.

“I was hoping that there’d be no sauce…”

She didn’t miss a beat. She said, “that’s the way it always comes.”

She wasn’t being evil. She was merely doing it by heart. Just like the intolerant judgmental guy who can quote you chapter and verse from his spiritual book of choice but never thought about the meaning of the words inside or the status quo protecting technician who isn’t a scientist because she’s afraid of violating something that feels like a law.

The next time you or one of your people starts rattling off the obvious truth by heart, wonder about whether it’s obvious because it’s true, or true because it’s obvious.

The problem with customer service is not a new one. It’s about balancing between serving a lot of people a little, or dropping everything to serve a few people a lot.

Getting a lot of benefit for a lot of people for not so much money isn’t particularly difficult. In the chart on the right, for example, (a) represents the cost of good signage at the airport, or clearly written directions on the prescription bottle or a bit of training for your staff. It pays off. Pay a little bit and you help a lot of people to avoid hassles. The utility per person isn’t huge, but you can help a lot of people at once.

(b) is the higher cost of a bit of direct intervention. This is the cost of a call center or a toll free number or an information desk. You’re paying more, you’re helping fewer people, but you’re helping them a lot.

(c) is where it gets nuts. (c) is where we are expected to spare no expense, where the CEO has to get involved because it’s a journalist who’s upset, or where we’re busy airlifting a new unit out to a super angry customer. The cost is very high, the systems fall apart and only one person benefits.

Of course, if you’re that one person, you think it’s not only fair, but appropriate and right.

This “spare no expense” mantra is extremely difficult to avoid, because in any given situation, when the resources are available, your inclination is to say, “make the problem go away, spend the money!”

It’s certainly possible to build a brand without going to (c) (witness the way Google almost never gets embroiled in special cases or even answers the phone–I know that they’re certainly not eager to fix my imap problems), but once you’ve trained your customers that (c) is an option, it’s awfully hard to scale back.

The reason we get trapped by (c) is that, “I’m doing the best I can” is always much easier than, “we need to be disciplined and help more people, even if that means that some special cases will fall through the cracks. The internet makes this even more difficult because people who fall through the cracks are able to amplify their complaints ever louder.

The way around it, I think, is to set expectations early and often. If you’re going to give me your phone number, you better answer it. If you’re going to offer a warranty, you better honor it. If you position yourself as a company with real people eager to make every single person happy–you better deliver.

No matter what, you should decide. In advance. How much do you want to spend on ad hoc emergencies, how much do you want to reserve on design and helping the masses improve their experience?