239 minutes of video
239 minutes of audio
77 slides
78 pages of transcript
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Freelance Business Systems: Operate Like a Boss
Like it or not, as a freelance writer, you are a center for production—a factory, if you will—for completed collections of written words centered on certain themes and collated to client-determined specifications. So many parts of writing involve independent decision making and the act of creation, but at the end of the day, as a business that delivers goods (read: polished prose) to clients, you need to focus on optimizing all aspects of your production operations. This is an area that I spend a significant portion of time with my coaching clients on simply because it’s such an unparalleled game changer, and I’m very excited to change your approach to how you produce your writing work in this webinar.
We will cover:
– What does it mean to manage your operations?
– Breaking down what “operations” or “production” is and how it applies to travel writers
– The process of improving your processes
– Tactics to start today to improve your operations
Freelance Business Systems: Control That Quality
While many writers I talk to worry—whether in their heads, to other writers on Facebook, or just to their friends and significant others—about the quality of their writing, not enough talk about what quality means as a business person, and how it can and should be leveraged, both in terms of mercilessly duplicating the steps that lead to quality every time and determining what exactly quality means for your clients in a way that allows you to deliver each time and rest assured you’ve got happy clients time and time again.
We will cover:
– What quality control means for writers and why it is so powerful
– The most important steps to starting systematic quality control
– Some quality management strategies to think more deeply on
– Tactics you can use today to control quality in the long-term
Freelance Business Systems: The Surprising Secrets of Servicing Customers as a Freelancer
Customer service–whether behind the counter at your local ice cream shop as a summer job or temping in a phone bank somewhere–has long gotten the wrap as something we may be obliged to do when young and deal with when older (why is it again that Amazon has no way for me to get in touch with them when my package shows as arrived and did not, in fact, arrive?).
The complex nuances in this business area, however, will literally make or break those attractive, retainer-contract gigs everyone wants to get their hands on with companies or magazines. There is a lot of surprising science to how you interact with your editors to achieve the best outcome for everyone, no matter whether you aim to write for magazines or pursue content marketing gigs.
We will cover:
– How does the idea of a “customer service department” fit into the bigger picture for freelancers
– The missing link between classic customer service and the typical customer interaction for freelance writers
– The role of customer service defined
– A grab-bag of low-hanging-fruit next steps to get started
Bonus
Introduction to Business Systems for Freelance Travel Writers
In this call, the beginning of our new series on organizing your business like you’re actually running one, rather than the “figure it out as you go” approach so many freelancers use, we introduce two frameworks for conceptualizing yourself as a business owner and the various roles that you take on before we go into each “business department” individually in the series.
We will cover:
– What are we doing in this weird series?
– Two models to looking at the managing of one’s own business
– The departments we will explore and why
