Archives: Programs

Freelance Business Systems: Control That Quality

60 minutes of video
60 minutes of audio
21 slides
20 pages of transcript

*****

Quality control? That sounds even more like something an assembly line needs that writers do not than our operations-focused webinar!

While many writers I talk to worry—whether in their heads, to other writers on Facebook, or just to 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: Operate Like a Boss

55 minutes of video
55 minutes of audio
22 slides
17 pages of transcript

*****

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 its 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: Perfect Purchasing

58 minutes of video
58 minutes of audio
20 slides
20 pages of transcript

*****

When you don’t know what your income is going to be each month, it’s automatically harder to budget (not just for life, but for your business!). The unfortunate follow up of that is that it’s also harder to make clear, informed, deliberate decisions about what to purchase why and when, which can often lead to snap decisions or overspending. But those are just the surface-level considerations in creating a plan for how to purchase purchases related to your business—which, in case you’re not thinking of it that way, also includes your travel spending. In this webinar, we pull a page from the corporate playbook and look at strategies that allow you to make the most of each dollar.

We will cover:
– What does corporate purchasing really consist of? (a.k.a. how do companies justify whole departments for this?!)
– What purchasing means and looks like for freelance travel writers
– Three main ways to streamline your purchasing
– Tactics to start today to improve your purchasing

Freelance Business Systems: Accounting Minus Suck

39 minutes of video
39 minutes of audio
20 slides
13 pages of transcript

*****

Freelance accounting commonly takes the form of “why haven’t I been paid for this story yet?!?! I sent the invoice this week!” but invoicing is actually a very small piece of the pie. On the heels of tax season, we’ll take this hour to go through, line by line, what numbers you should be tracking, how, where, and why, so that the numeric side of your freelance life no longer feels scary, and everything has a place that feels just right and brings you joy, Marie Kondo-style.

We will cover:
– How does accounting fit into our larger goals for this series?
– What is accounting and what’s different from finance
– The core parts of accounting that you’re already doing (whether you like it or not)
– Accounting systems that already exist and how to create your own (that work)

Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #3: Identifying Glove-Fit Ideas

67 minutes of video
67 minutes of audio
8 slides
22 pages of transcript

*****

In the last webinar in this series, which shows live every stage in the process of putting together a number of pitches in just a few hours, I compiled a list of article ideas matched to specific magazines and sections within those magazines. As we went through, I included things that were pretty sure-fire fits along with ones that I needed to check on further to make sure that the idea would really fly for the given section (which we will verify in this webinar by looking at past examples of articles in that section) and the magazine in general (which we will check against the demographics and general voice of the publication).

In this webinar, the hour goes from wide (where we’ve been in the past several hours of this series) to narrow as we slim from the ideas that we like to the ideas that actually have a shot with the magazines in question.

We will cover:
– What we’re doing and how to follow along at home
– What a glove-fit looks like
– Where we are with our ideas now
– Attacking the matches

Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #1: Turning Trip Notes into a Pitchable Idea List

64 minutes of video
64 minutes of audio
9 slides
20 pages of transcript

*****

In this new series, we offer a window on how pitching takes place for an established writer in the most minimal time with the least possible fuss as we walk from my initial trip notes all the way to polished pitches leaving my inbox right before your eyes. To make sure you can see and ask questions about my decision-making at every phase, I walk through each step of the process completely live with no prep work outside of our calls (or cheating, as I would call it!) to pretty things up or do more digging into an idea.

To kick off the series, we begin with the notes from my travels in the Czech Republic over the summer, transforming my ideas from that time, which are no longer fresh in my mind, into potential article ideas and article types. You’ll learn how to develop a sense for what is and is not a pitchable idea from the types of information you’re deluged with on a trip, and I’ll also note what types of articles could develop from each idea as we go along.

We will cover:
– The premisses + ground rules of this experiment
– How to follow along at home
– Refresher of the types of magazine articles we’ll be scanning for

Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #2: Matching Raw Ideas to Real Magazine Sections

64 minutes of video
64 minutes of audio
13 slides
20 pages of transcript

*****

Continuing in our landmark series walking, entirely live, through every stage in the process of putting together a number of pitches in just a few hours, we dive into the dreaded matching phase. I know that for many of you, this part of the process—finding a good “home” for your article ideas—can be the most trying part of the question, often lasting for weeks and sometimes months. In this webinar, you’ll see me take my entire list of pitch ideas from the previous week and make as many good matches as I can in an hour.

We will cover:
– What we are doing and how to follow along at home
– How do I know where to start looking for matches
– Recapping ALL the ideas to make the best use of our time
– Sprint searching ALL of the magazines that might work

Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #4: Ruthlessly Auditing Idea Fit

52 minutes of video
52 minutes of audio
12 slides
15 pages of transcript

*****

Four hours into our series and we’re still working on the ideas! It seems like it will take us forever to get to the actual pitching writing, but that’s part of why we’re doing this series: if you’re diving into a word processing document earlier than this, you’re doing it wrong.

Making sure that your idea itself is solid, salable, and safe for you to stick your neck out with AND that it is a perfect fit for the section you’re pitching it to is actually the secret to saving tons of time with your pitches while also netting a higher acceptance rate along the way.

Fewer, better pitches always win. Having a 90% acceptance rate sending five pitches a month will do better for you than sending 20 pitches with a 20% acceptance rate (4.5 acceptances vs. 4). You can estimate the time savings yourself!

In this webinar, we’ll narrow the ideas we’ve been working on even further so that we’re only moving forward with the ones that absolutely, as far as we can tell not being inside the magazine, have a chance of success as we finesse both the fit and the quality of the idea, focusing on looking for that “why” that really makes the idea pop when the editor reads our pitch.

We will cover:
– What we’re doing and how to follow along at home
– Where we are with our ideas now
– What fit checks we’ve done and what’s left
– Attacking the matches

Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #5: Creating the Bones of the Pitch

61 minutes of video
61 minutes of audio
16 slides
15 pages of transcript

*****

We’ve made it through so many stages of the pitch writing process that many folks lump into writing that are actually distinctly separate prep activities: pulling ideas from your trip, matching them to magazines, refining the best fits, and choosing the low-hanging fruit with the best chance of success and the easiest path to putting the pitch together.

In this webinar, the real writing begins! But staring at a blank page is a way to shock any creative mind into panic, so we begin instead by putting together the easier building blocks of the pitch in an almost placeholder-like style with minimal stress and research just to get our quick thoughts on the page.

Learning this trick to getting the basis of a pitch out quickly alone, can easily save you an hour per pitch.

We will cover:
– The purpose of this series starts to come into shape
– What are the bones of the pitch?
– Why we start with the easier bits: P2s and 3s
– What ideas are we going to work up pitches for?
– Attacking the pitches

Live Idea-to-Pitch Walkthrough #6: Filling in the Blanks & Hitting Send

74 minutes of video
74 minutes of audio
14 slides
18 pages of transcript

*****

Even though it seems like we’re at the end of the line, this is actually the hardest part of the pitching process and where I see many of you getting completely stuck. It’s too easy to be fully flush with the facts and fit of an idea, step away from it for a bit, then come back and have doubts because you’re not up-to-date on all of the details of the situation, and then decide that you really shouldn’t send the pitch after all.

In this webinar, we walk through live examples so you can see when enough is enough, when to cut and run, and how, exactly, to get pitches out of your inbox and into the playing field quickly and with minimal fuss.

We will cover:
– Quick recap: What are the bones of the pitch?
– Where did we leave off?
– Attacking the pitches!