July 2008

The local bait shop offers an outdoor vending machine so fishermen in a pinch for worms after hours can drop a few quarters and swagger off with a cup full of nightcrawlers. As disgusting as this may sound to those of you who don’t spend a great deal of time in waders before dawn, it’s a damn fine idea. Last time I was in the shop, I asked the owner how much business his vending machine does. He said he only gets a few hundred bucks in change out of the machine each month, which is less than it costs him to run the power that goes to it, but that the machine draws in new customers and gets them joshing around about how tacky it is once they’re inside. Warm customers make for better sales, he says. And Bubba is right.

The best way to lure a customer is with live bait.

For freelancers, this concept translates into things we hermits may not like: being personable when we’d rather remain in isolation camp, being willing to take risks that could make us look foolish, being available after hours in some form or another when we’d rather be vegging out with a good book.

There are surely some exceptions, but I’ve never met a truly successful freelancer who hasn’t spent time going the extra mile for his or her clients, who hasn’t worked hard and taken risks, who hasn’t gone out there and gotten dirty in the process. Most of the folks I’ve met who have tried freelancing but soon dubbed themselves failures and gave up were ones who went into this thing expecting it would always be easy and on their terms — short workdays, simple gigs, constant flow of perfect jobs, no marketing, no talking to people, no sacrifice.

Successful freelancers are like good fisherman: willing to get up god awful early, put on ugly clothes, sit on a cold lonely boat, touch worms, cast and wait, and some days still never catch anything. When the fish are biting, all is good. But what about when they’re not? Successful fishermen switch ponds, or they switch baits, and so do successful freelancers.

A serious fisherman knows where to go to get the fish. He might have sought out the advice of a more experience fisherman, or maybe he tried and failed enough times to learn on his own. Either way, he’s probably seen more than one body of water, stood on land and on boats, tried his hand at various kinds of fishing. He’s learned which type of fish taste best, and he’s figured out which kind of bait those fish are biting.

My father used to fish with Wheaties (the cereal). He’d take an old t-shirt, pour a box of Wheaties into it, crunch up the cereal and mix it with just enough water that the cereal would ball up and hang on the hook. As kids, this was our bait. We always caught tiny, nasty carp — the kind any real fisherman would laugh at and throw back. We were in it for fun, not for supper. My father always said that if we wanted to catch something good, we would have to use live bait. But we never bothered. Daddy had a real job.

Some freelancers are only in it for fun. Others do this for a living. I write for fun, but I also write as my means of putting supper on the table. I’ve had to learn how to sell my services for a price that will keep me from starving. The best way is with live bait.

I talk to people. I network live, with real people, where ever I go. I network a bit online too. I take the time to answer people’s questions, chat with folks, visit their blogs and interact with them.

I lure them in with a message: this is what I can do for you. I extend my hand, show them my bait. This is what I’ve done for your colleagues and for your competition. This is how I could do the same for you. This is why I could do it in a way no one else could. This is why you should pay me a professional rate to do it this way, because what I do is worth it. Here, talk to these folks. They’ll tell you how great I am.

I could spend my time on a half-assed job hunt, pecking away at the job boards and sending boilerplate resumes and cover letters out on a blind quest to maybe one day land the perfect gig. But I choose to focus, to spend my time going after only the really tasty fish, because in the end I know I would be unhappy with the other way. I’ve tried it, and I’m not one for standing on the bank of shallow rivers tossing back carp.

Once I have them on the hook, I prove myself. I work hard, remain available, get them the results they want. But that’s a whole other metaphor…

What kind of fish are you after? How do you lure them in?

Strolling through the town block party yesterday, I saw the sign: Pluck a Duck for $1! Perhaps you remember this game from your childhood carnivals? You pick a duck, and if you choose one with a star painted onto its underbelly you get a prize.

Feel like you’re still playing this game as an adult? As a freelancer, I feel like I spend a good amount of my time playing the grownup version of Pluck a Duck.

Clients: They’re not always as they first seem. The mild-mannered, appreciative ones morph into needy, shameless 3am-callers who can’t make up their minds but expect you to read them.

Projects: They seem simple enough, until you get started. Then your expert source bails, your main contact doesn’t respond to your questions, and your deposit check bounces.

Niches: Yours seems fine, until everyone else starts doing it. Or maybe no one else is doing it, and you realize there’s probably a good reason for that. No one cares. No one reads your blog. Not even you.

Any of the above sound familiar?

Life is a game of wet rubber ducks, floating around in the town fountain atop all the shiny pennies fools threw in to make their wishes.

Freelancing is a game of Pick the Winner. You can have the fancy degrees, the sharpest skills, the winning marketing tactics. You can rise from bed each morning chanting mantras of success and riches. But you still have to put your shoes on and get out there and play the game. If you pick a loser, you can always play again.

I had to lose a lot of games before I ever finally won one, and I still pick bad ducks from time to time. How about you?

The above sign hangs in the window of a local business. I did not manipulate the photo in any way. This is really what this business is telling its customers. Call Us. Telepathically. We Dare You.

Dear Dumbass: As someone who just quit smoking in February, who struggles constantly to stay quit, allow me to share some perspective. Quitting smoking is not a cheery time in one’s life. We’re not feeling inspired enough to drive by, see your sign, drive around for a parking space, and walk in. This is bad for us, your potential customers, and it is also bad for you.

As absurd as the above is, I have had clients who are not much better. Their website copy is god awful, and they email me and say “My tech guy is making me a blog, can you write it?” No mention of needing the poor copy re-written, so I can straight off assume they’ll settle for poor blogging too. Sometimes it’s a prestigious firm practicing in an area I would love to blog about, and I have the free time, and they’re willing to pay me enough that it should be worth my while.

But in the back of my mind I’m wondering, do I really want to associate my name with a firm whose website copy looks like something my autistic three-year-old niece wrote up in preschool? On the other hand, could I sleep at night knowing I passed by what could be my best paying client while allowing a lawyer to continue to walk around with the business equivalent of toilet paper hanging out of his pants?

How do you politely tell someone their copy sucks? Should you even bother trying?

What if the person doesn’t come to you? Do you go to them? Assuming the business offers up a phone number, do you call them and risk making waves at the hope of getting business or simply doing a good deed? Or do you walk by?

I’ll admit, I’m a walker. I see it as life is too short, I have plenty of work, and if people are too ignorant to see they’re driving themselves into the ground with their stupidity then who am I to try to stop them? Thin the herd. I’ve walked by the above-referenced sign at least three times a week all summer. I’ve never gone inside, never written them a letter, never looked them up in the yellow pages. If they don’t care about their business, why should I?

Selfish? Maybe. Am I in the minority here? Most definitely. I know, because I’ve received countless emails over the past year from freelancers pointing out my typos, offering grammatical assistance, and otherwise wasting their time and mine making suggestions I haven’t asked for or wanted. Most of the time, these emails are done very rudely. But even when the emails are politely worded, they rub me the wrong way. The name of the sender sticks in my mind, filed under the mental subfolder of “has nothing better to do” — and there they remain, forever etched into my brain as someone I will never contact to work for me.

If someone has already hired me, and I have established enough of a relationship where I feel comfortable bringing up suggestions on how to improve site copy, etc., of course I do say something (in a kind way). But as a cold call? Nope, not me. Do you?

Some days I feel like I’m going so slowly that I’m rolling backward. Where ever it is I’m going — and I’m frequently not sure where that is — it often seems as though all my freelance friends are getting there faster and flaunting it better once they get there. Sometimes I feel like I’m back in junior high school comparing my thrift-store jeans to the designer brands of my rich classmates. Meanwhile, they’re all looking back at me feeling equally inferior.

It always amazes me how much time we humans waste on caring what other people think about us, while everyone else is busy worrying what we think about them. How much time and energy could we save if we gave up comparing ourselves to other people? If we stopped caring what other people thought about us?

I’m not saying we should turn a blind eye to someone’s badmouthing our businesses or never engage in a healthy debate about why our buddies’ ways of doing things might or might not be better than ours. I’m saying that it might be a waste of time to agonize over our friends’ successes, to beat ourselves up because it’s taking us longer than we’d hoped to climb the freelance writing career ladder.

Most days, I couldn’t care less about any of the above. I receive emails from time to time from folks who say things like “I’m so impressed with how unconventional you are and how you don’t use society’s standards to measure your success.” The fact is, I truly am successful, and I’ve achieved financial success as a freelancer in a relatively short amount of time. Most days, I amaze myself. I don’t say this to be a boasting ninny, but to illustrate a point: no one is immune to feeling like a failure once in a while.

Like the serenity prayer, muttered hourly by struggling recovering alcoholics everywhere, I find myself repeating the AA-coined mantra progress not perfection about my freelance writing career as frequently as I do about my no-longer-so-newfound sober lifestyle.

My goal isn’t to race my freelance buds to some proverbial finish line. My goal is to keep moving forward. Sometimes the going is slow as hell, and I feel as though I’m moving backward. Sometimes I have to back up a bit, examine whether the road I’ve taken was the one I meant to turn down. Sometimes I change lanes, take another road entirely. But through it all, as long as I’m moving toward something, I am satisfied. I’ve learned that no matter how fast we go, we’ll always want to go faster. I’ve gone faster. I’ve crashed and burned, several times. Slow, for me, is better.

What’s your speed limit? Do you measure your progress against your perceived perfection of others?