If you’re in the writing business or considering going into the writing business, you need clients. Of course you want to have a lot of clients. However, if they’re all difficult then it can be frustrating. No one wants to work for rude or unappreciative clients.

On the other hand, a line-up of dream clients can be ideal. Finding dream clients isn’t always easy, but here are a few ideas to help you find clients you’ll enjoy working with.

Network, Network, Network  (Online and Offline)

Networking builds businesses. Do it correctly and you can build a Rolodex full of great clients. Online networking involves connecting in a number of ways. Social networking is a great place to start. You’re likely already using social networks to connect with friends and family. Why not use it to connect with potential clients? Join groups that represent your writing interests. For example, if you write for the pet industry then connect with pet related groups. Participate in the group, comment on posts and get involved.

Commenting on blogs and participating in industry chat rooms and forums is another way to network online.

Offline, you can join local groups and associations. For example, join your local chamber of commerce and small business administration. Join community groups, participate in get-togethers or you can even host meetings and teach a class.

Ask for Referrals

Ask your favorite clients for referrals. Consider offering them a discount or a credit for each new client they send you. Clients that come from referrals tend to be good clients. If you’re uncomfortable asking for referrals consider creating a referral program. Your clients can join it if they are interested.

Visit Job Boards

Job boards may not always be the best starting point, but they can provide you with the opportunity to thoroughly research a client and project before you apply for the job. This extra information can help you weed out the clients you’re not interested in working with.

Finally, before you begin searching for great clients, consider taking some time to define exactly what a great client is for you. Is it a person who pays well? Is it someone who is easy to work with? Is it someone who is easy to communicate with? What are your priorities? Write them down and then start searching for clients who fit the bill.

Once you have a number of great clients, go above and beyond the call of duty. Give them extras and offer discounts. Always strive to deliver quality products and services. Make sure your clients know you appreciate them. They’ll not only stick with you longer, they’ll refer you to others. It’s a very rewarding way to build a business.

Have patience when seeking ideal clients. It takes a little time and effort, but it definitely pays off in the long run.

To your success!

I was cleaning out the back-end of my blog and discovered that this never posted when it was scheduled. It should have been posted six months ago. Oops! I thought I’d share it now. :)

Many people aspire to live the writer lifestyle. It’s easy to understand why. You can control your work hours, take on clients and projects that you want and take a vacation or a day off when you need to. There’s a lot of freedom when you’re an online writer. Once your business is established and you’ve planned ahead so your finances are in order, it’s a great way to make a living.

However, the same people who aspire to become online writers are unsure if they can. The honest truth is that if you have a desire and a commitment to make a living as an online writer, you can do it. Here’s why:

You don’t need formal writing education to be a successful online writer.

Online writing is different than many other forms of writing and many of them are not taught in school. For example, blogging was never taught in school. It may be now, but you still don’t need a degree to blog. Additionally, your clients have a variety of purposes for their content. They may want to entertain. They may want to inform. They may want to attract search engines or sell products. A formal education may help you learn how to help your clients reach their goals. However, you can learn the same thing online or by reading a book from the library.

Everything you need to learn about being an online writer can be learned online. So if you have a desire to learn about becoming an online writer, you can do it.

Most of the content found online is conversational.

Conversational content is content that is written as if you’re talking to someone. You use words like “you” and “you’re” when you’re writing. Other common forms of online content include lists, tip sheets, fact sheets, reviews, comparisons and how to articles. If you can talk and format a list, then you can write online content.

Do you have a desire to own a successful business?

One of the most important aspects of being a successful online writer isn’t necessarily your writing skills. They do matter of course, but equally important is your professionalism. This includes your ability to meet a deadline, to provide the content your client is asking for and to be a clear and effective communicator. If you have the desire and passion to offer the best writing service possible, then you can be an online writer.

If you’d like to live the writer’s life and make a living as an online writer, you can do it. The dream is within your reach. Learn all you can about building a business. Consider choosing a specialty, brush up on your writing skills and get started.

At midnight the kick-off for NaNoWriMo 2010 begins! Are you ready? I’m not, and several of my writing friends have completely changed all their ideas and the story they’ll be working on this year. I guess there are times when even planners and plotters go in as pantsters. LOL

Anyway, I wish you all the best of luck. Remember it’s not really about a word count, it’s about sitting down as a daily routine and writing. Even if you do make the word count for NaNo, you will still have months of edits and rewrites and possibly need another 20-30k words for a publishable novel.

But the idea is to have fun…so HAVE FUN!

Happy Writing!

Stafford Scribe

Guest post by James Adams

Your workspace should spur creativity, innovation and productivity. When you step into your office, you should want to do your work. You should have the desire to go above and beyond rather than scraping by with the bare minimum. Here are some ways you can make your workspace more conducive to productivity.

1. Keep your office clutter-free – Workspaces collect clutter. You might have the reports that you used for a weeks-ago presentation. There may be that folder that you used when you were first hired. Put the important clutter back to its place. Throw away any clutter that is no longer useful. You do not want to spend your time thinking, “I should move that,” rather than working on your latest assignment.

2. Rearrange the furniture – Rearrange the furniture so it provides the best view and the best environment with which to work. If you want to be looking out the window, look out the window. If you enjoy being somewhat claustrophobic, move your desk setup into the closet. If you have to work with other people, see if you can move your desk or change the position of your computer.

3. Comfortable chairs – Nobody wants a chair that is uncomfortable. Some chairs are great for the short term, others for the long term. There is a lot more leeway in the short term chairs. Your workspace chair should be like being in heaven when you first rest upon it and remain comfortable for at least an hour. It should be adjustable in height and you should be able to place your feet solidly on the floor.

4. Heating – You might become distracted with the temperature of your office. You do not want to be sweating. You do not want to be bundling up in blankets. Keep your temperature in a comfortable range, perhaps a little warmer in summer, a little cooler in winter to save energy. Make sure that you are not sitting underneath the vent.

5. Lighting – There should be plenty of natural lighting flooding into your workspace. Give yourself a reason to look outside by planting some flowers and spurring that motivation. Your workspace is not a cave or a prison. It should be sunlit.

6. Move the clock – Take the clock out of your field of vision. If you are consistently turning to the clock, you are distracted from your work. Move that clock to where you have to intentionally look at it.

7. Change the colors – If the colors of your office put you to sleep, you are less likely to be productive. Study a little bit of color theory, add some vibrant colors to your office. Put colorful pictures on the wall. Do not be afraid to spice up your area.

8. Remove distractions – A lot of your time will be spent in front of your computer. Sometimes that distraction is necessary, but you do not want to be consistently distracted by pictures of your family. Move the exciting posters outside of your immediate field of vision. Take the dishes that you used last week and move them under the desk.

9. Everything is negotiable – You are not stuck with your office layout. You can move the chairs and desks. You can move the shelves. If you’re not pleased with the way that your desk is presented, change it. This is your workspace. The area is designed for your productivity.

10. Use conference rooms for more than conferences – You might need to think. You might need a quiet place to brainstorm your next company strategies. The conference room should be flexible to your needs, rather than designed for a single purpose.

A workspace should be the catalyst of productivity. Take a few moments to remove clutter and create a current message on the whiteboard. Changing the energy of your office promotes new ideas.

James Adams writes about business practices and productivity at an online store offering office stationery and office supplies for companies in the UK.

Blogging is a great way to get started making money online – BUT – it’s work. (All good things come with some effort, right?)

The absolute worst thing a new blogger can do is to do nothing. Yet, that’s what happens to many bloggers when they’re first getting started. While waiting to get their blog just perfect, they do nothing and, instead, spin their wheels – stuck in one place.

Meanwhile, they get frustrated, their dreams fade, and they end up giving up before they even had a fighting chance. It’s sad, especially since many of them are talented writers, are passionate about their topic, and have a lot to share with the world.

So, what can a new blogger do to avoid this from happening?

Simple. Outsource.

But, what, exactly is “Outsourcing“?

Outsourcing is just a fancy word for getting someone qualified to quickly and efficiently do a job for you that you

1. don’t have time for,

2. don’t want to do, or

3. don’t have the skills to do.

But what can you outsource, and how? And, can you afford to?

All great questions. Here are 4 tasks you can immediately outsource for a modest price (and boost your blogging efforts at the same time).

1. Blog Installation and Optimization.

If you’re planning to blog, the one thing you’ll need is a web host. Why not choose a multipurpose web host that will also install your blog for you?  Both MomWebs.com and ReliableWebs.com will install your WordPress blog for you. Why would they jump through these hoops? They want you to succeed so that you become a customer for many years.  As part of their service, both web hosts will also recommend and install plugins for you for a reasonable fee.

There’s no point in getting paralysis by analysis. This is an easy decision to get over your first hurdle – actually getting your WordPress blog online and ready to roll.

2. Design.

One thing I outsource gladly is graphics. When I try to do my own, they look unprofessional and, downright tacky. When I pay a more talented professional to create my graphics, they look awesome! You can find a professional designer at Shelancers.com who can make your blog look snazzy – just look around. Of course, you can also search places like eLance.com, but I’d suggest that you ask for a recommendation from a friend (or even on Twitter) before going with someone totally untested.

3. Content Management.

Keeping your blog active with fresh content can be a feat in itself. BUT – there is a big secret that bloggers use to make their lives much easier. It’s called PLR content and it’s something that I’ve also used in the past.

What is PLR content? Basically, PLR articles are written by ghostwriters and sold at a very affordable price (usually around $1-2 per article) to multiple bloggers and website owners. So, as a blogger, you can purchase these articles, and stick them on your blog. Or, as I recommend, you edit them a bit before posting them to your blog. While PLR is not totally hands-free – it can help you to get over the hurdle of having to write all of the content for your blog all by yourself.

By the way, the place I recommend you look for PLR Articles is EasyPLR.com .

Of course, you can save even more time by hiring a Virtual Assistant to add the PLR that you purchase to your blog for you so that it’s waiting in there the next time you face writer’s block (as we all do).

4. Community.

Do you ever hear the sound of crickets when you go to your blog? How do some bloggers get such a conversation going while others seem to be talking to themselves?  The answer may not be what you think. Another big secret of top bloggers is that they sometimes “seed” conversations with their own assistants and friends. Yes, they have commenters who are paid to come by and leave comments to keep the conversation going. Pretty cool, isn’t it?

While you don’t have to go quite that far, it doesn’t hurt to be “comment buddies” with some friends and help keep each others blogs active with conversation.

What Next?

Learn More about Outsourcing at my Recommended Resource. Outsourcing can be a big scary thing if you’re trying to figure it out on your own. So, if you’d like to learn more about how to Outsource in your Online Business, I recommend this course: www.OutsourceWeekly.com (You’ll see a free series of lessons on the top of that page.)

Courtesy: Nicole Dean, EasyPLR

We will be adding some new features here at the Stafford Scribe. One of them being Freelance Friday where we will cover many topics in the world of freelance writing. At times we will even showcase some of the most talented freelance writers on the web.

Other features will be announced soon. Look for The Scribe’s Scope in an upcoming post.

If you feel you have something to contribute to our Freelance Friday section, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to hear from you.

Be sure to check out the Guest Blogging guidelines. Don’t worry, they are really easy.

Happy Writing!

I’m as open to change as the next person; in fact, I know that life is transient and the only thing that is permanent is change itself. But if there’s one thing I can never get used to or bring myself to use is what we now term “text lingo” – the fashionable language that allows you to delete the vowels from words to shorten them and mix them with numbers that sound that parts of words to form totally unrecognizable words, all of which are fully accepted by anyone who uses a cellphone or is familiar with instant messaging. Apparently, if you frown at this usage, if you’re so focused on grammar and spellings, you’re not current or living in the present.

But, even at the risk of sounding like an old fuddy-duddy, I beg to differ from this point of view. While I think it’s each to their own when sending personal messages on your cellphone or when chatting online, when it comes to email and writing for websites, there are certain rules that need to be followed, even if you think they’re not “hip” and “relevant” to the times. No one likes to read emails that are grammatically incorrect and riddled with spelling mistakes. And believe me, if you’re getting away with the same kind of usage on your blog, it’s only because you haven’t noticed the drop in your readership.

You may think that language is a form of communication and that as long as you’ve included all the relevant information and facts in your missive (be it a letter, a blog post or a website page), it doesn’t matter that it’s peppered with grammatical and spelling errors. But what you don’t realize is that even a simple mistake like the misplacement of a comma or the transposition of words can change the meaning of whatever you’re trying to say. So because your knowledge of the language is poor, you may end up misleading your readers.

Some mistakes are just plain annoying – like the wrong placement of an apostrophe (saying you’re when you actually mean your) and the usage of I instead of me and vice versa. But there are others that could end up confusing your audience – like the placement of the world “only” in a sentence. For example, the sentences “John was only trying to help Jane” and “Only John was trying to help Jane” have totally different meanings. The first sentence is a sort of explanation for what John did because he somehow messed up while trying to help Jane, while the second praises John as the only person trying to help her. As another example, consider these two sentences – “Only children are allowed to play here” and “Children are allowed to play only here”. The first one has the word “children” as the subject and restricts the playing to children while the second has the location as the subject and restricts the location where the children are allowed to play.

So if you don’t want to end up making such mistakes when writing for your blog or website, it’s best to brush up on your language skills by including your vowels, cutting out the numerals from your words, and reading through what you’ve written to ensure that the meaning is loud and clear.

By-line:

This guest post is contributed by Anna Miller, who writes on the topic of degree online . She welcomes your comments at her email id: anna.miller009@gmail.com

I’m sure we have many reasons for being writers, but one of the best thing to me is:  I can do things simply because I want to.

• I can change jobs every day.
• I can have a new personality every day.
• I can be a man today.
• I can be a dog or cat today.
• I can be a little girl.
• I can be a god or goddess.
• I can fight fires, destroy and rebuild the world.
• I can fly, grow wings, or be a fish in the ocean.

All these things I can do in any given day and so much more.

What’s the best thing about being a writer to you?  Share the love with us!