#065: Carol Tice on 5 Profitable Article-Writing Opportunities

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Thank you for joining me for episode 65 of the High Income Business Writing Podcast. My name is Ed Gandia and this is the podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to take their writing businesses to the six figure level or the part time equivalent. You can find details shown us of this episode by going to b2b launcher.com episode 65 so today we're talking about article writing and this is a topic we haven't really addressed head on in this show until right now. And article writing is one of those fun and lucrative ways to make a living as a freelance writer. I discovered it by accident. I had no idea at the time that there was a demand for this, but I had a client was writing marketing collateral for a lot of brochure work, and their PR director approached me about writing some ghostwritten articles, some bylined articles for one of their executives. So they had fined a home, they had found a home for an article in an industry publication. So that publication had accepted their pitch to get an article placed there. And my client's PR firm didn't have the resources, the people to really get this article written in the way that my client wanted it written. So anyway, they approached me, the marketing director approached me, see if I'd be willing to write the article. I said absolutely. And I really enjoyed it. I had been writing a lot of white papers up until that point. To me, this was, this is like a mini white paper, a lot shorter, faster turnaround. I don't know, I found it more enjoyable when I had so many projects that at the time were kind of longer format, longer turnaround time, that sort of thing. So I added a little bit of variety to my work. And you know, one of the great things about this type of writing is that there are many different possibilities. The one I just described is just one of them. You can write blog posts for a client, you can focus on the growing trend of brand journalism, or you can specialize in writing newsletter articles or articles on the client's website. So there are many, many different possibilities. And what I wanted to do is discuss this in more detail. So in this episode, I'm bringing in veteran freelance writer and founder of makealivingwriting.com Carol Tice. This is her, gosh, her third time in the show. And in this interview she's going to detail the best five ways to earn a great income Writing article. She's going to describe each opportunity in detail. She's going to explain who's hiring writers in each of these categories. And of course, she's going to discuss the earning potential for these projects. So let's. So let's get right to it. I think you're really going to enjoy this. And I'll come back at the end with some announcements. Hey, Carol, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you here.

Thrilled to be back, Ed.

I think you just broke the record. I think you've been on the show three times. I've never had anybody else be here three times. So, you know, I must love you.

Oh, my God, I had no idea. I feel so flattered now.

You always have great advice for us and I just love your down to earth style. And, you know, you've been out there for a long time and you have your finger on the pulse of what's working and not working. So all that, you know, my, my guests love all those things. So you're a shoe in.

Well, okay.

All right. So today we're going to talk about something that I love, writing articles. You're very passionate about this. You have done a lot, a lot of training in this area. You've trained a lot of writers. And it's something that I haven't really addressed in this show before. A lot of people know that I've written a lot of articles in a corporate market, but you and I are talking offline. There's a lot of other opportunities when it comes to articles, and it can be a lot of fun. So why don't you kind of give us a preview as to what we're going to talk about and give folks an idea of when we're talking about article writing. What are we referring to?

Sure. Well, I'm glad you asked that, because the thing is that it used to be that there were articles and there were blog posts and they were very different. You know, articles had interviews in them and quotes and the facts were all kind of checked and you made sure they were accurate. And blog posts were things that people just sort of spit out off the top of their head that was all their opinions of stuff and didn't sort of need any corroboration from anywhere and what's happening. And this is why I say that article writing is like this. The key skill to have now, you know, if you're looking like, what do I need to know for 2015, I say it's article writing because that form is slowly taking over the World of blogging. And we all know there's a lot of paid opportunity there. So you know, to me that is, you know, open up any magazine and you know what an article is. It's got a tightly focused topic, it's been researched, it usually has interviews with live humans in it and often multiple points of view. You know, that's I think what we all know of as an article. But the thing that's happening is that form is sort of taking over the world. It's taking over the world of blogging, it's taking over the world of content marketing. It's just popping up everywhere. So I wanted to kind of run down some of the ways that's going on. And since I mentioned blogging as the first one, why don't I just start by talking about what's going on with blogging. A lot of people know that blog posts are getting longer and longer. And it used to be, oh, a guest post, 500 words would do it. And now a lot of the top places want 1500 or 2000 words for that guest post. And what my members are seeing in freelance writers den is a lot, a lot of requests coming from clients that would like to hire a writer that would pitch them to those big blogs and then ghost for them, then ghostwrite a big monster stem winder detailed authority building post on that big blog under the name of, you know, the CEO of the company. So it's, this is a really difficult niche to do. If you can do it well, I think it's going to pay really well. I think pay on it is still really developing the trick to it. I've actually done this gig and I got out of it because I didn't like it. And it's because it's half writing job, half PR job. And the PR job side of it can be a lot, a lot of work depending on what kind of blog they want to go after. What kind of niches? Back when I did it, I was looking for like insurance related blogs and I found it would take about 20 pitches to get one. Yes. And so then you'd write up the post. The trick is to not set up these deals so that you're getting paid per post. You have to get paid for this PR pitching time as well.

Yeah. Kind of on a consulting basis. I mean, essentially you're right, there's two components to it here.

Exactly. And so the trick is that your pay can't be based on getting the win. Your pay is based on, okay, I'm going to spend X number of hours doing X, number of reach outs and that's going to pay X. Then for posts I write, they're going to be this, you know.

Yeah. So I'm curious though, so there's two components. Is there a way you can make a living doing the writing component only? So they, let's say they have the relationships, they know who they're going after and so forth, but they're really lacking is they don't have the writing capabilities in house or not all the capabilities they need. Is that a possibility?

Yeah, I do think there are situations like that and sometimes when I've been approached to do it, that's what I've said is like, hey, what I want you to do here is hire a PR pro to do the pitching. Because I'm really not one and I really hate pitching. I just got pitched so much in 12 years as a staff journalist that I just can't ever do that to anyone. I can't be that person. So I would say, hey, I'm happy to connect you with someone who will do the PR outreach on this side and just doing the writing. And I think there is some receptivity to that and a growing understanding that is really kind of two different parts of the brain there and two different skill sets and not everybody has both of them. So, you know, I think we will see that get compartmentalized a bit and we may even see some of the big agencies taking, you know, the big sort of digital media agencies taking on those kind of projects where the, you know, the PR side of them will pitch and then they'll be looking for writers to do these placed ghosted posts that as I say, are really more and more resembling articles and have those kind of standards where they're going to expect you to have research stats to back things up and they're going to expect live quotes in them and, and you know, they're really a project, they're really an assignment. My saying on this is that longer posts, whether it's on a site you're doing on behalf of a client and you're ghosting for them or the client's just hiring you to write for their own site, I just am sort of on this stump to tell people to beware of getting suckered into doing these for really cheap. You know, I've been the Crusader for like 100 bucks a blog, A blog post for clients is a, as a minimum. And I think once they start talking about, oh well, we want them all to be a thousand words, two thousand words. It's a lot. It should be more. It should be $300. It should be, you know, don't get suckered into a scenario. And I know a lot of them are out there where it's a thousand word posts and they're paying $100. That is not an appropriate pay rate at all.

Well, let's talk about another kind because my experience, I think the next one you're going to talk about is articles for the client's website and their newsletter. And I've done a lot there in my experience has been that whether it's an article or whether it's a blog post, that the pay, especially in the corporate environment, can be much higher than even what you just suggested.

Yeah, well, I think part of the secret is positioning what you're doing as article writing rather than blogging. Because, yeah, blogging, it's like it's got a bad rep. You know, people seem to think it should be cheap even though it increasingly isn't any less work. So, you know, I think that's the way to sell it is, you know, instead of just a blog, why don't we position this as a newsletter or as article content that's on your website. Maybe it's exclusive for your subscribers or you know, it's behind a firewall. There's a lot of this going on where there's high quality content, you know, in the form of articles that companies want on their own site. And that actually kind of verges over into another niche that I'm really excited about that I think maybe the best paying article niche you can find. And it's what they call brand journalism. And this is where a company is essentially setting up a magazine on their website. Their hope is to kind of become a portal for discussion about their industry vertical. And they're putting up content that is just like you'd get in any quality national magazine. Fully reported long feature articles. And I worked on a big project like this for American Express. At one point they were launching a site. A lot of people know their Amex open forum site, which is for small business owners and they wanted to kind of do a mid market version of that. And I did like, I don't know, seven different articles for them. They were $2,000 a piece and there was absolutely no difference between what I did for those articles and the articles I do for Forbes magazine. They were just straightforward journalism, just reporting a story, talking to sources, you know, picking a trend and talking about why it's happening. That's a huge opportunity. And I think companies are Totally salivating over that.

Well, I think the lesson there is right, is the fact that it depends on the market. Everyone looks at things differently. Maybe Forbes, what's happening there is they're looking at it in a traditional sense where American Express and another large company or even a mid sized company is going to see it under a different light. There's different value to them in having that great quality content.

Yeah. See to them it's marketing material. It's really all just marketing material. Even though to the reader it's almost like they're reading a consumer magazine is how they perceive it. And that's exactly what the companies want, is that it doesn't feel salesy, it feels highly informational and enlightening and they start to be viewed as good guys who provide useful information to people just like any blogger is trying to do. Yeah, I think if anyone looks at Amex Open Forum, I just recommend that as a sort of a training ground to learn about brand journalism because they're really doing a great job there where you don't think, oh well, this is all just a big commercial for American Express. It's a really useful site. Tons of thought leaders are posting on there for free. Other people are posting on there for pay for a few hundred bucks a post. And it's just a great portal that's got a big dialogue going on about small business. Dell is big into this. There's a lot of companies that are very interested in positioning themselves that way and sort of soft selling where it's just sort of their name is on the top. But otherwise it's just an informational situation and that, you know, everyone I talk to who works on these kind of projects just expects to see a lot of that kind of work. And it's, it was super fun. They were, you know, because magazine word counts have gone down so much, this may actually be the future opportunity to write big features. And editorially, I was told nothing. I pitched concepts and got them approved. No one told me, oh, you know, be sure to slip a mention of American Express into this article. Nothing, nothing like that. It was run, you know, I was edited by a magazine level editor with a huge track record. And it was really like, just like in a magazine where editorial and advertising are kind of separate planets. So, you know, I meet a lot of people who kind of are getting into copywriting, who have a journalism background. You know, if you have that, if you've done interviewing, you know how to put together this kind of format. Just be on the hunt for ads, for brands that are looking to do this kind of stuff. I think there's a lot of journalists who are really appalled by this idea, you know, that, oh, horror of horrors, it's like, you know, you've sold out and this company owns you. You know, I just, it didn't make me feel bad about myself at all. And I have, I'm a pretty ethically sensitive person. I thought it was terrific, you know, I thought it was a terrific experience from beginning to end. And if companies want to devote money to this, you know, I'm there. I think it's great. You know, it's part of the whole giant trend away from selling, from sell, sell, selling, selly selling us because we don't respond to that anymore. The only way they can, you know, get us to buy and get us on their website and keep us there and keep us interested long enough to sell us anything is to provide these kind of in depth article level stuff. So that's the opportunity.

So so far we have, there's, there's ghost blogging and we talked about it that being a dual opportunity or individual. You're ghosting for someone who either wants you to write or wants you to write and find a home for these posts. We talked about client articles for their website, their newsletter, and we talked about brand journalism, which is just a huge growth area right now. And I've had the same experience there, by the way. And Joe Polizi actually talks about this in Epic Content Marketing, his book. He shows a lot of examples of companies doing what you just described and why they're doing. And you're right, it's. They're trying to engage prospects in a different way.

Oh, you know what, Ed? I have to cycle back to blogging because I left out yet another hunk of the world of this ghosting articles on blogs. And that's the world of the sponsored post. It's just exploding. There are sites, it works really great in the food niche. There's some niches where it just doesn't work in. But increasingly you go on popular blogs and sometimes you see a post that says sponsored by so and so. And you know, then there's the article. I actually did a whole section for that, actually for Entrepreneur's blog. But it was a sponsored section and the sponsor was UPS or somebody like that. And it was. So I produced like eight feature articles about shipping and logistics. And really the end client there was ups, not Entrepreneur. It was like custom content they were creating for ups. It was essentially a whole big section of sponsored posts by ups. Where they got a chance to stick their big fat ad next to it. There's so much of this happening, connecting with brands that are looking at doing sponsored posts and there's a shooting fish in a barrel prospecting scenario. You can just look and see who's sponsoring posts on blogs that you read. And those are all prospects. That means they're creating sponsored post level content. And I think often those are freelanced. The thing is, we're in this interesting time where there's a lot of big companies with traditional marketing departments and they don't know anything about blogging, they don't know anything about how to do this. They don't write newsletter articles like it's all out of their wheelhouse. They really rely on freelancers. That's actually how I ended up writing for Costco, is that they wanted someone to write articles for their business services newsletter. Didn't think anyone on their ad staff could do that. They were like, nope, they need those fresh eyes to kind of approach it from the outside. So I think there's a lot of assumptions out there like These big Fortune 5000s don't hire writers to do this stuff. But they do. They absolutely do. But. And so speaking of the big money end of this, I think the other niche we were going to talk about is placed articles. Yes, this is a great niche. I have a friend who does this at like 1200 bucks an article, I think, or more. And so this is sort of like sponsored posts, except back in traditional media, in magazines, in the Daily Journal of Commerce, in your town, stuff like that. Companies that want to raise their profile in their town or get in a national business magazine want to have an article in there written by their CEO and they need somebody to ghost that. Obviously the CEO can't actually write and report a story. And I have a friend who sells this as a package of pitching the publication, the idea of it getting the sale and then writing the article. And once again, I think there are scenarios that arise where they've already made the connection with the publication. They just need it written. And then there's scenarios where they might want you to pitch it or you might need to team with someone who has those kind of connections with publications and maybe they're going to do the pitching side of it.

This is where I probably have the most experience with article writing. And I've had several clients with their PR firm, did an amazing job of pitching these, these opportunities, pitching these article ideas. In fact, they would come up with the ideas, they would write the abstract, they would Pitch them. And then when they landed at home for the article, my client would call me to write it. That wasn't part of the deal they had with the PR firm.

Exactly. Yeah. This is a gig that's been around for a long time. But I just think that because of how traditional advertising is losing effectiveness, the hunger to do this kind of thing is just exploding in the corporate world. And sort of the close relative of the placed article would be the advertorial, which is almost exactly the same except they just pay for the space so they don't have to convince a publication to do it. They say, here's $1,000. It's basically an ad. But it's an ad that just looks like an article except for that banner around it that says advertising. We've all seen a million of these. Yeah. So once again, it's an article. It's a highly paid article. I got to do some of these early on when I was a staff writer at a magazine. And they actually gave the staffers the chance to write the advertorials for extra money. And that was sort of my first exposure to that. And I was like, oh, this is kind of fun, you know, and not that different from what I already do. You know, to me, these all just sort of extend basic article writing skills over into, you know, the corporate side of life where there's lots more money on the table.

Yeah. So talking about money, let's. So those are, those are great. I have really five areas or four and a half areas, including the sponsor post. Let's talk about earning potential a little bit. You've mentioned some, but can you give us an idea of what people should expect if they're looking to pursue some of these opportunities?

Yeah, well, I think I said I think 1200 is good for placed articles or my whole fallback knee jerk. Whenever people are like, what should I charge in these article things is think about the word just as a knee jerk. It's a 500 word advertorial. 500 bucks. The. That is a buy. You know, that's a starting point to think about it. A lot of times they're longer, they're 750 or 1,000, so. And a lot of times they want to do packages of these. Is is where it really gets nice. Like that one I did for UPS where it was eight. They actually wanted more. But I like, my brain broke. I couldn't think of anything else about shipping and logistics. My head was ready to explode. I actually referred it out to another writer. I was Just like, you got any ideas? Because I got to the end of my brain on it. But yeah, often increasingly that's what's happening. They're like, oh, we want to sponsor a series of 10 posts that are going to run over the course of 10 weeks on the top of this publication or this blog. So that allows you to really make it into a nice fat project. And when you're doing them in batches, that really makes it efficient. It's like writing eight articles about shipping and logistics. Well, it's like I need to talk to probably UPS for about half of them or the national association of Logistics and Shipping Professionals. It makes it really efficient.

Yeah, you can get a lot. I mean, yeah, you're already in there. You already know the topic, you're in the flow. And many times you can repurpose some of what you had from article number one and article number six.

Yeah, you can recycle sources. You talk to one source, he gives you an idea for the next article, and it all just kind of flows really naturally. You know, I think the low end of this is doing the sponsored blog posts for people because a lot of education still needs to go on in the sector about how much these should pay. I'm. I'm rooting for 300 bucks. That's a floor. That's my position statement on that. I did a blog post about that that that's what I want people asking for as a starter on that.

But everything else sounds like a starting point. A kind of a floor might be the dollar a word, you know, if you're looking at it on a word per word basis.

Yeah. And then. And that's not counting if you're pitching publications, blogs or that's. Yeah, that's the key thing people miss is that is all on top of the writing fee. Because it's work. It is, yeah. It is dog work. Just don't think that's going to be a walk in the park because so many brands are getting into this. That is getting, it's getting tougher and tougher to make that pitch successful. So, you know, it's. It's a lot of work.

Yeah. Would you say that if you have relationships? Because I know the people who've done well with that, they have been in pr, they got relationships, and that's really what's gonna set them apart, then it's something to maybe consider. If you don't and you're starting from scratch, maybe it's something to kind of stay away from. Is that a fair assessment?

Yeah, it's a little bit of a tricky area if you. Because the thing is, a lot of writers have their own blogs and maybe they might want to pitch that blog. And then things get really confusing because it's hard to pitch them that you want to write a blog post and put a company's link in it because sometimes they want it under your byline and they don't want it ghosted. That's to me, the worst case scenario. You want to keep your name out of it. You want to ghost for them so that you keep your own brand and your own personality. In case you want to blog about something you want to pitch. Tiny Buddha or Amex Open Forum or something, something you want that's going to go back to your blog and sell your thing. I just recommend that people be careful if it's in a niche you want to write in yourself because you can really create confusion and sort of hurt your own ability to build your own brand.

So let's talk a little bit about positioning. Somebody's listening you go, wow, I've been writing mostly this other thing. I think I would really enjoy this. What would you suggest they do?

Well, on the whole sponsored post, placed blog post type of thing, have a blog. Lots of folks already do. Anyway, write the heck out of your blog. Make it really professional. Don't think of it as some afterthought goofing around thing. Because the number one way you get blogging clients is to show them. You get blogging, you understand how it works. You're guest posting somewhere yourself and getting a lot of engagement, a lot of comments and you've got your own blog. And when they look at that, it looks professional, it's clean, it's simple. You're getting shares, getting comments. It's about a comprehensible niche topic, not about whatever you hit your fancy when you woke up this morning. I'd say those are the basics on that side. On the article writing side, you really just want to look for an opportunity to write one of these for anybody, pro bono or if you have past journalism clips, if you've been a reporter, you will be amazed at how impressed businesses are with those. They think you're so pro and special. This was the big revelation really of my whole career. I just thought that these were like two separate planets and they never could meet anywhere. It would be like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters, you know, it would rip the fabric of the universe apart if you did anything marketing ish, if you were a journalist. But in fact it totally doesn't businesses are insanely impressed and thrilled to have people with magazine cred because they just know that you know how to please editors. You know how to write and rewrite and really buff things up and how to report all the sides of an issue. You know, they just. And I'd say the big overarching thing that all of these clients are looking for is they don't have to teach you anything. They're looking to offload this stuff to someone who will develop their topics for them and get it written and they're going to look at it and go, awesome. There's not going to be revisions, which is a big plus to all of this. Often there isn't a lot of revising because they're really mentally offloading this task to you and they really want to stay out of it. They really don't have any time. They're not going to pick at it endlessly. It's not one of these complex pieces of copy that's going to go through five revisions, so they're usually pretty easy breezy. Go through five revisions, so they're usually pretty easy breezy.

What would you say in terms of the opportunity with existing clients? You know, if you're not already doing this for existing clients, what would be a good way to maybe broach a subject?

Well, I think it's a pretty easy upsell. If you're already writing for a client and they already like your writing, you're kind of in the door with it. It's just a great thing to suggest. Yeah. Have you thought about doing a placed thought leadership article in, you know, U.S. chamber magazine or whatever? You know, whatever they wherever would be good placement for them. Or have you thought about putting some authority articles on your website that you email out links to or you know, have you thought about doing some sponsored posts on X big site, you know that where your clients all hang out? Yeah. These are all great projects to suggest to people. I'd stay away from suggesting guest posting for them because I think it's really tough.

Yeah.

That to me is the most difficult of these assignments and the lowest paying. But if it's a placed article, you will run into a lot of clients who are very interested in leveraging your existing relationships with editors at publications. And once again, I think like guest posting on blogs, you might want to guest post for your own self in the future. You have to be really careful that you don't create a confusion with an editor. Think hard about whether you want to leverage those relationships or not or whether that's something you think that editor would be comfortable with if you said to them, hey, I have this scenario where I have a business client and they want to do a placed article and have me write it and, you know, do you do this? Would that work? You know, it just be really clear that this is a separate activity entirely.

Yeah, no, that makes sense. Especially. Yeah, like you said, if you, if you think that you'd like to pitch there for yourself at some point, so. Or you already have before.

Right. And the big, you know, the big, big thing to know is you will get approached with unethical requests. I get them on a really regular basis. Would you please just drop a link about my company into an article you're writing for the Forbes blog? Yeah, I can actually be fired from the Forbes blog for doing that. And they actually routinely make us, like, every three months or so, a note comes up where we can't sign into the WordPress dashboard without re agreeing that we don't do that. That we actually have to, you know, swear. Again, there's a lot of companies out there that, number one, don't know how journalism works, or number two, don't care and just want to get in and don't care. And they will ask you to do stuff that's not ethical. That. Yeah, I actually just had someone ask me to go back into a previous Forbes post and add a link to their company because they thought that would be a good placement. I sent it to my editor. I was just like, wow, they're getting more brazen all the time. Yeah. Or they'll just say, you know, I was just hoping you would pitch us to Entrepreneur and say we're a really good idea for a story and then you would write the article about us. Well, that's unethical. That's. I'm your client. You can't. The thing you can't do is play both sides of the fence in a single assignment. You can't be hired by a client, and they're going to pay you for the article. And then you also pitch it to Entrepreneur magazine and get paid by Entrepreneur. That will end your career when the magazine finds out you will never write for consumer publications again. It's something you just want to stay far, far away from. And I just find myself doing a lot of educating. A lot of times it's startups and they just really don't understand how it works. And I'm like, send me a press release like everybody else or hire me to be on your PR team. And then, you know, I can pitch them the idea that some reporters should write a story, but I can't be both. So.

Yeah, and you just have to be very, very careful. And that, that makes perfect sense. But it's interesting how many clients don't really understand that. So, I mean, I guess one thing to do is, you know, go after clients who maybe get this. They've done this before. You know, they, they're, they're a little bit more further along than someone who's just starting today. And they don't know this at all. They don't have anyone in marketing. And you're dealing with a CEO and of course he wants to do everything and he doesn't understand why you can't possibly do something, including Link and that and the other. So let's talk a little bit as we wrap up. I'm curious to get your thoughts on competition because, you know, there's a, there are a lot of journalists out there who are trying to get work. Most of them are freelancing now. And you think they would kind of saturate this market. You talked about some pretty big numbers there a few minutes ago. And I'm curious to get your thoughts on how. I wouldn't call it oversupply, but with so many writers entering the freelance world, have you seen a drop in what fees you can command for this type of work?

No, I think most journalists are just not thinking along these lines. They don't think of businesses as their clients. They're just pitching query ideas to editors and trying to get magazine articles published. Like their brains just don't go here. I think they should. But a lot of us who are old school journalism trained, we're trained that this is just not what we do. We don't write for clients, for businesses. We write about businesses as independent thinkers. So it's kind of a different mindset to get into. And I guess, yeah, you'd think that there just wouldn't be, it would be super competitive to get into now. But I don't think most journalists are thinking about these kind of markets.

Yeah. Which is a shame because, yeah, they're.

Good paying markets and it's fun writing to do. Yes. It's not investigative journalism. It is a different, you know, type of writing. It's, there's, there's certain types of stories you're not going to do when your client is a business. But I think there's a lot of terrific writing to be done in all these niches. A lot of enjoyable work that pays really great.

Well. You have a course on this and I want you to tell us a little about that because I hadn't seen anyone really teach this at that level of detail. So why don't you tell us about the course you have on article writing?

You bet. That course is called Article Writing Masterclass and it is our sort of 10 week, deeply hands on coaching extravaganza. It's the most in depth, most sort of hands on mentoring class that I teach. It's with Linda Formicelli from the Renegade writer, who a lot of people know also has been in hundreds of magazines. And we really take you step by step through every element of what constitutes a great article. From conceptualizing great ideas that are saleable and writing headlines that are going to work through to, you know, what's the lead of an article, how do you do each of these elements, how do you quote, how do you get people to interview and talk to you? Really every aspect you can think of within article writing is covered in this class. And it's. I love the format of this class. We hire professional editors actually in our forums. So when people submit article drafts, editors from like Redbook and Entrepreneur looking them over. So you've got that side of it. And then there's live Q&As with Linda and me where we, you know, talk people through whatever they're struggling with as they go through it. And we also have a feature in this class that I love where if you don't have an idea for an article off the top of your head, we actually have note files from a half a dozen feature articles we've done in the past. And you can just jump on one of those because we found in the past that a lot of people got bogged down on that if they couldn't come up with a good idea, they kind of train wrecked and they didn't write an article in the class. So we've solved that.

That's cool.

Yeah, we hand you an idea and all the interview notes and you just have to kind of practice. The focus of this course is on writing the article. There's lots of classes about writing a query letter to get an article assignment. And this one is just all the article everything to know, man, I love.

I didn't know that. That you hired actual editors to. To review the student articles. That's. That's huge.

Yeah, yeah, it's terrific that their feedback is totally invaluable. And, you know, so you kind of get the writer side of it from me and Linda. You get the editor side it as well. We pack it with all kind of bonuses. There's a news gathering 101. If you don't know how to find good experts, get sources. We have a one hour story idea lab that's in it about how to develop story ideas. There's just a ton, a ton of stuff.

Well, it's. So I want people to know that you were generous enough to give me a free ticket and to this, to this course and I want to give it away. I want to give it away to one of our listeners and here's what I'd like to do. Everyone's eligible. It's up to you if you want to participate. I want to make it very, very simple. So the way to, to enter is I want you to leave. Leave us a comment here at the comment section of this podcast which you can reach@b2b launcher.com episode 65 altogether and just answer the following question. Just let us know, what are you doing differently in 2015? So what are you doing differently in your business in 2015 to take your business to the next level? And you know, just go ahead and leave a comment with that. Now I will give you a warning that, you know, don't try to win it based on some sort of financial sob story. I mean, not that I'm insensitive, but that's not going to win you points. So just, I want you to be very honest, sincere and you know, just, just let me know. Let us know. And this is a subjective contest. I will pick the one I like the most. And in fact, I'm going to give everyone a deadline of December 12th. So that's next Friday. So you got until then. If you're interested in submitting your name, just answer that question and I will pick a winner the following week and I'll get you in touch with Carol so she could give you the free ticket.

That's going to be an interesting thread too, what people are strategizing about in their business.

It is. And I think everyone needs to think about that, right? So if you hadn't, this is a great way to kind of really sit down and think about it. In the meantime, if you're interested in learning more about Carol's class or masterclass on article writing, you can go to usefulwritingcourses.com.com edgandia altogether. Obviously, I'm an affiliate for Carol's course. I am a proud affiliate. I think she puts out great stuff. Many of you guys know I don't really promote a lot of things in the podcast, but this is one of those things that I think there's a hole in the market. Nobody's really addressing this at this quality level. And so I encourage you guys to check it out. And Carol, this is fun. Thanks for coming on the show.

Yeah, it always is. I have the same feeling when you come on my den meetings. I always learn something. It's a lot of fun.

Awesome. Well, thanks so much. And you know, we may have to have you again a fourth time next year.

Thanks a lot, Ed.

Well, folks, I hope you enjoyed that interview and I wanted to give you a quick recap. So the question that you need to answer if you want to enter for a chance to win a free ticket to the Carol's Masterclass is what are you doing differently in 2015 to earn more and or to free up more time for yourself? So go ahead and include your answer in the show notes for this episode@b2b launcher.com forward/episode65. You have until next Friday, December 12th, and I will announce the winner the following week. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd be grateful if you shared it with friends. And the easiest way to do that is to go to b2b launcher.com forward/love or to use any of the social media sharing buttons that you'll see on the Show Notes page. So that brings us to the the end of the episode. I am your host, Ed Gandia. Thanks so much for listening and I hope you have an awesome day. The High Income Business Writing Podcast is a production of B2B business launcher. Learn more at B2B launcher dot com.