WIN 41 - How To Build A Thriving Writing Business From Nothing with Sue Lapointe

Welcome to win, the Women Investing Network, the podcast where you can learn from successful entrepreneurs, business leaders and real estate investors who are winning in business and life. Learning from others is the fastest way to grow your skills, gain knowledge and avoid pitfalls so you can win. Join our hosts, Elizabeth Embry and Jason Hartman. Elizabeth is a seasoned real estate investor, experienced corporate executive and skilled mentor. Jason is a self made multimillionaire investor, entrepreneur and highly acclaimed thought leader. Together with their successful guests, you'll get the tools you'll need to win.

It's my pleasure to welcome Sue Lapointe to the show. She is the author of Working Writer Happy how to Build a Thriving Writing Business from Nothing. Sue, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me, Jason.

Well, it's great to have you on the show. Now, you have really, really been instrumental in helping writers get work and build their businesses. How do they do it? How do they start?

Well, first thing is that they've got to understand that this exists. Most writers kind of feel like they've either got to create a best selling book that lands them on Oprah or they've got to spend their life in misery, getting this pile of rejection notices from magazines and queries off to publishers and all that kind of thing. Most of them are not even aware that there's this huge other way that you can make writing. And it's all about commercial writing. And by that I mean writing for people's websites and their businesses, doing press releases and articles and ebooks and white papers and just all this kind of stuff that normal writers don't think about doing. But there's a huge market for it. So basically we start by just letting them have some awareness that this exists.

I just want to ask you because you said something kind of interesting and maybe very telling. You use the phrase normal writers. What is a normal writer that doesn't think about this stuff? What do you mean by that?

Well, a normal writer probably has a degree in English and enjoys writing things that could be possibly considered literature. There's a little element of snob factor which I love. I mean, I love to read, I love fiction, any kind of book. I just love to read. And this is nothing like that. This is not glamorous, sexy, highbrow, academic. There's no Pulitzer anywhere to be found. So I kind of refer to that other type of writing as normal writers. It's something that an average person is going to want to sit down and read. And this has nothing to do with.

Okay, good. So more about getting started.

So getting started, the Huge thing is, first of all getting that awareness that this exists. And then obviously the next thing is, well, how do you go from having no clients, no portfolio, no price list, no paid experience, how do you transform from that to actually having a thriving writing business? So basically what's involved is getting some skills so that you can actually do the writing projects, building a portfolio, tapping into where you can find clients in a way that's going to be very reliable, and then actually doing it because you know, you can have all this theory in your head and all these how to's, but if you're not actually doing it, it's not going to work.

And why the business writing side of it is it just that it's so much more lucrative? I mean, when people have a business and they need content for their website, white papers, blog entries, etc. They're just willing to pay a lot more than say, writing the great American novel and hopefully getting lucky. Getting Discover.

Yeah. Oh, definitely. It's more like having a cash machine where you can pull a lever and out pops money rather than hoping you're going to hit it on the lottery. Because honestly, most, I don't even know statistics on this, but everybody says they're writing a book. If you ask most people, I would think nine out of ten probably have a book in them and how many of those are actually ever going to get published and make money? It's such a small minute thing. So there are all these people sitting out there with really good writing skills and you don't have to be a perfect writer, but a decent writer, you know, who really long to be able to have writing being a part of their money, making their way of earning a living. And it's very frustrating because they don't have any way that they can kind of connect the two there. So if they're able to find a way that's an outlet that's creative and using their writing skills and actually make money, that's really the best of both worlds.

Sure it is. Sure it is. Well, let's talk first because I think the first thing you mentioned in terms of getting started is skills. And before we kind of go through the outline of your book, I want to talk about skills for a moment, if we can, because I've hired writers to do various writing projects for us over the years. And I've got to tell you, Sue, I mean, some of it is really, really disappointing. Some of the people that call themselves writers, it's scary. I mean, we hired someone to do some news releases for Us. And I couldn't believe how bad the writing was. And writing is kind of one of those things that's pretty subjective sometimes in terms of quality. It's kind of like one of the Supreme Court justices said years ago, I can't remember who it was about pornography. Well, I can't define it, but I know it when I see it. And you know if writing is good or bad when you read it. But you can't always define how to be good at it. Right. What about this quote?

I can't even remember who it is. It's somebody in sports who said something like, or you got it or you don't. It's the type of thing where I can't take somebody who cannot write and make them a good writer. And like you said, it's just kind of this amorphous. What makes for a good writer. You know it if you're a good writer. It's just that kind of odd thing. From there, though, by having basic writing talent, there's a whole different realm that's the skills that are involved. So being able to write for search engines, being able to write in a way that engages people and causes them to take action, being able to write in a way that the media will like a press release and the search engines will like it as well, those types of things can be learned. The basic talent for it, though, I think that's just God given. There's not a whole lot you can do. And I know the type of writer that you are describ because I work with a team of writers and occasionally we'll be looking for new writers for the team. And sometimes people will send stuff that's just like, wow, this is really horrible.

It's just appalling sometimes, or it's copied and appalling.

That's the tricky part. And I think, though it's the type of thing, you probably are a good enough writer if you did well in school for the writing segments, any course that involved writing. If you're the type of person where every job that you've had, you know, people are coming to you, bringing stuff to you, hey, can you read this and see if it makes sense? If you love to read and not just, you know, I mean, I read a lot of all kinds of different stuff. But if you're well read and you really enjoy words, that's a pretty good clue that you're a good writer. And if people just tell you, wow, if you've written something, wow, that's really good, then probably you have enough skill that you can or enough talent that you can develop the skills to actually be a commercial writer.

So I just want to say to listeners, if you're not a good writer, do the world a favor and do something else.

Because it's just really scary. Anyone can call themselves a writer. So you mentioned about news releases and writing for search engines. Is it possible to write for both at the same time in the same piece? Because nowadays, really, PR is done mostly on the web. It's not like it used to be. It has to be picked up by search engines. And also you use the distribution, the wire services, and so forth and get it into the hands of reporters. But can you write for both at the same time, or is that not possible?

It's absolutely possible. It's just not easy. So the same thing happens with writing website content. Obviously, every website owner's dream is to have Google fall in love with their site. So that requires certain technical elements to be there. But the way that people used to do that would be by just stuffing these things called keywords all throughout their content. And it made it horrible for an actual human reader to come in there and read it was just awful. And now people are understanding that if. If you have a person who actually stumbles onto your site and reads, the last thing you want them to do is vomit from the horrible quality and skip off to something else. Because Google's not going to like that either. So there are ways that you can write and be engaging and conversational and still include those keywords and the things that Google and the other search engines are looking for to make sure that your site is relevant to what you.

Say it's about before we move on off that subject, because I think it's just so important. Can you give us any examples of that? I may be putting you on the spot asking, but an example of that would be great, if we can get one.

We'll start with what the search engines want to see. Some elements that they want are. Every page that's written should have like one basic theme, one keyword to it. And a keyword is basically what somebody sits down and types into Google when they go looking for information. So how to build a doghouse. Just as a really basic example, so a webpage should be how to build a doghouse. And that phrase should appear in certain places throughout that page for Google to realize that, yes, this is absolutely what that page is about. And the reason for that is that the search engines are constantly trying to make sure that where they send people, they're going to find a very relevant source for the information that they're looking for. So if you went looking for how do I build a dog house? And Google sends you to something, a recipe for oatmeal cookies, you're going to say, google stinks and they start to lose money if that happens a lot. So they want to make sure everything that they send people to is going to be relevant.

So it's one keyword or key phrase per page, correct? That's a good point.

You want to have that be the primary. Now, you can have other things in there. Obviously, if you're talking about how to build a dog house, you're going to have other words that involve dogs and building plans and that type of stuff. But you want to really focus on just that one major primary keyword or keyword phrase per page.

Ah, very interesting. And how many times can you use it? Some of this content that I've read, like you mentioned, it's very hard for a human to read it because they're just stuffing. They're engaging in keyword stuffing. I mean, that's a phrase and they're just saying doghouses, dog houses, dog houses. Every sentence. And it just sounds. So I compare it to.

I don't know if you remember in Forrest Gump, there was the guy that had the shrimp and every word the man said had something to do with shrimp. And it was just like, oh, so if I read something that has too many keywords in there, I always think of that there's a term for that, and it's called keyword density. And the way people can figure that out is, out of 100 words on the page, how many times does that keyword show up? And you really want to aim for no more than about 2%. A lot of times. It used to be, you know, as people have worked with Google and try to fool Google and try to, you know, win Google's affection, these guidelines change constantly. For a while people were saying, hey, the more the better. So you'd have Pages that had 10% keyword density and it was just unreadable. Now, if you aim for, you know, 1 to 2%, it's going to make it so that it. The words are showing up often enough, but not so much that people are going, ah. And running the other way. And it's also a matter of where these keywords are. So for sure, in the little blue bar that's at the top of a screen when you're looking at a webpage, that's the title tag and it needs to be in there. A lot of people don't know about that. And they'll have completely irrelevant titles for their pages and that's not helping them in the headline, which would be the first words that actually appear on the page. It needs to, to go there. I also always try to make sure it's in the first sentence of the actual text of the page. And then if you have, you know, to make a page readable and something that people with very short attention spans, which is all of us on the Internet, to make sure that they're still engaged in reading, you want to make sure that you've got sub headlines and those are bold and kind of there's white space around it. And I put a keyword in there most of the time. And then if you have any, what's called anchor text, which would be the actual words somebody clicks on to get somewhere else, you want to make sure that what they're clicking, as long as it's referring to somewhere in your site, is also a keyword there. So there's just certain places like that. And then I'll kind of, you know, sprinkle it throughout if it fits, wherever it fits appropriately. But for sure in those strategic points, that's going to help to win a lot with Google.

Good point. Well, that's so important nowadays, so I'm glad we covered that. And of course we don't have time in this show to cover what makes good writing and so forth. So I wanted to move on to kind of some of the more business aspects if we could sue. How does a writer find work? You mentioned that commercial writing is the more lucrative side of the business. You don't have to wait to be discovered. It's not about getting on Oprah. It's about having cash flow, that daily or weekly or monthly cash flow that supports people. How and where do they go to find work? Do they go to these various freelancer websites like Elance, Craigslist? What are the best places?

That's a fantastic question. So there are online and offline ways that you can get this type of work online. You listed one of them that I love Elance, but actually I kind of have a love hate relationship with Elance. So it's kind of like a Coke and Pepsi thing. Writers will either love Elance or hate it. The one that I prefer is called guru.com, G-U-R-U.com and it's very similar. It's just it organizes itself a little bit differently and I prefer the way that it kind of goes with that for Elance. For a while they had open bidding. So you're constantly seeing what every other writer is bidding for a project. And writers by and large way undercharged for their services. They have a very hard time because if writing comes easy to you, it's very hard to see that it has value to somebody else. So I've seen people, basically, I joke about they'll write your whole book for a dollar or they'll pay you to let you write for you to write their book. Having an open bidding scenario like that makes it very hard to charge enough. So I prefer Guru with that. I know Elance has changed some things now, and I just haven't even been back in there. But Guru, it's blind bidding. So you'll find projects where people are essentially lined up, waiting, looking for writers to write for them. And you find a project that looks good to you that you know you can do, and you submit a bid and if they like your project proposal, they'll hire you to do it. And it's just very cut and dry, super easy to work with. You can use their escrow system, and that way you're virtually guaranteed you're going to get paid. You can find a lot of projects on other sites like Craigslist and Monster, and just all over the Internet you can find writing projects, but there's not that safety net of an organization in most cases. So you'd have to for sure get a deposit, make sure that you're getting paid, because it's a little bit iffy with that. Also with all these sites, I've had people say, oh man, I bought a membership and all I'm finding are these gigs for writing 500 word articles for a dollar. And yes, those are definitely on there, but I know for sure because for the first year or so of my business, all I did was guru. And I was very quickly, within six months, I was making $5,000 a month and I was not writing for a dollar. So there are projects out there. You just have to kind of be selective and stick to your guns. Because, yeah, there are definitely people out there who want to pay you a dollar, but there are people who will pay you 30, 40. I've gotten paid 200, $300 for a 500 word article before.

Wow. Yeah, that's like the, that's like the old days of pr. Really, Those kind of rates are so, so high. I mean, if you went to Burson Marsteller or one of the big PR firms 10 years ago, 15 years ago that's what big companies were paying for news releases. And now it seems like the Internet and just the new world of business has really put a lot of downward pressure on those writing fees. Do you want to comment on that?

Yeah. I think a lot of it too is that now we have access. So, you know, worldwide access. If you go to the Philippines, you can find English speaking writers where their skills are decent. It's not going to be like hiring somebody who's US based. And I have different levels of projects that I'll hire. Some stuff comes from the Philippines, some I need to have somebody who's in the States, you know, for various reasons. But you can see there's a huge pricing differential. And a lot of the clients that are out there, they really don't care what the quality is of the writing. They just want something that that's going to look kind of unique to Google, meaning that hasn't been plagiarized and they just need massive quantities. So they're looking for the cheapest possible commodity that they can buy. I steer very far away from that type of client because with that you would have to have literally hundreds and hundreds of clients at one time working constantly around the clock to even hope to make any sort of financial gain at all. On the other hand, there are clients out there who are really looking for quality and they understand that while they may be able and capable of writing their stuff, it's not the best use of their time. So they're looking for somebody who can really step in, write high quality stuff that's going to represent them well and still get these projects done. Because otherwise it's going to constantly stay on their back burner and never get done.

I'm sort of wondering if that mass type of writing, I'm wondering if that ever makes sense for the business, for the client, the Philippines type writer that's really inexpensive or does that sometimes work against them?

I've heard actually, you know, Google gets smarter and smarter each day. So typically I tell clients, look, you can definitely find a way cheaper writer. It will probably at some point come back to bite you though, because Google is constantly looking for what people are doing when they're on your page. And if you have garbage text that's up there. And not to disparage the Philippines writers, I do have some that are good, but I'm just saying the junk stuff that tends to come out, if a reader is on that page and it's just absolute junk on the page, they're going to hop off and Google's paying attention to that as well. So quality, that's huge.

In other words, Google's paying attention to the amount of time people spend on your pages and ranking your site accordingly. That's what you mean.

And the only way they're going to stay on a garbage page long enough is if they have some sort of fetish around correcting grammar.

I think that would be my mother. My mother would do that. Writers typically are kind of creative types and they tend to be, I think, less interested in the legal side of the business. And chapter three in your book is called the Legal Mumbo Jumbo. What do you need to know about the legal side of things as a writer?

Okay, well, a couple things. You for sure do not want to be writing under your own Social Security number, mostly because you're going to get really hit hard by taxes. So different states have different rules on this. You definitely need to talk to an attorney or an accountant or somebody who knows about these types of things. But I just kind of go into what the different models are that are out there myself. My business has an LLC that's important to have. You just want to make sure that however it is that you're protected both from liability. I mean, I don't foresee any way that anybody is ever suing a freelance writer, but you want to make sure that there's some element of protection separating you from your business. And then also financially, you need to make sure because of taxes and all of that. So I could just kind of go into the different varieties of business entities. It's like you said, not anything that most writers are going to be interested in, but sole proprietor versus a C corp or partnership or an S corp or an llc, that type of thing. The other thing that's important is you want to make sure that if there are any local rules that you have to follow, like you're working from home. So if you have any sort of local city community rules or licenses that you need to get, you want to find out about that so that you don't find yourself in trouble.

Our overreaching over intrusive government is just everywhere you look nowadays. And in some cities there are rules against working out of the house. This is just insanity what's going on out there. But that's a good point. Writers need to know about that. So. Good point. There anything more on the money side of the business? How do writers decide what to charge? What else do they need to know about money?

First of all, you can almost guarantee whatever you think you're going to charge that you're probably way undercharging. Most of my colleagues still laugh at me because of my prices being lower than what they're like. I don't even get up for this amount of you're writing a book for that. There's a lot of way undercharging that goes on. And like I alluded to before, if writing comes easy to you, it's very hard to see the value in it because it seems like, well, can't everybody do this? So that's been my growing edge constantly. And the perfect example is the first sales letter that I wrote. This is for an online product. It was five, seven pages long, something like that. They call that a long copy sales letter. And the first one that I ever did, I wasn't sure I could do it. So I thought, well, I'm going to just not charge that much so that if it's horrible, they're not really mad at me. So I charged like $60. And the client came back and said this is fantastic, I'm getting sales. I'm like, oh wow. So the next one came along, I thought I'm going to be really bold and double my price. Actually all more than double. So 125 for the next one and same response. This was a great letter. It's doing well. Alright. I'm doubling it again. I mean it was just crazy. I think at one point I got up to $500 for a sales letter and I thought I'm crazy, this is nuts, nobody's going to pay this. And I still had a line of people. It turns out the ceiling on these things I haven't even discovered. I have a colleague who writes sales letters for 10,000 bucks a pop and he said that that's undercharged. So I mean a lot of it. You really kind of have to grow your confidence, find out what other writers are charging and then charge way more than you think you should be able to. And you'll be able to eventually find out what's the right pricing on this. You want it to be fair to the clients, but also because there's so much of yourself and it's your talent, it's all this stuff that you pour into writing. You need to charge well. And all of these things like website content, press releases, articles, if you're doing business to business, it's not business to consumer. So there's a whole different thing. A client is actually investing by paying a writing fee, they will get a return on their investment and you need to be aware of that, because it's not like you're selling and they're just enjoying it for their own use. They're putting it to work to make money for them. And you should share in that.

Do writers ever do royalty deals or anything like that at this level? I know they do it, of course, the movie business and so forth and book publishing, but do they ever do it at this level?

Well, I know some of the big names, like Clayton Makepeace. I mean, I know he's got to have deals like that going. If he writes something and he's like a million dollar sales letter writer, I'm sure that there are royalties and, you know, commissions paid and that type of thing. At the level where I play. No, we don't do that. It gets way too complicated. It's very hard to monitor. You know, if you have. All my clients are virtual, almost all of them anyway. I never met them. There's no way that I can see. How much did you make from this? And, you know, there's just not that level of transparency at all. So people don't need to get involved in that. And I think if you approach a client going, okay, we're going to profit share on this kind of thing, revenue.

Share, it's too complicated.

They can probably go the other way. They really want to keep things simple. A big goal for clients is to have hassle removed from their life. And royalties, I think would be a pretty big hassle for them.

Right, right. What about the technical side of the business?

Okay, so with technical stuff, you got to get some skills. That's one thing for sure. You need to be able to handle the software that's involved. It's not much, but I've actually had people say, oh, I want to do this. I don't have word. It's like, well, you can't do this without word. I'm sure that with Mac users, I know there are things that you can do that are equivalent, but everybody's going to be able to read. You want to make sure that you're writing in a format that everybody can read. So if you're on a Mac, make sure that you've got the conversion bridge, whatever it is. I'm on a PC, I'm switching to a Mac the next time I buy. You want to make sure that you're not delivering in some obscure formatted program. I mean, it doesn't seem like you should even have to mention that, But I've actually had people send stuff and I'm like, I can't even Open this. This is crazy. So make sure you've got the right equipment. It really doesn't take much either. A basic laptop and Internet connection, that's pretty much it. For other things, though, you have to look at your business. As a business. You need to make sure that you're building systems into it so that you're not constantly recreating from scratch. So if you're going to do press releases for a client, make sure that you have a questionnaire that you can send to them so that you can get all the information you need from them. And this way it's not like you're coming back. Oh, yeah, I need to ask you about this or that or that. Make it simple for them. Make it simple for yourself. The best advice possible is to systematize everything you can for your business. That doesn't mean you're just cranking out template stuff. It just means that you have rails to run your business on rather than kind of freewheeling it over the dirt. So that's a big part, is making sure you've got these templates built, questionnaires that you can do that type of thing. Make sure that you've got a system for going and looking for work. So develop a proposal template that you can have. And actually, I offer a proposal template as one of the bonuses if people buy my book online. That's one of the big things that I wanted to include, because a lot of the time, even if you have a membership with Guru or Elance or any of these things, you go to bid on the project and it's like, oh, well, what do I say? How do I price this? What do I tell them that I'm going to deliver? How do I freeze this? How do I tell them about my experience? And a lot of your success is going to depend on whether you can communicate well with your client that it's to their advantage to hire you. So, you know, these are important things to build in. You need to have kind of at least a mental price list in your head, because every single day, if you tell somebody you're a writer and once they understand what it is that you do, you're going to have questions about, well, what do you charge for whatever? And you don't want to be going.

I don't know, it doesn't look professional, and it's going to be very hard to get business that way. So all these different little systems in place, a marketing system, pricing system, how do I actually do this? Project type of system. These are very important to have Some other little technical things is sometimes you're going to have clients ask you to sign a non disclosure, non compete type of thing. Sign it. It's not a problem. I've had a lot of my clients that I had over the past years, few years. I seem to attract the same industries over and over. So a lot of personal development people. For a while I had several bodybuilders and you know, I'm a 43 year old housewife. This is hysterical. I'm writing bodybuilding stuff. Internet marketers, a lot of Internet marketers, some of them are competitors or what do they call frenemies. Competitive, you know, but they're, they're friends. But I'm working for all of them. So you have to have ways that you can really understand what are none the of disclosure is and be willing to sign it because a lot of people are not in very competitive fields and they are not going to ask. But sometimes, you know, the better paying clients are going to be kind of at the top of their game. They want to make sure that you're on their page. You're not going to be taking their info and selling it for your own use. So those are the basics of the technical stuff that you need to understand.

And is that what you mean when you say in and on your business develop systems? Are you sort of referring to the E. Myth concept there? I had Michael Gerber on the show, so that's what that looks like in.

Chapter that was one of my favorite books ever and it just really revolutionized it. Just having that whole mindset of thinking of your business as if it were a franchise and you owned a whole bunch of them. Well, there's a lot of stuff you wouldn't be doing if you had a hundred of these things. And for some reason just having one, people kind of lose sight of that and spend a lot of time spinning their wheels when they don't need to. They could just systematize this thing and move on. Another great resource for that is Sam Carpenter's work, the System that's really, really helpful as well. So between the two of those, people can really learn a lot about systematizing and working on the business, not just in it.

Anything else that writers can do to earn money with words.

Oh, definitely. It's incredible because I stumble onto stuff all the time. People are doing editing, you can do book indexing, you can do just different types of writing. There's all these different specialties. When I first got started I thought, thought, well if I have a specialty, I know I'll make more money, but I don't know enough about anything in particular to really be a specialist or I'd be doing that thing for accounting, I'd be an accountant or just whatever area of specialization. And it hit me that actually it's more like you have opportunities to specialize at different skills. So I have writers who just do white papers. I have one who pretty much all she does is press releases. Another guy does blogs, that type of thing where so much of the actual information you're conveying it'll vary, but it's all roughly about the same from different industries. The particulars are different, but the style of that writing is where the specialty comes in. And that's really important to come up with is ultimately new writers will not have this. You're just going to take whatever projects kind of come your way at first, but after a while you're going to find that you're really good at at certain things and they're fast and they're lucrative and that's probably where you want to spend the bulk of your time writing on those types of things.

How can writers grow their business? Just any other tips on that kind of thing?

Well, another thing is that I mentioned briefly that you can grow it also by offline finding offline clients.

Right. We talked about guru and eliance and so forth, but just in the simple, good old fashioned offline world.

Yeah, it's amazing. When I first started doing this, I would go to chamber of commerce type thing or networking lunches and I didn't even know really how to explain what I was doing. I'd say I'm a writer and people would say, oh, what are you? You know what book? I'm like, no. Or you say you're a commercial writer. They're like, well, which commercial did you write? No, that's really not it either. And it was just very hard to kind of get a handle on what it is that would appeal to them, that they would understand what the heck I'm doing. So what I would say after a while is I write the things to help you get seen online so that your business will be the first one that pops up and you'll be all over that front page on Google and they really start to get that. They understand that that's not just an automatic thing. You build a website, you're going to be at the top of the list. So if you can convey the benefit to them where they're really going to understand what it is you can do for them, it's Huge. I've had times where I've gone to networking luncheons and left with, with 2 inches thick of cards, people saying please call me, I need you. That type of thing that's really kind of rewarding to do. That's a fantastic way to grow your business. More writers, probably 50, 50, introvert, extrovert. So for some people, the idea of going to a networking lunch, they would rather just have all their teeth pulled or something rather than do that. It's still worth it to go and practice those little people skills and get out and about network. And then so I still, you know, I would shove them out of the nest and say please do this and try it and you will get better and it will get easier. But that's a huge untapped market is your local people because they don't know about guru and elance and all that. You'll never find them there. But I've had wonderful success working with local type clients like that. Information marketing is a fantastic avenue for a lot of writers to start making more like residual type income. And it can take a while. You can hear all kinds of different Internet marketer, information marketer, gurus and a lot of the sales pitches sound like do this now and tomorrow you'll be making a million dollars a month. And it's not the case. It is definitely not get rich quick. It's definitely not a four hour work week. As much as I love Timothy Ferris and I love that book, I am certainly nowhere near a four hour work week. But you can definitely, if you have a passion about anything, start building an information marketing business around that now because it will take a while to build and it's a great way to highlight your writing skills to write about something that you really care about. And all along you can do this alongside your actual writing business.

How do writers deal with the mental.

Game you're talking about? Writer's block.

Yeah, writer's block. Overcoming inertia, Getting lazy, Working out of the house. Writer writers tend to many times be sort of laid back kind of group and sometimes they're kind of waiting for stuff to come to them. And you've talked about proactive steps people need to take now. What if they get work and they just can't churn it out?

Yeah. All right. This is not a lazy person business. So for that type of writing I think you need to do like regular, normal writer type stuff. If you're going to do commercial writing, it is fast paced and you're always working as far as you're Doing something. It might be that you're learning more about SEO writing or copywriting or something. You're learning that could be constant. You're also marketing all the time until you reach the point where. And actually at this point, for me, I've got so many regular monthly customers that I don't have to do a ton of marketing. But I've been doing this now since 2006, so I'm going on my fifth year. So marketing, you're learning, you're building up your portfolio, you're pursuing work, you're actually doing work, you're handling billing, which I hate, doing that type of thing. It's constant. You are always working on something. It's not going to work if you don't have that drive. You absolutely need to have some entrepreneurial spirit in here to do this. Now, I have writers on my team who don't do any of that other stuff. I mean, they're learning and they work on stuff, but they're not building a portfolio, they're not marketing their business businesses, and they know I'm feeding them work all the time and I take a cut on it all the time. And they know they could make a lot more money probably if they were out there on their own. It's just not worth it to them to develop the systems for whatever reason. So great for you if you can find, you know, if you don't want to do any of that business building type stuff. But you will have to find some way to do it, you know, to find somebody who's going to feed you work at that point and understand you won't make nearly what you could make if you're out on your own.

Any more tips though, on the writer's block component of it?

Sure. Oh, yeah. Okay, here's a couple of great things. Writer's block in particular, I think is probably pretty much caused by this thing that I like to refer to as your internal editor.

The internal editor.

I hit this all the time. If I'm working on a project that's kind of hard for me, I'm writing and deleting and it's just painful and horrible. I'm like, why I hate my life, you know, all this kind of thing. What happens is that the little voice inside the brain is going, no, that's not good enough. You should have phrased it differently. You know, all this kind of chatter. So you have to have a way that you can shut that thing up and duct tape it. Duct tape over the mouth of the internal editor. There are two Ways that I recommend for people to do that. And they sound. Both of them are kind of weird. But one is to write with your eyes closed, obviously align your fingers on the keyboard first and then close your eyes and just start writing. Because here's what happens is your brain can only remember maybe the last several words that you wrote and it can't correct fast enough. So you can type a lot faster if you can't sit there evaluating constantly. Now, obviously you're going to have to edit, probably you're going to hit a lot of wrong keys and that type of thing, but you can generate it, generate the content and then go back and edit, and that's going to hugely cut down your overall time. The other thing that I tell people to do is to. I love this software and people either love it or hate it. But it's called Dragon, Naturally speaking. Have you heard of it?

I've tried it. I still like to. And I must disclose, I still like to type better, even though I dropped out of typing class in eighth grade because I was a real elitist snob idiot thinking that typing was for secretaries.

I love it.

I'm going to admit that on the show here, and that was a huge mistake. And the richest man in the world, Bill Gates, is probably a very fast typist, I would think.

Yeah, I would think so. That's hysterical. I know. You know, I look back at my. I think I had typing in junior year in high school, and I look at that going, wow, I had no idea that skill was going to be so pivotal in my life.

Me neither. But I tried Dragon and, And first of all, I get kind of tired of talking, to tell you the truth. I like just not talking, which few people in my staff would probably believe, but I'll just tell you that. But yeah, it just, I don't know, I don't think that voice recognition technology is really there yet.

I mean, it takes a lot of training. You know, I've lived all over the country and Dragon often cannot figure out what the heck kind of accent I have. I don't know what kind of, you know, I've lived everywhere, so I don't know. And I think if you have a very distinctive accent, accent, it does better, but you can train it as you go, and it does get smarter. What I do love about it, and I love these statistics, is that I think it's something like people can listen at a rate of about 1800 words a minute, which is just crazy fast. We can speak at probably, I don't know, I think the statistic was a thousand words a minute. And that's, you know, maybe women more than men. I don't know. Maybe it's because I lived in New Jersey for so long. But I can talk really fast now. I can type pretty fast because I did well in that class. Maybe 80, 90 words a minute. And that's pretty good for a typist. But if you add in the fact of writing or thinking about something as you're writing, so, you know, you're still kind of forming this thing as you write, then you go way down to maybe 30, 40 words a minute. It's kind of a screeching halt topics that I know well, I really prefer if I can just dictate it and then, you know, and have Dragon come out with it. And even adding in all the time where I have to go. What did I say? I know I did not say that. And editing for that, even with that time built in, it's way faster, really.

That's an interesting point that you bring up. So that eliminates writer's block is the fact that you can just speak it. But what about all the mistakes and the correction? I mean, I don't know. Maybe I need to try it again.

10 times easier to edit than it is to create. So that's.

Yeah.

I mean, you're gonna have that no matter what, even if you're writing. I mean, if you're writing so that it's perfect the first time go around, it's gonna take you forever anyway. So you have to go back and edit most of the time. I mean, there's certain types of things where you don't really have to because it's not prone to lots of mistakes. But yeah, it's.

Well, that's. That's a good point. So Dragon. Okay. What else for writer's block? Just. And let's kind of wrap up. But this writer's block thing is a big deal. So any tips you have will be very much appreciated.

Yeah, well, the other thing that I do, this is a little bit like Dragon, but you can call into something like freeconference calling.com, any site where you can record your voice. And this is where I use. Filipino transcribers are phenomenal, and they're really, really cheap. To hire a transcriber in the States, it's going to cost you, you know, $60 to $90 per audio hour.

It's interesting you say that. We pay $1.25aminute to transcribe my shows. Yeah. How much in the Philippines, by the way, very expensive.

I have transcribers in the Philippines, where an hour of audio, it's like $30, $20.

And they're good, huh?

Oh, they're phenomenal.

That's great.

They're fantastic. So it does, you know, I mean, if you were doing a book for somebody or more, that's for just the average person, not so much for a writer. If you're a writer, you got to push past the writer's block. Basically, I would say do the dragon or do the writing with your eyes shut. But if you're not a writer and you still have to produce content, I would say for sure, write it. I mean, speak it, get it recorded and get it transcribed and then you can hand it off to somebody to edit so it doesn't look like a transcription.

That's a great tip. Isn't it so different though, the way we speak versus the way we write?

Yes and no. That's again where writing for the Internet comes in. Because people, I mean really, we have the attention span of a 2 year old hopped up on Jolt or something. We don't want to sit and wade through. I've had writers submit stuff where I'm looking at their sample and I'm just looking at it going, oh, this is too much work to get through. I've gone through college, I had grad school, I read all the time. It's not like I can't read, it's just if it's too much work, I don't want to do it. So if a writer is like that, think of the average person looking online. Conversational style writing is hugely successful, unless you're writing for financial industry or something that's kind of stuffy like that. And even them sometimes a lot of their content is coming down a few notches. The most successful content online is written at the 5th to 8th grade writing level or reading level.

Wow, that's amazing.

So there's slang. I start tons of sentences with and or. But I mean, my English professors would probably wring my neck if they saw some of the stuff that we produce. But that's how people read and that's what's working. So it's a little bit different.

Very, very good point. Very interesting. Well, sue, this has really been a great show. You have provided so much content, but there's always more. And tell our listeners where people can get the book, where they can find out more about your courses and if it's anything like the content you've provided today, I've got to Highly recommend your work to listeners.

Well, thanks, Jason. The best way that they can find me online is to go to Stay at Home Mom Writer. You know, you can spell it out or you can go to sahmwriter.com that is where you can find the actual book for how you can build a writing business from absolutely nothing. Because I started with absolutely nothing. No paid experience, no clients, no anything, no portfolio nothing. That's where I can take you from nothing to having clients. What I found is that a lot of students, after they've figured out how they can get clients, now they're a little bit stuck because they don't know how to actually do the work. So I set up a thing called Freelance Writers Boot Camp and you can actually go to freelancewritersbootcamp.com and that teaches the six basic, most common, very well paid projects that writers run into. Any one of those you could build an entire business around. And I go into how to find clients that want that specific type of project, what I charge, what I recommend charging, how you can communicate with them, how to actually write the project so that people can go out and find this work with full confidence that they can actually do the project. Otherwise, it's kind of like you're driving with one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake because you're not sure you can actually handle speed. Those two together are really good. And I've seen, you know, I get thank you notes almost every week from writers who have built from nothing. And it used to be, I thought it was just going to be all stay at home moms, but I would say half my buyers at this point are men who either got downsized or got sick of having a boss and wanted to do something on their own and have writing talent. I had one college kid actually who emailed me. He's made like 2, $3,000 now since doing this and he's going to school still. It's just incredible. So I love that. So if you do start building a writing business and if I've helped you, please do let me know because that's exciting for me to hear back.

Well, Sue Lapointe, thank you so much for joining us today. The book is Working Writer, Happy Writer how to Build a Thriving Writing Business from Nothing. And we really appreciate the insights today.

You're so welcome. It's my pleasure.

Thank you so much for listening to the Women Investing Network. Be sure to subscribe, rate and review the show on itunes or the platform of your choice. You can find the show notes and resources for today's episode@womeninvestingnetwork.com remember that guest opinions are their own and information is of general nature, so be sure to consult appropriate tax, legal or other professionals for specific advice.