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Writers: Get Published & Build Your Career With My New E-Courses!

Four years ago, I offered my first class for writers wanting to get pitching, get published, and get serious about their careers.

And I have to tell you, I was amazed by the results.

My students went on to publish in major magazines, like Parents and American Baby. They were featured on big-name websites like the Huffington Post and BabyZone. They went on to land regular blogging gigs at places like Disney Baby and Babble.com, wrote and published books, and even taught classes of their own. Several of my students told me that my class changed their life by helping them build a career they could love and be proud of, working from home on their own schedule.

It showed me that when you take a motivated group of writers, give them plenty of in-depth, nuts-and-bolts information, and walk them through it every step of the way – while offering plenty of encouragement and cheerleading, of course – they have everything they need to build a successful, satisfying freelance career.

Now it’s your turn to get your writing career off the ground. For the first time in two years, I’m bringing back my popular and sought-after series of writing classes: Get Pitching, Get Published! and its build-on course, Writing Intensive.

The classes will take you from idea to pitch to assignment and beyond, helping you build and shape a freelance career that suits your interests, lifestyle and the goals and dreams you have for yourself with the flexibility you need to work around family commitments.

Early-bird rates will end this weekend, so don’t delay! Learn more about Get Pitching, Get Published! and Writing Intensive now. Payment plans are available, so no more procrastinating – make your writing dreams come true in 2015!

Back To Basics: Why I’m Cutting Out Business Blogs & Focusing On What Matters

By Meagan Francis 1 Comment

The other day I looked at the podcast app on my phone and noticed that it had been months since the last time I listened to my favorite business show, Smart Passive Income with Pat Flynn.

This is the same show that for two years I listened to faithfully, week after week, usually on its release day. I was thrilled when Pat added a shorter, 5X/week podcast so I could get a daily fix. My kids know Pat by name. I was even a guest on his show back in 2013.

Over the years, I eagerly gobbled up helpful tips on marketing an ebook (which I put into effect during my launch of Beyond Baby last spring,) starting an e-commerce business, setting up an email autoresponder series, monetizing a podcast, choosing keywords, effectively using affiliate marketing, writing a great sales page, and hundreds of other themes centered around building a tighter, better, more effective business.

As time went on, even Pat’s frequent podcasts weren’t enough, and I found myself falling down the iTunes rabbit hole searching for more hosts dishing out more advice. Every time I’d listen to a new episode I’d feel a burst of energy and enthusiasm, and would delve into hours of research surrounding the topic du jour. Sometimes I’d work on implementing new strategies right away; other times I’d just let them percolate for a while.

I’m not sure what the tipping point was, but some point, I hit a serious wall.

What happened?

Somehow, in all that research, I’d found myself getting a bad case of “other-people’s-business-itis.”

That’s my fancy term for when, instead of charting a course that feels right for you, applying yourself to that course, and measuring your own unique progress, you find yourself paying more attention to what other people are doing and buying into the idea that somehow they’ve come up with the One Unique Formula That Unfailingly Leads To Business Success. (And if you could just learn and apply that formula, you could replicate their success, too.)

In my eagerness to absorb new information and learn new skills and techniques, I’d overloaded and overwhelmed myself with data, tips, and tools that I was not prepared to use, that did not always jive with my particular goals, skills and beliefs, and sometimes, that I was just not that interested in implementing.

And it wasn’t just the mental burden taking its toll. One day, wondering why my business bank account seemed to be bleeding money, I added up all the plugins, tools, services, domain names, hosting accounts, and tutorials I’d purchased (some with monthly recurring fees) and – well, ouch.

So what’s the lesson in all this?

In my well-placed zeal to learn new things, I lost sight of the basics: those things I’m really good at and love doing, like writing, communicating, and connecting with people. Without those things, any business strategies I tried to put into place would never be a true reflection of me or have the same potential for helping others.

Because no matter what tools or plugins or systems you have in place, what really moves the needle is doing the thing you can do better than anyone else. (Tweet This!)

And conversely, no matter what tools, plugins, or systems you have in place, if you lose sight of what you bring to the table, you will never make the same impact as you will if you invest in your unique skills and interests.

There’s a lot of advice out there about the best way to do online business.

Some of it is genuine, hard-won, and helpful. But much – perhaps most – is self-serving, opportunistic, and obfuscated by slick sales tactics and questionable success stories. For those of us who just want to create and communicate and are looking for guidance on the best ways to grow an audience, it’s not always easy to tell the difference. And even the best advice can become clutter when it overwhelms you and gets in the way of focusing on your core strengths and purpose.

But for those of us interested in doing business with heart, there’s one starting point that can never lead you astray: Be yourself, and focus on what you’re good at.

Let your unique personality and talents be the cornerstone of every other thing you do. By all means, listen, learn, and implement new ideas, but don’t get so caught up in the quest for new and more that you forget what brought you here in the first place.

Looking around the blogosphere this new year, I’m struck by how many of us are expressing a longing for a return to something simpler, more connected, more real. The good news is that we have the power to bring it back, and in doing so, create a better Internet for ourselves and our readers.

I also believe wholeheartedly that it is the only path to true success in this space, whether we define success as the money we earn, the lives we touch, or the satisfaction we feel at the end of the day. (Personally, I’m going for “all of the above.”)

One of these days, I’ll start listening to business podcasts and reading business blogs again. There’s just too much good information out there, and too many good people (like Pat!) to write off the genre forever.

But this time, I’ll be more selective. I’ll listen only to the hosts I sense are genuine, thoughtful, and interested first and foremost in their audiences. I’ll focus on the topics that have a direct relevance to something I’m currently working on. I’ll make sure I spend a lot more time focusing on the things I do best and that help my audience most, than trying to learn the next new traffic-building or monetization strategy.

And I’ll keep in mind the lessons I’ve learned from this experience, which could also serve as my 2015 blogging resolution:

Be yourself. Do what you love. Help as many others as you can along the way. (Tweet This!)

It may not be the kind of business advice that will fill my bank account with affiliate dollars, but at the end of the day, it’s the best way to keep loving what I do.

You can always go to the mat.

By Meagan Francis 2 Comments

Recently I started working with a wellness coach. It wasn’t something I’d planned – I haven’t been putting much emphasis on fitness or diet over the last few years, but still felt like I was living a reasonably healthy lifestyle. But when my yoga instructor, Kathleen, announced in class that she needed a few free clients to finish up her certification process, I remembered that I would like my pants to fit better and impulsively threw my hat in the ring.

During our first face-to-face session, Kathleen asked me to set a 10-12 week goal. I told her that I would like to make it through one of the more difficult yoga classes at our gym “without dying” and shared that I had been sticking to the gentle yoga classes out of fear that the harder ones would prove to be too challenging for me to make it all the way through without stopping.

“Well, that’s okay,” she said. “You can always go to the mat.”

You can always go to the mat! Of course. This is part of the reason yoga speaks to me so much more than other kinds of fitness classes: the knowledge that the mat is always available to me – that in fact, I am encouraged to use it if I think I need it. [Read more…]

Learning to embrace the ordinary

By Meagan Francis 1 Comment

This was the scene from Big Sur, California, last spring as Jon and I perched on a rock at a highway turnoff near the Bixby Bridge.

It is maybe one of the most gorgeous sights I’ve ever seen. Like, the kind that makes your heart beat faster and your eyes tear up and just leaves you speechless.

I was speechless a lot on that drive, up “the 1,” from the LA area up to Monterey County. We’d round a corner and see a stunning stretch of blue-green water, then round another and see a jaw-dropping mountain range, and just when I wondered how it could possibly get any better, we came across the scene above.

We saw some other impressive sights on our trip to California: the view of LA and my first sighting of the Hollywood sign from the Griffith Observatory; the adorable city of San Luis Obispo, nestled in a green valley; spotting pelicans and seals in the wharf in Santa Barbara; the rocky coast outside of Monterey. It didn’t hurt that the weather was perfect the entire time we were there, either, sunny and 75-80 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. [Read more…]

Learning to embrace solitude (even when it comes with sadness)

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One recent weekday afternoon, I found myself in a completely quiet house. Clara was spending the day with my mother-in-law, Jon was with clients, and all the boys were finishing up their last week of school. The weather was perfect: 75 degrees, sunny, and clear. I’d planned to go to the gym, but the outdoors was calling, so instead I tossed on my sneakers, piped Cyndi Lauper into my earbuds, and hit the pavement for a brisk walk with an occasional burst of half-hearted running.

The town was surprisingly empty for such a beautiful day, but it was an expectant emptiness, somehow: midday, mid-week, right before tourist season would kick into high gear, it was as though my town was taking a big, deep breath before the onslaught of kids and vacationers hit the streets and beaches, and I felt myself taking a big, expectant breath, too, waiting for the quiet to fill up.

As an extrovert with five kids I spend a lot of time around other people. My day to day life, my social activities, my travel, my work, all typically center around large groups of people. And that’s mostly a wonderful thing: I like people; I like the energy I get from being around them. There’s a reason I feel at home on a crowded dance floor or speaking to a full room.

But as lovely as it can be to be surrounded by people, I also need time to myself…I just don’t take it very often. My “alone time” tends to be spent in purposeful, productive ways: working out, for example, or taking a shower, or grocery shopping, or writing. When you’re so used to filling your time and your thoughts with other people and activity, the hush of slow solitude can be unnerving.

So at first I avoided the quiet, keeping up a quick, calorie-burning clip with peppy 80s music bouncing in my ears. But when I got down to the beach and saw how empty it was, how blue the water and sky, I did something that, for some crazy reason, I rarely do: I stripped off my shoes and socks, rolled up my pants legs, put Cyndi on pause, walked along the water’s edge until I came to a secluded spot, sat down on a ledge of sand, and then just…stayed there.

And standing there on the beach, with no music or conversation or activity to distract me – just the pounding of the waves, the beauty of the water, the feeling of the sand under my feet – I felt a sudden burst of melancholy. [Read more…]

In Praise of a Thin Skin (And How To Keep It From Derailing You)

By Meagan Francis 6 Comments

When I first launched my career as a writer, I heard the phrase “thick skin” a lot.

“You have to develop a thick skin to handle rejection.”

“Criticism comes with the territory; if you’re thin-skinned, you won’t make it in this business.”

This worried me, because I’ve always been “thin-skinned.” I’d just learned how to hide it.

My mother was a crier: anything from a sad song to an offhand comment could set her off. She was also emotionally erratic and depressed, so for years, I equated displays of emotion with weakness and instability.

My dad, on the other hand, was a model of reserve, and I found myself emulating his cool exterior and stoicism…even when I was crumbling on the inside.

So while I spent my elementary-school years crying over everything from scraped knees to mean teachers, by junior high I’d developed a talent for making my face go blank when embarrassed or sad.

As I got older, high school and beyond, I often coped with difficulty by making a joke out of upsetting situations.

The truth was that I was afraid of strong emotion, and actually practiced detaching from it.

And eventually, it worked. As a young adult, I’d experience a sort of delayed reaction to sadness or anger: when something bad happened, at first I’d just feel numb.

Later – sometimes much later – in the privacy of the shower or during a vulnerable late-night moment, I’d start to grow angry or sad or afraid, but by that point it was sometimes difficult to identify exactly where those feelings were coming from, or link them to a particular event.

Not surprisingly, this led to a lot of fights with my husband that weren’t really about the thing I thought we were fighting about at all.

That’s all changed over the last decade, though. In fact, I seem to be losing my ability to suppress my feelings…or maybe just the desire to try.

At some point, I think I realized that the same part of me that allows me to really embrace happiness and enthusiasm is the same part of me that cries at commercials, and that I can’t truly experience one without allowing the other.

Don’t get me wrong: I’m naturally pretty laid-back. I still tend to react slowly to news, I still don’t like to argue or confront people, and I still use humor to get me through hard times.

But the more difficult feelings I avoided in my teens and early twenties seem to have risen closer to the surface, and have become harder to tamp down or cover up.

I cry easily now: watching commercials, listening to songs, talking about the people I love, when I feel misunderstood or regretful or embarrassed. When I get angry, I can’t help but speak out. I’ve become impulsive with physical affection around the people I like and admire, and in some situations, have even become the same kind of “hugger” that used to make the younger me uncomfortable. [Read more…]

What summer break can teach us about being busy vs. getting things done

By Meagan Francis 2 Comments

This afternoon, when sitting at the beach for the second day in a row, I had one of those “should” moments we all experience from time to time.

“Is it right for me to be sitting here at 2 in the afternoon on a Thursday? Maybe I should be working,” I thought.

I quickly waved the thought away, applying more sunscreen as I watched my boys splashing in the water while Clara dug in the sand at my feet.

After all, we’ve had an unseasonably cool summer, and there just haven’t been that many hot, sunny days that have lent themselves to a leisurely afternoon on Lake Michigan. Living in a beach town, it would just be wasteful not to take advantage of the sand and waves when we can.

But more importantly, I’ve found that the summer – when my kids are all out of school and our schedule is turned upside-down and, more often than not, I have small people wandering in and out of my office while I work – is always an important reminder of the difference between “being busy” and “doing what needs to be done.”

Truth be told, my essential workload doesn’t change much in the summer. I still have client expectations to meet, stories to write and schedule, emails to answer.

What changes? My attitude.

Because our household routine is so much looser and my kids are around all day, I feel more free to take entire mornings or afternoons away from my computer to head to the beach, the park, the ice-cream shop.

I find myself fitting work around all the things I want to do before the summer is over, rather than trying to “fill up” work hours with productive-seeming activities that are often really just busy-work or wheel-spinning.

And as a result, I make a lot of hay in a very few hours each week, and I admit, I sometimes wind up feeling a little uncomfortable about it.

The “should” side of my brain asks: If what I’m doing has value, is genuine, is worth what I earn for it, shouldn’t it be taking up more of my time?

But let’s turn this on its head. Rather than feeling like I should be working more during the summer, what if I should actually be working less – or, to be clear, spending less time “working” on things that don’t matter – the rest of the year?

It’s pretty sobering and perspective-shifting when you look back over a three-month period and realize that the entirety of your essential “full-time” job could actually fit into a few hours a day.

It tells me a lot about the way I spend my time when I have more time to spend, and makes me question how “productive” I really am when I’m doing all that clicking and feed-sifting and typing, September through May.

It turns out there’s a difference between filling time and being productive.

And that’s what summer break teaches me, every year.

[Read more…]

Untangling the chain: why both strategy and intuition matter

By Meagan Francis 2 Comments

Last weekend, as my husband and I were getting ready to leave town for my birthday celebration, I discovered that the necklace I wanted to wear had become hopelessly tangled in the drawer of my jewelry box.

It wasn’t a pretty sight. The dozen or so delicate strands, joined at each end by a wide bar and meant to lie one inside the other, had knotted over and over one another and become entangled in other necklaces plus a number of dangly earrings and bracelets. (What can I say? I don’t spend a lot on my accessories and have a bad track record when it comes to their care.)

I still had to take a shower and get ready before we could leave, and my frustrated, hurried picking at the knots didn’t seem to be getting me anywhere.

So I turned to my husband Jon, whose methodical, detail-oriented approach to problem-solving seemed much better suited for the task.

He shook his head (as methodical, detail-oriented people are apt to do when faced with the sort of mess an impulsive, big-picture type like me can make) but set to work on the unpleasant job.

When I got out of the shower a few minutes later, I watched Jon and his strategy became clear: choose one strand and work on it until it becomes straight and unkinked, then move on to the next.

For a while, it worked: he’d made quite a lot of progress in a short time.

But eventually, hunching over a tangled mess started wearing on him, and a few times as soon as he’d straighten one strand it would make the next one worse. “I’m not even sure this is possible,” he sighed, and laid the necklace carefully down on the bed to take a break.

I picked it up again to give it another shot. But this time, as if by magic, the twists and loops began to rapidly untangle themselves. I found that I almost wasn’t even looking at the strands as I unwound them, working backward to dislodge the knots.

Instead, I was somehow going by intuition: sensing the weight of the metal as I grasped entire clumps and shook them free at once, almost without effort; feeling the way the entire necklace should hang together, rather than focusing the individual parts.

In no time the necklace – which had looked like a hot mess just two or three minutes before – lay smooth and untangled in my hand, and I got to wear it to my birthday dinner after all.

[Read more…]

Should you attend that conference?

By Meagan Francis 10 Comments

Right now the BlogHer conference is ramping up in San Jose, and those watching the hashtag from the sidelines might be feeling a little left out, regretful, or even anxious about not being in attendance.

This is only the second BlogHer I’ve missed since 2007, so I understand the feeling.

But this year, I’m sitting the conference out with no regrets.

Why? Well, while I’m sad not to see friends who will be at the conference – and yes, I do love to sleep in a hotel bed! – this year I took a hard look at the cost-benefit ratio and decided that as lovely as it would be to attend, ultimately, this year the benefits weren’t worth the tradeoffs.

It’s nothing against BlogHer, by the way. Of all the conferences I’ve attended – and conferences, I’ve seen a few (more like a dozen, to be honest) – I’ve been most loyal to BlogHer. It was the first blogging event I ever went to, and I’ve attended a total of six times. I’ve found the conference professionally and personally rewarding every year.

But the focus of my business has been slowly evolving, and when I sat down to really think about what I wanted to get out of BlogHer this year, the truth was…I just didn’t know. And just not knowing isn’t a good enough incentive to get me to shell out a lot of money and fly across the country for the duration of one of just a handful of precious summer weekends. No matter how great the content, how nice the location, or how crisp those hotel sheets might be.

So if you’re also sitting this one out, or maybe have never been to a conference at all, I don’t want you to feel too bad about it. I also don’t want you to let your left-out feelings spur you into making a hasty decision to register for some other event just to make yourself feel better about missing this one.

Attending a conference can be an excellent and worthwhile investment in your business, but like any other investment, it’s one that’s best made with plenty of critical thought.

So click away from that registration window for just a few minutes, and take a few steps before you pull out your credit card: [Read more…]

Bloggers (and Freelancers): You must diversify.

By Meagan Francis 12 Comments

As I write this, there is a storm of controversy blowing up in my blogger community. Many of my colleagues contributed their time and talents and credibility to a parenting site that went from indie darling to corporate machine seemingly overnight. Other colleagues were editorial and marketing staff at that same website. And along the way something happened – no one seems quite sure what – leaving former staffers without jobs and former bloggers without gigs and a lot of people confused and stressed about paying the bills.

I’m not taking sides. It’s a mess all around, and I hate that people and their families (whether on the staff/executive or blogger level) are under strain because of it. I have no idea where to place blame or even if there is blame to be placed.

But here’s the part I want to get across loud and clear: this – all of this – was completely, totally, 100% predictable.

This is what happens with media companies: they merge with other media companies. They get sold and bought and acquired. They change ownership, leadership, and staff. Sometimes they completely disappear without warning. Sometimes the people in high-up positions are just as blindsided as everyone else. Sometimes they know something is up, but can’t talk about it. Other times they choose not to because they need or want to figure out their own next steps first. This is all true even if you are friendly with those people, or believe them to be your actual friends.

I learned this the hard way myself when I began freelancing back in 2003. After working my tail off to create a strong connection with an editor at a national magazine, she left the company abruptly while thisclose to assigning my first big story. She passed the pitch on to her successor, who never – and I do mean, never, never, not ever – responded to a single one of my follow-ups. Other magazines I slowly, steadily, persistently courted disappeared. The website where I got my start as a parenting writer folded. Others stopped paying contributors. Sometimes a story of mine would be killed and I’d go from regular writer to persona non grata for no reason except that the new “guard” wanted to wipe the slate clean and bring in all their own people and ideas.

In 2010, right in the middle of the editing process with my book The Happiest Mom, which I wrote in partnership with Parenting magazine, 3/4 of the magazine’s editorial staff was let go…including the editor-in-chief who had championed my idea in the first place. Her replacement was not nearly as enthralled with the book – or, I believe, me – and I can only say the launch experience was not quite what I’d hoped for. (Parenting, incidentally, has since folded.)

This is the reality of freelancing today. It requires a certain comfort level with risk, an ability to bounce back quickly from loss, and the foresight to see what’s coming next. It also requires – demands – diversification, so that when one leg of your stool breaks you’re left with a few others to support you. [Read more…]