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speakers, or other businesses advertising around town,” she says. “More often than not, these materials are riddled with errors. I edit them and sometimes rewrite them, then send them to the originator with a note advertising my own services.” Of course, you don’t have to work as a wordsmith to try this trick. If you’re a DJ, you can tactfully point out why no one was dancing to the tired old Kool & the Gang tracks at your local yoga studio’s holiday fundraiser and send over an MP3 of your best Bollywood-inspired set. If you’re a landscape designer, you can tell your neighborhood community center that their greenery’s dying from sun, shade, or aphid overload and show them some choice photos of the lush courtyards you’ve designed.

No matter how you get your daily media dose (print, web, phone, TV, radio, microchip in your head), learn to love the local business news. It’s the best way to see which regional organizations are making good, which corporate Goliaths are opening up a satellite office near you, and which midsize companies are expanding—all potential clients you can hit up for work.

Freelance Job Sites—the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

While there are a lot of great job-hunting websites out there for freelancers, there’s also a ton of garbage. Early in 2008, the directory AllFreelance.com listed several dozen freelance job sites, from catch-all sites like Sologig.com, Guru.com, FreelanceSwitch.com, and Elance .com to industry-specific sites like RentACoder.com and DesignQuote .com. Since freelance job sites come and go like a bad stomach flu, I’d rather not focus on which sites are good (or bad, or downright fugly), but on site practices, instead.

Let’s look at the good first. I’m a big fan of narrowing the playing field from the globe to one geographic region (whether that region is your state, country, or continent). A majority of jobs listed on freelance sites can be done from anywhere—Indiana, India, Indonesia—which may sound like a good deal for you at first blush but couldn’t be farther from it. Think about it: Would you rather be one of one hundred regional applicants or one of one thousand worldwide? Sadly, sites like Freelance-Seattle.net and FreelanceDirectory.org (for the UK and Ireland) are few and far between. So unless you see an ad for the solo gig of your dreams, I’d stick with region-specific ads on those national and worldwide sites.

Craigslist can be a speedy way to drum up local freelance leads. A number of freelancers I spoke to landed their first few freelance gigs through Craigslist. But you don’t have to read a site like CraigslistCurmudgeon.com to know that countless freelance ads on Craig’s venture into the territory of the seriously scary. Some easy ways to spot a Craig’s dud: The ad doesn’t say what the company name or website is or is incredibly vague. What’s more, they promise to pay you not in cash dollar bills but in “exposure.” (More about when to do freebies in Chapter 10.) And my personal favorite, “To find out how you can make $8,000 a month working from home, call this 800 number for a recorded message. Please have your credit card ready . . .” Trust your gut. If it sounds like a scam, don’t bother.

Then there are the subscription-based job sites, of which I’ve seen both good and bad. Since nonfiction writers land a lot of their assignments by pitching ideas to magazine, web, and newspaper editors, nominally priced subscriptions to sites like Mediabistro and FreelanceSuccess—both of which offer current leads and professional advice—can pay for themselves quickly. But some other sites cost hundreds of dollars to join annually. For your money, you may get some services that ensure your clients pay up, but this involves giving the site your tax ID (social security) number and routing your invoices and payments through them, which gives me the willies. Even if you have no other work, there are better ways to spend your money. For more marketing ideas, see Chapter 18.

As for the out and out ugly, a lot of these freelance sites are set up like one big job auction.