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TextMaster.com is an interesting little site that is fairly new but already has a reputation for being a good way to get started as a freelance writer. They make the claim that they are writer centered and by all accounts are fair and honest.

To become a member of the site, you simply sign up and verify your email address. Then you can go and explore the site.

There are 3 categories on TextMaster that will be of immediate interest to you: Copywriter, Translator, and Proofreader. These are the 3 areas that you can apply to for work.

My mantra is to do it instead of thinking about doing it. If I catch myself doing the latter I just switch to doing instead of thinking. Easier said than done for me, but I’ve gotten better at that. But there aren’t enough hours in the day. Or not if you’re also going to stay healthy and be a part of your family and not get burnt out. So things fall off the table, even more so if you’re hell bent on creating really great work. Yet, I find that quality is what wins at the end of the day and that solves a lot of other problems.

And if they share it, you gain greater readership. So I encourage writers to think of the entire canvas when creating content. Think about the headers in your piece and about the images you’ll use to enrich the story.

Which leads me to my second point: Your story is about Gina, at forty, deciding whether or not to leave her boyfriend. Are you really going to spend half your story showing us Gina’s white-trash childhood in Elbridge, Michigan (a key bit of backstory)? Or are you just going to cut to the chase, provide a few key details, and move on?

But push this advice too far, and again, you’ll get stuck writing mediocre fiction. Because sometimes the things that don’t work are actually important. They don’t work not because they’re the wrong things, but because they’re the hard, ambitious, at-the-very-edge-of-what-you-even-know-how-to-say-things, and the only way to land them is to dig deeper, work harder, and sometimes even (god help you) add rather than cut.

That’s the basic idea: Get in front of OPA, and then publish fantastic content so you can earn that audience’s respect and trust.

Interacting with others, sharing the content of others, and participating in communities are all great ways to generate attention and build an audience.

build an audience that is relevant to what you do

Comment on their posts.

If you want to build a blog, the reality is that Twitter is one of the most important platforms for sharing, probably followed by Google+, at this point. If you’re in a home/food/how-to niche, Pinterest may be important to you as well. If Facebook seems like a place people talk about your topic a lot, it might be useful, too.

There are plenty of tools out there — among the most popular are AddtoAny, ShareThis, and Sharebar (which is what I’m currently using).

It’s a trash can. Not a physical one, but a mental trash can. It’s for discarding advice that doesn’t feel right for you. It doesn’t seem like the right answer. Your gut tells you this advice isn’t for you. It just doesn’t resonate. If that happens, you should ignore that tip and move on. My teacher would say, “Use what feels right and discard the rest.” I think a lot of writers forget to take out their trash can when they’re learning about writing. But it really pays to keep it handy.

It’s easy to get caught up in the fact that we want others to love what we write. We make one tiny, harmless alteration after another, and eventually our work becomes something else entirely.

I’m a freelancer, but I have a couple of contract gigs that play a big role in my monthly and daily cycles. I’m the science editor at BoingBoing.net, a technology and culture blog with 6 million monthly readers. I also have a monthly column with The New York Times Magazine.

The rest of the day really varies a lot, depending on what I have on my plate at that given time. I have ADHD and it’s really easy for me to get distracted and be unproductive, so I have lots of little tricks I rely on to keep me focused throughout the day. I used to use a timer on my computer a lot, just to have something that, periodically, forced me to look up and think about what I was doing and what I had to do next. But I find now that the two hours between breast pump sessions actually does that job pretty well. I also jump back and forth between stuff on my to-do list, depending on what I feel motivated to do. If I just can’t get myself to write during a given two-hour block, I’m better off answering email or sending out interview requests than just sitting there, staring at a blank page.

Skype, Call Recorder, and Stickies.