Textmaster Fail

When I started this blog I promised to share my successes and failures. This one is a failure and there may well be a few useful lessons in it.

I subscribe to a newsletter called "Freedom With Writing" where I found a very recent review of Textmaster.com. Good place for beginning freelancers to get started. Very new so you're kind of getting in on the ground floor but you'll have to put up with a few site teething issues and growing pains. Sounds like an opportunity right up my alley. Only downside was a complicated sign up/application process.

The application process wasn't really complicated. It did take time and thought though. Personal introductory paragraphs take a great deal of thought. The idea is to my a positive introduction that gets people's attention in the right way. That part took most of the time I spent on this. The other part was classifying my skills. They had categories and I always find that difficult in the sense that I second guess my choices. Took me a little more than an evening to do the initial application after the sign up.

I was thinking, so far so good. The next step was to apply for either copywriter, proofreader or translator. That is where the process ended for me. They don't need anyone who does English, Italian, French, Japanese or Korean. I was quite irked at that point. The site could have posted that they had enough people for those languages up front instead of the final stage of the application process. I wouldn't have wasted my valuable time then. I'm sure I'm not the only writer that walked away with a bad taste in my mouth.

Couple of lessons illustrated here.

First one is that freelance writing is a very competitive field. There are a ton of writers just like you looking for writing opportunities online. A company or website with a finite number of openings available will likely be filled up very quickly.

Second lesson is that if a "hot" opportunity is offered in a widely available newsletter it'll be stone cold by the time you call up their site and finish applying.

My focus right now is a little scattered so maybe that is part of my problem. I will continue to plug away and refine my approach as I go. This is all a learning process.