• setup/set up
• backup/back up
• login/log in
• cleanup/clean up

It’s pretty simple to remember the difference and it looks far more professional if you’re able to get it right.

Nouns

The following are nouns:

• setup
• backup
• login
• cleanup

A noun is a word used for a person, place, thing, object etc. So the following sentences would be correct:

• The setup process was ready to go.
• The backups were stored on the server.
• Go to the login screen.
• He needed their cleanup services.

Verbs

• set up
• back up
• log in
• clean up

Verbs convey an action. To any of the above list you could append “to” – “to set up”, “to back up”.

Here’s how you would use the phrases:

• To set up your website, go to the admin screen.
• You should back up your website every day.
• Please log in to get access to support.
• He decided it was time to clean up his desktop.

If you want to go crazy you can use them both in the same sentence:

• Proceed to the setup screen to set up your website.
• When you back up your website, you should store your backups safely.
• Go to the login screen to log in.
• You might need some cleanup services to clean up that hacked site.

Hopefully now I’ll never see another misuse of “setup” again. *cough*

I wanted to write this post because I remember how scared and nervous I was when I began. I was constantly anxious, filled with self-doubt. I had zero confidence, and I looked around me and saw all these successful people and convinced myself that it would never be like that for me. I was sure that there was some magic formula to being a successful freelancer or businessperson, and that for someone like me it just wouldn’t be possible.

But it was. Here’s how I did it:

How it Started

I started out on Elance, a website where clients can post jobs and freelancers can bid on them. At the time I was working in a restaurant doing admin and books, trying to pay my way through my Masters degree. I was totally unhappy in my job and I wanted to have more control over my means of earning a living. With a Philosophy degree and MA, I knew that there wasn’t many jobs out there. And anyway, I hated working for other people. I was sat in my office one day, faffing around, and I came across Elance. I spent ages worrying whether it was a good idea. I was sure that no one would want to hire me. After all, I lacked any portfolio or freelancing experience. Who would want to hire me over people who had loads of experience? In the end I thought “Fuck it, what’s the worst that can happen?” I signed up, made a profile, read a bunch of articles on bidding on Elance, bid for a job and (to my surprise) got it.

Bidding on Elance

My Elance profile

The thing about Elance is that there are always people looking for cheap labour, but equally there are people looking for quality labour who are willing to pay for it. I got my first break from Hampton Catlin, a developer who was looking for some content for a project. Lucky for me my zero star rating made no difference. He said he was “a sucker for giving someone a start” (he’ll always have a special place in my heart for that). Hampton was fun to work with and he loved what I did. This was a massive boost to my confidence and I felt ready to bid for more jobs.

Here are some tips for building your profile and bidding on Elance.

In case you’re interested, here’s that first job I bid for, along with my bid.

Hampton’s job:

I’m looking for a writer with good explanatory writing skills and is very competent with computers. I’m looking to have a series of articles produced that help non-technical users understand about preserving family photos. I am running a website that allows users to upload their family photos for longterm storage and so I’m looking to partner with someone who can produce publicly-viewable articles to drive traffic to the site.

For instance, an article about “How to make images smaller?” or “Why is my photo so huge?” or “Easy ways to cleanup images” or “What is DPI?” or “What DPI should I scan my photos with?”

You need to be computer literate and have Photoshop/Office installed. The articles will need to use both of these bits of software.

Also, I’d love to produce some articles about people losing their family photos or having hard drive crashes. I have a bunch of people to talk to about it off a HARO request.

This project may be a long term project depending on quality and popularity of output!

My bid:

Most of us, at some point in our lives, come across a massive box of family photos that has to be dealt with. Recently my boss dumped a huge box on my desk and told me to start scanning. There were recent photos, photos from the turn of the century, photos from England, photos from Poland. Many of the photos have been sat at the bottom of a box for years, many are damaged and need to be touched up. But I love photographs, I love the nostalgia and sense of the past that you get when going through a box of old photos. Luckily I love Photoshop as well and it is a perfect tool for preserving the past.

Trained in advanced Adobe Photoshop use and a confident writer, I’m the perfect person for this job. Examples of articles that I can produce would be:

- Should I bulk scan my images? – How to batch crop and straighten in Photoshop. – How should I organize and store my images? – What does “resolution” mean anyway? And why is it important? – The importance of backing up. – Using the clone stamp tool to touch up damaged images. – Now I’ve got all these images on my computer on my computer, what can I do with them?

I would absolutely love to write about people who have lost their family photos, whether through hard drive crashes or other means. I’d be happy to carry out interviews to do so. Another angle could be some articles on the phenomenon of boxes of discarded family photos showing up at flea markets and on Ebay.

What I can offer you: 1. High quality, proofread articles; 2. A light and friendly tone that will engage your reader; 3. Articles produced on time, with screen grabs from Photoshop if required; 4. A good working relationship; 5. Full dedication to your project for its duration.

Please refer to my portfolio for examples of my work, and to my website: www.siobhanmckeown.com

The Next Step

About 6 months of doing piecemeal work on Elance for lots of different clients, as well as doing my MA and working a part-time job, I virtually met James Farmer, who needed to blog at WPMU.org. I had been working with WordPress for a while, mostly as a hobby but also building the occasional client site. I knew even then that making good money from writing fiction, or even about arts & humanities, was a dream. Even bestselling authors don’t make that much money. Because so many people want to do it, the pay is incredibly poor for that type of work. But I could, I figured, write about WordPress.

I think that this is something that people who start out freelancing don’t realize. You don’t only have to use your career skills, you can use every skill you’ve got. WordPress was a hobby, it became a job. Don’t be afraid to use anything you have experience in as a freelancing skill. You don’t have to be paid at something to be good at it.   I started blogging for WPMU.org with a few posts a week, but this quickly increased. After a while I was brave enough to ask for a pay raise (which I got) and then got another raise after a post that went viral. At the same time I kept on other clients who were bringing in steady income, most notably writing regular articles for Wix which provided me with steady income for months.

Quitting the Job

The only good thing about my job was the view from the office

The jump from person with job who freelances on the side is a terrifying one. I can’t stress how much I hated my job. It made me totally miserable. I hated going in, I hated my arrogant boss who always thought he knew best. It made me feel like shit to sell my labour power to such an idiot. Despite things going well with freelancing I still needed that security blanket of a steady income. At the time I was working around 50-60 hours a week between freelancing gigs and work.

I had a particularly miserable experience just before Christmas in 2010. My office was at the bottom of a cliff by the sea, with a steep path through some woods going down to the sea front, or a windy road. When it snowed it was a nightmare to get to. We had particularly heavy snow one night. No one could get to work; all the roads were closed. But since I lived nearby I could walk. So walk I did. When I got in I said to my boss that I’d appreciate it if I could leave before it got dark as it was going to snow again and the path had been treacherous on the way down. He fumed at me, saying that he didn’t care about me, that I wasn’t going anywhere and basically I should fuck off to my office. Given that I did admin and there was no admin to be done, I had nothing to do but sit in my office, in the freezing cold (no double glazing), watching out the window as the snow fell over the sea. I nearly walked out.

The next week I went on holiday for three weeks. I freelanced the whole time and was totally flat out. When I went back to work after Christmas I managed 3 days before quitting. It was the biggest relief I’d felt in a long, long time.

Working a job you aren’t fulfilled by, or don’t care about, sucks, but working for an asshole in a job you aren’t fulfilled by is even worse. There are ways out of it. When I started freelancing on a whim I didn’t expect to be able to quit my job; six months later I was out.

Getting Comfortable

For the next year I wrote for WPMU.org, and did other things around Incsub. I found myself getting totally comfortable. I loved working there and having a team of people who were so much fun to be around. There were definite low moments, which people in the WordPress community will know all about, but mostly it was great and I made some fantastic friends.

Eventually, though, I started to get the feeling that I’d traded in having a job for having a job. I was working for one company, with the same group of people, but without any of the benefits of being employed (paid holiday, pension, bank holidays, etc). I wrote this up for Freelance Switch so you can read about it there. When the idea for Words for WP dropped into my lap I thought that maybe it was time to set up my own business. I created a Google form and sent it out to some contacts in the WordPress community. I was surprised when the response from many of them was “when can you start?”

Here and Now

In January 2012 I gave up writing for WPMU.org. It was a really hard thing to do, and I was again terrified that I was going to fail. Working there had become its own safety blanket and it was preventing me from going on and developing my own business and career. I was putting all of my efforts into someone else’s business instead of my own.

Now I focus 100% on Words for WP. I work with some fantastic clients in the world of WordPress and beyond, including ManageWP, OntheGoSystems, Sucuri, Piwik, PressCrew and Event Espresso. My client list is growing all the time and I’m always surprised and pleased at the emails that land in my inbox. I’ve recently employed a sub-contractor and am thinking about incorporating and expanding the business. The baseline $45 per hour I earn is considerably more than the $4.50 per article I got for those restaurant reviews. In fact, I work only 30 hours a week and I earn more than ever.

Highlights

I have a clear memory from when I started freelancing: I discovered Smashing Magazine. I loved everything about it – the detail of the articles, their quality, the overall style. I remember thinking “imagine writing for them – it’s a shame that they’d never want me.” Now I write regularly for them, working with super-lovely WordPress editor Jeff Starr. The day my first post went live on Smashing Magazine it was a real milestone. That gave me the confidence to push even further and I started sending pitches to online magazine that I had always loved but been intimated by, including Cracked, Freelance Switch and, most recently, The Quietus.

Two Years On

One of the most important things that this process has taught me is that if you don’t ask you don’t get. That may seem obvious, but I always used to second-guess people (I still do). I would think “they’ll obviously say “no”, why would they want me when they have all these other amazing, more impressive people?” And, if I’m honest, that feeling has not gone away. My most recent pitches for unsolicited work went to The Quietus about two months ago. I spent days in deep anxiety, with sleepless nights, and had convinced myself that they thought I was a dick. I (really) even dreamed about them thinking I was a dick. When they said they’d publish my stuff I danced around the living room, shocked and elated that someone wanted my writing. That still doesn’t go away, because, after all, I care about what I do. I still fear rejection, and rejection still happens. There is always doubt, but the doubt no longer induces paralysis.

The scariest thing when I started out what seeing all of these people who had already, in my eyes, made it. I had no conception of how to get from where I was to where they were. Even a year ago I saw a massive gulf and that gulf made me anxious. It’s not about getting from here to there in one leap, it’s about small incremental steps. I am naturally an impatient person, I want to be doing something right now, or I figure that it’s not worth doing. But starting out with that one job on Elance was the first step, and the rest went from there. And I’m still stepping, so who knows what will come next. I really don’t feel like I’m at the end, in many ways I’m just beginning.

Your Profile:

• Create a strong profile, being honest about how you are and your skills
• Talk yourself up. Your profile is no place to be modest. Be realistic though, don’t make shit up, just highlight your real achievements.
• Use the Elance tests to showcase your skills
• Make sure to use examples of your work. I had no paid work at the time, so I used some university essays and a magazine article I wrote. If you need to, write something to show off your skills.
• Once you get some jobs, make sure you ask for reviews, and leave reviews in return.

Bidding for Jobs:

• Bid for jobs that are suitable to you and your skills. There’s no point in wasting your time, or the potential client’s
• Read the buyer’s profile and see if you can find anything about them on the internet. Sometimes their username will easily tell you how to find them. For example, Hampton’s user name was catlinsoftware, making him pretty easy to track down.
• Make your opening line grab the buyer. They are going to read potentially hundreds of bids, make sure that your’s stand out.
• Be yourself and get your personality across. Some people are looking for long term relationships and the bid can be just as much about how well they think they’ll work with you as one specific job.
• Think about how you structure your bid. Don’t just brain splurge. I always included information about me, addressed the specific project and how I would carry it out, and then what I could bring to it. These could be in any order.
• Don’t use a template! It’s so obvious when people do. You need to hand craft each bid. It’s a pain, and you’ll write more than you get, but you’ll have a better success rate.
• Be clear about rates and hours. Money can be a thorny issue but it’s best to be up front so you can manage expectations.
• Proof-read. This is particularly important for writers. A grammatical mistake or spelling error in a bid demonstrates that you’re a pretty rubbish writer.

Some more Elance tips:

• Accept that you may be starting out small. After I got lucky with Hampton, I got a job writing 44 restaurant/pub/attraction articles for $200. I like eating out so I figured it would be a good job. It was a painful slog. $4.50 per article and they each took about 30 minutes. I was cursing doing it, but it added to my overall rating and no doubt helped me to get future jobs.
• Maintain relationships with clients – be friendly and helpful. Two of my clients came back to me again and again for work.
• Accept that, after big promises, some jobs will come to nothing. I got a gig writing personalised biographies for an American company who promised me loads of ongoing work. After one job the whole thing seemed to fizzle out.

After a few years of bumbling around being confused, I started writing a book, started my own business, and realised that last week I started reading Philosophy again. And today I started thinking about why I had gotten out of Philosophy in the first place. It’s not like I am any less interested in the questions, or less interested in reading Philosophy.

Then I picked up this on Twitter, which is a discussion between a friend who I knew at Warwick, the writer Scott Bakker and some other Philosophy type people. It reminded me exactly of what I was getting out of. I hate that really small, tight (often pedantic) type of discussion of things that don’t really matter to anyone else except a few people. And that’s what Philosophy is, right?

Well, now I realise, no, not right. That’s not what it is – that’s what it’s been defined in a very narrow, masculine, over-codified, academic world. What I always disliked about Philosophy is the idea that you’ve got to combat with people, all the time. Academic conferences, in Philosophy anyway, although I’m sure in other disciplines too, would always have enthusiastic people presenting their work only to be followed by people trying to pick holes in it. Warwick was bad, although it was usually across the stupid analytic/continental philosophy divide. I heard stories of people who had given papers at Middlesex only to have strips torn off them by members of staff and PhD students.

I’m giving some papers at a Tech conference in Holland this week and I have none of the same worries about presenting. I gave a paper on Deleuze & Leibniz once and was terrified of the questions. I was worried I’d say something wrong, knew that there would be people there ready to trip me up. I’m quite looking forward to questions at the end of my WordPress papers.

Seriously, Philosophy may be populated with geeks, but it’s not lacking in testosterone. The thing about academic philosophy is that the stage has already been set, and it’s a male stage. If you’re a woman and you enter into it you’re doing it on masculine terms. You’ve already lost – game over. Maybe some people are comfortable with that, fine, I never was. Maybe that’s why while there are so many women who do Philosophy as a BA and MA, the numbers to drop off toward PhD and then in academic careers.

My husband asked me this evening if I’d ever felt discriminated against as a woman. I said no, I didn’t think so. But when I think about it, while I was never personally discriminated against, I was structurally discriminated against. You have got to enter into those masculine power structures to do well – there isn’t really any other way. Of course, you can, and I could have, but I was never comfortable with it. And if you try to be part of the academic philosophy world without entering into combat mode you’re seen as weak or flakey. And it’s not just men who see you like that that. Women who have acceded to the masculine mode of doing things think that too – are even more likely to say it.

I guess another way is to go down the feminist theory route, which wasn’t really my thing since what I loved in philosophy was ontology and ethics. And anyway, just because I’m a woman doesn’t mean that I have to do feminist theory.

There were few of the men who I met who I thought were sexist (though there were a few); the methodology itself is sexist. There isn’t room for any other mode of doing Philosophy. It’s as if combat is the only way to do it. It’s not. Philosophy doesn’t have to be narrowed down to the myopic world of academia. In the end, I’m glad it was academia that I gave up, instead of giving up Philosophy. I didn’t accede to the masculine power structures that were being enforced, and I’m sure that I have thrived much more outside of them. Maybe I’ll even start writing a bit about Philosophy again

This is the first time that I’ll be speaking at a WordCamp so I’m a little bit nervous. And I’m not speaking once, I’m speaking twice!

Do’s and Don’ts for WordPress Startups

Bowe Frankema suggested that I do this presentation. It builds on articles I’ve been writing for Smashing Magazine over the past few months. I spent a lot of time emailing people who run WordPress businesses and it’s been great to use these contacts to put together a (hopefully) helpful list of advice for people about to start their own WordPress startup. It also includes some advice from me, that I’ve learned from starting up Words for WP.  They’ve put me on the keynote track - EEEP!

Writing Docs Like a Boss

Since my own WordPress superpower is writing documentation, I also thought it would be a good idea to say a bit about that. I’ve never seen a presentation about documentation at a WordCamp before and it’s actually a really important part of producing a successful WordPress product or service. In the presentation I’ll talk about how you can produce really great docs for a WordPress product. The title comes from a dumb thing that Bowe Frankema says all the time, then I was told by Paul Gibbs that it’s from this:

I’ll be writing up both of these as articles for Smashing Magazine so even if you can’t make it to Utrecht you can find out what I’ve been talking about (minus the silly clanger-voice that I have).

I’ll also be writing a piece for Smashing Mag called “Diary of a WordCamp” so I’ll be doing some roving reporting, taking photos of people and generally trying to keep track of everything that’s going on. If you’re there make sure you say hello!