• Overview: Hiring Content Writers
• Part One: Finding Writers (this section)
• Part Two - Creating a Detailed Job Description
• Part Three: Screening Candidates
• Part Four - Working with Writers
• Part Five - Terminating Writers

There are thousands of working freelance writers in the world, but if you’ve never hired one before, you don’t know where to find them. In this section, I describe the places where I sought writers and which sources were fruitful.

Highlights

• Is It Keto continued its streak of growth, with a 72% jump in revenue to an all-time high of $389 for August.
• Given that Is It Keto is doing better than any of my other projects, I decided to stop ignoring it.
• I finally got a high-ranking domain to link to Is It Keto, but the experience soured me on guest posts.
• Zestful had its best month ever, earning $728 in revenue.

Goal grades

At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish. Here’s how I did against those goals:

I derive immense satisfaction from outsourcing my chores. All of my friends have heard me encourage them to place a higher value on their free time and delegate their errands. Few of them heed my advice, and it’s probably because they know about the time I paid someone $96 to clean a $39 keyboard.

Highlights

• I’m shelving What Got Done, as customers seem uninterested in the idea.
• Zestful has become my greatest challenge in not sweating the small stuff.
• Is It Keto continues growing in the background, with a 22% increase in revenue and a 35% rise in traffic.

Goal grades

Conduct five calls with new customers

• Result: Conducted nine calls and meetings (five for What Got Done, three for Zestful, one for a project idea)
• Grade: A+

I got almost twice as many interviews as I thought I would for and improved my skills at customer conversations.

A quick, practical guide to interviewing customers during the early stages of a new product idea.

I expected basic advice about how you shouldn’t ask customers leading questions, but Fitzpatrick goes much more in-depth. The book made me recognize weaknesses in my approach to interviewing users and provided interesting perspectives about obtaining unbiased, actionable feedback from customers.