• Home
  • /
  • Blog
  • /
  • 4 Keys to Growing Your Freelance Business

4 Keys to Growing Your Freelance Business


You can earn money as a proofreader, but you need to know there’s no trick or magic pill to growing your proofreading business or ANY business, for that matter.

There is plenty of hard work and dedication, though. I‘ve never met anyone who said it wasn’t worth it, so if you’re one of the few who are willing to earn their own success, keep reading.

To really grow a proofreading business, you need more than just great proofreading skills. That’s why we teach our students not just how to do the work, but how to get the work, too because being successful involves so much more than hanging a sign on the door that says “PROOFREADER.” Anyone who tells you otherwise probably isn’t growing a successful business :-)

So what do you need to grow? I‘ve narrowed it down to four “keys” check em out!

RELATED: Step-by-Step Tutorial to Building Your First Money-Making Website

1. Always Keep Learning

You need to commit to being a lifelong learner. We are ALL works in progress, and despite how old you are and how much experience you have, no one knows it all. When you work with words, too, things aren’t always black and white.

Great proofreaders, for example, know that language evolves and punctuation rules can change. To have an edge, we need to be on top of those changes. Read motivational books, invest in courses and seminars, follow blogs, visit forums anything you can get your hands on to improve your skills and gain knowledge will help you grow.

Books to Grow Your Business

BOOKS are an excellent, low-cost way to keep learning! Here are some of my favorites lately:

  • The Best Punctuation Book, Period.  by June Casagrande: An excellent tool for understanding the differences between sets of punctuation rules in different industries. It does not go into punctuation for court reporters; however, it sheds light on the fact that punctuation is an art, and *GASP* no one knows everything about it 🙂
  • The Elephants of Style: A Trunkload of Tips on the Big Issues and Gray Areas of Contemporary American English by Bill Walsh: I love this book for the same reason I love the one above, Bill Walsh acknowledges the gray areas!! There’s a reason English classes in school are now called Language Arts (and not Language Sciences).
  • A Dash of Style: The Art and Mastery of Punctuation by Noah Lukeman: I love how this book, again, likens punctuation to art: in particular, a symphony! Lukeman has a knack for helping punctuation make sense in people’s heads, and I especially recommend his book to anyone who struggles with the less common punctuation marks, such as the dash or semicolon.

RELATED: How to Become a Proofreader

2. Market Your Business

4-keys-to-building-proofreading-businessMarketing is an ever-evolving beast. What works one year may not work great the next year. What works in one industry will flounder in another. That’s just life, and we’ve got to grow and change with it if we don’t want to be left behind.

Social media is the most modern tool we have for marketing… but it’s not as simple as just getting on Facebook.

For business marketing, LinkedIn is actually the best social media platform for growing your proofreading business. If I had to pick just one social media platform to grow my business, it would be LinkedIn.

Fellow super-nerd Melonie Dodaro (author of the #1 best-selling social media book The LinkedIn Code) is my go-to guru for mastering LinkedIn. In fact, when I took Melonie’s master class, I learned four major mistakes I was making on my LinkedIn profile. FOUR! It physically hurts to think about how that may have stunted my business growth. But thanks to Melonie, they’re fixed, and my profile’s working like a well-oiled machine. 

Not feeling particularly savvy in this space? You can always hire a LinkedIn marketing agency or take our Ideas to Impact course and learn everything you need to know about social media marketing for your business

Check Your Marketing Mindset

It’s not just the social media stuff that makes your business grow it’s your own outlook, too. Having a giving attitude vs. a taking attitude when it comes to your business will make a noticeable difference in your business growth. A taking attitude (which you don’t want) means your primary focus is on YOU: how to get work, how to make money, how to find more clients all those verbs I underlined are very “you“-focused. If you make your marketing effort client-focused and adopt a giving attitude, your primary focus would be how to serve your clients, how to help them become better, and how to provide a better experience. See the difference? All client-focused verbs.

This means when you’re writing content on your LinkedIn profile and/or website, make sure your language focuses more on the benefits your potential customers/clients would experience by working with you not on what you can do for them. The focus is always on them.

Bonus Tip: Clean Up Your Social Media Photos

You can use PicMonkey to add a little extra oomph to your images on Facebook.

Take this image:

PicMonkey Editing for Proofreading Business

See how I took a plain ol’ profile picture and added a little extra to make it more useful? You can do that, too, using PicMonkey.

3. Build Your Web Presence

Cold, hard truth: IF YOU HAVE A BUSINESS, YOU NEED A WEBSITE.

Funny story: I stumbled across a freelance job board recently that actually forbids people from posting links to their websites within the board because it’s an unfair advantage to people who don’t have websites.”

I was like, Um…

NO.

If you want to grow a business, there are no excuses for not having a real website. It’s not hard, and it’s not expensive to build a good-looking one. A website adds credibility to your business and to you as a professional. In the online world we live in, it’s really become a common courtesy to have a web presence.

Do I Have to Pay for a Website?

Technically, no.

You can build free websites that have subdomains (like caitlintheproofreader.wordpress.com), but bear in mind: these are free for a reason. The subdomain does detract from the professional look, plus you’re left with a very visible ad for the website builder on your page: two things that, for a very reasonable cost per year, can be gone completely. In fact, a real domain costs between just $6 and $15 per year to own and hosting is between $4 and $8 per month that’s less than the cost of a meal at McDonald’s! And in a market where it pays to stand out, I‘ll take all the credibility boost I can get. I recommend Bluehost for web hosting and domains. Their 24/7 customer service rocks, and I LOVE the easy website builder.

Bonus Tip: Use Our Step-by-Step Guide

Check out our easy, step-by-step guide to building a professional website on the cheap! If that totally freaks you out, Weebly can help you create a professional-looking website even if you have no prior technical website-building knowledge. Build a website, blog, or eCommerce site on their easy-to-use drag and drop interface without breaking a sweat.

4. Make a Plan for Success

We’ve all heard the saying, If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.”

Well, it’s true! One thing I‘m really working hard on this year is to be more mindful of my goals each day. Every day, I‘m making it a point to determine one reasonably achievable task to accomplish on that day.

Some examples of my “reasonably achievable tasks” are:

  • Read 100 pages before two o’clock
  • Write 1,000 words for a new article
  • Create 3 new images for the blog
  • Film new tutorial video for the course

Assigning myself just one of these tasks a day helps me avoid becoming a workaholic there’s no reason I need to force myself to do all four of those tasks in one day. Doing too much too fast can negatively affect my mood and my work quality. If I‘m in the zone and I can do all four tasks in one day, great. If I can’t, I‘m not going to beat myself up.

Another thing I‘m doing is using the Dailygreatness Business Planner. What I love about this particular planner is that it’s helping me get real with myself about what I want to happen with my business, and it guides me in determining the action steps I need to take to get there. Of course, it keeps me organized too. I actually almost didn’t buy it because it was $45, BUT I have to say I‘m glad I did because I‘m 100% convinced that directly because of it, I‘ve more than made that in return. And of course, it’s tax deductible (yay!).

Proofreading Business Plan
The action-taking is built in. I SO NEED THAT!!

How Do I Manage Accounting?

Not only did I used to use Excel to create my invoices manually, I also used to be terrible at tracking expenses (as in, it didn’t happen!). Now, I have my credit card and business checking account attached to my FreshBooks account, so that makes accounting a lot easier, and I create all my invoices there as well. It’s cut down on the time I used to spend tracking down clients for payments, too, because FreshBooks allows clients to pay online with just a few clicks. Yes, there are fees attached to that, but the fees are tax deductible and I get paid faster so it’s worth it :-)

Bonus Tip: Have an Eye-Catching Logo

Don’t think a logo is important? There are many businesses that we can easily recognize by their logo alone. (Think Nike, Walmart, McDonalds, WWF, etc.) We are all exposed to thousands of brand messages per day so it is important that your brand stands out! You can check out sites like Fiverr and Upwork to find freelance graphic designers who would love to create your logo! 

Your Turn!

What are you doing to grow your proofreading business? Share in the comment section below!

[Disclosure: some of the links in this post are affiliate links. I only recommend things I‘ve read, used, or tried myself, so I know they work!]


Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked

  1. I love tip #1! I’ve just begun working on the course, but this is a philosophy I apply to my life already. I once joked that I’d be a perpetual student, and turns out I was right!

  2. This is such a valuable post! I am so grateful for the suggestions because I know that you have had success incorporating these tools into your business practice. I am looking forward to beginning the course soon.

  3. Thank you, Caitlin for sharing with us your in-depth knowledge. Your time and effort is much appreciated. I am learning so much from your FREE course. I can just imagine how informative the full course must be.

    As for learning every day, this is fun.

    To improve my business I think what I personally will work on my business communication skills,

    1. That’s awesome. Business communication should probably be on this list!! And you are very welcome; I enjoy sharing this with you all! I appreciate you taking the time to leave a comment, too!

  4. As usual, all really useful content. I especially liked #4. I can get sidetracked with all of the different things going on in my life. Having a daily goal, broken down into achievable chunks, is a great idea!

    1. I have a “bare minimum” task to complete each day. I break up what I want to do over the week into bite-sized chunks. Totally achievable mini-goals all add up to one HUGE accomplishment 😀

  5. Thank you, Caitlin! Wonderful article, and I love your generous spirit 🙂

  6. This article is great! This year I’m determined to create an online income large enough to quit my retail job. I’m getting a website soon, and also plan to write ebooks. The book recommendations are greatly appreciated! I will have to get them as they will help with my writing goals.

    1. Hi, Veronica!! So glad you liked it! And what an awesome goal — it’s totally achievable with this grand thing we call the internet 😀

  7. Caitlyn, I took your free course, I got my IPad Mini 2, now I just have to save up to take your whole course. Unfortunately I have been out of work for 6 weeks so money is tight, but I hope to put a little away at a time to take your course. I also purchased Court Reporting by Margie Wakeman Wells. I got 3 books out of my purchase and find it very useful. Can’t wait to take your course.

  8. Great informative post, Caitlin! I had my jaw surgery on the 12th, and I’m eager to get busy marking up practice transcripts in Module 5. I plan to work through those 3000 pages as I recover. 🙂

  9. So much useful information!
    I just made my first image using PicMonkey as I followed you through the video. You have such great ideas of how to make posts engaging and useful.
    Really appreciate it!
    Robin

  10. Wow Caitlin! My head is spinning and its just day 4/5 of the free course. I just want to add that your knowledge and ability share it is remarkable. One of my downfalls to really getting going on new things is fear. I am getting better with that. I believe I will be fine with all of your support should I start this journey.

    1. You are not alone!! We all battle fear when starting something new… mainly because we don’t know what we’re doing yet 🙂

  11. The link for the business planner does not work.
    Dailygreatness Business Planner
    Just wanted to let you know. Thanks!

    1. Thanks for letting us know. We will get that fixed ASAP. 🙂

  12. I love your suggestions! I have just started the course but am really excited to build my own website again but with the aim of the website being a working website, The last website I built was strictly a class project. Websites are very easy to make with all the assistance you can find online. Good luck everyone.

  13. Thank you for this excellent article. I am an experienced editor and proofreader of fiction and nonfiction books, and elearning courseware and training manuals … trying to figure out how to grow my business. I do not have a website yet.

{"email":"Email address invalid","url":"Website address invalid","required":"Required field missing"}

Posts You Might Like

2K Shares
Share
Pin2K