Demand Studios Work Challenge – June 9, 2010

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I haven’t updated you all on the Demand Studios Work Challenge for a while, since I’ve been busily going through books and planning out my copywriting career. The books I’m mainly referring to are The Well-Fed Writer: Financial Self-Sufficiency as a Commercial Freelancer in Six Months or Less by Peter Bowerman, Start & Run a Copywriting Business by Steve Slaunwhite, Secrets of a Freelance Writer, Third Edition: How to Make $100,000 a Year or More by Robert Bly, and The Wealthy Freelancer: 12 Secrets to a Great Income and an Enviable Lifestyle by Steve Slaunwhite, Pete Savage, and Ed Gandia. I’ll be talking more about these books later on as I get started in my copywriting business. As I’m just getting started, I’ve been devoting most of my time to books and my portfolio.

Since the days have become a little less hectic, I’m able to continue blogging. However, I’ve been writing less frequently for Demand Studios because I’ve made my copywriting business my first priority. From here on I’m only going to write one or two articles a day as I continue the Demand Studios Work Challenge.

Since I last updated this blog on my Demand Studios progress, my scores haven’t changed much. I received 10 approved rewrites and 14 approved no rewrites last month, with no additional rejections. This month I only wrote 3 articles so far, with one approved without a rewrite, another approved with a rewrite, and another article abandoned because the copy editor asked to rewrite the entire article due to a disagreement (and I wasn’t about to do that again and risk a rejection).

As far as my scorecard is concerned, I noticed that I’m receiving a constant score of 3 for grammar and a score ranging from 3 to 4 for research. Since I’m trying to raise that grammar score to 4, I did a lot of analyzing and reading about what could be preventing my score from increasing. I like to compare my revisions in the “Published Work” section to see what copy editors took out or edited. I think the main thing that’s killing my score is my complex sentences. I’m going to try to write more simple sentences to see if that does the trick. My overviews might also be lacking, since I often have trouble creating compelling ones. Though I read this article before, I decided to give Why Your Overview Matters (And How to Make it Good) another look. Once that was done, I realized my overviews didn’t exactly start with catchy phrases or follow catchy phrases with interesting facts. I’ll spend more time on my overviews to see if it makes a difference in my grammar score.

I noticed that, as long as I cite at least 2 or 3 sources in my article body, I maintain a steady 4 as my research score. Going through the Content Rating Checklist in the Training Camp section of the Resource Center, I might be able to increase that 4 to a 5 on my scorecard just by working on creating a compelling overview and making each step as informative as I can, while continuing to cite sources. I’ll do a few tests to see how it goes.

Ultimate Demand Studios Work Goals

Maintain a score of 4.5 or higher in Grammar and Research on the Scorecard (now at 3.2 – 3.6).
Reach an assignment limit of 35 or greater (now at an assignment limit of 10).
Finish articles on topics of expertise in less than 30 minutes without doing rewrites.
Receive my first special assignment.