 Use social media to promote your proofreading business.Here at The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course, our aim is not only to show you how to become a proofreader, it is to show you precisely how you can make money proofreading. Depending on your goals and commitment, proofreading can become your sole source of income or it can be a lucrative side-hustle.
Let’s have a recap on where we’re up to:
In this article, I’ll address Step 3 from our Where to Start list of steps that will give you concrete solutions on your journey to creating your own successful proofreading business. OK. Here we go. Step 3. Sign-up with every appropriate social media channel you can find. The way to get this right, is to only sign-up with the most appropriate social media channels for what you’re trying to achieve. So, if you’re trying to promote your online proofreading business, there are clearly going to be social media channels that are more suitable for you to have a presence on than others. Put another way, don’t think that you’ve got to sign up with every social media site, regardless of the number of people on them! That’s not to say that you shouldn’t have a presence on multiple, or all social media sites if they have an appropriate audience, but do try to be selective. Take for example Tik Tok. It allows its users to create their own short video clips and then share them. Despite having an impressive 1.2 billion users worldwide (and counting), it’s highly unlikely that these same users are going to respond well to your proofreading business, even if you’ve gone to the trouble of making a cool short video! The point is, your target audience is much more likely to have a presence on other social media platforms. The 16 most popular social networks worldwide*
This list may well represent some of the most popular social media platforms, and the ones to promote your proofreading business are definitely amongst them, but going back to that word ‘appropriate’ many of these platforms will have little impact on your business, as their popular user bases are unlikely to be your target demographic, unless of course you’re looking to promote your proofreading business in China or to Gen Z! (it’s okay, I had to look that up too!) So how do I know where to promote my proofreading business? Like I said, not all social media platforms are going to be appropriate or lend themselves to promoting your proofreading business, but let's take a brief look some that could. The biggest and most far-reaching social media platform of them all. First things first: Create a business page. For a professional Facebook presence, you should have a separate business page from your personal page for your proofreading business. Use the many settings options to include as much information about your business as possible, especially important is your contact information. With an active user base of over 2.4 billion, you shouldn't have any trouble getting a 'like' or a 'follow' from your posts. Always try to be engaging and helpful when you post, remember that social media is all about building relationships and not all about selling. LinkedIn: Maybe not the biggest, but LinkedIn is all about business promotion, recruitment and networking, and having a LinkedIn profile could definitely benefit your proofreading business. Above all else, LinkedIn is an environment where aspiring business professionals and potential business partners go to build their client base and their peer to peer network. It's the perfect showcase for your proofreading skills and services. You should consider creating a LinkedIn company page for your proofreading business. You can set up a business page and as you complete the Résumé section of your personal LinkedIn profile, your company page will be automatically linked to the Résumé in your profile. With your profile set, you can start actively marketing yourself and your business to other LinkedIn members because in all honesty, that’s what they’re expecting (unlike Facebook). Twitter: According to Twitter ‘It all starts with a Tweet’. Twitter is a microblogging and social networking platform where users post (Tweet) messages (of up to 280 characters), videos or both, and it has the potential to drive thousands of targeted customers to your proofreading business. You can also ‘Follow’ people or organisations that you hope to work with and be alerted every time they Tweet. Equally, your own followers are alerted when you Tweet too. Despite having an active user base seven times smaller than Facebook, Twitter punches well above its weight in terms of public exposure, not least because it’s the go-to place for every news service in the world who are all monitoring Twitter for trending and viral tweets that have breaking news potential. As with all of the other social media platforms, getting your settings and profile right will pay huge dividends, and once again as with the other platforms, your posts should be engaging, helpful and worthy of a like, retweet or fingers crossed, five minutes of fame with a viral post. YouTube: Maybe not the most obvious channel to promote your proofreading business, but a great asset is your own YouTube channel. Once you remind yourself that a big goal of using social media is to be interesting, engaging and helpful, it shouldn’t take much to get you inspired. It wouldn't be difficult to create a compilation of videos or slideshows of the most common grammatical errors that a proofreader encounters. YouTube is also a valuable source of backlinks to your proofreading website, never post a video without including Google-loving links back to your site! To conclude, choose the social media platforms that have a natural fit with your business and your message, and whichever ones you do sign up with to promote your proofreading business, remember to link them to the social buttons on your own website! As ever, the choice is yours but go ahead and get stuck in, you won’t regret it, and once you do, you’ll be the proud owner of a successful proofreading business much sooner than you think. Coming soon… Step 4. Write, post and blog like crazy! (and the best places to do it!) Bye for now. Jeff Full disclosure & disclaimer… Mike and I are not affiliated in any way to the social media sites listed above, other than to have our own business pages on some of platforms listed. This information is presented without condition or for personal profit in the hope that, having bought The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course you can make money proofreading without delay. *The 16 most popular social networks worldwide as of October 2019 as compiled by Statista
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 A short proofreading exercise.This week, I’ve put together a little proofreading exercise for you. It’s a very brief summary of the early years of William Blake’s life. Set your beady eyes to work and see if you can spot the errors and issues. As with all proofreading activities, I strongly recommend you print this out and read from a hard copy. You can just cut and paste the paragraphs below into your word-processing application. William Blake was born in 1757 in Soho, London. In 1772, he became an apprentice engraver under the tutelage of James Basire. At the end of this seven-year apprenticeship, Blake became a student at the Royal Academy, where he studied for six years. During this time, he became friends with the artists John Flaxman, Thomas Stothard and George Cumberland, and married Catherine Boucher. There are only two errors here.
Well done if you spotted both errors. See you next time. Mike  It's Time to Get Your Proofreading Business Online and Start Making Money: Create a Website! Our aim is to help you make money proofreading.
Let’s have a recap on where we’re up to…
Okay, this is Step 2 of our Where to Start list of steps that will give you concrete solutions on your journey to creating your own successful proofreading business. So, why create a website for your proofreading business? As I mentioned in my initial post (here if you want to refresh your memory…) the obvious benefit of having your own website is that you’re in complete control of how you communicate with your target audience to sell your products or proofreading services. Your own website is a shop window to an ever-expanding online community, which also happens to include the very people you want to advertise your services to. Consider this: when was the last time you leafed through a printed copy of the Yellow Pages? No, I can’t remember either. The fact is, almost all searches are conducted online, and if you don’t have an online presence, all of your efforts to become a proofreader will be wasted. Just some of the reasons why you should create your own website:
Despite these obvious benefits of having your own website, I also understand why many people avoid doing so. It’s all too easy to feel overwhelmed at the prospect of learning yet another new discipline, especially if you’re fresh from working your way through The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course. And hiring a professional can be just as daunting and expensive. The key is to do some research and break the process down into manageable steps. If you stick around, that’s exactly what I’ll try to do. Hopefully you’re now fully on board with the idea that in order to take your new proofreading business forward, you really should have your own website, so let’s start with the most cost-effective route to making this a reality: Free web hosting and free website builders Yes, they do exist, and they’re an excellent place to start if this is your first foray into setting up a website. Most of these free website builders offer a range of solutions that provide template-driven designs and drag and drop designs that make the process pretty straightforward. Below is a list of fourteen popular free website builders which include free web hosting. (They’re all .com if you’re copy and pasting.)
As ever, before you jump in, let me make a couple of things clear from the outset. Whilst all of these website creation options offer ‘free’ web hosting and in most cases ‘free’ site builders, not all of these options may be acceptable to you for your first proofreading business website. For example, just about all of the free options are indeed ‘free’ in than you won’t part with a single penny but the name of the website host will remain in your website title. Using Wix.com as an example, you may want to call your site ‘abc-proofreader.com’ but a ‘free’ website set-up with Wix.com would become ‘abc-proofreader.wixsite.com’. I fully understand that this may not be acceptable for many people, especially if you’re trying to convey a professional persona, but if this is your first exposure to website creation, this is without doubt a fantastic opportunity to experiment on someone else’s dime. Whichever site you choose from the list above, you’ll find all of them provide templates or themes in one form or another to help you with your design choices. Going back to Wix.com as a further example, they offer a superb automated set-up assistant called Wix ADI, which actually creates a site for you based on a series of questions and answers that you’re guided through in the setup. Whilst I’ve referred to Wix in my examples, please go ahead and take a look at all of the sites I’ve listed, as you’ll only find one you’re comfortable with by signing up and trying them out. It’s also worth keeping in mind, that having set up your proofreading website with any or all of the free website builders listed, you’re not obliged to publish or make them live, until you’re good and ready to do so. Once you get to the stage where you’ve got your site set up and designed to your liking, you can go ahead and publish it (for free!). If, however, having the webhost's name visible in your domain name bothers you, you can very easily upgrade to a paid plan with all of these free website providers. In doing so, you will remove the name of the host from your website title. In the case of Wix.com, upgrading to a paid plan, for a small monthly premium, allows you to add your own domain name, thereby removing ‘wixsite’ from your site name and giving you the desired professional look for your proofreading business. This principle of having the webhosts name visible in the website url is more or less universal amongst all webhosts offering ‘free website creation’ but can almost always be dropped by upgrading to their paid plans. In fact, I’m happy to reveal that this was the very evolution of this website https://www.proofreading-course.com/ It started life as a free website on Weebly, and was upgraded to a paid plan at a later date and remains a Weebly powered site today. The bottom line is that you can have a very professional website to promote your proofreading business for absolutely no cost whatsoever. And all of the free website builders listed above are very scalable too once your proofreading business grows, and most are very intuitive and easy to use even for beginners. Finally, a little bit about WordPress… I may have placed it at the bottom of the list above, and mentioning it at the end of this article, but WordPress is by no means a last choice, far from it. Of the entire internet, WordPress powers over a third of it, with approximately 455,000,000 websites built on a WordPress platform right now. Don’t be fooled in to thinking that it’s just a blogging platform because that would be to overlook one of the best website builders out there, and they too have both free and paid plans. Having created websites with WordPress, Shopify and Weebly my own preference is WordPress without a doubt. However, depending on how much functionality you want on your website, it’s probably fair to say that you’ll have a steeper learning curve with WordPress if you’re a beginner. As ever, the choice is yours but go ahead and get stuck in, you won’t regret it, and once you do, you’ll be the proud owner of a proofreading business website much sooner than you think. Coming soon… Step 3. Sign up with every appropriate social media channel. Bye for now. Jeff Full disclosure & disclaimer… Mike and I are not affiliated in any way with the free website building sites listed above, though we do have first-hand knowledge of Weebly, Shopify & WordPress. This information is presented without condition or for personal profit in the hope that, having bought The No-Nonsense Proofreading Course you can make money proofreading without delay.  A Proofreader’s Guide to the Semicolon Last week we looked at precisely what I meant by ‘a proofreader’s perspective’ on grammar. You can read that post here. If time’s a little tight, here’s the ‘nutshell’ version. A proofreader should only concern themselves with the correct/incorrect uses of grammar, language and punctuation. You are not trying to improve a piece of writing – that would be an editor’s task – you are there to highlight errors and give instructions as to how they should be corrected. We’re looking at the semicolon today. We’re going to be considering it objectively. Wrong and right. If we were to bring our subjective opinion to bear on a piece of writing containing a semicolon, we could find ourselves in the middle of a heated debate that’s been raging for decades. For example, this is what the great novelist Kurt Vonnegut had to say about semicolons in his 2005 memoir ‘A Man Without a Country’: “Here is a lesson in creative writing. The first rule: do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you’ve been to college.” The crime writer Donald Westlake (who, under the pseudonym Richard Stark, penned the incomparable ‘Parker’ novels) is a keen advocate of the semicolon. However, in defending his use of the semicolon in ‘The Man with the Getaway Face’, he acknowledges that its use is more as a stylistic device than as a grammatical necessity. In response to an editor removing the semicolon from a sentence, he says, “Breaking the offending sentence into two sentences is grammatically correct but… rhythmically wrong.”
Two exceptional writers. Two completely different views on the value of the semicolon. If, as a proofreader, you get yourself in the middle of that little debate, you’re going to lose a lot of valuable proofreading time! So, we’re going to be looking at how to spot:
Let’s start with the first of those: the inaccurately employed semicolon. Before we can do that, we need to be clear about the purpose and ‘correct’ use of the semicolon. A semicolon is used to connect two related but independent clauses. In other words, two clauses that can stand alone, separated by a period but that are so closely related there’s an almost intuitive urge to reduce the length of the pause between them. Examples of Semicolon Usage I hate ice cream. It makes my brain hurt. I hate ice cream; it makes my brain hurt. Both of the above are correct. There is an argument to be had about which is better, but that’s someone else’s problem. The following, however, is incorrect: I hate ice cream; because it makes my brain hurt. The use of a conjunction and a semicolon is plain wrong. Put your red pen to work. There is no debate to be had. If you see a semicolon immediately followed by and, but, or, nor, for, so or yet, it's wrong. The following is also incorrect: I hate ice cream; elephants are my favourite mammal. There is no connection at all between these two clauses, beyond the notion of likes and dislikes. That being said, if this is a work of fiction and the writer is trying to demonstrate the character’s terrible concentration span, it might actually be a very effective device! This is why proofreading fiction or, worse, poetry can be a bit of a nightmare. The following is… debatable: I hate ice cream; my favourite food is bananas. In this case, I would argue the two clauses are not closely enough related to warrant a semicolon. The writer might argue otherwise (she’s talking about food likes and dislikes). In this case, we move on. There’s no error here (no conjunction for example) and the clauses are sort of related. It’s for the writer and editor to fight this one out. Now let’s look at where the absence of a semicolon can be problematic. We’re talking about lists here. Or, more to the point, lists which containing additional information that requires the use of a comma. Examples of Semicolon Usage in Lists My favourite writers are Alan Moore, the author of the Swamp Thing comics and the novels Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem, Stephen King, whose written too many books to mention and William Blake, English poet, painter, engraver and visionary. Now, this sentence can be read and easily understood but it’s grammatically problematic. It should read: My favourite writers are Alan Moore, the author of the Swamp Thing comics and the novels Voice of the Fire and Jerusalem; Stephen King, whose written too many books to mention; and William Blake, English poet, painter, engraver and visionary. In other words, if we’re listing things and at the same time using commas to insert additional information, the semicolon comes into play as a kind of ‘super-comma’. Also, it’s worth noting that when being employed as a super-comma, the semicolon can precede a conjunction. Another example J.K. Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter Farewell Tour’ will visit the following cities: Louisville, Kentucky; Huntsville, Alabama; Columbia, South Carolina; Wilmington, North Carolina; and Atlanta, Georgia. Takeaway As a proofreader, you will need to make for deletion:
You will need to add a semicolon:
And that’s it, other than to say: I’m not a fan of semicolons; they’re a pain the backside. See you next time. If you liked this article, please share! |
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