I have followed and enjoyed your contributions to HN from your old username days. Please take this as commentary from a friend who wishes you the best and sincerely wants you to succeed.

I am the kind of person who would hire freelance writers. (Unfortunately the subject matter is arcane tax law so . . . .)

The website does not present an image of a professional writer. You do not need to know how to do web design or what “pro” looks like. Go hit Teh Google, find someone who is writing web content for a living. Be sure it is someone you want to be like, and copy that person’s web design. Sorry web designers. That’s a typo. I misspelled “copy” when I meant “use as inspiration”. This is essential. You website does not mark you as someone to take seriously. From your history, I know you are a serious person.

Writers write. You must write. A lot. You have a blog. Write for your blog. Your potential employers will get their first impressions from the visuals (site design) and from reading what they find on your site. So. Your job is to blog in the dark, all alone, for the most important customer in the world — the HN user formerly known as Mz. The payoff will come.

Ask yourself why people would pay you to write for them. They don’t care about you. They care about themselves. We humans are all alike in that way. People will hire you because they can draw a straight line from giving you money for words to a result: organic search results. It is their job to turn search results into money. So make your website rank. Your own website’s ranking is your proof of concept. Do this by writing about one topic and one topic only on your blog. Might I suggest . . . how to use freelance writers to increase SEO results? If you want to write about anything else at all, do it elsewhere. I personally would not put out anything overtly political, as a side comment. People are not open-minded and tolerant. Especially in tech. And education. And California. Note-I have not seen you be overtly political but I would keep rigorously on target. Business only on the main site, innocuous elsewhere.

Do this a lot. My friend Chris taught me the concept of brute-force SEO. Write about stuff. A lot. The same stuff. Two times a day. Keep it interesting, but the person visiting your site today is not likely to go back two months into the archives and say “Oh, she’s repeating herself!” Actually, that’s a whole series of posts right there, isn’t it? Why repetition is fabulous for SEO. Because a writer is needed to subtly reword the text in order to keep Teh Google happy.

Ditch the Patreon. You are either a business or an object of charity. Be a business. Aim for the explicit exchange of value for value. This is the only way in which you will be able to test what you are doing. The moment of truth is when the person enters a Visa card number on your site and pays you. If that does not happen, you must treat the result as entirely your responsibility. Being an object of charity obfuscates away that clarity. Don’t blame the potential customer who didn’t buy: you selected the wrong target audience, not the buyer is sexist, for example. Or your pricing was wrong. Customers decide value, you decide price. A mismatch in the customer’s head rules against you.

So that’s the best I can do on a Saturday night with a head full of sinus infection and antibiotics.

- steal a design for a website.

- blog religiously about one topic and one topic only.

- that one topic should be proof of concept for what you are selling. Hint: it’s easiest to do when you take the position of trying to make your reader smart. An educated customer is the best customer.

- be a business, and use customer response as a way to fine-tune your product offerings.

This is not a fast way to glory and money. But it worked for me.

I think the fast way to glory and money might involve website redesign and some blog posts (20?) so a visitor sees credibility. Then you will need to do cold calls to potential employers or use the job boards.