My Invisible Website

I like to think that I’m a pretty good judge of my own character. That is if you were to ask me to describe myself and one of my friends to describe me, both of our descriptions would be very similar. My view of myself is neither substantially better nor worse than someone else’s might be.

I know where my strengths lie and where I could use a little work.  I’m funny, I’m smart, I can write like a beast, and I’m a veritable cavalcade of useless facts and information. But the more I write and try to let my freelance flag fly, the more I realize that I am terrible at marketing and self-promotion.

I can build a fancy website, but then I just cross my fingers and hope the internet fairies take care of the rest. I don’t know how to go about getting people to visit the site. And then someone showed me how to do a status check of my site. And it turns out that the internet basically doesn’t know I exist. Or maybe it was just the search engines. Either way, if someone is looking for a freelancer in the greater Los Angeles area, they aren’t going to find me.

Fortunately, an opportunity has arisen to work with a woman who knows everything about everything that I don’t. SEO, marketing, sales, promotion, web-hosting and more — the whole enchilada and a side of beans. It’s going to mean a ton of work and a huge commitment, though. Essentially, I will become the Grasshopper to her Master (for those of you not lucky enough to have grown up on 1970s TV, that’s a reference to the show Kung Fu).

Fortunately, although I’m confident enough to know what I do well, I’ve got enough humility to accept criticism and brutally honest feedback. And I think that might serve me well in this endeavor because it sounds like we’ll be tearing a lot of my work down to the studs and totally remodeling it.

I’ve got until Monday to consider her proposal and I’m going to give it some serious noodling. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make me a bit nervous. And it’s not the work or the commitment. It’s walking into a world I know nothing about and the thought of getting completely overwhelmed by all the new information and the tasks I’m not sure how to accomplish. Fear of failure, maybe? Fear of looking like a total noob?

But, I know I want to succeed as a writer, as a freelancer, and as a creative individual, and I’m not going to do that on my own, sitting around updating my invisible website.