Best Writing

In July, we shipped some features, designed blog pages, launched the Best Writing Newsletter, and published new content. It’s been a harsh month regarding paid job posts as the slowing economy and summer holidays affect hiring globally. We used most of our earnings to upgrade our software subscriptions to annual plans and hire freelance writers for content creation. The motivation levels were low due to dropped revenue and stress juggling client work.

Highlights:

Marketing

• Finalized newsletter cross-promotion deal (Career Hackers).

Business

• Applied to become a publisher at Carbon Ads (in the end, we rejected it as it’s not the right fit).
• Joined JazzHR partner program.

Company

• Spoke with tax clerks about corporate taxes and VAT registration obligations.

Content

• Launched Best Writing Newsletter
• Sent the first issue of the Best Writing Newsletter.
• Published 11 new blog posts https://contentwritingjobs.com/blog.
• Researched wiki-style content formats.
• Sent multiple writer interview requests.

Product

• Onboarded 7 new writers https://bestwriting.com/writers (15 total now).
• Added Writers section to the homepage.
• Added basic company pages https://bestwriting.com/#top-hiring-companies
• Designed Blog and Blog Post pages. Ready to be implemented.
• Configured and coded an image uploader using Cloudinary. [ Colby’s (https://twitter.com/colbyfayock) tutorials were a huge help.
• Customized a new template for Best Writing Newsletter.
• Automated Best Writing Newsletter automatic sending directly from Notion.

Failures

• One of the hardest months balancing freelance work and this business.
• Tried and failed to collaborate with a mentor from Codementor.

Next Steps

• Finish the image uploader feature and use it for Writer Profile images.
• Partner with HR companies.
• Promote Best Writing for Busines https://bestwriting.com/business and land another client.
• Secure more sponsors for the Content Writing Jobs and Best Writing newsletters.
• Implement a simple email welcome sequence to onboard subscribers.
• Get a VAT number.
• Continue migration to Best Writing
• Implement and move the Blog.

One of the key advantages of independent makers versus big tech giants is that we can show our personalities and behind products. People support people. 👐

We've finally got the About page up and running after 2 years as a side hustle. 😅 (Clearly didn't set the priorities right)

Check it out!
https://contentwritingjobs.com/about

My Co-Founder @tomaslau worked hard recently to plan and build a fully managed content writing subscription service for business.

Nearly every company wants a thriving blog and a newsletter. But not every company wants to go through a process of hiring and managing content writers.

With Best Writing for Business we put companies at ease and help them grow organically. After subscribing to a monthly or yearly plan (starting with ~4 long-form articles at $1,900/mo) companies can request their first content piece via simple form. Their content is delivered within 3-7 days.

✅ Blog posts
✅ Ultimate guides
✅ Comparisons
✅ Listicles
✅ How-to’s
✅ Newsletters

The initial landing page for the service was put together as a Notion document: https://bestwriting.com/business

For managing the service we use Service Provider SaaS: https://bestwriting.spp.io/order/subscriptions

🚀 Just launched a Beta version of Best Writing News - a place for writers to share and discover new content! Think of Hacker News but for writers.

Not sure yet if this is something writers are interested in, but let's see!

It's invite-only for now. Send me a message and I will send you an invitation.

Started in 2020 as a job board, we’re pivoting into an all-in-one platform and rebranding to Best Writing. Working on Content Writing Jobs we realized we have a lot more to offer for writers and hiring companies besides curating and posting jobs.

We've been working on the new website and a new membership system. The initial website version was finally launched: https://bestwriting.com  🎉 We will be gradually migrating all the current website pages to the new one: jobs, blog, writers directory, company pages, newsletter page etc. As well as adding new pages such as guides for writers and public writer profiles.

Currently we are also migrating our existing writer members from the old membership system (and the old Stripe account) to the new one. It will probably take several more months before we are able to migrate fully all of our current members. Some of them will most likely churn. Migrating customers between two Stripe accounts seems to be more troublesome than expected!

We started experimenting with revenue streams. As a first attempt we introduced an early-bird Daily Newsletter Membership for $5/month. As a benefit, the subscribers receive a daily newsletter with the latest job posts, as soon as they are posted. Several days after we introduced this feature we got our first paying subscriber.