We recently connected with Vanessa Infanzon and have shared our conversation below.

Vanessa, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear the story of how you went from this being just an idea to making it into something real.

As a kid, I wrote short stories and read a lot of mystery books. Once I was in college and graduate school, writing was a chore, something I had to do for a grade. When our son, Ben, was born with a genetic disorder, I became his advocate – reading and researching about what he needed to live his best life. People reached out to me for help and I found myself repeating the same information to multiple families. In 2009, I started a blog to share local and national resources. I also began exploring my feelings about raising Ben and talking about what it meant to be his mom. eSpecially Ben (www.especiallyben.com) became an outlet for me.

After a few years of writing blog posts, I contacted an editor of a local parenting magazine about writing a story for them. She assigned me a short piece, with no fee. I wrote about wanting Ben to gain as much independence as possible and the struggles I faced trying to reach this goal. The editor began assigning a few pieces a year and paying me for them.

In 2016, I took an online class about how to start a freelance writing business through the Horkey Handbook. That fall, I made the commitment to work 20-25 hours per week. I increased my number of clients from two to 10 by following the class’s instructions. I joined Instagram, Twitter and opened a business page on Facebook. I hired someone to create a logo and I ordered business cards.

In the early years, I kept the deadlines in my head. With 10 clients and many stories due each month, I developed a chart I call, Pitch to Payment. I track each pitch and if it’s accepted by an editor, I take it through the deadline, publish date, invoice number and then payment.

I still work about 25 hours per week. My goal is to write eight stories a month and 2022 will finish just shy of that with 93 stories. My overall rate per story has increased since last year by 16.7%.

Vanessa, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

Writing is my third career. My master’s degree is in higher education with an emphasis in counseling. I worked in student life at Queens University of Charlotte for 13 years before becoming a mom full-time to our three boys – my second career.

I write about art, business, parenting and travel. Each story is almost always connected to the people who are behind the topic. My education in human services (undergraduate) and my counseling background help me ask the right questions and listen to the answers. I connect with my sources and often stay in touch with them long after the story publishes.

I like writing profiles and digging into the motivation behind why someone does what they do. In one series, I talk with retired people who’ve made a considerable impact on their chosen business and community. Inevitably I learn about the region’s history and how the industry evolved over the past 50 years.

Any fun sales or marketing stories?

As a freelance writer, my target audience is editors, not readers. Although I write stories people want to read, my business comes from the outlets who hire me to write an article. I need to build relationships with editors to get work.

I have a few ways I market myself to editors but the best way is to meet them in person. Several years ago, I emailed pitches to an editor of a magazine – all were rejected or ignored. After more than a year of sending this editor emails, I saw he’d be on a panel discussion at a conference in a city about three hours away.

I purchased a ticket to the conference and made sure I met him after the panel discussion. The editor offered to meet me for coffee a few weeks later. Since 2019, I’ve been writing six or more articles a year for this editor. My investment on the conference and overnight stay paid off with steady work in a great publication.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

I have a reputation for filing clean copy on time. Writers are an integral part of a website, magazine or newspaper’s cycle of publishing content. If a writer is late handing in an assignment, it can hold up the entire process. If a writer turns in a story with grammatical or sloppy mistakes and factual errors, it takes the editor time to get them fixed. I fact-check every story and complete the assignment the editor hired me to do.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.vanessainfanzon.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/morethanvmi/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/morethanvmi
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/vanessainfanzon/

Image Credits
I have permission to use these images.