Uncategorized

Here you will find articles that don't fall into another category (or that I forgot to assign a category to), so look out you might find anything here!

Homesteading Progress and Preps For The Week

April 27, 2018 M.D. Creekmore

Hello everyone, I hope that you’ve all had a good week and managed to get some stuff done this week… we’ll get into homesteading progress and prep in a moment but first I want to ask you all a couple of questions…

First, what type of content and subjects would you like to see more of here at MDCreekmore.com? As you’ve probably noticed I’ve been writing and posting a lot of different ways to make extra money and or become totally self-employed.

I’ve been doing this because “a lack of money” has always been the number one response to the question “what is your biggest obstacle to prepping or setting up a homestead” so I’ve been doing everything that I can to give you ideas and ways to solve the problem that you told me that you had.

However, from the lack of responses, it doesn’t seem like readers are very interested in the subject of making extra money and being self-employed… Have I not been covering the topic correctly, or in a way that’s actually helpful to you? If not, then what can I do differently to help you more?

Okay, now on to the next question for you…

I’ve been playing with the header subtext and would like to know what you think… take a look at the samples below and let me know which one that you think fits the blog best and that I should use via the poll below…

homesteading and self-reliance — Header 6

[poll id=”2″]

Okay, not that we have that out-of-the-way let’s get on with Homesteading Progress and Preps For The Week…

This week I…

I filled with survival gear and buried this waterproof cache tube in a secret location. If you want to buy one of these then you can get one here.

I got my garden tiller fixed and now I’m ready to till my garden area for planting…

Okay, that’s it for me this week… What about you?

Homestead Income: The Wonderful, Chaotic, World of Freelance Writing

April 27, 2018 M.D. Creekmore

by Sawyer S

Whether you’re looking for a full-time career or a side hustle to make ends meet, freelance writing can offer anyone with a unique voice and strong work ethic a flexible, diverse, and engaging way to make money. Being a freelance writer means making your own hours, choosing your own projects, and working from anywhere. It can provide creatives with more financial freedom and can help aspiring writers cultivate a portfolio and platform for their future careers. That being said, being a freelance writer isn’t easy, and getting started often proves more difficult than people realize.

I have been working as a freelance writer for over a year, and while I now find the job to be fulfilling and financially stable, I didn’t always. It took a lot of time and resilience for me to find my footing along the rocky road of freelancing, but now that I have, I can share some of the important lessons I learned and tricks I picked up along the way.

The first thing you have to consider before you even begin working as a freelancer is whether or not you’re going to use a platform. There exists a multitude of online forums which help connect freelancers with possible clients. There are free platforms, like Upwork and Blogmutt, and there are ones with membership fees like Contena.

These websites can be incredibly helpful for freelancers who are just starting out, and my not have any connections or experience. That being said, some of these platforms take a substantial cut of your earnings, and some make it near impossible to get jobs without paying for a premium account. Upwork, for instances, takes a hefty 20% of all your earnings, and BlogMutt’s free account option is really limited.

If none of those platforms sound appealing to you, maybe you need to carve your own path. While creating your own website can also be costly, and very time consuming, at least you have complete control and will get to keep 100% of the money you make. A few tips for starting your own website – make sure you know how to use social media (or hire someone who does), this will be your most effective outlet for reaching potential clients.

Also, ask around. Chances are you have friends who own business, or who are in need of some writing assistance. Let everyone know that you’ve become a freelance writer so that they think of you next time they need a new press-release, grant proposal, or are maybe just looking to spice up their LinkedIn bios.

Once you’ve decided how you’re going to approach freelancing, you have to learn how to promote yourself as a freelancer. Whether you chose to join a freelance platform, or want to create your own website, you’re profile/bio needs to be eye-catching and engaging. This is how potential employers are going to get to know you, so let them! Don’t suppress your personality for the sake of sounding professional.

Trust me, these employers have read thousands of professional sounding bios, and yours will not stand out. When you’re competing against the entire internet’s worth of freelancers, you have to take every chance you get to separate yourself from the herd. Don’t be afraid to start out your bio with a funny tagline, or your favorite quote – draw your reader in, and then outline your skills and experience.

Promoting yourself doesn’t end with your bio, however. You also need to know how to promote yourself when you’re applying for jobs – especially in the beginning. If you’re just starting out, chances are, you don’t have much of a portfolio to pull from when applying, which can be frustrating when every job you look at asks you to “send links to previously published work”. You’re going to run into that request a lot, but don’t let it discourage you. There are ways to get around it.

When applying for jobs for which you have no previous experience, you should start out by humbly admitting it. I have found that not only do employers respond well to honesty, but also lying and/or stretching the truth when it comes to getting freelance jobs can quickly land you in hot water. On most freelance platforms, there is a rating system, which is used by both freelancer and employer to evaluate each other after a job is complete. When you’re just starting out, one bad rating or comment can plague your entire profile, and make it very difficult to get any future jobs.

After you’ve admitted that you may be a bit underqualified for the job, you should always offer to send either inapplicable samples of your writing, that way they can at least gauge your raw talent, or, if you’re comfortable doing work for free, you can offer to send them a spec piece. A spec piece is something you write specifically for the project you’re applying to, but without any expectation of payment or compensation.

Unfortunately, not every employer is going to give you the benefit of the doubt. A lot of them will see that you don’t have any experience and immediately delete your application. It took me over a month to get hired for my first job, but once I did everything changed. With one good review and some well-needed experience on my resume, suddenly almost all my applications were being considered, and I was even sent unsolicited job offers!

After you’ve successfully completed a few writing assignments, and have padded your resume a bit, you can start being more discerning when it comes to applying and accepting jobs. The freelance writing world is notorious for being financially insecure, and as you will probably notice once you start looking for jobs, most clients pay astonishingly little. That’s why it’s imperative that you understand what kind of writer you are.

If you’re a quick creative writer who can pump out prose for hours on end then it might be worth it to you to get paid $300 for 30,000 words. But, if you’re a slower, more methodical writer, you should consider applying to long-form article jobs, possibly in the academic field. If you know how you write, and more importantly, know your worth, it will make sifting through the thousands of daily job proposals much easier.

Working as a freelance writer will be difficult, unstable, and frustrating at times, but you can rest assured, it will never be boring. There are countless job opportunities available for those willing to put in the effort, so stay committed and keep applying. Remember, even the most qualified writers once started out experience-less, portfolio-less, and begging for a chance. But they made it, and so can you.

This Week On The Homestead

April 21, 2018 M.D. Creekmore

I have a new and FREE homesteading course for those of you who are interested you can get that here – Free Homesteading Course. Also, two other free courses that you might be interested in – Free Prepper Course and my Free Blogging Course. Yes, they are 100% free with no hidden catch attached!

Well, folks, it seems that my switch from a “survivalist blog” to a “homesteading blog” was a great decision! The response has been overwhelming in support of the change and most have said it is a great improvement.

One concern that many readers of my old blog (www.thesurvivalistblog.net) did express was about the loss of the content on that site when it is taken offline and asked for a CD or thumb drive with that content archived.

Well, that’s a good idea, however, I think that a better idea would be to pick and choose the very best articles and then combine those into an anthology and make that available in paperback! What do you think about that idea?

Let me know what you think of that idea in the comments below and also if you have favorite articles from www.thesurvivalistblog.net then, please mention those with a link to the article in the comments below.

Also, let me know if you have any ideas for other free courses that I can put together for you all, article ideas and or any other improvements to this site. I want this to be the best homesteading blog with a prepper twist that’s online…

Okay, now what happened on the homestead this week…

I cleared up an old dead tree that fell on my property, repaired some fencing, planted some roses, organized my tools in my shop (still not finished with that), and a few other small jobs.

Unfortunately, my biggest plans this week were thwarted by a garden tiller that refused to run.

Now, that the threat of frost is over (I hope!) I had planned to till my garden area and start planting, unfortunately, my tiller which is only three years old refused to run long enough to get the job done. So I’m taking it to have it repaired today.

Hopefully, it will be fixed by next week and I can get to moving some dirt and planning some seed.

Okay, that’s it for me this week… what about you?

This Week On The Homestead

April 14, 2018 M.D. Creekmore

Well, folks, it’s easy to tell that spring has sprung in Tennessee…

Every morning my truck is covered with a layer of green pollen and my sinuses are killing me. The drainage in my throat, the stuffy head, and the ear pressure. Oh, how wonderful.

I love Tennessee for a number of reasons however the spring pollen count isn’t one of them. If you suffer from seasonal allergies then you might want to consider building your homestead somewhere else, somewhere where there isn’t a constant barrage of attacks on the sinuses.

I spend a large part of this week getting my new FREE course ready for you all.

As you know I make my full-time living blogging and online and it’s great. No job, no boss, and I can earn as much as I willing to put in the time to earn all right from my homestead. Being self-employed is one the if the most important part of being a successful homesteader.

And because that’s so important I put together a FREE course to show you how to do what I do. It’s a seven-part course on blogging and you can sign up for it here – Learn How To Launch A Successful Blog!

Just click on the link and then add your first name (or a nickname or whatever) and your email address and you’ll get an email asking you to confirm that you want to receive the free course, click on the confirm button and you’re all set.

Okay, now what else do I need to tell you… oh, yeah…

Instead of sending out an email to subscribers of this site every time that a new post is published I’ve decided to send out a weekly digest of posts instead. I decided to do it that way because I didn’t want to be flooding your email inbox with blog updates.

I know that time is precious and I want to save you all of the time that I can and the weekly digest does that by sending you all of the posts since the last digest and you can quickly scroll the email and then choose what you want to read and skip the rest.

The weekly digest will be sent to your email inbox every Wednesday at approximately 10:00 AM eastern time. However, you can always just come directly to the site to read the most recent updates and comments. Don’t forget to bookmark it or just do a search for M.D. Creekmore.

I noticed this morning that someone has my book 31 Days To Survival listed on Amazon for $34.83! It’s a great book, that’s for sure, however, even I don’t think that it’s worth that price, the great news is that you can get it from me for only $21.24.

Also, if you want to set up a dirt cheap homestead then I wrote a book about how to do that too, this book will show you exactly how I did it. I set it up, lived there, blogged, saved the money that I earned from blogging and bought a small two bedroom mobile home, and then saved some more and bought this house – all from blogging income and you can do it to – take my free course to find out how.

Unfortunately, I didn’t get a whole lot new done on the homestead this week. The first part of the week I mowed my grass and then the sinuses started, so I’ve stayed indoors for the most part of the last couple of days working on the free blogging course and trying to get these allergies under control.

I did order a copy of “The Backyard Homestead Seasonal Planner: What to Do & When to Do It in the Garden, Orchard, Barn, Pasture & Equipment Shed” I think this will be a great book to review here on the blog.

And this is when my allergy troubles started!

Okay, folks, that’s it for me what about you… what did you do on the homestead this week?

This Week On The Homestead

April 7, 2018 M.D. Creekmore

Well, folks here we are another week on the homestead and another week working and prepping towards our goal of becoming more self-reliant. Nothing beats the feeling of doing something with your own two hands when knowing that the end result will be that you are less dependent on others.

And that is the goal here at MDCreekmore.com and that is to become less dependent on others, corporations, and government. And the most effective and productive ways to do that is via homesteading, prepping, and a home business.

Okay, now let’s get into this week on the homestead…

My Homestead — This week I planted two more dwarf apple and two dwarf peach trees.

These are the apple trees that I planted and these are the peach trees…

I also added a thick mulch of straw around my other dwarf fruit trees. These are ones that I planted last spring.

Chicken coop — Cleaned out my chicken coop to get it ready for the new chicks to be transferred into it. (This is before cleaning.)

Coop after cleaning (several days after) and 12 new Golden Comet chicks added.

This week I also ordered the book – The Blogger’s Simple Guide to Taxes: A Guide to Saving Time and Money, however, I’ve not received it yet.

Well, folks, that’s it for me on the homestead this week – feel free to add what you did on the homestead this week or what you did to prep this week in the comments below…