For the past four weeks, I’ve been putting in overtime on a freelance editing job for a new client. We finally launched today which means I now can happily share the details.

I’m pleased to introduce you to Reinvent Yourself, a series on career reinvention that’s running on BlogHer, the women’s blog network.

Readers of this blog may be familiar with BlogHer; the company runs the advertisements that have appeared on WordCount for close to two years. In addition to running an ad network on approximately 2,500 blogs, BlogHer also operates a website where women – and men – share posts on every topic imaginable with about 35 million readers a month.

The Reinvent Yourself series will run inside BlogHer’s Career pages for several months, offering a new post every day for women returning to the workforce, switching careers or starting a small business. My kick-off post for the series is about my career reinvention role model – my mom.

I’m the editor of the series, which means I’m rounding up bloggers, editing and formatting posts, working with BlogHer’s editorial staff and helping promote it on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. It’s everything I love about working as an editor.

Working on the series is also pushing me to pick up some new skills. Chief among those is learning Drupal, a content management system that’s popular with some websites. So far, so good (hopefully my editors on this project would say the same!)

It’s also allowing me to use other skills I’ve picked up over the past few years, including:

1. Working with bloggers. Thanks to the blogathon, I have plenty of experience with this.
2. Coding stories to get them ready to appear online. Again, thanks to other clients, I have plenty of experience adding tags and other SEO bait to stories to make them appear higher in search-engine results.
3. Sourcing photos to go with blog posts. This sometimes aggravating job is not unlike finding the proverbial needle in the haystack. Somebody needs to create a stock photo library that has relevant, timely photos on subjects such as business and careers. What’s out there now is terrible, anything even slightly better would make a killing.

I didn’t need to wait until the New Year to resolve to try something new. As has been the case for the past couple years, opportunity came knocking about a month early.

I’d love you to check out the Reinvent Yourself series and let me know what you think.

And here’s to you trying something new in 2012!

In case you missed them the first time around, here are the WordCount posts people were buzzing about this month:

• 10 reasons to clean out your office – now!
• Recommended reading for Nov. 18 – Occupy Portland photo
• 10 ways to find new freelance clients
• 10 phrases freelancers hate to hear
• 6 writing lessons from Pulitzer-winning biographer Stacy Schiff
• Top tax tips for freelancers

This year if you’ve resolved to take on something new different in your work life – whether it’s starting a blog, pulling t0gether a book proposal, pitching a dream publication, starting a writing-based business, looking for a full-time job or just upgrading the technology you’re using to write – here’s some career-related inspiration to  get you started.

The links are to posts about careers and reinventing yourself or the tech tools you’re using that I’ve written over the past year for SecondAct.com, Entrepreneur Media’s website for people over 40:

• 12 First Steps Toward Reinventing Yourself in 2011
• 10 Do’s, 10 Don’ts for a New Year’s Job Search
• My Favorite App: 15 Cool Tech Toys for Your Smartphone
• The Get-It-Done Guy on Working Less and Doing More
• Top 10 Tips for Finding Temp Work and Contract Gigs
• How to Botox Your Resume
• 5 Steps Women Over 40 Can Take to Rule the World
• Making the Right Moves in the Career Game
• Finding Your ‘It’
• LinkedIn: The Social Network That Puts Work First

Here are the top 10 stories I worked on this year, and a little bit about what made them special:

Boomers Lead with Business Startups – One of the first features I wrote for SecondAct.com, an online magazine for people over 40 that Entrepreneur Media launched in April, attempted to correct the popular misperception that 20-somethings start the most small businesses. I did it by telling the stories of three entrepreneurs who began companies in their 40s and 50s, using them to exemplify trends I culled from small-business think tanks and industry research reports.

Young Entrepreneurs Get the Glory, but Boomers Start More Tech Ventures – Time just named Mark Zuckerberg its 2010 Man of the Year for bringing Facebook to over a half billion members. Digital natives like Zuckerberg, the main character in The Social Network, are part of the reason why people think “young” when they think “startup.” But as I wrote in this SecondAct.com post,  more tech startups are hatched by boomers.

Engineering a Career Change from Factory to Farm – I met Chrissie Manion Zaerpoor,  an Intel engineer who started an organic farm with husband Koorosh Zaerpoor, at her stand at a Portland farmer’s market. When I heard about her switch, I knew she’d be a perfect SecondAct story.

Civic Ventures CEO Champions the Encore Career - This is a SecondAct.com mini profile and Q&A with Marc Freedman, the man widely credited with popularizing the notion of civic-minded second acts. Q&As aren’t necessarily the toughest assignments. The hardest part of this one was getting time to talk with him, and then trimming down two lengthy interviews to a manageable size while retaining the essence of Freedman’s comments. The other reason it’s special: when we talked in early September, Freedman had just turned in the manuscript of his latest book, titled The Big Shift: Navigating the New Stage between Midlife and Old Age. The subject was still fresh in his mind and mine was the first interview he’d given in months, so it was a scoop of sorts, since he’ll no doubt say a lot of the same things in interviews once the book is out next spring.

How Midlife Job Seekers Can Respond to ‘You’re Overqualified’ – I included this SecondAct post because it represents a sub-niche I carved out for myself this year, covering careers for people at midlife. Even if you’re 45 and you’ve got a degree and a job, you still need to make sure your resume are skills are up to date and you can get along with older and younger coworkers. But if you’re over a certain age and out of work, the odds are a lot tougher you’ll be able to find a position – that’s where I come in.

Brightscope Shines a Light on 401(k) Plans – I’ve been a contributing editor at Crain’s Workforce Management for more than five years. In the past, this HR industry magazine was one of my largest clients; I didn’t write for them as much in 2009 when the recession hit trade magazine advertising and freelance budgets shrank. I wrote for them even less in 2010 after I started my editing gig. But I did write a smattering of news, news analysis and features for them, including this profile of a startup that rates corporate 401(k) plans. This piece is a good example of what I like most in a company profile: meaty details, a splash of history, lots of voices and a little controversy.

H(app)y Days –   This 3,000-word Workforce Management feature on how the HR industry is embracing smartphone apps was one of the biggest writing projects I worked on all year. I started doing research in April after I got the assignment, did the bulk of the reporting and writing in August, finished rewrites in early September and saw it in print the following month.

The Yawning of a New Era – I pitched Workforce on this story on employee fatigue after a source I interviewed for a different piece mentioned a survey they’d just finished on the subject. Many people lost jobs in the recession, but workers who held onto theirs got more responsibilities, working longer hours and no assurances they’d still have jobs the next week. The result is stress, fatigue and burnout. I reported on how bad it is, and what some companies are doing about it.

A Little ‘Thank You’ Goes a Long Way – Most of my work on Inside Edge, the corporate finance website American Express and Federated Media launched in March, is editing. But in the site’s early months I wrote a couple stories too. This one  allowed me to use my background covering workplace issues. It also let me revisit a subject I’d written about before – employee perks – and give it a new spin suitable for a different audience. As a freelancer, it pays to be able to re-use research, and assembling such stories is always easier because some of the writing you can do from accumulated expertise.

The Oregon Patent Report 2008-2010 – There’s no link for this project, a 5,000+ word white paper on the state of the state’s patent industry, which won’t be published until the first quarter of 2011. I did the bulk of the work on this in summer and fall, and will finish up once the U.S. Patent Office releases 2010 statistics early next year. This is one of the more extensive white papers I’ve worked on. It entailed researching the state’s economy and industries, reading past reports, sifting through patent statistics, interviewing sources, collaborating with multiple representatives of the law firm that commissioned the project, and then pulling everything together into a multi-part document with lots of charts and graphs.

I get to blog about a lot of things at SecondAct. But mostly I write about work – finding it, doing better at it, getting more meaning from it or transitioning out of it.

Here’s a sampling of some of the work-related posts I’ve written lately:

• How Not to Sabotage a Career Search
• Top 10 Tips for Finding Temp Work and Contract Gigs
• Ageism: How to Spot It, How to Fight It
• Hive Mind: What Bees Can Teach Us About Work
• How to Botox Your Resume
• Making the Right Moves in the Career Game
• Finding Your ‘It’
• To Get Ahead at Work, Think Like a Millennial

It might not be apparent to you, but those 500 blog posts changed my life.

Three years ago I was a stay at home mom.

I’d put a career as a staff reporter then freelance journalist on hold seven years before to have a baby. That made three kids, a husband, dog, assorted lizards and goldfish, a big house and an even bigger yard. It was too much to handle all that and work without constantly being stressed out.

Over the years that followed, I dabbled with part-time work: a semester teaching at journalism school here, writing a couple stories for a daily newspaper there, filing a couple features for a friend who’d taken over as the editor of a trade magazine in between.

I finally came back to writing full time in fall 2007 when our oldest went to college and our youngest went to first grade.

Writing was the easiest part of my freelance business to slip back into.

It was everything else that had changed since I’d been away that was hard to figure out. I’d quit during the dot-com bust and had no clue what Web 2.0 was about. One day a friend casually mentioned LinkedIn and I needed her to explain it to me – me, who’d spent years as a tech industry writer and columnist.

To get myself up to speed, I started a blog. I signed up with Blogger first but quickly switched to WordPress because, honestly, the free version of WordPress had prettier themes, and more of them.

At first I had no specific subject in mind, and barely managed to figure out the software. Most of my initial posts were marginal, though a few have held up surprisingly well.

I got the hang of it soon enough. Over the two and a half years that followed, blogging literally transformed my writing business. How?

• By teaching myself about the mechanics of blogging, I was able to nab assignments to write about blogging and social media for publications like Inc.com.
• By teaching myself to blog, I made myself more marketable by showing perspective clients that in addition to writing straight news, features and columns, I was proficient in another writing format, no small thing as more publications maintain contributor-written blogs.
• By using the blog to showcase my resume, bio and clips, I landed the biggest freelance gig of my career to date, a long-term contract from Federated Media to edit GetTheInsideEdge.com, a custom publication on corporate finance for mid-size companies that American Express launched in April. Afterward, I learned that even before they called me, the people who hired me had thoroughly vetted my blog and LinkedIn profile.
• By showing I understood the medium and could post week in and week out, I was invited to be a paid contributing blogger at SecondAct.com, an online magazine for people over 40 published from Entrepreneur Media, publisher of Entrepreneur. In addition to blogging here, you can read my posts on workplace issues, careers and retirement on SecondAct’s Prime Time blog twice a week.
• By using my blog to track what’s happening in the digital media industry I’ve been invited to speak at journalism conferences and industry groups.
• By inviting other writers with blogs to join me in a personal challenge to blog every day for a month, I started the WordCount Blogathon, an annual event that’s created a writers’ community and become one of highlights of my year.
• By holding myself to a twice-weekly or more blogging schedule and strict editorial standards, I qualified to join a blog advertising network, BlogHer, and this year for the first time am earning advertising income solely from this blog.

I don’t point this out to brag, though I am proud of what I’ve accomplished, especially at a time in our industry when many freelancers question their ability to continue doing business in the manner to which they’re accustomed.

The main reason I’m sharing is this – if I can do it, you can too.

All it takes is commitment, confidence – and a blog.

About the time some people wind down their careers, Art Koff revved up his.

Koff, 75, is the brains behind RetiredBrains.com, an online job board and resource center on all things retirement-related, from continuing education to type 2 diabetes.

After a career in advertising Koff retired in 2000 at age 65. But he couldn’t sit still.

While still at his old agency, he’d worked in online advertising enough to know the value of a good domain name, so he and a friend bought a bunch related to retirement. Over time they sold off most of them. But Koff hung onto RetiredBrains. In 2003 he used it to launch a retirement resource center with information he couldn’t find elsewhere online.

Read the rest of this post at SecondAct.com: RetiredBrains puts experience to work.

If you’ve sworn off online communities like Facebook and Twitter because all people seem to do on them is goof around, consider joining LinkedIn, the site that puts the “work” in “social network.”

While other online networks might be bigger – Facebook now has more members than the entire U.S. population – LinkedIn is specifically tailored to the world of work. No Mafia Wars. No Farmville. Instead, you’ll find people talking shop, looking for jobs or job candidates and connecting with colleagues past, present and future.

Read the rest of this post at SecondAct.com: The social network that puts work first.

It’s not easy for me to tell people how old I am because I don’t want them to think I’m, well, old.

Working in an industry like mine that’s evolving almost daily – iPad, anyone? – it’s not always good to be a seen as a seasoned veteran lest people assume you’re not inclined to change.

But in the two years since I started writing again full time after a  seven-year hiatus to raise my family, I continually get comments on how well my freelance business is doing, and it made me realize something.

Nothing takes the place of experience. I might not have the technical skills of younger journalists who can churn out computer code as well as they can cover a fire or flood. But after years of reporting on topics such as the birth of the internet, corporate finance and workplace issues, I’m a quick study.

Read the rest of this post at SecondAct.com: Older, wiser and tweeting too.