My latest freelance gig: BlogHer’s Reinvent Yourself series

If it seems like I haven’t been posting here as much lately, you’re very observant.

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!