Big-Biz Strategies Solo Operators Can Steal, with Ashley Cisneros-Mejia

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Rachel Smith: Hello and welcome to The Content Byte, a podcast for freelancers who use their words to make money. I’m Rachel Smith, a freelance journalist, copywriter, and content producer. I’m also the founder of Rachel’s List, a jobs board and community for Australian writers and other creatives. 

Lynne Testoni: I’m Lynne Testoni! I’m a journalist and content writer as well. Rachel and I are your weekly co-hosts, and every week we bring you all kinds of tips, tricks, and some fabulous guests to help you make the most of your freelance business.

Rach, I have a question. Have you ever worked for a large agency? Because my last full-time job, which is a while ago now, was for a content agency and there’s definitely things that I missed from that company when I first set up as a solo freelancer. What about you? 

Rachel: Well, I was working for a really big media company when I went freelance and I was more working as a feature writer and a sub. And then I went freelance from that company and kind of was working for magazines as a freelancer. But I really missed having colleagues to chat with and shared tips and just actually even going into the office and having that separation and that’s how Rachel’s List started in a lot of ways, because I was so lonely.  

Lynne: Set up a community. I definitely miss having workmates, which is probably why I am so active in online groups like Rachel’s List and Jennifer Gregory’s group – I love that group. And so, this week we are all about taking lessons and learnings from large agencies into your own business. We have this amazing guest, very excited. She’s all the way from the east coast of the US – nice, sunny Florida, and her name is Ashley Cisneros-Mejia. Shall I introduce her? 

Rachel: Yes. 

Lynne: Okay. Ashley is a freelance communication strategist, business coach, and she’s the host of the Talk Freelance to Me podcast, which I love. We’ll put a link to that. With 20 years’ experience across journalism, marketing and agency leadership, she now helps creative freelancers. Particularly women and caregivers build profitable, flexible businesses on their own terms. Ashley works with clients ranging from global consulting firms to startups, and she’s passionate about helping others diversify their services, embrace change, make freelancing work for real life.

Welcome, Ashley! 

Rachel: Welcome! 

Ashley Mejia: Thank you so much, Lynne and Rachel. I am so honoured to be here. I’m such a fan of you ladies, so this is very exciting. 

Lynne: Oh, good. 

Rachel: We do love to meet fans from overseas. It’s exciting because you don’t get a lot of transparency do you, on who your audience is. We’re about to do a survey, so that’s kind of cool to try and get a little bit of that information. But look, we are here to talk about you. You’ve had such an interesting career and we’re going to kind of dive into bringing strategies from big agencies into a solo freelance business. So why don’t you start by telling us a bit about your agency experience.

Ashley: So, my agency experience really happened kind of by accident. I was approached by a good friend who was really technical, who knew how to make websites from nothing and mobile apps and all of these things. And she was really looking for someone who could write like kind of what we do to do the content for some of the projects that she was con getting contracted for. And so, we kind of started it for my kitchen table, our first agency. Bootstrapped to the whole venture at the beginning. I freelanced while I was building this company with her, and we grew it from literally nothing – just my laptop at our kitchen table to nineteen people at the peak. We had a huge office, and it was a beautiful experience.

I think my life kind of changed. I became a mum. I now have three kids, and so I needed something different. But I actually also had a smaller agency, a, a boutique agency that was smaller after that. And it’s just been such a fun journey really to go from freelancer to agency to now being a freelancer again and really making creative work accommodate where I am in my season of life right now.

Lynne: That’s so interesting. Is there anything you miss about working with those larger teams and agencies? 

Ashley: Oh man, I really miss that brainstorming, the comradery, the people. Being with creative people is such a treat. I think that for a lot of us who write from our home offices or a coffee shop or wherever we are in the world, there’s something – you can be so creative, I think to a point. Sometimes that creativity, I feel like doesn’t, the magic doesn’t always happen when you’re by yourself and you need someone to bounce ideas off. And that was one of my, I think, favourite aspects is being in a group of people. We signed a new client, and we are strategising and thinking about how we’re going to develop campaigns for clients. That’s what I miss the most. 

Rachel:  It’s so nice, isn’t it, when you’re surrounded by other really smart – all the people who kind of do things differently to you and you can get ideas and all of that. I found communities are good in a way for replacing that. How have you created those experiences when you’re working for yourself?

Ashley: Absolutely. So, I’m a part of a couple different forums, Facebook groups. I try to really go where other creatives are and so that can be in forums. I’m a member of a group here in the United States called the American Society of Journalists and Authors, ASJA. 

Rachel: Oh, we know that one. 

Ashley: That’s been such a fun experience. They had their first in-person conference again after several years after COVID, and that was really cool to just see people in the flesh again. That’s such a treat now. So, I really try to find other creative people and also not limited to just content professionals, but just anybody in the creative space. I go to startup competitions and just listen to founder’s pitch investors to just think about how people are innovating to solve problems. I always learn from other people and just get different ideas.  

Lynne: That’s so interesting. What do you love about being a solo business owner? I mean, there’s great things about working by yourself as well. 

Ashley: I love the flexibility. I mean, for me, when I had my agency, I also, around that time, the time that we were really growing, I became a mum for the first time, and it was difficult for me. I think when you have people that are counting on you for their pay check, that’s one of the most beautiful, most fulfilling privileges to sign someone’s pay check and to realise, wow, this abstract idea that was just in my mind now creates a way for people to pay rent and buy groceries. That’s so powerful. But it requires a lot. It demands a lot. And I think for me, where my life kind of turned and the choices that I’ve made and having three kids, it was hard for me to have two babies – a human baby, and an agency that required so much. 

Working as a solo allows me to still strategically collaborate with other creative people but also have some of that freedom where I can work the way that I need to for this season in my life where I’ve got three elementary school aged children now. And I just love that. I love that I can get up at 2 am and crank out a thought leadership piece if I need to for a customer, meaning that I can then take the day off the next day to go on a field trip with my kids. I love that ability to flex with my life. 

Rachel:  It’s interesting what you were saying about how one of your greatest rewards was signing people’s pay checks and realising that this little nugget of an idea that you had turned into a massive business that supported other people’s lives. I mean that’s really cool. But also, the flip side of that is the responsibility. So, when you walk away, there’s freedom in that, in not having to worry. We’ve talked to agency owners before and a lot of people have touched on how that’s the scariest part as well.

Ashley: Yes. 

Rachel: Being an agency owner, you do have to make sure you make enough money to sign everybody’s pay checks. 

Ashley: Yes, 

Lynne: Yes. 

Rachel: Did you have that stress as well, at times? 

Ashley: I think so, I think of course now the market’s different here where I am in the United States and right now, I think it’s different. But I think there’s always been ebbs and flows with the market, with the way people embrace content marketing or at that time it was inbound marketing, there’s different no nomenclature that we would use. And I think that there were times where we would staff up to fulfill a big contract. And then what happens if the client – just like the same with working in a freelance capacity. Clients can make business decisions that affect us, right? They can decide to pull everybody in house and they’re not engaging with freelancers anymore. And the same thing can happen with working with an agency. We had a, I think it was an attorney client that was super entrepreneurial, and he decided to have his own marketing agency. He was really fascinated by the way we worked and just agencies in general and thought what? I’m just going to create my own marketing agency to serve me, and then I’ll also serve other attorneys and it’s another stream of income from me and so there were those times I think that the business decisions that my clients made did create situations for me where I was thinking, okay, I’ve got to replace this business right now. Because it’s not just me that’s relying on this, it’s all the people that I’ve committed to the organisation.

Rachel: Absolutely. Well, we know that agencies are, they need procedures, they need processes and systems, and that’s something that. I feel like I’m constantly looking at, as a freelancer, I’ve just done a big session with the automation expert who sent me like a 20-page report. I’m too scared to open it, but we know that we need those processes and systems and often we don’t have them until we’re in dire straits, and we have to create them. What are yours like? How have you created them? Have you brought any from the agency and modified them for your freelance business? How has that worked? 

Ashley: Absolutely. So just a lot of the critical infrastructure that I had at the agency in terms of the way we do contracts, our SOP manuals, our standard office procedures, utilising templates, of course when you have a team, especially if you are. We had other writers. We had a team of writers that would produce content, website copy, ad copy the whole nine, depending on what the customer needed. So, we would have to create, here is our standardised approach for what is a complete LinkedIn, for ghost writing a LinkedIn content item for a customer, or this is how we do what we do and how we judge what’s quality and what’s not. And so, documenting that idea of documenting everything that we do and having standards, doing a full onboarding activity with our new customers and having a kick-off meeting, having key milestones where we get sign off before we proceed and different – all of those kinds of practices are things that I still do my business today, even though I’m a one-woman band. They’re the same things that I did when we had a huge organisation. 

Rachel: It must have made it easy. You could take those, some of those templates yourself from the agency, modify them. 

Ashley Mejia: Absolutely. It was great. And I think being a freelancer and sitting on both sides of the desk, being a freelancer, working with directly with a customer and of different sizes working as a subcontractor for other agencies and then being an agency owner, hiring other freelancers for needs, I think you get a good holistic appreciation of what’s important for everybody and how to make things work for everybody where you have buy-in from the freelancers where you have. I feel like that communication across what everybody needs to be successful. That’s something that I think I took away is understanding what that looks like. 

Lynne: Oh, that’s interesting, isn’t it? One of the things when I freelance and I guess it’s almost contracting. When I used to go from company to company and do a few weeks here and there, I used to pick up lots of different skills and I found that really, oh, they do it this way. Oh, they use that template I found. So how do you replicate that experience as a solo practitioner? 

Ashley: I think for me, I definitely take away lessons from each client that I work with as a freelancer and also understanding both from what the customer either is doing to meet their marketing objectives, their content marketing objectives, and also even what my main point of contact, how they work with freelancers, both positive and negative. Sometimes you might have had experiences where you’ve worked with a really good editor or maybe not an editor who is nearly as helpful or someone at an agency that’s been great to work with versus ones that it’s more difficult, right? And I think for me, the biggest thing has been communication and understanding what success looks like and how people approach that. Whether that is creating checklists and style guides or having standard times that we check in about projects. I pay attention to all of those things about how do people do the work that they do? How do they package it? What words did they use? I take notes on all of that.

Lynne: So interesting because you don’t have to just learn from your colleagues, learning from clients is actually quite a good idea, isn’t it? 

Ashley: Yes. I think so.

Rachel: And it’s how you tweak your systems as well. If something went wrong, we had Maggie Peterson on the podcast recently, and she was talking about systems and how if something goes wrong with a client, that’s how you know to tweak your systems going forward. 

Lynne: Yes. We’ve all learnt that way. 

Rachel: Yes. Changing contracts, putting a clause in, changing how you do everything. 

Lynne:  Or even sometimes just setting expectations. I think sometimes when you are by yourself and you’ve been doing it for a while; you tend to know how you work and you sometimes expect that the clients do too. You don’t say, oh, this is the way I would track changes, or I don’t track changes, or I use Google Docs, and they use Word or whatever. So, you think of different ways of people working helps too. 

Ashley: I think so. I think when I first started as a freelancer, I was very much of a chameleon, and I would just be very fluid and would fit into every client’s system which I think is, we need that flexibility because sometimes clients don’t want to adopt our system and we can decide how we feel about that and if that’s acceptable to us. And I think after having an agency, I realised clients are not just coming to us for the work product, they’re coming to us because they can’t – they need help. They’re putting money behind this because they’re busy and they need us to have a system ready to say, here’s how this is going to go. Here’s how we’ve been successful with other projects similar to this. This is the system that we should use. This is why and I think for some clients, they can have almost like a sense of relief because they feel like, okay, I’m with someone who knows what they’re doing, and who can guide me through the process.

I still encounter clients who want me to back into their system and that’s fine. But I think that’s something that was a big aha mument for me is after I had the agency, is understanding that that structure is important to a lot of people and it kept me sane, I think.

Rachel: I love that because I think that’s something a lot of freelancers don’t understand that they are not only bringing the outcome to the client, but they’re bringing the system and taking that off their plate, taking that whole stress and worry and the outcome off the client’s plate. So, if you don’t have those systems, you’re chasing your tail and it’s not going to be a seamless process – are you going to get repeat work? I don’t know. That’s why it’s so important to put them into place.

Ashley: I agree.

Rachel: So, Ashley, are there any skills that you recommend writers get on top of, so you can experiment more and get better outcomes? We were just talking about. 

Ashley: Yes. I think right now one of the things I’m learning about, and I’m definitely not an expert in, is just this new generation of a AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) and GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and AI. The whole thing, right?  I think in terms of how we use it, how we feel about it, how do we do it ethically, but then also it’s affecting the work that we do, how do we play in the sandbox nicely with these LLMs (Large Language Models) and get them to recommend us and to cite us and our clients when someone is searching for things. So, I’m learning a lot about schemas and how websites are created now versus how I used to do them and that’s something that I think that all writers we need to pay attention to and start learning those things as well. 

Rachel: I agree with you, but the word schema just makes my eyes glaze over. I know that it is something we need to learn, but oh gosh. 

Ashley: Oh man, I hear you. 

Lynne: AI is such a topic at the mument, and I swear it’s even more of a topic than it was a year ago and thought that’s all we spoke about a year ago. So, what are you using it for? Where do you stand and how’s that working for you?

Ashley: So, I am a huge AI enthusiast. Now, I also definitely hold space for all creatives. Everybody in our industry, authors, there’s a lot of people who are rightly upset that their works were used without their permission, without compensation. I also understand the environmental concerns, the water usage that’s required for these data centres to make all of these new technologies work. So, I’m try to be very thoughtful in my consumption of AI, thinking about not using it for every little thing, but thinking about how can I use it to get the biggest bang for my buck in terms of my business. 

For me, I am using it a lot to teach myself things. Summarising some for clients that I have that are very technical, where I am needing to absorb big pharmaceutical documents quickly. That’s something that I feel like if I can get a handle on this in fifteen minutes as opposed to my old way of doing things where I marinate in things for eight hours – that is a better use of my time. And even just thinking my podcasts, the workflows for my podcast. That’s actually the only way that I’ve been able to still be working on that project, is because AI has made some of those mundane workflows easier for someone like me. My husband, he works in healthcare. He travels a lot for business. So, I’m a solo business owner, but I also am the default person in my home for my three kids. AI has helped me in many ways, I think with business and even personal things.

Rachel: I think we would love to ask you how you’re using it with your podcast because as podcasters as ourselves, that’s always interesting to find out. 

Ashley: Yes, absolutely. So, I do my interviews similar to how we’re doing now, recording and then I take the transcripts of those interviews along with when you have a guest, usually they provide a bio or something, or maybe you grab it from their website and I have basically a prompt that I’ve created where I feed ChatGPT basically, here are the things that I want in my show notes, the elements that I want in my show notes. The keywords that are important for me to optimise. These are things that are important to the person that I’m interviewing. Things that they’re, maybe they’re promoting or maybe they’re really interested in. And then creating show notes literally with just a little, hit submit and then it’s ready to go. And before that, something like that would’ve taken me hours doing it by hand. So that’s something that I’m using it a lot for show notes, also for social media, to promote everything that we create, we have to promote to get anyone to listen or pay attention. So, I use it a lot for that. I’ve got designated prompts that I’ve worked on to make that process easier, because I do it all myself. 

Rachel: Amazing. 

Lynne: So, I guess one of the things, when you are a solo business owner, how does it go when you work with corporates? I know some of my bigger corporate clients often work with agencies and sometimes they’ll give me work, but sometimes I have to go through an agency. How do you overcome that? 

Ashley: Yes, I think I like to leverage my old lives. I feel like a lot of us have lived many lives as when we were journalists, lives when we were content people and in different ways. And so, I do a lot of networking and just really keeping those relationships as current as you can and really trying to dig the well before I need it and not always coming to someone when I’m wanting something and trying to be a good friend, trying to be a good fellow business peer.

That’s really helped me I think, in my specific situation because I was a working journalist. I was a newspaper reporter back in the day, and then I was a tech writer, and I worked for a PR agency. And so, I think for me using those relationships that I had with big companies, people who are now at some of those big corporations has benefited me. I think I get basically maybe a second look if I have certain people that I know from one of my previous engagements. And the other piece is being just really creative. I have subcontracted for other contractors. I’ve gone in with other creatives, like a friend – she’s an animation artist and she also does graphic design. And so, we teamed up together and we went over and pitched business for a governmental entity that was doing an opioid, basically a drug prevention campaign for teens. 

And so, we just said, you’re a business of one. I’m a business of one. Let’s go together. And pitch for this big business and we got the contract even though we were not an agency. So really just thinking about how to work with other people to approach and leveraging those relationships. That’s how I’ve been able to kind of get noticed. 

Rachel: So, it sounds like you’ve got a really good little black book, basically, of people that you can call on. Would you in a pitch to a big corporate who needed different skills that perhaps you couldn’t have, would you say, I have access to this person and this person. I can put together a team; I can project manage this project for you? Would you be doing that as part of your pitch to show that you have those relationships and could leverage them if it was needed?

Ashley: Yes, absolutely. I’ve done that. I have my key videographer person; I have my key graphic design person. I have a friend, my friend Ken, he’s a branding expert. And so, there’s been projects that we’ve gone together, leveraging his expertise, even crisis management, PR people. So, it just really depends on what the customer’s looking for. But I think, even if they don’t take you up on it, I think being able to say, I’ve got people for that. If we need this, I’ve got somebody who really knows programmatic ads and who really is great at, SEO or now I guess it’s AEO and GEO. I think people, clients like to know that you have those relationships.  

Rachel: And it really speaks, doesn’t it, to the importance right now of collaborating and not being a one-person business. To really look at who’s around you and create that tribe around you. It’s more important than ever right now, I think. 

Ashley: I agree with you. I think community is how we get through everything that’s hard. Whether it’s changing economic situations, whether it’s something happening in the industry, in life in general. I think even though that we are solopreneurs, that’s the flavour of entrepreneurship that we’re embracing, I think that doesn’t mean we work alone. 

Lynne:  So interesting. 

Rachel: Love that. 

Lynne: I wanted to say how much I love your podcast, and you’ve had some great guests on. It’s one of the highlights of my walk with the dog. So, what drove you to do the podcast and has it been a good experience? What have you got from it? 

Ashley: Thank you so much. I love podcasts Just as a consumer, as a person, I am obsessed with podcasts. I think for me, because I had a baby, it was like I had this convergence of my interest in being a business owner and doing that in different ways as a freelancer. And then having an agency, but then also just with life and biology and having three kids and realising if I want to be a mum, this is it. This is the time that I’ve got to do this. I was really interested in how creative people approach caregiving. I had a good friend who’s still a dear friend who cared for her mum, when her mum got really sick. And even though she chose not to be a mum herself, she still was a caregiver.

It was interesting to me how different people in our space or even adjacent spaces, get graphic designers or web developers, mobile app developers, just other people that I would work with on these creative projects, how they were all using either contract work or freelance work as a way to generate income, but still fulfill these obligations, these responsibilities, and even these choices that they wanted to do, whether it’s family or friends.

So that’s really where it grew out. It’s just the podcast, I think grew from my own I think experience and just fascination on how many women. I feel like there’s a lot of women freelancers that I meet, and so I’m very interested in how they’ve approached freelancing even to command more money and to be more in charge of their economic future as opposed to when you work for a boss and you’ve got to make your pitch to try to get a 3% raise. Freelancing, when you’re a business owner, we get to decide what businesses we’re going to take, what kind of projects we’re interested in, how much we’re going to be accepting or not. And so that’s those things, both of those ideas about doing work our way is really what led me to start the podcast, and it’s been such a great experience. I think for me it’s been a way to network. It’s been a way to learn, to get new ideas, to be inspired, and also to get just those practical ideas for the day-to-day operations of being a solopreneur. 

Rachel: Talk to us about some of your favourite episodes, the ones that have really stuck in your head, just to give our listeners, some jumping off points for going and exploring your podcast as well.

Ashley: Absolutely. I’ve had so much fun with it. I’ve spoken with a lot of different kinds of folks who work for themselves. I think that’s also something important to note is I’m a writer by trade, a journalist, by trade, but I have interviewed people in other creative ways of working as a freelancer. I think one of my favourites is a friend named Ameris Castillo. She’s an author and she’s a journalist, and I think it was early on, I think it might have been episode fourteen, but she was talking just about again, how do you write and find time to write when you are a mother? And she has two young sons, and she was grading her, writing her novel in addition to having a full-time communications job. And she was saying how she got COVID and sponsored her own writer’s retreat and just made lemonade out of lemons and went upstairs and decided away from her sons and her husband and got all this work done with her novel. And it was just, it was comical to me, but it was also very real to me.

I think when I was asking her how she gets her writing done, how she got her book done, I was thinking that she might say, oh, I went on a writer’s retreat. I left my home and invested in a retreat and no, that’s how she did it. And she was also telling me how she would be in her playroom with her sons and she would just bring out her smartphone, go to her Google Docs app and paragraph by paragraph she would just punch it out and that’s how she would work on her book. And it was just so telling to me because it just taught me, okay, that perfect time to write is never going to come. That perfect time to do whatever we really want to do is never going to come. And sometimes that creative work, we have to fit it in if it’s important to us. I feel like that episode is really. It’s really a good representation of kind of the feel of my show. 

Rachel: Okay, we’ll pop that in the show notes, that episode so people can check it out.

Ashley: Thank you. Sounds good. I’ll put a link to yours as well. 

Lynne: One of the fun things, and we find this about doing our podcast, is that you hear a lot about how freelancers are doing and I’d love to talk to you about the future of freelancing. What are you seeing from the people you speak to and being just out there in the world? 

Ashley:  I think here in the United States it is a tough market across all industries. Not limited to content or to marketing or to journalism. It’s been hard. I don’t think freelance is going away. I feel like more and more companies are embracing the idea of working with freelancers to get work done. That work still needs to get done. How it gets done might look different, right? It might look different in this new age that we’re in. I think for writers, even though I studied journalism, I was a newspaper reporter right out of college. I love it and I will always love it. That’s who I will always be. But I think that the way that we work, the services that we offer are changing. I think there’s going to be more strategy. Maybe it’s more branding. It’s going to look differently than it does, then it did. Back before, I think when I started freelancing in 2009 when I would get paid to write an article, that’s what I was paid for. I would file my story, invoice and that was it. Now it’s changing, I think it’s that the work itself is changing, but I think freelancing is here to stay. I think especially again, in the United States, there’s been so many people that have been laid off and that want, are interested in freelancing while they figure out what’s next. And so, I think that this way that we package our skills, this way that we package our services isn’t going away. It is going to change what it is that we offer though. 

Lynne: So interesting. 

Rachel: I think, I really agree with you on that. I mean, you could go onto LinkedIn and read ten posts, and they’ll all be so different. Like one is saying people are leaving the industry in droves and the freelancers that are left standing are the ones who have evolved and embraced and upskilled and done a lot of work to meet the new need out there. But also, I was just reading a post this morning about how the world is now so saturated with freelancers because there’s this thought that it’s an easy way to make money and it’s really hard to know what to do. I know for Rachel’s List, a lot of people are retraining in not even adjacent areas, but totally different, like as PTs or teachers or that sort of thing. So, it’s quite interesting to see how people are responding to what’s going on. 

Ashley: Absolutely. I keep seeing ads. I swear I know my phone is listening to me, but I keep seeing ads for cybersecurity and start, go back to school and become a cybersecurity person. I have a cybersecurity client, so I think my phone must have been listening to meetings or I don’t know what, but it’s funny to see.

I mean, it’s interesting. I will never fault anybody for doing what they need to do for their livelihood. To take care of themselves. To take care of their loved ones and so I think some of us, this is the way that we maybe want to continue working. And so, we’re going to pivot or we’re going to embrace these new skills and then some people are going to do something totally different. And I think that’s okay either way. 

Rachel: Well, something that we – you would know this – but as a regular listener of the podcast, you mentioned the question that we ask all our guests is the software or apps that they would be lost without. You’ve talked a little bit about how you like to use AI, but do you have any other favourites that you love for maintaining success as a freelancer? 

Ashley: Absolutely. So, I think my top three this week, or just recently this week. Gamma. There’s so many. I mean, you could try a new one every day, right? I think Gamma.app. Have you tried that one yet? 

Rachel: No. What’s that about? 

Ashley: So, Gamma.app is a presentation, it’s an AI presentation tool software, and basically you can give it a prompt of literally a sentence, or you can take, say you did a talk about freelancing, you can actually paste it in into the system and it will generate beautiful slides. And I know there’s similar ones on the market that will create slide decks for you. This one I think is the easiest to use, and I feel like they’re more aesthetically pleasing. I think the artwork is beautiful and you can actually create decks, like slide decks, but you can also create documents. So, if you want to create a freebie or some kind of guide, I’ve done that, and then you can, I haven’t done the websites, but supposedly you can use the same tool to create a simple website. I love it. It’s been such a game changer for me. 

The other ones that I’m using, I use Ino Reader as my RSS reader, so I subscribe to a bunch of forums and blogs for different clients that I serve. One is cybersecurity. Actually, we were just talking about cybersecurity, and I use that as an Ino Reader to organise the feeds. And then I use Zapier when you were talking about automation, I think earlier. I use automation to basically, I tag – it’s a whole setup, but I tag these headlines as they come in and then it will tag ones that meet certain specifications and it will put it into a designated Google spreadsheet that I have, and then it will populate summaries. So then when I need to do ghost writing for my client of what’s happening lately and what position should we take, I go to my handy dandy spreadsheet and its things done. 

Rachel: The research is done. 

Ashley: The research is done, so it’s been a game changer for me. 

Rachel: Amazing. So that, that’s sort of like what the automation expert I was talking to is trying to set up for me and using Zapier, which I use already, but to sort of create these Google sheets and just claw back those hours into your week. 

Ashley: Yes. 

Rachel: What it’s all about really. 

Ashley: I love it. I’m obsessed with that. I very fascinated. It’s enough to be scared. But I’m willing to try, if I break it, I’ll find someone to help me. Exactly. 

Lynne: Oh, wow. Thank you so much for a great chat, Ashley. It’s been so lovely to see your face and to get to know you a bit better. Tell us where our audience can find you. 

Ashley: Absolutely. So, you can find me at Talkfreelancetome.com. You can search in your favourite podcast app wherever you’re listening to this conversation. If you want to listen to Talk Freelance to Me, I would love for you to check it out and I’m on LinkedIn under Ashley Cisneros-Mejia, just my name. And so, I’d love to meet people there as well. 

Lynne: Fantastic. 

Rachel: Thank you, Ashley. We will link to your podcast and you on LinkedIn, the episode that you mentioned that you thought people should check out. It’s been really just such a lovely chat and really insightful, and thanks to everyone who’s listening. Leave us a rating and review on the platform where you find your podcast, because we love to hear what you think and we will see you next week. 

Lynne: Back again next week. Thanks. Bye 

Rachel: Bye. 

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Credits:

Connect with Ashley via her website: https://www.ashleycisneros.com or through her podcast: https://talkfreelancetome.com/

Find Lynne www.lynnetestoni.com 

Find Rachel www.rachelsmith.com.au 

Rachel’s List www.rachelslist.com.au 

If you have questions you’d like us to answer in our next Q&A episode, just send them here.

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Episode edited by Marker Creative Co www.markercreative.co