Quickie Post: On-Line Writing Jobs

You can find a million jobs on-line, through various listings and through your own research. For instance, 5 minutes on Google netted me the following possibilities:

- Demand Studios owns a bunch of on-line companies and want writers for them.
- The AARP Magazine is open to submissions and pays $1 a word or 25% of the fee if they decide not to publish your story.
- Mothering Magazine accepts articles on a decent range of topics and poetry, as well.
- ProBlogger, of course, has a lovely list of blogging jobs available.
- b5media is looking for bloggers, too.

Take a few minutes and do your own digging. You never know what's out there if you don't look.

Sure, You Can Write, But Can You Market?

I’m not a huge fan of Technorati because I find it unreliable. However, I do like to check in from time to time on my “Watchlist”. That’s how I ran across How to Start a Freelance Career from Inkwell Editorial.

Don’t be intimidated by the long posts. They do go on for miles but the author generously sprinkles them with valuable nuggets. Much of the advice focuses on marketing and getting clients. This valuable information fills some gaps in my experience for you, my friends.

I would prefer to believe that great writing will draw clients through word of mouth, eliminating the pesky marketing requirement entirely. Then again, I would prefer to believe that the tooth fairy will bring my children money instead of my having to keep a buck or two in my sock drawer, just in case. My preferences don’t change reality, more’s the pity.

If you intend to make freelance writing your career, you will market yourself. You can do so directly, by pitching jobs to folks through on-line sites, or you can do so in the ways suggested at this blog. Either way you must put yourself out there to make money. Try Technorati, while you're at it.

Balance in My Writing Life

I have a trio of recent articles that I haven’t mentioned. The latest was another journey on my hobby horse: How Urban Sprawl Ruins Roads at Associated Content. I got my highest offer ever for this one – I finally broke the elusive $6 mark.

The other two are at Helium. One is about a favorite anime series of mine, Trigun, and the other takes a swipe at explaining why “reduce” and “reuse” are as important as “recycle”. I will be reworking that one to submit to AC, too.

Being without internet access for the weekend really forced me to get some work done, even if I couldn’t post it right away. I did things that I had put on the back burner because I had so much networking and promotion to do. (Networking and promotion means checking through Technorati, BlogCatalog, mybloglog, blogflux, and the other half a dozen places where I try to be active and find places to pop in links or mention how wonderful I am. I am uncomfortable doing this so it’s actually work for me.)

The fact that I had so many articles sitting around partially written (there are still two waiting to be edited) and that I finally made time to fix the header for this blog opened my eyes to the fact that, once again, my efforts were out of balance. I should spend my writing time writing; everything else is ancillary. I need the practice, and the little bit of cash is handy, too. Squidoo lenses, as much fun as they are to set up, aren’t nearly as useful to me as new articles.

Grammar and Promotion: Ponderings

I've been reading blogs that cover somewhat obscure grammatical points, of late. One that got me thinking was AnnaLisa Michalski's post The Creeping Overuse of Up at Be Your Own Editor.

The reason it caught my eye was that I'm re-reading the Harry Potter books and I immediately thought of Ms. Rowling when I read the piece. “Washing up” does seems to have become a common activity, even if it doesn't involve any “upping”. While she can tell a ripping yarn, at times her grammar is, well, lacking in technical perfection.

There you'll also find Lisa's post about her adverbial pet peeve. While the site is directed toward fiction writers, many of the editing tips apply to non-fiction as well. A well-constructed sentence is useful (and admirable) whatever the context!

I've had a disgustingly productive writing week, with a total of four Squidoo lenses, four Helium articles, and a new one submitted to Associated Content. I've concentrated so much on posting here and on networking that it feels great to write something that doesn't have “I” or “me” in every other sentence.

I am curious to see if the articles I've posted on my lenses enjoy an increase in traffic. Several of the Helium articles listed on Squidoo have earned a penny or two overnight. If only there were a way to tell from where that traffic was coming. Of course, I am at the mercy of Associated Content to update page views whenever they get around to it. Who knows where any of those clicks come from, either. At least the stats I can view for my blog tell me how people got here!

It is difficult to promote when you don't know what method works. That's why stats are useful, even if it is too easy to obsess over them at the expense of your content. It's better to focus on what works than to waste your time trying to get attention in the wrong places. You won't find readers who will continue to visit by pasting yourself all over the wrong places. Stats at places like mybloglog and blogflux an help you figure out which ones those are.

My Top Five Most-Read Posts

I thought about doing a "My Five Favorite Posts" list but decided that people might find what other readers chose more useful. It turns out, it isn't as easy as it sounds to make a list of your 5 most-read posts. There isn't anyplace that has stats on my blog from the first day I posted (at least, not that I can find). The results from the 5 or 6 other places I have stats vary depending on when I posted their little codes into my template.

Blogflux is probably the most useful site for stats because they are exceeding generous with them. The only problem is that I didn't sign up with them until a couple of days into June. That means that I have no stats for May! Then again, I had a lot fewer readers then, too.

Here are the top-five most read posts from this blog as best I could determine. They are in no particular order.

Article Writing and Freelance Tips about the 10-Second Rule, formatting, and Sharon Hurley Hall. This one also has the second highest number of comments.

A Bit of Encouragement and Ethics about the Well-Fed Writer.

Resources: Promote Your Blog, Blog for Someone Else about blog listings and job listings (and Deborah Ng).

Freelance Jobs Galore for which the title is pretty self-explanatory. The post has a couple of wacky comments on it. I'm debating whether to leave those, so if anyone can shed light on whether they're as spammy as they seem I'd appreciate a note or a comment to that effect.

To me, the strangest result is that the post that came up in three places as my most-read, most-searched-for topic is Does the World Need Megaglobe? It's one of two sponsored posts I've done. I can't help but wonder if it was the company searching for buzz or others hired to write about them searching for other posts. I suppose it could be people searching for the site because they've heard the buzz. It just seems strange to me that that is the one that tops the list. Perhaps I'm writing about the wrong things after all?! Nah. I like what I'm doing. I hope you do, too.

Journalism Jobs and Writing Inspiration

Chris Bibey over at chrisblogging.com had a useful mini-review of journalismjobs.com the other day. I thought I’d check it out and see if I wanted to add it to my sidebar list of places to look for freelance jobs. There wasn’t a link in the above post, but if you want to look into it yourself, it’s right where you’d expect it.

The jobs that I looked at were out of my league, at least for the time being. I don’t have the experience or the time necessary. There are, however, a lot of jobs there. It’s motivating to think that someday I could apply for one, if I can ever get myself started. I don't think it quite fits into the sidebar list, though. Maybe in a few years.

In the mean time, I’ll keep writing and build up the expertise I'll need. That reminds me - I finally got an offer on my latest urban sprawl article at Associated Content. Of course I’ll post a link as soon as it’s live.

I’ve been having trouble coming up with good articles over the past month or so. I went looking for some help and found advice and tips all over the web. If you need some inspiration and guidance, take a look at Roy Jacobsen at Writing, Clear and Simple. He had some great advice on finding inspiration for articles and blog content. I need to start using some of these tricks. I tend to start writing in my head when I’m sitting at a stop light or standing in line at the bank. Maybe I should try remembering that my mp3 player and my cell phone have voice recorders!

Ai - I forgot to mention that I am submitting my blog to Blogging Fusion. It's yet another blog listing, but it provides a lot of information so that you can really specify what you blog is about. Hopefully that means that I can then find more blogs to read!

Article Writing Tips and An Apology to Blogflux

As I often struggle with actually sitting down and writing an article, this post at Writing Help about The 30-Minute Article really struck my fancy. It actually inspired a new take on a article that I've been futzing around with for over a week. I may well actually finish the silly thing. I'd been so focused on outlining the problem that I forgot to offer the solution! I may never be a 30-minute article writer, but I can focus on what I'm trying to do rather than playing with language until I've forgotten my own point. That ought to eliminate frustration and increase writing speed.

As promised, I've been researching guru.com and have very little encouraging to say about them. There is a basic, free membership and you can bid on jobs. I've had people tell me that they were members long ago before there was an “upgrade” available and that they made great contacts with whom they now deal directly. That's fantastic, but the bulk of the information I encountered from recent users was that there is not much work awarded and that the rates were generally low. If you're interested in the site, I'd stick with the free membership and only bid for a few projects. Someone must be making money there, but it doesn't sound like it's worth investing much time. Note: unless you search with quotes around the name of the site (“guru.com”) you'll get the self-proclaimed guru for everything from snowshoeing to hang gliding.

One more note: My opinion pendulum has swung back the other way on Blogflux. Why? Because I finally started using some of their tools. For interacting with other bloggers I give them a D. But for useful things and toys? An A- at least. The two things that have really surprised me there are the Pinger that pings all over the place with one click. I had never even heard of Icerocket until I signed up there, and now I pop up there without ever having visited!

The other tool I like is the e-mail scrambler. I'd long been reluctant to add an e-mail address to this blog because I had heard so many horror stories about bots scraping addresses and overwhelming amounts of spam. No sooner did I open a new e-mail account than I noticed this tool. Now I've got a handy-dandy “Contact Me” spot that is doubly safe! As a plus, the stat map is a really cool toy. Blogflux, please consider this my official apology. I misjudged you. Then again, I was mislead by the “Top Sites” tag you provided to me. Let's just shake and forget the whole thing.

A Day Without A Computer

For those who doubt the saying "You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone", try having complete hardware failure and being without a computer for a full day. This is my apology for not being anywhere to be found yesterday and my explanation for why I don't have much in the way of links today.

I wanted to check on Blog Flux (on which I've cooled, as apparently I missed the part where you only get the cool stats if you pay them and there is no networking set-up over there) and I knew I had a new article published at Associated Content. That one is about fighting urban sprawl with mixed-use development. I was excited to see it up as it's part of a series I'm doing.

I also ran across guru.com and I really wanted to get some feedback on whether anyone I "know" has used it and how it works. The link points to the page for searching projects, and I found a fair number of freelance writing jobs both under the Article/News category and the web content categories. It also appears that they pay by escrow, which tends to mean that you can feel more confident that you'll actually get paid for your work! I'll look into this and post more later.

More on Promotional Tools

Not only do I have a lovely new set of toys from Feedburner, but I discovered Blog Flux today as well. I’ve registered this blog with them. Obviously I cannot live without 42 different kinds of stats from 19 different places. At any rate, if you’re curious you can check out their Directory of Writing/Publishing Blogs and, if all goes well, I’ll be listed soon. Ah, I'm told to put this in here! Now, it doesn't give the the option of choosing writing or publishing as my blog type. I'll have to see how that goes.

Apparently they recently merged with Blog Top Sites and bought out Commentful last month. But what I like about their stated standards, as with blogcatalog, is that they are looking for sites that are not just lists of referral links or shilling for other sites. That’s not a crowd in with which I’d like to get lumped. (How’s that for an awkward grammatical construction?)

While I am getting a fair number of clicks from Technorati and mybloglog, I’d like to target more serious writers and bloggers. Not that I don’t appreciate the interest. I just don’t believe that they much care about the mechanics of writing. It seems that many bloggers are specifically interested only in how to make money. Money's lovely, but to me the act and art of writing are more important.

Is Viewing Your Stats Bad For You?

While you can learn all sorts of fascinating details, sometimes I can't help but wonder if being able to see things like from where people came to your blog, how long they were there, and what they saw and clicked is bad for the average blogger.

On the one hand, I discovered that someone did a Google search for Deborah Ng, whose praises I have sung a plenty. Apparently my blog popped up and they wandered over, spending 14 mintues here. I love that person! But it is good for me to care so much?

Letting Other People Write The LinkBait is a lovely post by Andy Beard with which I whole-heartedly agree. What I write probably isn't over the heads of people who want to write well, but people who are on-line solely to cash in where they can won't understand what the heck I'm talking about. I am more than happy to have them visit, but I'd rather have people hanging around who share an interest in improving the tone of the blogosphere and of articles on the web in general.

The question is, does that make me a snob? Well, yes, but not necessarily in a bad way. I can admit to enjoying the toys and tools that come with various programs. I check my stats at MyBlogLog and AdSense and be thrilled with that day's numbers or despair about ever finding success.

I have to continually remind myself that I have not been around long enough to build a base of steady readers. And obsessing over where those who visit come from on an individual basis is not going to help me over the long term. What I need to do is to watch for trends over time. To do that, I've got to give myself time.

I've been posting all over the place looking for feedback, too. I see that there have been quite a few people wandering by so I wanted to thank those who have taken the time. I'd like this to be an attractive and useful place. I appreciate the help!

Another Promotional Tool

I really want to get this blog into BlogCatalog - the even have a nifty button to add:

But the first time I submitted it they said that it was too new. Since this is the 20th post, I'm hoping that they'll reconsider. I re-submitted yesterday, but forgot to add the aforementioned button. I'll try again today and see if they will let me play. [Edited to add that they did, indeed, let me in. Let's hear it for perserverance!]

I've got listings all over the place, and I've found that mybloglog, technorati, and blogcatalog are the ones from which that I get the most feedback, both in readers and in on-site comments. I've decided to narrow down my focus because it takes so much time to market yourself individually on 15 sites. Maybe I can get established better at these three and then expand. I don't really get how some folks are everywhere and seem to be up-to-date and responsive on all of the sites. Deborah Ng must have cloned herself a dozen times to keep up with her listings, her profiles, her newsletters, her updates, and still finding time to write to a couple of blogs, like Finding the Right Words. Deb, I wanna be just like you when I grow up!

Okay, that was my embarrassing gush for the month. It's hard not to be impressed by people who really seem to know where they're going. It's even harder not to be awed by those who have gotten there and never gloat about it. The key for me is to try being inspired rather than discouraged. I have to remember that all of the good writing jobs are not being snapped up in half an hour by far better and more experienced writers than I am. And that, if I don't try, I'm never going to get even one of them. In other words, I have to stop being a chicken and really put myself out there. That's part of the reason that I'm writing this blog. If I keep all of these resources in a place where I can easily find them then I can work up my courage to the point where I'll actually use them!

MyBlogLog and HTML

MyBlogLog certainly is a wealth of information, even if it does look like the entire purpose of most communities is to post a link and then find another community in which to do the same. But there is some interesting information buried amongst the "Click Me!" posts. For example, I discovered The Web Marketing Blog's post for Saturday, which has some good tips for beginning bloggers. I doubt that I would have run across that on my own.

In my meandering around over there, I also came up with geckoandfly with their blogger templates. I may have to check these out, as I'm not overly fond of the background on this one and I don't really know how to change it.

Of course, I could just learn more HTML. These days, it's getting to be an essential skill for anyone publishing on-line. It's easy to get intimidated by all of that jargon and secret-code-like symbols that make browsers display amazing things. But there really is a way to at least learn the basics. I'll post a tutorial or two along the way here, as well.

I also wanted to point out that I have two new articles at Associated Content. I'm trying a few different experiments over there, including my newest article with a very searchable subject - How YouTube Got Don Imus Fired. We'll see how the hits on this one go, as opposed to the other article published last night. If only they'd update page views more often I could post updates here!

Follow the Yellow Crumb Road...

I thought it might be useful to give an example of what I mean when I say that I “followed a breadcrumb trail” to find a post. This is the one I followed this morning.

I was in the forum at Associated Content and saw the listing for Scott’s Web Writers Café. Naturally, I was curious, so I clicked for a visit. There I ran across a post referring me to Dr. Tony Hung’s blog marketing post on problogger, which led me to his article at newassignment.net about using mybloglog to create a social network of blogs.

I thought that I had joined mybloglog, but it turns out that I hadn’t. Of course, that’s what I’ve spent half of the morning doing – adding widgets and setting up screen shots and filling out profile information. Hey, sometimes you’ve got to play!

Once I got tired of that, I explored the communities tagged for writing, where I found Writers Edge, which led me to linking information from Jack Humphrey, which led me to Brian Clark on copyblogger (where there is a ton and a half of great information) which in turn led to Kevin O’Keefe.

So I visited or found eight great sites, starting from an innocent post in a forum. While I’m not going to go and notify every one of these people that I’ve linked to them here, they may find out anyway through pings and other tracking widgets. Then they could come and read at least this entry, if not be fascinated by my scintillating wit and sparkling personality. And I got a free post out of it, too!

Links for Writing Better News On-line

In my browsing today, I ran across Paul Bradshaw’s post about the future of magazines, which made me think of Associated Content as a sort of out-of-control magazine trying to be everything to everyone.

The problem with that is that things are spread so broadly that it’s hard to find anything specific. Having enough sub-categories to make things findable will only make the submission process harder. Then again, not having specific enough categories makes browsing an exercise in frustration or boredom, wading through 700 articles that do not interest you to find three that do. I think everyone knows that people are not that patient in reading on-line.

And following a trail of breadcrumbs from Mr. Bradshaw's post, I found this post from Danny Sanchez filled with resources for learning about journalism on-line, many of which are free. I know I’ll be checking some of these out. I don’t do well with third-person writing and I could use some pointers on story composition. From who better to learn than the pros? I dugg this one and couldn’t believe that no one ever had before.

I’ve submitted this blog to two places, already. There’s
and . I've also submitted both of my blogs to Blog Listings and .

I may tackle a few more from this submission site list later. I have my older blog on these two as well so I already had accounts set up.

While I’m tiptoeing forward, I’ll be checking out AdSense here on Google as well as finding more freelance and on-line journalism blogs to help expand my knowledge base. And of course, I’ll be posting my findings and experiences here.