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Many freelance writers have their own blogs. I’m always surprised by how many blogging writers I know don’t blog for clients! Why not? More importantly, why should they consider it? Today let’s talk about blogging for others and why it might be one of the best things to happen to a Web writer (or someone wanting to become one).

Why Might Writers Prefer to Blog for Themselves?

I understand the lure of running your own blog. Hell, I run a lot of them. I get it. I really do. You figure it’s a better way to build exposure and branding to attract other clients. Or maybe you think you’ll “get rich” blogging for yourself but that clients will only pay you crap rates, making it unworthy of your time. Some writers I know avoid blogging for clients because they consider blogging to be a very personal thing. They’re afraid clients won’t let them be themselves.

What other reasons might you avoid blogging for clients even if you run your own blog? Give us some personal insight.

Why you Should Consider Blogging for Others

None of the reasons I gave above for blogging only for yourself are really good ones. They don’t reflect reality. The truth is that many writers can get more exposure and more money blogging for clients than they’ll ever see on their own blog. There are also many different types of blogging clients, and plenty who do want your personality to shine though. Let’s look at some of the benefits of client blogging in more depth:

• More Exposure — Let’s face it. Most bloggers who blog for themselves are never going to get “famous” doing it. Most blogs never amount to much. However, writing for a well-funded blog with a good reach in your target audience can bring you a great deal of visibility — more than you’d get going solo.

  Popular niche blogs are one of the best options for visibility (why do you think even relatively well-known bloggers are out there guest posting on them?). But don’t neglect blogs that you don’t think of as huge. You’d be surprised at the traffic levels of some blogs out there. They might seem a bit understated on the surface, but they could have an outstanding reach within the industry.

  It’s all in who you’re targeting. Those targeting professionals inside an industry are going to look very different than those blatantly trying to attract a huge, more general, audience. They might connect you to more relevant client prospects too.

• More Money — Blogging is a big money game these days, and it has a large amount of room for growth. Many companies still aren’t blogging — even big ones. Some never will. Others are just looking for the right person to guide them.

  Even small businesses are often better funded than freelancers think. The highest paying clients I work with are almost always small businesses. Pitch a blog to one of them. Maybe it’s a local business needing an online presence to be found in local search. Perhaps it’s a company in China or India that wants to expand or improve their visibility among English-speaking audiences (and yes, clients in those countries also pay very well to reach those goals).

  There is a lot of money to be made in blogging right now. No, you won’t get those gigs by only responding to job ads or turning to networks. You will get them if you go out there and pitch your blog ideas and network so you’ll hear when companies are looking for someone.

  Keep your own blog going too — it makes you visible and serves as a dynamic portfolio piece!  Here’s another tip for you: contact SEO and Internet marketing firms. They often need bloggers to help with multiple blogs. They essentially bring several clients to your doorstep at once.

• More Flexibility — If you only blog for yourself, you might think it’s the more flexible option, but you’d be wrong. Whether you realize it or not, you get into certain habits or a certain style of writing on your own blog. That’s not a bad thing. It’s about branding your blog and being something readers are comfortable with. Blogging for clients allows you much more freedom because you can diversify your gigs (like anything else I’d strongly recommend against relying too heavily on a single blogging client).

  You can write for multiple clients, meaning multiple styles. Some will be personality-driven and others might be more instructional posts for beginners in a niche. Some will be by-lined and some will be ghostwritten (giving you greater style freedom because you don’t have to worry about the writing conflicting with the style you’re already known for). It’s a very flexible job to have.

A Blogging Break-Down

Let’s look at an example to help break it down. Let’s say you’re a finance writer. You write about a broad spectrum of topics in that niche, but you prefer writing about business finance. For your own blog, you want to reach potential clients, showing them that you not only understand basic financial premises but also financial writing as the specialty area it is. So you launch a blog on finance writing.

Your Own Blog

Your blog is a great business tool. You post to it daily, Monday through Friday. It not only attracts clients wanting to learn more about what financial writers do (not to mention ranking well for related terms clients are searching for), but it also connects you to a network of other finance writers. These are people who might refer gigs to you because you’re fresh in their minds due to your blog when they get a gig offer they can’t take on. That’s great.

You also monetize your own blog directly with affiliate ads, a product of your own, and contextual ads. I’ve seen what it takes to take a blog in a similar niche to $2000 monthly in a pretty short period of time, and I know it’s doable. I also know it’s more than most bloggers make. But if we want to give blogging for yourself a fair shake in the comparison, we need to assume you’re capable of being one of the exceptions to the rule (yes, yes, I know I always say never assume you’re the exception to the rule — but we’re being hypothetical today to debunk the “blogging for yourself is the best way to get rich and famous myth”). Using that data from ProBlogger as a guide, let’s say you’re one of the 19% of bloggers earning at least $1500 per month.

In reality you might have to run several blogs to earn that much per month, but you’re a super star. You do it with one. Not too bad, right? If you truly are one of the few bloggers who’s going to earn a full-time income at it alongside great visibility, is there any benefit at all in still blogging for clients? You betcha!

Client Blogging

Now let’s say you also do some finance blogging for clients. For clients you charge around $75 per post (this is very achievable and actually on the very low end of the massive amount of private gigs out there right now). That assumes you’ll receive a by-line. You charge a premium if the client wants something ghostwritten because you won’t get the exposure. For those you charge $100 (also a very achievable rate for professional blogging for other companies).

Your own blog does its job and attracts new clients. You decide to blog for them too. You pick up four regular blogging gigs (and if you can’t get at least four regular gigs at your current rates, you’re not marketing yourself effectively — you really can do it). Here are those gigs:

• You write a weekly by-lined column for client A on business credit issues. (At four weeks per month that’s $300 per month for four posts.)
• You write a 10 posts per month (by-lined) for a financial firm’s blog, connecting them to their own customers or clients. (That’s $750 per month.)
• You ghostwrite three posts per week for a personal finance blog managed by a debt consolidation company. Normally you focus on business finance, but since it’s ghostwritten you don’t mind being more flexible. (At four weeks per month that’s $1200.)
• Another client likes the tone and style on your own blog, so they hire you to write by-lined opinion pieces twice per week (they want to get a piece of your authority status in the niche credited to their site). This is a large small business blog. They have you post twice per week by taking news stories and posting your opinions / feedback on them. (At four weeks per month that’s $600 per month.)

Much of this kind of blogging work you can do in an hour per post or less. They don’t involve conducting interviews. They don’t involve getting extensive background from the company itself (like if you were managing a PR-driven blog for image maintenance and more in-depth audience interaction).

Let’s see what it all works out to. Over the course of the month you earn $1500 from your own blog, posting 20 posts per month (one per day, M-F, figuring a flat four weeks per month).  During that same time frame you earn $2850 from your four blogging clients, writing a total of 34 posts per month.

That means you basically earn $75 per post on average when you blog for yourself. You earn $83.82 per post on average when you blog for other people.

Delving Deeper Into Blogging Income

I know what you’re probably thinking — “That’s not a big difference, so why wouldn’t I only blog for myself and ignore all of the deadlines that come with client work?”  Because those numbers don’t tell the entire truth.

Yes, your own blog might pay you $75 per post if you’re one of those rare bloggers who can monetize their own blog fairly effectively (and consistently). However, you need to break it down into hourly rates. When you blog for yourself, you have to factor in all of the administrative work (design changes and development, upgrades, problem-solving, managing and responding to comments, etc.) and all of the marketing time that goes into the blog (commenting elsewhere to get links, evaluating stats so you can improve your position, guest posting elsewhere, taking part in social media to get the word out about the blog, etc.).

Your hourly rate for managing your blog would likely go way down. Yes, you can outsource some of these tasks. In that case you have to decrease earnings by the corresponding expenses to see what you’re really earning from your blog. It still would go way down.

But don’t you have to do some of these things for client blogs too? Perhaps. Here’s the big difference though. You should be getting paid for all of the “extras” you do for client blogs. It’s one thing to be paid to write. If they want you managing all comments, promoting the blog via social media, etc., then you can negotiate a fixed monthly rate for those services on top of your writing rates.

Many clients don’t require that of their writers at all — they prefer to handle it themselves or they have other contractors dealing with some elements of it, like social media promotion. Yes, there’s also some administrative time involved. But I’ve found that private blogging clients ask for edits almost never — definitely less than things like content networks — and the time you’ll take getting post topics approved or dealing with a few clients via email or calls probably won’t come close to the time you’ll put into administering and marketing your own blog. You come out ahead.

Here’s another consideration. While you might be able to get to the $1500 per month point, that does not mean you’ll be able to double that income on a single blog within a reasonable amount of time (depending on how big your niche is, and what types of monetization streams are available to you, it might be nearly impossible to turn that business blog of yours into a $3k+ per month money-maker). So don’t assume that single blog could make up the difference between a lack of client work.

Some people might think “well, that’s okay, I’ll just start other blogs!” You can. In fact I find diversifying (within reasonable limits so you don’t spread yourself too thin) can lead to more blogging income than a single blog ever could. Once you’ve learned how to successfully manage a high-earning blog, you have the ability to take those skills and experiences and apply them to other niches you know will monetize well. However, with every new blog comes more administrative and marketing time, and during the first few months you’ll probably sink in a lot of time and / or money with little return while it gets off the ground.

I gave blogging for yourself every chance here to compete with a modest client schedule. I used low rates for the client projects (based on professional blogging rates in related niches) and if anything I overestimated the earning potential of someone’s individual blog since most won’t ever hit that $1500 per month level. In the end, client blogging has the potential to pay significantly more for the time invested. If you target medium to high profile clients about launching or maintaining their blogs, you also have more exposure potential than most bloggers will hit with their own blogs. It’s a good deal all around.

By all means I’m not suggesting that anyone quit their own blogs, and I’m not saying you shouldn’t launch blogs of your own. I’m a huge fan of running your own blogs. I know how lucrative they can be from experience. And I know how fun they can be to manage and write for. I also know they can do a great job of attracting new freelance writing clients. All I’m saying is this — if some of those clients it attracts want you to blog for them, don’t dismiss the idea just because you think you’ll get “rich and famous” blogging for yourself and just be another worker bee for someone else. That’s short-sighted, and it’s downright wrong.

A lot of people email me. They are like, “Clint. You should probably pay your credit card bill.” They’re unprofessional emails, and I refuse to deal with a bank that can’t personally call me and ask me nicely if I’d like to give them money as a gift since they’re having a tough time this month.

But those aren’t the emails I want to talk about. I also get a lot of emails from people who are just starting out freelancing. They want to know how to stay on task and get their stuff done. It’s tough being your own boss. So here’s a few ideas on how to keep yourself motivated and working.

1. Keep the TV on in the background. There is nothing like sitting on your laptop slamming out an article while distracting things happen in the background. Sometimes, I get so productive with this method that my jaw goes slack with my brilliance. Sometimes, I will produce up to a quarter of an article per day with this clever little tip. Additionally, you should put on your favorite movie. I find it motivating.
2. Take frequent breaks every five to ten minutes. I suggest the following sites: Gawker, Facebook, Wikipedia, TV Tropes, or any given webcomic that has been online for longer than five years. If you take a break every five to ten minutes, then you keep your brain fresh. Be sure to take a break that is at least 30 minutes long. You need the rest!
3. Leave the chat programs on. You may have a 5 PM deadline today, but you don’t want to sacrifice your social life. That’s why it’s always a good time to fire up AIM, GChat, and Skype so that you can stay in the loop with all your buds. Remember, you may not have left your house in six months, but there’s no reason why you can’t have a shallow and brief conversation with each of your friends who happen to be online at work. This is known as networking because you are on a network.
4. Multitask with involved chores. While you’re writing, there is no reason why you cannot do a little sprucing up of the homestead. I’m not talking about amateur errands like laundry or groceries either–you ought to spend time on intensive projects like scrubbing the grout in your bathroom, refinishing your floors by hand, producing an intricate mosaic tile pattern in your kitchen, or adding a rec room to your house. Personally, I am a fan of custom-making wooden furniture for my house. These are all projects you can do as a quick little break from your ever-increasing stack of projects to complete.
5. Surf the web mindlessly. If you have something really important to do, here’s what I would suggest you do. Look at your email inbox, sigh sadly, then turn to your browser (Firefox is best, but you can easily make do with Internet Explorer or Safari). Type in random phrases or try to find a website you visited once seven years ago. Please note that this is different from tip #2 because I needed to come up with five tips but then it turns out I hadn’t seen the latest episode of Caprica so I put that on first, and now I am making a quality article.

These tips will make you ultimately more productive. Hammer away at these five points (which are totally five points and not four stretched out to be five) until you’re a successful freelancer. Shower me with praise via email.

Today I’d like to talk about blog comment etiquette — some dos and don’ts I guess you could say when it comes to commenting on others’ blogs. This issue comes to mind periodically regarding over-linking, but I never considered it worth its own post. Lately though, I’ve been seeing more commenters on various blogs of mine getting flagged as spam by default, so maybe it’s time to visit the issue.

When I say “etiquette,” I’m not talking about being sweet as pie to everyone when you comment. I couldn’t care less if commenters have strong words as long as they’re not entirely on the attack. By all means disagree or even fight when it’s called for. But blog comment etiquette isn’t just about being nice. It’s about respecting the platform and what amounts to the “virtual home” of another blogger. With that in mind, here are a few dos and don’ts when it comes to commenting on blogs — at least when commenting on mine.

1. Keep the linking to a minimum. — The biggest reason I see people get flagged for spam when they’re trying to comment is that they’re putting too many links in their comment. Wordpress, for example (or maybe specifially Akismet — I can’t remember), has a default setting of any more than two links being flagged as spam. If a blogger gets a lot of spam (*raises hand*) they might not always even sort through all of it comment by comment. You might just find your comments deleted. Try to stick to linking policies that are pretty widely accepted in the blogosphere — that includes not littering your comments with links.
2. Don’t add manual link signatures. — Adding links to the end of your comments is not a good thing. It’s spammy. In fact, it’s what many spammers quite blatantly do. Blog comments already come with a built-in place for your link (if and when the blog owner chooses to allow it). It’s your username. Blog comments are not designed for you to stuff your anchor text links in. They’re designed for conversation. If the links are solely self-promotional, they’re not appropriate for the body of the comment. Keep it to your name. If they don’t add something relevant within the context of your comment, they’re also inappropriate. Save your signature links for forums and email where they belong, or only include them if you know for a fact that the blog owner is okay with it. I occasionally let it slide if someone actually adds value to the discussion, but it’s still somewhat annoying (and readers occasionally point it out to me too, so I’m not the only one who’s bothered by it).
3. On that note, add value! — Don’t post useless drivel like “I agree,” or “great post.” No one cares. You might be trying to kiss the blogger’s ass for some inexplicable reason, but don’t. A) You look silly when you do. B) You force people interested in the real conversation to scroll through a bunch of crap to get back to business. And C) if you really want to show appreciation for a post, the blogger would quite possibly rather that you contribute than simply flatter. That’s not to say that some people don’t have a constant need for validation and a constant craving for the oohs and ahhs. Plenty do — just not this blogger.
4. Sign comments with your real name or a very recognizable handle. – There is rarely a good excuse to comment on a blog anonymously. If you aren’t willing to take credit for your words, you should probably just keep your virtual mouth shut since you clearly don’t value your point that much. Stuffing the author field with a keyword phrase? That’s just asking to have comments deleted or banned as spam. If you must include your site name, do it in addition to your real name.

Clearly not everyone will agree with me here. That’s fine. The important thing to remember is that it doesn’t matter what you personally consider appropriate and inappropriate blog comment etiquette. What matters is how the blog owners of the blogs you comment on feel about it. Don’t assume that because Blogger A loves the warm and fuzzy “Oh my god, you’re so great!” crap that Blogger B is going to be okay with it. Just because one person is cool with you linking all over the place, don’t take it as a license to do it everywhere you go. Get to know the bloggers you follow as well as their usual community members and get a feel for the blog comment culture of that site before jumping in with any assumptions. Just my $.02.

The designer and I finally finished up the design side of the AFW update I mentioned previously. The PSDs are off to the coder, and hopefully we’ll have them ready to live on the site in the next week or so. I wanted to give you an early preview so there are no surprises when it happens.

As you can see in the preview below (click it to view it full-size), the new design is based on the current design’s structure. Everything should be accessible from the same place, so there shouldn’t be any confusion in navigating. I know it’s a somewhat drastic change stylewise, but I like it and I hope you will too (or that you’ll at least get used to it!). The logo is also being updated — I finally have one I really like for this site, and I think it works well with the new theme.

You know what? I like talking about the weather. It’s beautiful outside. Hopefully some of you full-time freelancers out there remembered to spring forward since you didn’t have a bunch of annoying bosses and coworkers to sit around and complain about it! Personally, I gave myself an extra hour of sleep. Now, on to the freelance writing jobs!

The Freelance Writing Jobs

Freelance Writing Job Tip of the Week

Beware of ads that ask you to have passion. I know that might sound a little odd because of course, as a writer, you are going to have passion for a topic. The only issue with that is many employers take advantage of people they view as hobbyists and pay them a much lower rate because they’re already passionate about a topic. I’m not telling you not to bid on projects that excite you, because you should by all means! But if an employer posts a job asking you to be passionate about a topic, they are about to pay you $.001 a word. I will guarantee it.

Worst Freelance Writing Job of the Week

looking for strong business writers or writer with a english major that can write business related topic or history topics . 2 years of college min. Must know APA and MLA formats. Pay is 300 a week for 5 days a week , min 7 pages a day or we can do less days a week the pay would be reduced based on days that you could work.

Looking for Ethics writer as well. Philosophy writer needed as well.

If you think that you’re going to get a full-time writer to pump out at least 200 pages a month for $2,000 (that is way below $.01 per word, by the way), you definitely might need input from an ethics writer too. It’s pretty clear that the rate of compensation on this job is terrible. Here’s what bugs me most about it though. Notice that they change the duration of time when talking about certain things. They talk about the rate of compensation per week, but then discuss the daily output of work necessary. See that? They don’t want you to figure out that you’d be working your ass off for around $100 a day. Not very mathy? Get a friend who is. These gigs very commonly ensnare newbie writers because they’re so vague on terms.

If you’d like to look through longer aggregated lists of freelance writing jobs to help you save time in your job search, All Freelance Writing recommends Anne Wayman’s freelance writing jobs at AboutFreelanceWriting.com.