The changes at AFW are continuing to come, so I want to give you a quick heads up about some of the changes you might see (or will soon see). If you run into any problems with any of these updates, do let me know so I can look into them.
Ad Testing
As you know, I recently brought in a team of writers (six of them in addition to myself). While services and other sites are paying for those staff writers, I want this blog to be able to justify keeping people on board all on its own. Therefore, I’ll be testing various monetization methods now and in the near future.
One of the first things I’m doing is re-introducing Adsense. However, ads should only display in a visitor’s first five visits to All Freelance Writing (or if you clear your cookies, because it then assumes you’re a new visitor). Even for new visitors it should only display one ad per page and not be overly intrusive. The idea here is to monetize one-time traffic like search engine referrals while cutting regular readers some slack on the ads (since regular readers become ad-blind anyway, it doesn’t even make sense from the income standpoint to make you look at them every day).
I’ll also be looking for ways to better monetize job ads. For now you’ll see a job search box at the bottom of Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday job lists. That may or may not change depending on how it goes. Again, hopefully nothing terribly intrusive.
New Products
I’m hoping to release two new products here before the end of this year, both e-books.
The first will be an e-book version of the 30 day marketing bootcamp for freelance writers that was recently completed at The Query-Free Freelancer. The e-book version will be enhanced a bit and will include tools and worksheets not available in the post series.
The second will be the next e-book in the Web Writer’s Guide series — a marketing workbook for freelance writers, filled with all kinds of tools you can use to better market your services such as a full marketing plan template tailored specifically to freelance writers.
New Freebies
We’ll continue to release free tools and more as well. For example, the next tool will be an interactive freelance writing rate calculator based on my 2007 article on setting freelance writing rates the right way. If you have tool suggestions, feel free to mention them in a comment and I’ll see if it’s something my programmers can whip up.
New Branding
While I wanted to make some minor branding changes with the last design change, I didn’t get around to it. As of today though we have a new logo and tagline for All Freelance Writing.
Back-end Updates
I’m also making a series of back-end updates to plugins and such to keep the site running as smoothly as possible. There’s always a possibility that plugins will be incompatible or cause some kind of hiccup or another. If you run into problems on the site (like not being able to comment, things displaying oddly, etc.), please leave a comment or email me at jenn(at)allfreelancewriting(dot)com and I’ll look into getting it fixed asap.
I’m really hoping these changes will be for the best. :)
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Cathy Miller
Amandah
Andrew Kardon
Amelia Ramstead
Lori
I love the new logo. I noticed it right away and thought, YES! I also just figured out how I’ll be raising my rates in 2010 to get paid what I really deserve. Which, of course, was made possible by the Web Writers Guide.
I’m really excited about your next ebook offerings. I’ll be setting aside the dough to purchase them right away. With the popularity of the Web Writers Guide, do you think you’ll be utilizing an affiliate program for either / or? Just wondering, and I know that I would probably utilize said program in a niche content site I’ve been working on for freelance business.
I’ve been writing for so long today that I went to hit Ctrl-S after I finished that paragraph. Sheesh.
I think, it you deem it profitable, you should add a few ebook or book (with Amazon or other affiliate codes involved) review posts and put them in your More Resources sidebar. Just a thought. I’ve been a fan of yours for a while and I know that you could still make affiliate dough of me (and similar groupies) by turning us on to great new books. Like, have you read ‘Six Figure Freelancing’ by Kelly James-Enger? I adore that book because of its focus on networking, but it also talks about mag writing a lot. Something I don’t do and I know you do for hire, but I know you wanted more content on that too. Kelly would make for a good interview, too. Her website is http://www.becomebodywise.com.
Just my four cents. Because my cents are very valuable.
- Jessie
That new logo gave me some goosebumps. Like, at least four.
Love the new logo it really stands out. As for ads I didn’t find the adsense ads intrusive at all and I hope they work out great for you. I’m sure regular readers won’t mind either because you provide great content. Jessie’s suggestion for Amazon links is a good one too.
Amanda
For some reason I’m still not crazy about the logo, so it might get some minor tweaks in the near future (no big changes though). That’s not the designer’s fault. Love him to pieces. But I had to play with final colors on the site to see which options would pop more, and something just feels odd w/ the edits I made. I was more worried about getting the new slogan out there — plays into other coming changes in how the site’s branded / promoted.
Glad to hear the Adsense ads weren’t too annoying. I probably won’t use Amazon though. I have in the past, and I just can’t bring myself to support their affiliate program. Their pay out per product is ridiculously low compared to most affiliate programs (equal effort for lower earnings), and the time you take to create their affiliate ads and get them posted often isn’t worth the payout (or lack thereof). I’m also not crazy about their oddly controlling behavior over independent authors, so while I’ll link to them for people who want to learn more about a book and see reviews, I don’t want to profit from them.
There definitely will be more affiliate promotions. I just won’t promote complete crap so I need to research some options, buy them, make time to read them / use them, and then review them here. That used to be the primary income stream of AFW and I’ve let it slack. While I’ll mostly promote my own e-books, there are other software packages and such that would be useful to writers, and I’d like to promote some of the better options.
@Jessie – There are currently no plans to launch an affiliate program of my own. It might be an option further down the line when there’s a full WWG series available for sale and I’ve pretty much tapped my own market. But I’m not happy with existing affiliate program options. Clickbank is unacceptable because of their fee structure (the amount I was paying them for every sale I made myself – at least 95% of the sales – wasn’t worth my while anymore). E-junkie and completely self-run affiliate programs are a bit too hands-on and I simply don’t have the time to deal with them. If e-junkie ever get more of a CB-style affiliate system in place with automatic payments and such I might consider it depending on the fee structures involved. But until then, available options are too much of a hassle when I already reach a very large portion of my market directly (as opposed to someone new to a niche who needs the affiliates to reach out for them).
I know I’ve seen the book you mentioned, but I don’t believe I’ve read it yet. I’ve promoted David Drake’s Six Figure Freelancer e-book here very successfully though in the past, so promoting both (if I liked the second enough to endorse it) might get a bit confusing. I will give a couple of recommendations right here though for two freelance writing books that are perfect for serious freelancers wanting to earn that kind of income – Peter Bowerman’s The Well-Fed Writer and Michael Meanwell’s The Wealthy Writer. :)