We’ve already looked at why freelance job boards aren’t the best places to find gigs and how you can make it easier for clients to find you through your writer platform. But what can you do in between client projects, as you wait for responses to your pitches or while you’re still growing your platform?

You can build additional non-client income streams (and some of these are actually a part of your writer platform, meaning they can attract clients in addition to direct income). Let’s look at some revenue stream options for writers and then I’ll point you to some further information we’ve covered in the past about two of the most popular options.

Additional Revenue Streams for Freelance Writers

Here are ten potential new revenue streams you can develop as a writer:

1. Books
2. E-books
3. Blogs
4. Niche content / resource websites (free)
5. Paid membership sites
6. E-courses
7. Email newsletters
8. Industry reports (based on original research like surveys)
9. Website flipping (create small well-optimized sites and sell them to webmasters)
10. PLR articles or e-books (content sold at very low prices for re-use or resale, but the same content can be sold to multiple people)

Not all of these income streams will be right for you. For example, if you tend to charge $50 or more per blog post (or want to), selling cheap PLR content can tarnish the image you want to create even if it might be more profitable at times. On the other hand, not all writers want to devote the time that goes into writing, editing and selling a book to bring in additional income.

Now let’s look at two of the most common additional income streams for writers: blogs and e-books. I’m not going to say a lot about them directly in this post as they’ve been discussed extensively in the past. Instead I’m going to link you to further reading, so you can pick and choose the information you really want or need to know.

Blogging

Here are some articles from our archives about getting started as a blogger and using blogs as an additional income stream:

• Make Money Blogging — An Additional Income Stream for Freelance Writers
• Blog Launch Checklist
• Coming Up With Blog Post Ideas
• 101 Niches to Write About
• Score Points for Better Blogging
• Are You a Slave to Your Blog Sponsors?
• How We Increased Blog Traffic by 80% in Less Than a Year (and How You Can Too!)

E-books

Writing and selling e-books can be another way for freelance writers to earn income between gigs. Better yet, these e-books can sell for a long time after the initial launch. If you’re thinking about writing e-books, here are some resources you might be interested in. (Note: Some of these posts are located on my indie publishing blog rather than All Freelance Writing.)

• How to Write an E-book in Just 14 Days (a free e-book)
• How Writing E-books Can Save You From a Low Pay Rut
• Planning and Outlining an E-book
• E-books and Reports — An Additional Income Stream for Freelance Writers
• Using Testimonials to Sell an E-book
• 5 Factors to Consider in Pricing Your E-book
• Zoe Winters on E-book Pricing: Does Low-Balling Attract the Wrong Kind of Reader?
• Why Most of My E-books Won’t be Sold on Amazon
• How to Market an E-book

No freelance writer must create additional income streams. You can spend that extra time on more pitches. This is just one way to diversify your writing business, and products or services that bring in regular income can alleviate some concerns when freelance work dries up.

Choose income streams based on your own target market. PLR articles have no place in some niches. Print books might not make sense for fast-moving industries where books would quickly be outdated. Not all markets will happily pay for access to a new membership site.

Identify your market and figure out how to solve problems for them — in the end, that’s how you make better money, whether through freelance contracts or your own projects.

If you’ve enjoyed this series, come back next week when I’ll share tips and advice with five freelancers about their situations and goals for moving past Demand Media. You might find some of those suggestions useful in improving your own freelance writing career.

In the meantime, if you’d like to read more, you can check out the following articles from our archives:

Update: I’m happy to say that KeriLynn and I finally sorted out the mess of that other designer’s theme! She was able to create a new template file and I set it as a home.php file to override the designer’s functions which were already overriding WordPress settings for what should display on the homepage. Whew! It takes a lot of patience to sort out and fix bad coding in some cases, and most designers won’t help you do this for a third party’s theme (and I can’t blame them!). I couldn’t recommend KeriLynn highly enough, whether you need help sorting out an existing theme or creating a brand new one. She has the patience of a saint and the stubbornness of a mule (that’s a compliment!) — exactly what I needed to help me through this most recent WordPress nightmare. So a huge thanks to KeriLynn!

If you follow me on Twitter, you’ve probably seen some recent rants about WordPress theme designers. You see, I’m launching or redesigning around a half dozen sites at once. I figured the quickest option in this case was to purchase premium base themes and then customize them to get exactly what I wanted (which is what I did with this site recently — it kicked off this series of launches and re-launches).

Two theme designers I purchased base themes for were ridiculous. They made the themes unnecessarily complicated — overriding basic WP functions with custom versions that simply didn’t work as they claimed. The support for these problem themes was terrible. While I did get this one fixed up after some drastic optimization (extra weeks of time lost), the other theme for my new fiction author site (AriaKlein.com) hasn’t been so lucky. I had to make design concessions I’m not happy with because the theme designer’s back-end options didn’t work as labeled, he took a long time to respond to support tickets, ignored questions and complaints on the sales site comments, and when he finally gave a solution it wasn’t even what I asked for.

I’ve wanted to pull my hair out for weeks over this. But I had a chat with KeriLynn Engel of Dreaming Iris Design over on my pen name Twitter account, and then she was referred to me again by Evelyn Lafont. Now I rarely turn to WP designers for help with customization. I can generally get any theme to do what I want. But this one stumped me. She was the only person who had ideas that could potentially work around this designer’s problems. (Many designers I know won’t even look at another designer’s code for you because of the sheer mess they might be asked to clean up.)  Even though I haven’t implemented all of the possibilities yet (as I’m considering just scrapping the theme altogether for fear of more problems with every update), I wanted to bring KeriLynn to your attention.

While I can always go back to designing and coding my own WordPress themes from scratch, I know that isn’t possible for every reader here. I recommend WordPress highly as an ideal platform for both a professional site and blog to promote your freelance writing services. But sometimes you’ll need help troubleshooting or customizing something small, and you won’t be able to find an answer easily online. And sometimes you’ll want a fully custom design developed for a new website or blog. If those things happen, you should have someone in mind to go to. And for that, I wanted to recommend Kerilynn. She has been one of the most responsive and insightful WordPress designers I’ve had the pleasure to deal with.

So the next time you need WordPress help, make sure you have Dreaming Iris Design bookmarked.

One of the earliest things you’ll do when you launch a new blog is choose its design, or theme. Generally I recommend WordPress as a blog platform for writers (and anyone else really), so today I want to share a few resources with you — places where you can find great WordPress themes.

The WordPress Themes Directory

This is the theme directory hosted by WordPress itself, and all of the options here are free. It can be a great place to start for your first blog or if you just want to play with a few themes to get the hang of customizing them.

Go there.

Elegant Themes

ElegantThemes.com is a WordPress theme club. That means you pay a yearly fee and then you can access all of the themes they’ve released in the past, and all of the themes they release while you’re a member. It also gives you access to their support forums.

This is my personal favorite theme club and I’ve used their themes on several of my smaller blogs. For just $39, it’s tough to go wrong here. But just in case you’re concerned, you can preview every theme available before you actually sign up.

Go there.

Theme Forest

Theme Forest is a great place to go if you want to purchase one-off premium WordPress themes. Prices are more than reasonable — generally in the $30-40 range. And the themes often have a lot of features available that free themes do not.

That said, you have to contend with the fact that they’re all from different designers, so there is no consistent quality. And I’ve found that while some themes are gorgeous on the surface, they aren’t all well-coded and some are quite bloated in an attempt to offer a lot of built-in options.

So if you’re brand new to WordPress, I’d suggest sticking to more straightforward options at first unless you find a theme that you won’t want to customize much. In general though, this is my first stop when I’m looking for a new base theme to customize for a project.

Go there.

If you’ve been blogging on WordPress for a while, have you used these resources? Do you have other favorite places to find WordPress themes? If so, share them (or your experiences with these sites) in the comments below.

Having done this for years — managing multiple blogs and knowing when to launch more vs letting them go — I want to share some simple tools and habits that have made multi-blog management easier.

Blog Development

First let’s look at the early development, which can be time consuming and push some people away from the idea of multiple blogs. Here are a few tips for making that process a bit easier:

1. Use pre-developed themes or hire a designer. I recommend premium themes or having a designer create a custom one for you. It’s an investment if you don’t want one so common that everyone and his brother is using it, but it’s worth it for the time it saves.
2. Then customize those pre-made themes so they appear more unique to your site. Change font styles, colors, and images and you can quickly turn a theme several people use into a unique option that ties to your brand.
3. Put together a blog launch checklist to help you streamline the setup process. For example, if you like to use a certain permalink format, include that in your checklist you can quickly copy / paste that information into your settings for each blog you launch. Don’t make decisions all over again every time you go through the setup process.

Writing Blog Content

This is the part that seems to worry bloggers most. How will they ever find the time to regularly write for another blog? Here are some tips and ideas to make it more realistic.

1. Decide on a posting schedule up front, and know that consistency is more important than frequency (not that higher frequencies will hurt). If you can only post once per week or every other week, acknowledge that up front and don’t pressure yourself to do more until you see how that works out.
2. Create a master post idea list. Sometimes the most time-consuming part of blogging is deciding what you want to blog about on any given day. You might spend a while browsing the news and other blogs to see what people are talking about or do keyword research to see what people want to know. You won’t always have time for this. So create a blog idea list with evergreen content ideas. If you can’t come up with another idea quickly on any given day, turn to your list. Personally I like having these ideas saved as drafts in the blog. Then I can just pull up the post draft list, open one up, and start writing.
3. Accept that short posts are okay. You don’t have to write epic posts every time you blog. Shorter updates are okay and they can keep the blog active and readers coming back. If you’re used to writing longer posts on your main blog (like I tend to do here), then try a different style on other blogs (for example, my personal blog usually includes much shorter posts, making it more manageable).
4. If you know you can’t post as frequently as you’d like, go in with a plan. Either recruit guest posts (which can be tough for a new unestablished blog) or go in with a budget so you can hire occasional contributors.

Blog Admin and Promotion

Writing blog posts isn’t enough. You still have to deal with backups, upgrades (which can be all too frequent as any WordPress user knows — and something I need to do this week on several sites), managing comments, and promoting the blog. Here are some tips and tools to help with that.

1. Come up with a marketing plan for the blog, but it’s okay to keep it short-form. I provide two tools you can use to do this, and I use both of them (varying depending on the project) — a one page marketing plan and a project planner template. They’ll give you direction and you can turn back to them when you feel off track.
2. Consider switching your browser. I’ve found Chrome to be the best for managing multiple blogs. With updates recently, other browsers may now offer the same functionality. But there are three reasons I love Chrome. First, it’s fast. When I pull up a half dozen or more blog admin pages at once, it can handle it flawlessly. I also love that I can set more than one startup page. For example, I can tell Chrome to open several different blog admin screens in different tabs whenever I launch the browser in the morning. I can get that admin work done without having to pull up any bookmarks. And when I’m in the middle of my day I can click the new tab button in the browser and get a list of visual bookmarks using the Speed Dial extension. It makes it absurdly fast and simple to open up blog admin screens with just two clicks.
3. Go assembly-style. Open the admin screens for each blog in a new tab. Then cover the same tasks for each at the same time — clearing spam, reviewing pending comments, running blog updates, exporting your backup files, etc. I’ve found this is be much faster than trying to get from A-Z for each blog one at a time. And I can deal with things like comment management for my own blogs and client blogs where I’m hired to handle them seamlessly.
4. If possible. set your server to run automatic backups. If you can’t do this yourself, your host might be able to (or they might already do it and make them available for download). But be sure to test those backups once in a while. When we recently moved things to a new host and upgraded server, they handled backups differently and for some reason we only got partial database backups. I had to manually restore over a month’s worth of content after a catastrophic failure because the backups created during that time were impossible to restore as they were incomplete.
5. Check stats at the same time. Here’s another good time for streamlining. Add all blogs you run to a single analytics program (generally you can track multiple sites; in some cases you’ll have to pay for each). Google Analytics is one popular free version, and your host probably includes stats programs for free as well. When you get an overall feel for the success of each blog side-by-side, you can make on the fly decisions about how to adjust your schedule, what needs less emphasis because it isn’t working, and what needs more time dedicated to it.
6. Don’t be obsessive about blog promotion. No one likes a blogger who constantly throws their marketing in their faces (yes, we notice you promotion whores). And frankly the best marketing you can do is to create content people give a damn about. So spend less time tweeting and yapping and “sharing” on third party sites and spend more time on your blog with your community. The more you give them what they want, they more free promotion you’ll get out of the deal as they spread the word for you.
7. That’s not to say you should completely ignore blog promotion. You’ll still need to get the word out yourself, especially in the beginning. Just don’t be a dolt about it. Streamline your marketing and networking just like you streamline your admin work. And don’t promote things constantly that your audience doesn’t care about. If you run different blogs much of your marketing will be separate (or should be). For example, you may use more than one Twitter account. If so, try to manage them all during a set block of time each day instead of fluttering about between your writing and your networking and one account to another. And automate where possible, but without pushing the spam boundaries. (For example, we offer a feed-specific Twitter account for those who want to get links of every post, and I don’t feed every link into the main networking account which is, frankly, spammy — I reserve that for the better content, things others are already talking about, or posts that tie to conversations I’ve had there recently.)

There’s nothing complicated about managing multiple blogs. It’s all about basic organization and streamlining the workflow. Some of these tips might work for you. And you’ll probably have other ideas based on your own work style. I don’t like to incorporate too many external tools into my blogging because I find they cause more hassle than they save in the long run for me. But I know some bloggers are tool addicts. So if you use others or know of some good options other bloggers might want to try out, feel free to tell us about them in the comments below.

Here are a few situations where it might make sense for you to launch more than a single blog.

Multiple Blogs Make Sense If…

1. You’re blogging for pleasure and you have multiple distinct interests you want to talk about. “All-encompassing” blogs can actually be more difficult to build a following for and more difficult to rank well in search engines due to lack of targeted branding.
2. You’re blogging as a part of running your business and you need to target multiple unique target audiences. For example, one market of mine is other freelance writers because I sell products for you. Another would be small businesses interested in hiring a business writer. I have different blogs that appeal to those different groups.
3. You write under multiple names. If you use a pen name for some work (or more than one), you might want to consider a separate blog for that other “brand.” For example, I’m working on my first mystery novel which will be published under the pen name Aria Klein. I’m currently developing a new professional site and blog for that name both for branding and because fiction is a topic I don’t discuss much on my other sites. You might do the same if you’re a content writer who uses different names to write about different specialty areas.
4. You have the time to dedicate to multiple blogs. This is a big one. Blogging takes time — a lot of it if you want it to rank well and build a significant following. I’ve been at this for years and I still find it sometimes overwhelming when you factor in the admin, updates, back-ups, writing, editing, etc. — not even to mention working with other contributors and creating non-post content like a new podcast series we’ll be launching this week. I meet a lot of freelance writers who question whether or not they have the time to devote to one blog. If you’re struggling with one, you might want to wait on your new blog idea. If you can find ways to blog more efficiently on your current site and you have an interest in a new blog, you might be a good candidate for managing more than one.

For me, blogging habits vary quite a bit between different sites. I have several new ones in various stages of development right now and others that are active almost daily (like this blog) to ones updated once a week. One is actually updated by a contributor weekly and I rarely post there myself anymore, although that may change in the near future. Here are some of the main blogs I manage:

1. All Freelance Writing – the blog attached to this site
2. All Indie Publishing – my indie publishing blog
3. Jenn Mattern – my personal blog
4. BizAmmo – my small business blog
5. Social Realist – my social media blog (coming back tomorrow after a recent break while I decided on a new direction for it)
6. Climb Your Family Tree – my genealogy / family history blog
7. Pro Business Writer – my business writing blog attached to my business site (updated occasionally to keep the site fresh, but not as active as most of them)

I have others that are sitting around waiting on me to decide what to do with them, like one featuring free online courses from respected schools and organizations which I’m considering new branding for. And then there are several in development, mostly tied to the new fiction writing side of my business, including AriaKlein.com, MurderScripts.com (the site for the upcoming mystery book series and related ancillary products), and QuickMystery.com (a blog where I’ll publish short mystery stories to help me build my fiction platform before releasing the first book).

It sounds like a lot, but when you’re highly organized you can make it work in the long run. Tomorrow I’ll share some tips and simple organization tools I use to keep things straight, help me map out plans and goals for each site, and keep them updated as often as possible.

How many blogs do you run? Would you like to start another one, or do you feel it would require too much of a time commitment? Do you think you could streamline the process to make multiple blogs a more realistic option for you? Leave a comment below to share your thoughts.

Let’s take a look at the two RSS-related tools that allowed me to access the deleted content for a manual restoration — tools that might save your site too should anything similar ever happen to you.

Email RSS Subscriptions

Quite a while ago I wrote an article here about bad blogger behavior, such as when bloggers delete their posts to hide things they’ve said in the past (such as taking on sponsorships from sites they used to speak out against or after changing their mind about an important issue when they don’t want to explain why their position changed). I pointed out that those bloggers are never quite as stealth as they think they are. Why? Because everyone subscribing to their blog via email still potentially has a record of those deleted posts. Once they show up in your inbox, deleting the content from a blog doesn’t make it go away entirely.

That same thing can be used to help you find old archived content after a server or database failure to bridge the gap between your last backup and the freshest content added to your site. I’d suggest setting up a separate email address solely for subscribing to your blogs so the subscriptions can be a true archive and not litter your inbox on a regular basis. Or you can filter those emails into a separate folder if you don’t want to manage a new email account.

If you subscribe to your own sites via email and keep those emails rather than deleting them (or at least the most recent ones to cover gaps between backups), then you can simply copy / paste your newest posts from your inbox should you lose them for any reason.

Google Reader

You can do something similar with Google Reader. If you subscribe to your own blogs using that tool, the posts won’t disappear as soon as the on-site content is inaccessible. It’s still archived in your feed reader (other feed readers might be equally effective, but Google Reader happens to be the one I use).

While I haven’t been able to restore all comments from the crash period here yet, I also have access to those via my reader, because I subscribed to the comment feed as well. I highly recommend subscribing not only to your posts, but to any other content areas you may have on your site (comments, job board listings, and forum posts to give you some possible examples from this site).

Your feed reader can do much more than keep you up to date on the latest posts from your favorite websites. It might also save your ass if a tech disaster strikes. Are you subscribing to your own feeds? If not, now might be a good time to start.

Yet some freelance writers still claim they’re great ways to get started — letting you hone your craft and leading to significantly better paying gigs. For many, that’s complete bullshit. For the rest, they’re the exception rather than the rule. And just because something may work in the long haul, if it doesn’t work more effectively than the other options available to you then it’s not smart business.

One of those other options is to launch your own website or blog as opposed to using cheap content for others as a basis for building your freelance writing future.

The Barrier to Entry Issue

When I, and others, mention that your own blog can be far better for your writing career than cheap content for others, a common argument comes up. That’s the issue of barriers to entry. Some say that there are no barriers to entry in blogging and therefore any work for a third party is better in your portfolio. Not so much.

There are actually far fewer barriers to entry with content mills and extremely low paying clients (who will accept anyone, or nearly anyone, who can work within their pay structure) than there are in creating a good blog. When I say a blog is a better marketing tool or portfolio piece, I’m not saying that throwing any old crap up online is going to cut it. You still have to focus on quality. The difference is that your own blog doesn’t immediately lump your quality writing in with the reputation-tarnishing crap on mills and SEO’d-to-death content sites where writers were paid little to nothing for their work.

It’s more difficult to set up a blog, come up with design that suits the audience, come up with a continual flow of ideas for new blog posts, manage the resulting community, and monetize that blog (if you want to). Each of those things is a barrier to entry in a sense, and why so many blogs never really get off the ground.

Cheap Content Begets More Cheap Content

Here’s the other thing. Your own blog only refers to you prospects who are within the specific market you want to target. When you take on those cheap content writing gigs, referrals are often for more cheap content writing gigs. Are there exceptions? Absolutely. Should you expect to be one? Not really. For every success story there are thousands of other writers working these gigs who never get to grow beyond them.

And even if you’re 100% confident that you could break the mold, why would you choose to disrespect your abilities so much to start that low to begin with? If you genuinely believe you can do better than most in that situation, why not try to do it from the start? You don’t need to start off low and build your way up. And even if you did, there’s “low” and there’s absurdly low. You can earn ten times what some of these people pay per article and still be starting on the low end overall.

Keep in mind that clients do talk. If you’re writing $5 articles for some SEO firm and a colleague mentions to your client that they’re looking for a writer to work within their own low budget, you’ll come to mind. You’ll get referred for the low-paying gig because the client can already confirm that you’ll accept those terms — you’ve already shown that you don’t value your work more than that. If you’re a hobbyist happy doing that, then there’s nothing wrong with that. But if you’re trying to build a freelance writing business, you need to look beyond those absurdly cheap markets. They won’t usually lead to significantly higher paying ones.

Why Blogs are a Better Marketing Tool

With blogs, on the other hand, there are no preconceptions about rates and worth. Most people are intelligent enough to understand the difference between taking on cheap work during your billable hours and writing “for free” during your marketing hours to promote your business. And frankly, you don’t have to write for free when you blog for yourself. There are plenty of ways to make money blogging, even if you’re fairly new to it.

Here are some of the other reasons your own blog can make a much better marketing tool, helping you land better clients than writing for cheapskates likely will.

• You have a full set of metrics to share to demonstrate the value your writing offers. You can show prospects your traffic numbers, comment counts, time spent on the site, etc. — stats not usually available to you from third party clients.
• Having a blog of your own (a good one at least) shows that you have ambition and the ability to attract regular readers.
• Your blog also shows that you’re capable of handling long-term writing commitments. Of course consistency is key here — you have to stick with it.
• Your blog lets prospects become familiar with “your voice” as a writer to get a better feel for whether or not you’ll work well together on a more personal level. That isn’t always possible with more formulaic “cheap content” writing samples.

Ambition is the big one. There’s a big difference between filling out an application and plugging away at article after article and starting a project from scratch. You show that you understand how to identify a target market and write to their interests — vital for most high paying writing assignments. You show that you know how to make your content profitable with direct stats available (or convey other measurable value points that make your work worth the higher rates you want to charge). And you can write in a way that very directly addresses the needs of your own ideal buyers — attracting who you want to attract rather than whoever happens to come along.

The IP address is basically a number that identifies the server you host your site or blog on. When you use a shared host, there could be hundreds of sites from hundreds of owners on a single server. But many hosts give you the option to pay a bit extra for a dedicated IP address. That’s an IP address that’s for your account only.

Why would you want a dedicated IP address?

I’ve been going through some drama with a shared account recently. When I comment on some blogs, my comments are regularly defaulted to the spam folder. That’s more than a little hassle when you take the time to write thoughtful comments while networking.

Why does this happen? It happens because there’s a “bad neighbor” on the shared host’s IP address. Basically, if another customer is spamming people, the whole IP address can be put on blacklists. That means your own comments and emails might be flagged as spam. And when you run a business that’s not acceptable.

I’m moving all of my sites that are on shared hosts off of them as soon as I can. But if you’re not ready to do that, see if your host offers dedicated IPs at a bare minimum. It’s at least worth looking into. It may explain why you don’t always get through when you expect to.

“I simply have a penchant for INTELLIGENT conversation.” – Megatron, Beast Wars

Ego issues aside, rambling to myself has actually helped me come up with a lot of great ideas. Often my mind wanders to certain topics, which naturally leads me to trying out joke lines, to laughing to myself once I stumble on a nearly-perfect gag to use. Of course, as mentioned in the title, this only seems to work when I’m in the bathroom. Hey, what else am I gonna do in there when I’m finishing up?

Still, that got me thinking. Many writers advocate writing a terrible first draft to get everything on paper and avoid censoring yourself. Same’s true for joke writing. I’m thinking that this tendency of mine to make up material in the bathroom is my own way to bypass self-censorship and really get my creative juices flowing. And if it works for me, why not anyone else?

So here’s what I want you to try. It might by silly, but do it at least one time. Go to a place where you can be alone and do something to keep your hands busy. While you’re doing that, let your mind and mouth wander, speaking aloud what you’re currently thinking about. And as you do this, try to let your natural thoughts and reactions to things bubble through. You’ll find that, even as the risk of looking like a mad person, the lack of a barrier can summon some authentic and truly original material.

Of course, this might not work for everyone. If you’re like me and you tend to bop through life and make jokes, this will feel more natural to you. Even so, I think it’s worth a shot. Who knows? Jokes on the can just might turn out to be a valuable tool in your comedy arsenal.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

1 – The Value of Guest Posts in Promoting Your Freelance Writing Business – Simply Stated Business

2 – Being Artsy Doesn’t Mean You’re Cut Out for a Freelance Writing Career – Words on the Page

3 – 3 Lessons to Learn from Traditional E-book Publishers – Keyboard Hussy

7 – Why Selling Similar Work to Multiple Clients is Risky Business – About Freelance Writing

8 – Want Better Freelance Gigs? Put Your Business First – The WM Freelance Writers Connection

9 – 3 Personal Branding Tips for Freelance Writers – Social Media Mercenary

10 – Virtual Publicity Tours for Freelancers from the Comfort of Home – The Work at Home Woman

14 – Talking Money With Clients: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 – The Writing Base

15 – A Freelance Writer’s Regret: Not Having a Freelance Business Plan – Freelance Business Plans

16 – How to Monetize a Blog Without Selling Out – Lemonicks.com

17 – Create Portfolio Pieces by Promoting Your Own Writing Business – Writing Thoughts

21 – When to Self-Edit (and When to Get Help) – Get Paid to Write Online

22 – Dr Freelance

23 – Vgal

24 – Live to Write, Write to Live

28 – Diary of a Mad Freelancer

29 – Jargon Writer

30 – Freelance Zone

31 – The Well-Fed Writer

Thanks so much to all of the bloggers who graciously offered to host me on this virtual blog tour. To both those I pitched and those who approached me after the tour announcement, I greatly appreciate you giving me the chance to reach out to your readers. Can’t wait to see you on the tour!

AFW readers — please visit these sites and help support the freelance writing community. There are some fantastic blogs, communities, and resources here. Maybe you’ll even find a few you weren’t already familiar with.