For today only, you can save a whopping 50% on both of my current e-books for freelance writers. That includes:

• The 30 Day Marketing Boot Camp for Freelance Writers (regularly $9.97) — Now just $4.97!
• The Web Writer’s Guide to Launching a Successful Freelance Web Writing Career (regularly $37) — Now just $18.50!

This deal expires at 11:59pm Eastern tonight, so don’t miss it.

To take advantage of our Cyber Monday savings, just visit the purchase pages above and enter coupon code “CYBERMONDAY” before you hit the “buy now” button to place your order.

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:

You know that I’m a big fan of e-books as a residual income stream for freelance writers. And you probably know that e-book pricing can be a hot button issue, especially since Amazon jumped in and seemingly took over e-books in the public’s minds. You may have also noticed the obscenely low prices some e-book authors charge, as though that’s the way e-book should be (with no regard for the fact that e-book publishing is much older than e-readers and that premium pricing models have done very well by many an e-book author).

Personally I find the race to the bottom game pathetic, whether that’s freelance bidding sites, content mills or now e-book pricing. So I talked to Zoe Winters, an indie author raising her rates.

Check out the interview and join the conversation if you’re an e-book author or plan to become one.

A lot of new content will go up this week. Some will be brand spanking new. Other posts are being moved from this blog to a permanent home on the new indie publishing blog (generally posts that came from AllBookMarketing.com or AllBookWriting.com previously but were housed here after the big site merge a while back). Posts in the latter group are marked so you know what’s new and what isn’t (although some of the moved content is being updated to reflect changes in indie publishing that have occurred since its original publication date — also noted on case-by-case basis).

Is All Indie Publishing for You?

All indie publishing is a site about professional independent publishing. That does not mean it will cover everything under the more general “self publishing” label. For example, we won’t spend a lot of time on POD publishing (and I’ll talk about why that is on the blog itself later this week). We also won’t spend much time talking about so-called independent publishing houses. Being small and not tied to a major publisher doesn’t make you “indie.” This site is for true independent authors — ones who don’t seek publishers, of any size or affiliation.

If you’re interested in any of the following, All Indie Publishing might be able to help you out:

• Writing your book or e-book, from the outline process through the final draft
• Self-editing
• Working with professional editors and proofreaders to put out a professional product
• Dealing with the business of being an indie author (no, it’s not all about the writing)
• Book marketing, PR, and publicity
• Using beta readers
• E-book pricing issues
• Working with professionals on the design and production of your book
• Interviews with indie authors and other professionals who can help you bring your book to market

There will be a big content push through next week before I settle into a more regular Monday / Wednesday posting schedule on the site. So make sure you check it out soon so you don’t miss anything! And be sure to follow me on Twitter @indiepublisher to connect and talk about indie publishing issues.

I’ve emailed E-junkie to see if they had any widespread problems over the weekend, and if so whether or not they’ve been fixed. I wasn’t personally able to replicate the issue however — the link I tested worked fine for me. So you may not have problems. But if you attempt to buy one of my e-books in coming days and you run into download problems, please email me at jenn@allfreelancewriting.com. I’ll manually deliver the material via email, and I’ll forward any similar problems to E-junkie so we can make sure everything’s sorted out.

Sorry to those who were affected by this weekend’s download issues.

What’s happening? Well, these sites purport to be about helping you find .pdf files. First of all that often means they’re hotlinking files (linking directly to the download and not to the download page on the publisher’s site, which is often against the terms of use). But the bigger problem is that some of these sites are making your entire .pdf document available for viewing on their own site.

That means any e-book you give away for free or files you host but don’t share download links for publicly (such as subscriber-only links) are not only being indexed by these so-called search engines, but they’re being republished without your knowledge and usually without your consent.

I’ve already walked you through how to deal with content thieves. In that article I explained how you should go after their traffic and ad income before trying to have the content pulled offline, and explained how to go about it. Today I want to talk about how you can discover this kind of infringement and how you can attempt to stop at least some of it.

How to Identify .pdf Content Thieves

I don’t care for most plagiarism detectors considering they’re often used by plagiarists to edit stolen content rather than to really defend against stolen work (hence requests for “Copyscape-passed” content from some buyers on the Web). Instead my tool of choice is Google Alerts.

Set up a Google Alert (or Yahoo! Alert if you prefer) for your name. Set one up for major niche keywords. Most .pdf content thieves don’t edit anything. So if your name is in your .pdf file as author names usually are, you’ll be alerted if your files are suddenly appearing on other sites with or without your permission. Then you can click the links, visit the pages, and see if they’re summarizing the .pdf and linking to it or if they’re republishing the content in full.

I plan on taking a more proactive approach in coming weeks as well — searching for the actual file content. This can work if you only have a few. If you have more than a half dozen free .pdf files available it could prove to be time consuming. The idea is to search for a specific phrase unique to each file.

How to Protect Your .pdf Downloads

Your .pdf files can be important to your business. You spend a lot of time creating unique resources to bring in traffic and backlinks. So how can you stop others from re-publishing those files, getting in the way of your own business goals for them? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Make sure the usage and distribution / publication terms are laid out in the documents themselves. Then no one has any excuse for saying they didn’t know what they were and weren’t allowed to do with them (if they choose not to look, that’s their own damn fault).
2. Put a terms of use section on your website as well. This is one I plan to do on a few sites of my own in coming weeks.
3. Keep your download files in a separate folder on your server and use your robots.txt file to stop the automatic indexing of documents within that folder.
4. Place the files in a password-protected directory if they’re for members or subscribers only and if you don’t mind the extra hassle for those members or subscribers.
5. Use a .pdf download service if possible, where every recipient gets a unique download link.

Have you also seen an increase in stolen .pdf files lately? How are you dealing with it? Leave a comment to share your stories and tips below.

Need some ideas on how you can get started? Here are five examples of ways you can use your freelance writing skills and knowledge in your specialty area to sell information products and make more money.

E-books

E-books are a popular option these days for writers wanting to sell products thanks in part to e-reading devices. But they’ve been a big deal in entrepreneurial circles for a long time. They’re a proven income stream, and they can bring in recurring income as long as the topic area is still valid (meaning evergreen topics are a good choice for e-books). Write an e-book of your own and you can sell it. Target members of your existing target market if you want to capitalize on your current platform and network to boost sales.

Books

You can also go a more traditional route and write print books. You can seek traditional publishers or you might opt for the indie publishing route. Again, focus either on your own target market or on their target market (for example, if you write for magazines that cater to parents, you could write a book directly to the parent audience).

DIY Kits

As much as you like having people pay you to write for them, you could make a good amount of money by teaching the true DIY-ers of the group to do things for themselves. There are several ways to do this, including webinars or e-courses. But if you want a simpler recurring revenue stream, why not create information kits? For example, if you write sales letters frequently and you want to tap those who might not be willing to pay your service rates you could put together a kit with tutorials and templates. You create it once and sell it over and over again. You don’t have to give away all your secrets. But you get recurring income and get to reach buyers who otherwise wouldn’t have given you a dime.

Subscription Websites

Maybe you’d like to spend more time writing the content that you want to write instead of what clients want. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could essentially sell that content over and over instead of to just one client (or a handful in the case of reprints)? You can do something similar with a subscription website or a subscription-only section of your blog. Just create premium content once and sell access to it repeatedly to each subscriber to your site. You won’t get away with charging for basics everyone else offers for free though. So find ways to make a subscription worthwhile.

Reports

Maybe you’re used to writing white papers and reports for clients. Why not do your own original research and release the report for a fee? If you specialize in an in-demand subject area where people are interested in new research, this could be a great information product for you. For example, you might run a major survey each year and publish the results (note that a simple online poll isn’t going to cut it if you want to charge for the resulting report).

How would you turn your writing services into products to expand your income potential beyond your typical billable hours? Leave your experiences or ideas in the comments below.

This discount is the first of many that will be offered to Twitter followers on products I release. So if you want to save some money, follow me at @QueryFreeWriter. Other discounts will follow in coming weeks and months and they won’t all be mentioned here.

For this discount you can save almost 30% on my latest e-book, getting it for just $7 (normally $9.97). But check out the Twitter profile before it’s too late. The offer is only available this week!

Confronting the impact of your work is something all cretive minds have to deal with. This is especially true in comedy. A badly framed joke gets you blank expressions if you’re lucky…or gets you cussed out nine ways to Sunday. Standup comedians have to face a tougher heat, since they deal with a live audience, but even writers can feel the burn when their work tanks, and it can be difficult to move past that and get back into the groove.

Here are some things to keep in mind to help you cope with a bad reception:

1. Seperate yourself from your work. It’s very easy to invest your identity into a work and use a good reception to fuel your ego. Of course, this becomes harmful to your self-worth when you inevitably tank. Pull back. Don’t concern yourself with the outcome. Instead, make your goal to improve your work through any kind of feedback. It’ll keep you humble, dedicated to the craft, and most importantly, sane.

2. Get yourself laughing again. If you’re stuck in a funk, load up your favorite funny videos or comedians and get to laughing. This serves two purposes. Most important one is to get out of that funk and put your brain towards doing better. The other is to give you a little subconcious help – by refreshing your mind on what makes good humor, you’re more likely to pull it off next time.

3. Look towards a brighter future. Just because you’ve tanked once doesn’t mean you will again. Writing terrible material is part of the process anyway – you just published it when you thought it was finished. It happens to all of us. Still, I believe a good idea with a poor execution is worth revisiting. And even if you don’t feel like rewriting, you’re not doomed to write poorly forever. Pick yourself up and try again – pressing on will always solve the problems of the human race, as the quote goes.

That’s it for this year, folks. Thanks for sticking with me for this long – stay frosty and I’ll see you in 2011!

Visit the e-book page to learn more or to order your copy today for just $9.97.

As of today you can find links to this and my other e-books in the “E-books” section linked near the top of this page (in the green bar below the logo). Rather than linking you to my Web Writer’s Guide e-books alone, you can find a page summarizing all of my e-books for sale and my free e-books that are relevant to freelance writers.