New Forums Added

Registered members of All Freelance Writing have access to our writing forums. While we had freelance chat areas before, we’ve now added a section for book chat. There you’ll find a few new forums covering self publishing, e-publishing, and working with publishers.

Not a member yet? Register now. It’s free!

Branding Changes

There will be a minor branding change here at All Freelance Writing and most of my other websites. Rest assured we won’t have a name change here or any big design changes. But within the next week you may notice a reference to this site being a 3 Beat Media property. It is not being sold off. I’m simply in the middle of a business name change for my base business — from J.H. Mattern Communications to 3 Beat Media. The new company branding will be more heavily promoted on my sites and blogs.

You may have already noticed that there are shortlinks below each post here. They all starts with 3bm.co. That domain is tied to the new branding and all of our shortlinks will follow that format.

Other than that, it should be business as usual.

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. :)

In addition to Clint Osterholz and Yolander Prinzel who will be taking on the freelance writing jobs and blogging jobs, we’ve also added Jenn Escalona and LaToya Irby to the group. I’m thrilled to have them on board!

Jenn Escalona will be publishing a monthly column on the first of each month offering a DIY project tailored to freelance writers. I asked her to come on in this capacity after her excellent idea on her own blog a while back regarding making your own white boards (because those babies can get expensive if you like a lot of writing space!). Find out more about hiring Jenn at JennEscalona.com or follow her on Twitter @jennescalona.

LaToya Irby will be running a bi-weekly Freelance Finance column offering money and finance-related tips for freelancers. You can find out more about LaToya’s business and finance writing at Irblance.com or follow her on Twitter @aboutcredit.

We will be adding a fifth new blogger to the team shortly. I put the offer out to someone and am waiting to hear back. One way or the other, we’ll be bringing someone in to publish another bi-weekly column – a “how to write” series which will offer tips and advice on tackling specific types of writing projects (SEO articles, feature articles, press releases, sales letters, etc.). More on that once we’ve confirmed who our final new blogger (for now) will be.

I have some other exciting (and some not-so-exciting) announcements coming up soon. New products, new freebies, a contest, and more. We’re going to be seriously stepping things up here between now and the end of the year, so I hope everyone’s ready for the ride!

Rather than just springing it on you one day, I’m including a preview here, so you can get an idea of what AFW will look like moving forward. Just click the image below to view the full-size design (and note that while the preview is fixed width, the coded design will be fluid so it will extend to fit your screen size, so you won’t see the white surrounding it).

I hope you like it!

(Note: I just realized I forgot to put the bullet points in the design – other than that, this is what the finished design would look like!)

• I changed some of the existing ads a bit.
• A re-added adsense into posts. I’ll be testing the current format for conversions for a few weeks at most, and may be changing that to a different ad format or position at that time (or may be keeping it as-is).
• I believe the pencil images in the sidebar are now fixed and should be blending seamlessly with the background.
• I changed the subscription options from a plugin to manual links in order to position them a bit differently. The links appear to be working fine on my testing.
• I added the regular feed subscriber count under the email subscriber count.
• I moved the archives from one side of the sidebar to the other (they’re on the far right if you need them).

I believe that’s everything, and I think everything’s fine for now. I’ll probably be playing a bit with various ads over the coming weeks as I work to optimize this site a bit better, so you may see a few temporary changes from time to time as I get things settled.