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.

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.

Here are five things you can do to make sure your blog keeps functioning as usual (or as close to usual as possible) while you’re away:

1. Pre-schedule new blog posts. — If you want to minimize lost traffic while you’re gone, you can keep your blog updated by writing new blog posts early. Schedule the publish date and time for each post and you’ll have fresh content appearing until you come back. Since I generally post on Fridays here and Friday is a day off for me, I usually take the pre-schedule approach (including with this post).
2. Schedule guest posts. — Another option is to bring in a guest post (or a few) from different bloggers or others in your niche. You can either pre-schedule these like I mentioned above (meaning you don’t have to personally write a bunch of new content before leaving), or you can set up login info for each guest poster and let them post their articles while you’re away.
3. Hire someone to fill in. — If you can afford to hire another blogger in your niche or industry to fill in for you while you’re taking time away from your blog, that can be a good option for extended breaks.
4. Swap blogs. — Can’t afford to hire help while you’re away? Consider an equal barter — they’ll fill in for you X posts per week while you’re on vacation and you’ll do the same for them on their blog when they’re on vacation down the road. Hiring someone just to approve comments and delete spam while you’re off can also help by letting conversations continue. If they sit in moderation everyone else is essentially placed on hold.
5. Blog about your time off. — While not ideal if you’re on a restful vacation, some time away from regular work actually lends itself to interesting blog posts. For example if you’re away doing something work-related — a conference or writer’s retreat perhaps — blogging while you’re away might be fun and interesting to both you and your readers.

Not all of these will apply to you on your next blog vacation, big or small. But perhaps one will give you a way to maintain your blog’s traffic and keep your audience happy while you enjoy a little extra time to yourself (or with loved ones). Have other blog vacation tips to share? Leave a comment and tell us how you manage your blog when you go away.

Unlike my niche blogs this one will cross all of those niches I publicly cover, and will provide news and commentary on projects in each. For example, while you might get All Freelance Writing news here, you would also get announcements about other unrelated sites and projects I launch (giving you a more comprehensive view of how I run my business).

I’ll also talk about things like the mystery novel series I’m planning, and you can learn about the new indie publishing site I’m launching as we go rather than just a quick “here it is!” post here when it goes live. The basic idea is to give me a place where I can be a bit more personal when talking about my overall business, and also to give my readers a more well-rounded look at who I am and what I do so hopefully you can pull new ideas from it to incorporate into your own business models. And we’ll have plenty of fun discussions along the way I’m sure — about indie publishing, Web publishing, blogging, marketing, writing books, managing the day-to-day aspects of running a business, and more.

I hope you’ll stop by and check it out!

Today let’s talk about making the decision to merge two sites or move one of them to a new domain, what’s involved in each, and how to decide if it’s really worth it.

What’s Involved in Site Moves and Mergers?

After you’ve moved or merged a few sites, the process can become fairly quick. But it still takes time away from other things, and you may spend more time later marketing the change. Here are some of the things you’ll need to do when you move a site to a new domain:

• Backup your database.
• Choose and register a new domain.
• Set up your new domain with your Web host (or get a hosting plan if you’re moving from a free host to self-hosted site).
• Import all files and databases to the new site via your host’s control panel.
• Create your new site design if you’re not keeping it the same as the old one (re-branding doesn’t usually involve keeping the old design).
• Create a new logo and slogan for the site — important branding elements.
• Decide if you want to keep the same permalink structure (meaning SiteA.com/article1 will redirect to SiteB.com/article1 — no change in file names or other permalink structure elements).
• Set up 301 redirects for every page and file — automatically directs traffic from the old page to the corresponding new page under the new domain. This can be quick if you don’t change the permalink structures, or you might have to redirect everything individually if you change things on the new site.
• Announce the change to readers — introduce them to the new brand and why you made the change.
• Start a new marketing campaign to build brand awareness on a larger scale.
• Contact people linking to the old site and ask them to update their links to the new addresses (I don’t always do this as I just redirect, but some say having the links changed is better for SEO purposes. I haven’t personally had any SEO problems without doing this though.)

Those are some of the basic things you’ll have to deal with if you move a site to a new domain. But what if you’re merging two of them? Things are slightly different. You won’t have to do some of the above-mentioned things (like creating a new logo if you’re merging one site into another you already have), but there are extra steps you need to consider. Here are some of the steps involved (specifically thinking about WordPress sites).

• Backup your databases for both sites being merged, so you can separate them again quickly if there’s a problem.
• Decide which site will remain and which one will be merged into it.
• Create an export file that you can import into the WordPress installation you’re keeping.
• Import that file into the installation that will be your remaining site. This will bring in all pages, posts, comments, etc. from the second site.
• Clean things up. You’ll probably have two About pages after your import for example. Kill one and edit the other to reflect the merger. You might also have a bunch of new categories from the blog that was merged in, and they might not all fit well with (or be too similar to) your existing categories. In this case you’ll have to move the posts from the imported blogs into appropriate categories from the blog you were keeping. You might even want to change the categories on the old blog before creating the export file so you can import them directly into the right categories.
• Go through the same 301 redirect and link update process that we talked about in the site re-branding section above.

When are Moves and Mergers Worth It?

As you can see, there can be a lot involved in moving or merging your blogs or other sites (and those lists aren’t comprehensive — you also have to consider plugins, sitemaps, and other updates). If you’ve never done them before, either can be rather time-consuming. Neither is a decision to take lightly.

Here are a few thoughts on what I personally consider when deciding whether or not these moves and mergers are worth it. Hopefully they’ll help you make your own decisions.

• If I’ve promoted the brand a lot and no one is talking about it, I probably did a lousy job with the brand development. Sometimes a simple name change for a site or blog can go a long way towards bringing in more readers or customers.
• If my market changes in any way, the old brand might not be relevant anymore. In this case it’s also a good time to consider moving and re-branding the site.
• Re-branding can also be a good idea if you add new services or expand the niche you’re covering in a blog if the old brand doesn’t nicely cover the additions.
• If I feel like I’m spending too much time on a niche because I have too many sites in it and it’s taking away from other projects, I’ll merge them. (For example that’s why I merged the Query-Free Freelancer book site and blog into All Freelance Writing, and why I also merged my freelance writing jobs, book writing, and book marketing blogs here.)
• If a site is being neglected out of a sheer lack of time, and its topic area fits nicely within another blog I do have more time for, then I consider merging the two.
• If there are two similar sites and one has a great brand while the other is struggling, I’ll consider merging them and keeping the successful brand.
• If I choose to sell a domain / brand name but want to keep the content from the site I’ll either move that content to a new brand / domain or I’ll merge it into an existing one I have.

Are you thinking about moving or merging a site or blog? Have you gone through it before? What factors do you consider before making that time commitment?

Let’s talk about the issue of taking our own work as seriously as we take client projects, and what we can do to make productive changes.

How Serious Are Your Own Projects?

Whether you write e-books, run a blog, manage other types of websites, are writing a book, or tackling any other work-related project of your own, do you take it as seriously as you take your client work? Sometimes I do. And sometimes I don’t. For example, I take this blog fairly seriously in how I treat it as a part of my business. On the other hand, I really don’t prioritize e-books, haven’t spent as much time on my book as I would have liked to so far, and even when I personally write a post here I treat it very different than client blog posts.

For example with client gigs I tend to come up with a list of post ideas I would be interested in writing. The client accepts that list or narrows it down to the number in their planned order (for some I just send our weekly ideas over, and for others I send more than they want to buy so they can pick and choose). For each article I usually come up with some clever spin to the title, outline the post, write it, edit it, embellish it with images or whatever it might need, and then have it ready to be published.

For my own blogs I tend to write more on a whim because something inspired me (like this post or any of my rants) or an idea popped into my head (like our last post about e-books). I just open WordPress and start writing. I proofread it quickly and then I publish. I don’t generally embellish posts here with lots of images — did a while back and there was no difference in readership for this particular audience so I don’t unless it really illustrates a point now. And when I edit I know I don’t have fresh eyes, so plenty of typos get through. That doesn’t really bother me. After all, I’m using an instant publishing platform for a reason — to share my ideas in a timely fashion, and not to create amazing pieces of journalism.

The real problem for me is that this “on a whim” approach to my own blogs leads to inconsistencies. Some blogs are rarely ever updated. Others like this one are updated more often (by me personally) because I’m thinking about the niche or industry more. And ironically it’s the blogs I neglect that financially support this site because I’ve refused to whore out to individual sponsors and don’t want to overload the site with network ads. And because I don’t prioritize my e-book projects I’m not selling as many of my own products here as I should. The inconsistency therefore hurts my overall earnings. I do well with my projects, but I can do quite a bit better.

I’ve decided to change things a little bit when it comes to my own work projects, and I’d like to share some of those ideas and plans with you in the hopes that they’ll help you prioritize some of your projects too. After all, our own projects can bring in income and attract new clients. They can be an integral part of our freelance writing businesses. And because of that they deserve much better than being put on the backburner while we throw ourselves into other things.

How to Make Your Own Projects More of a Priority

There’s one basic rule I’ll follow as I prioritize some of my projects more in coming weeks. I’m going to start treating myself as if I were a client. For me this involves e-books, a book, and a decent-sized network of sites to manage. All of these ideas might not apply to you, but go through the list and see if there are any you can implement to make your own projects a bigger priority during your work week.

Here’s what I’ll do:

• Set aside dedicated “project time.” – For me that will likely be 2-3 hours each work day. That means no screwing around with Twitter and other sites during that time. And it means I won’t overload my schedule with so much client work that I lose time for my own projects. They both bring in income, and both need to be nurtured equally. It doesn’t mean I’ll take on less client work overall, but rather that I’ll keep it as consistent as possible so a week of overload doesn’t lead to the bad habit of neglecting my own work.
• Set self-imposed deadlines. — “I’m going to do x, y, and z” is fine and dandy as a place to start. To-do lists have always been a big part of how I get so much done. But I can do more. I’m one of those people who works best under pressure. I have deadlines for client projects in most cases, so projects get completed by those deadlines. But my own projects are always more open-ended (like the Query-Free Freelancer e-book I wanted to release months ago). Thing is, I get so distracted with other things as they come up — tech problems, blog post ideas that are timely and need to be covered, client work, etc. — that I say “I can always work on that later.” But later never seems to come. That needs to change. I need to assign specific deadlines to each project. I’ve already started that here by assigning myself to Tuesday and Friday blog posts on All Freelance Writing (although to be fair I did miss Friday’s “deadline” last week because I forgot to publish before going away, so that post went up Saturday). I need to also break my book down into mini-projects with their own deadlines to keep me moving along smoothly. And the marketing boot camp e-book needs a serious deadline. But there’s the problem — how do you keep your own deadlines? You won’t fire yourself, so what kind of reward or punishment would it take to make you take those deadlines as seriously as you take a client’s? For e-books I think it’ll be easy — it’s about the direct income. You don’t get paid until you finish. With blogging it’s a bit tougher, but I’ll work harder to stick to those post deadlines (and let myself be a bit more free-spirited by periodically posting on a whim at other times during the week). If you have any self-imposed deadline tips, please share them in the comments. I’d love to hear your ideas.
• Focus more on planning. — I already do a fair amount of planning when it comes to my projects, but I could be a bit better about the details. For example, I’d like to put together a list of blog post titles I intend to tackle in coming months, so I can work on them early if I have extra time during that “project time” I’ll be setting aside. I’ll outline my blog posts (I already outline my own larger projects thoroughly). I’ll go back to using the planner I bought specifically for this site. Yes, I have individual planners for individual projects — I’m a paper planner kind of gal (electronic notes just become more clutter to me and I don’t want to be connected to electronics day in and day out). I already schedule out each individual day. But my own projects don’t get worked into those schedules as much as they should because although I know there’s a lot to do, I’m often left feeling overwhelmed by it and I don’t know what to tackle next. I’m hoping the planning calendars will help with that.
• Keep the bottom line in mind. — Money is an excellent motivator. When a client sends me $xxxx to work on a project, it’s easy to jump in and get the work finished so we can move on to that next set of blog posts, the next report, or whatever it is I’m working on for them. And since we’re talking about projects that are tied to our freelance writing businesses here, we need to remember that they can also impact our bottom line. For example, if you want to finish an e-book that you plan to sell think about your sales targets and how much profit you’ll earn based on those projections. Let that motivate you to do more. If you blog but you don’t earn much (and you want to), find ways to better monetize your blog. Try new ad models for example. As you bring in more money you might find that it justifies having you spend more time on the site on a regular basis. If you don’t want to earn from them directly, look at how you can use it to attract more clients and bring in more income that way. E-books are the big one for me in this area because I know I’m hurting myself in that income stream area by not completing the two e-books I already started. But it will apply to this site too. While it makes money, it doesn’t make enough to pay for all of our contributors, designers, coders, etc. who I periodically have to bring in. And because it doesn’t earn enough for that, it certainly doesn’t bring in enough money to justify the time I put in personally when compared to other areas of my business. And I don’t want to continue using my other sites to support this one.  They should be contributing to my bottom line independently, and I certainly wouldn’t keep most of them if they weren’t profitable enough. So either it needs to get to the point of supporting itself income-wise, or I’ll be cutting back on how much I spend here come 2011. I’ve always been good at monetizing sites though. I just have to rework the strategy here a bit, and we’ll see what happens. I keep putting it off simply because I haven’t had the time to review the kinds of offers we’ll be promoting here. In the future though you’ll see more affiliate promotions and more of my own products being released. I think it’s a better option for this audience than partnering with less than ethical “sponsors” notorious in this niche, and affiliate products will either be personally reviewed by me or coming from colleagues I know I trust already — no random garbage. But I often forget about the income side of things as I focus on content (I do the opposite with some other sites), and I think a better balance is necessary on all counts.
• Increase review times. — Look. I’ll never run a typo-free site, and I’ll never succumb to the grammar nazi crowd. If they can’t handle occasional typos, they shouldn’t be reading things on instant publishing platforms. It isn’t technically possible to stay timely in that sense and still have fresh eyes when you proofread. I’m not willing to let blog posts sit for days or weeks or more just so I can be “fresh” when I edit them And I’m not willing to have an outside editor work on my posts when here they’re designed to be rather personal in nature. That said, I can certainly revamp my process in a way that will hopefully catch more — the same way I handle client blogging. For me that means I’ll type most articles in a word processor (as I did with this post) rather than directly into the blogging platform. I’m not crazy about the idea, but I’m willing to try it for a while. By doing that I can proofread in a basic text mode in the word processing program first, then put it into WordPress and format it, and then do a final edit in preview mode where I can see how it displays on-site. However, very short posts and quick announcements will likely still be done on-the-fly. I’m just talking about more substantial posts here.
• Clean up the past. — In addition to increasing my review time on upcoming posts and projects, I plan to go back over old posts and clean them up a bit. I’ll add tags if there are none. I’ll add meta details where I skipped them before. I’ll make sure posts are formatted fairly consistently with things like subheadings (we used different formatting with old designs, so I’m sure some old ones are screwed up on the site with the current stylesheet in place). And I’ll give them all a solid read-through and fix any glaring errors I see. If links are now dead I’ll remove them or redirect them. If I find typos, I’ll fix them (although I’ll probably still miss plenty). If something is seriously outdated, I’ll add an edited note in the content. I won’t change old content beyond things like typos without an editorial note being included. That’s because I don’t want readers to worry about posts suddenly being deleted or changed to hide things like some other bloggers have been known to do. But if an opinion changed you might find a note in the post to that effect which links to a more up-to-date article explaining the change of opinion.

Well, those are my plans for the time being. I’m sure I’ll struggle with some and change will be slow at first, but it’s all about taking steps in the right direction. And I really do think that treating my own projects more like client work will help me stay on task and get more done. What about you? Do you think you take your own projects as seriously as you take client work? Do you wish you could? What projects are you working on, and what things do you think you can do to take them more seriously when it comes to working them into your schedule and making sure they’re of the highest quality possible? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Website: http://savvy-writer.com/

Specialty: Blogs and articles

Rates: .50 to 1.00 per word

Rebecca Sebek counts among her passions the arts, communication, and travel. She makes her living as a writer. She enjoys coaching and teaching others, and sharing her knowledge of writing skills.

Rebecca’s also a prolific freelance writer and blogger who posts regularly on several websites, writing on topics such as travel destination articles, general writing tips, and personal advice.

Starting with how to install a WordPress theme on your freelance writing blog last week, this week we’re going to take an introductory look into how to promote your freelance writing blog using 5 different social media tools.

N.B. – this post is meant to act as an introduction into social media and its uses, aimed primarily at those freelance writers who have just set up their own blog.  It includes what I consider to be the 5 most useful social media tools for beginners, but it by no means covers how to use them in an in-depth manner,  acting as more of a way to get started and help your new blog get off the ground.

1. Twitter - if you haven’t already got a Twitter account, go get one now.  Arguably the most important social media tool out there at the moment, there are two golden rules to always abide by when using Twitter.

   Firstly, you should never just tweet about your latest blog post and secondly, you need to use it as though you were having brief – but helpful – conversations.  The idea is to share and discuss information with your followers so that they enjoy tweeting with you, meaning that they will not only recommend that others follow you, but that they will also be more likely to read your business related tweets.

2. Facebook - I’m going to be honest here and say that I don’t use Facebook for business.  Yeah, I’ve got an account that I use (sparingly) on a personal level, but as I’m not a massive fan of it for keeping in touch with friends, I’ve only used it minimally for business.

   However, I know people out there who use it regularly for business purposes and who see massive benefits, which is why I’ve included it in this list.

   If you’re planning on using Facebook to promote your freelance writing blog, there’s no need to take out a business account just yet (or at all, in fact).  Start by setting up some groups on interesting topics related to your niche and begin promoting them so that their member count increases.  When your groups have several members, you’ve got yourself a captive audience and whilst not really suitable for promoting your freelance writing services on a general or direct basis, if you’ve got something in particular to offer on your blog – an e-book, for example – then you can expect to see a steady stream of traffic from Facebook.

3. LinkedIn - I love LinkedIn.  I’ve only started using it in the last 6 months, but I think it’s an absolutely fantastic social media tool and a must for any freelance writer, regardless of whether they’ve been writing for 2 weeks or 20 years.

   LinkedIn works by acting as a way of keeping in touch all of your business associates, allowing you to contact people who you have worked, or are working, with.

   Most importantly, it has a fantastic ‘recommend’ feature, where you can recommend people who you have worked with and conversely, receive recommendations yourself, instantly helping to get your name – and therefore your freelance writing blog – noticed more.

   When you start using LinkedIn, look for everyone who you have worked with in the past and add them.  Then, just like in your Facebook groups, you’ve got a captive audience – made up of people who have enjoyed working with you in the past and benefited from your services previously – to begin promoting your freelance writing blog to.  Simple.

4. StumbleUpon / Digg / Delicious – I’ve grouped these together (no doubt much to the dismay of StumbleUpon, Digg or Delicious aficionados), as the way I see it is if you look to use one of them, you can use any of them with relative ease.

   The idea behind all three of them is to share interesting and informative content from around the web.  Now, the reason that they can benefit you and help with the promotion of your freelance writing blog is that you can gain followers to your profiles (which should feature the details of your blog, as well as all of your details as a freelance writer) and become reputable amongst the community as someone who provides quality content.

   Therefore, if you provide informative content on freelance writing, you’ll soon develop a loyal following who, if interested in the freelance writing news you’ve been providing, will also be interested in your freelance writing blog.

5. Blogs - although they may have developed away from the whole social media scene, blogs are still, to all intents and purposes, a social media tool – and possibly the most useful.

   When you’re first starting out your freelance writing business, you need to be getting involved in as many blog discussions as you can, making sure that your input into the discussion is worthwhile and that you’re not commenting for the sake of getting your name out there.

   It’s also worthwhile noting that regardless of what you may hear from Search Engine Optimisation experts / gurus / gods, you don’t have to  comment on blogs that are only  ’do follow’ (there are two types of blogs – those which have an effect on your ranking in search engines if you use the comments box to fill in your blog’s details – known as do ‘follow’ – and those which have no effect on your search engine rankings whatsoever – known as ‘no follow’).

   This reason behind this is simple and as long as you fill in your details properly and your comment is beneficial to the conversation, people will begin checking out your blog naturally.

It’s important to remember that social media tools aren’t to be used solely for promoting your own freelance writing services.  There’s no doubting that they’re a fantastic way for promotion, but it’s important that you use them in a way that’s going to offer value to others, as without this, you’re doing nothing more than providing random pieces of information that no one particularly cares about.

Furthermore, don’t expect overnight results.  Take things slowly, gain members or followers and most importantly, listen to what is being said about your business.  You might not be able to see instant  in, for example, the number of people coming to your blog, but due to the nature of social media websites, you’ll be able to see instantly what someone thinks about it.  Whether it’s positive or negative, it allows you to act on it and ensure that your freelance writing blog is heading in the right direction.