Do you use Google Analytics on your blog to track your website traffic statistics? If so, have you ever looked at your bounce rate there and wondered “why is this so high?” The problem might have very little to do with your blog and have more to do with the fact that the typical bounce rate metric isn’t always relevant to the blog format. Fortunately
Three different freelance colleagues mentioned using editorial calendars to me within the past week. And it made me wonder — is this a new trend among freelance writers and bloggers or are many of you already using this tool? I don’t have an editorial calendar per se, but I do a fair amount of post planning. I use editorial calendars for special circumstances (like my
Do you ever feel embarrassed as a blogger? Maybe the grammar police came a-calling. Or maybe you forgot to post when readers were expecting something. Or maybe you missed a publicly self-imposed deadline. Here’s what I have to say to that: lighten up! Coming to Terms with Typos Blogging is a relatively casual and conversational medium and yet we sometimes get worked up over simple
Everyone is willing to give you advice about freelance writing — from non-writers with preconceptions about the freelance lifestyle to professionals who have run successful freelance writing careers for years. In between you’ll find newbies who try to give advice like they’ve found the holy grail of freelancing, former freelancers who couldn’t cut it but still feel qualified to tell you how you can, and some
Bloggers usually love to receive comments. But as a reader, I sometimes don’t leave them, even if I love the blogger and content. It occurred to me as I looked through my RSS feed this morning that there’s one blog in particular that I almost never comment on. I admire the blogger. I love the content. But I don’t comment. Why? There’s one simple reason
“What does original mean?” my inquisitive, 3-year-old asked me. I had just told her that I wanted to video one of her original dances, instead of a fourth installment of Yankee Doodle. “It means you make something up,” I told her. That’s my layman’s definition of the word. In the blog world, have you ever noticed that you can read the same thing hundreds of
Whether you need a long weekend to unwind or you’re planning an extended vacation or business trip, sometimes life calls for a little blog vacation. This is when either you walk away from blog management completely for a while or when you alter / decrease the time you spend on your blog while you’re away. But when you need time off, how can you keep
Should you merge two of your blogs into one? How about combining your professional site and niche blog that are currently on different domains? Is it time to simply change the domain of your site for branding reasons? I’ve gone through a lot of site mergers and re-branding efforts over the years, and I’m going through another one right now. Today let’s talk about making
Yesterday I talked about how to increase blog traffic — specifically how we increased All Freelance Writing’s traffic by 80% in less than a year. One of the things that had a big impact for us was reformatting our category archive pages. Rather than making people browse through page after page of posts (they never do get to the really old gems that way it
Let’s turn back the clock to the fall of 2009. I was the sole blogger here at All Freelance Writing. Traffic was already fairly significant. But my posting was sporadic at best. I’m a busy person. I had multiple sites to manage (the ones that earn more and help support AFW so we don’t have to completely whore out to advertisers here), client projects to
Let’s tackle a very common myth about Web writing. I see it all the time on freelance writing blogs and forums. There are people out there telling new or aspiring Web writers that the Web simply doesn’t pay as much as print work does, and they need to get used to it. I’ve even seen the term “old school” tossed around referring to writers who
If there’s one thing I hate about blogging, it’s blog comment trolls. The topic recently came up in my post on SocialImplications.com — “Gurus” and Other Social Media Monsters. Someone asked about tracking trolls. I gave them some tips. It’s something I’ve been wanting to cover in detail here, given that this blog has been the target of trolls in the past, and I’m sure
Lately I’ve noticed a disturbing trend while reading various freelance writing blogs. I’ve watched people act like authorities on subjects they obviously had little to no experience actually doing. The clues that these blog posts were by posers instead of professionals were there for all to see. The writers showed an obvious lack of knowledge about what they were talking about, the advice was the
Many freelance writers have their own blogs. I’m always surprised by how many blogging writers I know don’t blog for clients! Why not? More importantly, why should they consider it? Today let’s talk about blogging for others and why it might be one of the best things to happen to a Web writer (or someone wanting to become one). Why Might Writers Prefer to Blog
Today I’d like to talk about blog comment etiquette — some dos and don’ts I guess you could say when it comes to commenting on others’ blogs. This issue comes to mind periodically regarding over-linking, but I never considered it worth its own post. Lately though, I’ve been seeing more commenters on various blogs of mine getting flagged as spam by default, so maybe it’s
If you blog, you’ll likely come across at least one content thief in the process. They’ll take your articles (usually in full) and they’ll publish them on their own sites so they can either monetize your work or use it to build their own false authority. As someone who makes a living from writing, I find content theft infuriating. I’m also the wrong person to
If you run a blog, chances are good that you’re going to get hit with blog comment spam. There are tools, like Akismet, to help combat this problem in blogging. But Akismet doesn’t catch everything. Blog comment spammers keep getting more clever. It seems like it’s more difficult every day to separate the spam from true comments. What’s sad though is that spammers take advantage
If you read freelance writing blogs to help yourself create a better career then I’ve got news for you. Not every blogger out there (in any niche) is everything they say they are which means you could be using untested or bad advice. Consider those MLM bloggers who talk about how much money you can make with their awesome pyramid.. er… multi-level marketing schemes… er…
One of the topics we cover here quite a bit is blogging. More specifically, I share tips on how to use blogging to get freelance writing jobs and how to make money blogging directly. Let’s talk more about the latter. Some writers want to make their blog a serious income stream, and others simply want to earn a little bit of money while their blog
Now you see it, now you don’t. The blog post you read in your feed reader an hour ago was deleted by the blogger. But why? It always baffles me when I’m reading a blog and suddenly the content changes (as in it vanishes). There’s rarely a good excuse for it, although I’m sure there are some. Before you think twice about a post and
No doubt you’ve stumbled across a competitor at some point and thought “how is this person even in business?” Their credentials aren’t as solid as yours. Their samples are terrible (or they don’t seem to have any to speak of). Their professional site is so dated that it needed to retire a decade ago. Given those things, why are they ranking #1 in the search
We’ve been talking about blogging here lately — mostly how to successfully earn from your own. And that’s had me thinking about blogger personalities a bit. Let’s talk about it. Your Blogger Persona You have two basic paths you can take when it comes to blogging. You can be real or you can be fake. Sure, you could fall somewhere in between, but for the
Previously I talked about why I consider residual income sites and content mills to be bad business decisions for freelance writers. I also promised to later talk to you about how you can earn decent residual income, but by writing for yourself — your own blog. Let’s talk about that now. Why Blog for Yourself? For some reason, many writers I talk to are afraid
Kathleen Roberts (a QFF reader) recently asked for tips on setting up an add-on domain name through Cpanel (a popular control panel used by hosting companies), setting up a WordPress installation on that domain, and then uploading and installing the Depeche WordPress theme I’m giving away free here to members (you have to be a member and be logged in to view that link’s content
I stumbled across a comment recently where someone said blog posts should be objective and not based on opinions. I found that odd. After all, opinions are what make blogs blogs. Remember they were originally started as more of a journal than an educational tool. The content has morphed from personal blogs to a wider variety or topics including business and niche blogs. Let’s look
SEO professionals don’t have the best reputation in the freelance writing community. If anything, they take the brunt of the blame for the incredibly low-paying Web content writing market. You know the one I mean–where a penny per word is too rich for many buyers’ blood. As it turns out though, SEO professionals are making up for past “wrongs,” by positively influencing the growing freelance
Let’s get into some technical bloggy goodness today. I’ve been asked a few times privately how I can have a separate RSS feed for the freelance writing jobs here at All Freelance Writing. More specifically, how the gigs not only have their own feed, but can also be removed from the primary blog feed. It’s surprisingly simple to do, and I hope others will find
Yesterday we talked about Clickbank Ads and how they can be used to monetize a blog or website. Ironically, this morning an email went out to Adsense publishers regarding changes to the types of ads they’ll be showing. You can read parts of that email below: We’re writing to let you know about the upcoming launch of interest-based advertising…. Interest-based advertising will allow advertisers to
Anyone can publish anything at any time on a blog or microblogging service, like Twitter. But does the fact that you can publish immediately mean that you should? Personally, I think the answer to that question is a resounding “NO.” I’d like to share some thoughts on the immediacy issue today as it might apply to journalism and get some of your own feedback. The
I’ve been thinking and blogging quite a bit about blogger relations lately (including featuring some excellent cases of good blogger relations in book marketing). In fact, I even revived my PR blog for a brief time to tackle the issue. In that post, Heather Yaxley of GreenBanana left a comment sharing an email she received announcing the launch of Serendipstick.com, a self-proclaimed “network for bloggers