Blogging

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

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

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…

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

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

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

As a blogger or content writer, chances are good that you’ll be contacted by readers from time to time. They may have questions about what you’ve written, or questions about your niche unrelated to your article or post. You probably try to be as helpful as you can–responding to comments, answering emails, giving advice when asked for it, and just generally trying to help your

It’s almost inevitable – if you build a large content site or blog, at one time or another you’ll likely feel that there’s nothing left to talk about. Fortunately, unless you’ve chosen an incredibly limited niche, that’s not the case. There are always other topics to write about in your niche, or other angles to topics you’ve already covered in your articles or blog posts.

While I know today’s freelance writing challenge won’t apply to everyone, I think enough freelance writers are also bloggers to make this a worthwhile exercise. Today we’re going to evaluate our blogs – basically look at the factors that come into play when you want to sell a blog, and use that evaluation as a guide to see where we could improve our blog’s value

Not too long ago (it may have been on a forum or something), I saw someone say that you aren’t a “professional writer” until you’re earning six figures. I think most of us would disagree with that (I’d reckon that most “professional writers” – authors, journalists, etc. – aren’t earning a solid six figures every year actually). However, it got me thinking about professional blogging

We’ve talked a lot here about why writers should blog, from using blogs as a marketing tool for your freelance writing services to blogging as an added income stream. Now let’s talk about how you can get more from your blog by moving beyond the blog itself. Here are additional income streams / outlets that blogging can potentially lead to if you levereage it right: