My Success Diary

Getting My Freelance Writing Business Organized

December 14th, 2009 4 Comments

The first step in my new freelance writing business strategy is to think about how to get my writing business organized. I used to have a system, but I sort of stopped using it. This was a natural by-produce of primarily using online sites to make money. However, regardless of how I make money writing it is still a good idea to keep track. The same goes for my affiliate marketing business as well but I’ll address that in a later post.

I was reading Six Figure Freelancing by Kelley James-Enger the other day and I particularly like her organizational strategy. So, I’m adopting it. I looked everywhere for a software program to keep track of my writing business but I could find one. In the end, I decided to just use spreadsheets. If I ever find a good program, I’ll pass it along.

Here’s what I am doing:

Earnings Tracker – This is a spreadsheet that keeps track of earnings. I track the date of payment, where the payment came from, how much it was for, whether they paid by check, cash, or paypal, etc.

Expenses Tracker – Another speadsheet that pretty much has the same categories as above.

Submissions, Queries, and Pitches – I’ll have one spreadsheet for each. What the pitch was, where it was sent, the date, the response, etc are the categories.

Current Work Tracker – This is probably going to be a word document listing my work in progress, work completed and waiting for approval, and work approved and waiting for payment (once it’s approved I’ll list it in earnings)

Note that I set a lofty goal to always have $2000 worth of work in each category. Well it seems lofty now!

Contacts – This is something I’ve never done. I’ll keep track of my contacts (writer friends, editors, etc) using a database.

Billing and Invoices – This will be a folder where I’ll keep my invoice template and any completed invoices.

Mileage – I have to log it somewhere!

In addition, I’ll keep all my expense receipts and invoices and maintain a good filing system. I got the idea from Six Figure Freelancing to start a project folder for each assignment and put a hard copy of my first draft and final copy, my notes, and printouts of any research material.

I’m curious – what kind of system do you use for your freelance writing business? Is it working for you?

Blank Slate, New Theme – The Rebirth of My Business

December 13th, 2009 8 Comments

I wish I could describe to you what I’ve been going through these past few days. I’ve known for a while that something needed to change about my business but I haven’t known what. I’ve been writing furiously in my journal and I finally came to grips with what was botherine me.

I’m bored.

It’s so simple, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before. The writing that I do doesn’t hold my interest – isn’t interesting – isn’t even lucrative! I’m sorry but writing articles on “garage door openers” is not going to help me make a living, especially when the article is barely (or not even) paying me $3.

Earlier today, I created a folder on my computer called “old stuff”. I put everything business related in it. Okay, I’ll take some of th stuff out as I restructure but some of the folders I won’t be removing because they have to do with writing that I’m sick of.

Notice the new theme? I thought this would be a great opportunity to change it. Another symbol of a new beginning. The idea came to me last night. I had a brief detour (it went blank after an upgrade and theme change!) but it’s all better now.

Anyway, I have a simple plan really- to write… to make sure that what I write is something that I’m at least having fun with. I’m sick of making lists and making things complicated. Here’s to a new start! Prost!

Make Money Writing at eHow

December 10th, 2009 5 Comments

I’ve been writing at eHow since August of 2007. I started off as the Herbal Medicine Expert but I no longer have that role. Still, eHow remains one of my favorite sites to make money writing on the internet. When they first implemented the Writer’s Compensation program, I was a bit perplexed as to how such a thing could make me money. But, I did stick it out – and Oh Boy am I glad I did! Of all the revenue sharing sites out there, eHow appears to be the most lucrative. It has been for me at least.

Writer’s Compensation Program

If you sign up for the site but don’t also sign up for the writer’s compensation program, you won’t get paid. Right now, only people in the US can sign up. From what I can gather, it looks like they are looking to add UK writers to this mix but it hasn’t happened yet. So once you sign up for the site, sign up for the writer’s compensation program right away.

Keyword Research is King

The revenue share program is indirectly based on traffic and I’ve found that promoting my articles doesn’t even compare to getting the keyword research right in the first place. A high earning article manages to hit on the magic combination of a well-researched keyword that also has a high earnings potential AND you get on the first page (even better if it is the first result) on google. Sound like a lot? I’ve hit on this magic combination a few times, and the compensation earnings are pretty nice. Most articles fall somewhere in the middle of awesome and dud. And I’ve had a few duds that’s for sure.

Yes, you can promote.

Some people on the site promote their articles, some don’t. I went through a short phase of article promotion and I didn’t see much of a difference in my earnings. However, most people who understand SEO know that having backlinks can boost your chances of getting on the first page of google which is really nice. For me personally, I’ve found that a better strategy is to have more articles. I almost have 200 articles on there and the earnings have been pretty steady.

Using eHow for Backlinks

Even if you can’t sign up for the writer’s compensation program, you may want to consider using eHow for backlinks. If you decide to do this, remember this golden rule – include something that is helpful and enhances the content to your article. For example, if your article is about how to make swedish apple pie, you can list the link to a Squidoo lens you wrote about tasty apple desserts. The content needs to relate for this strategy to make sense. You can interlink to your other articles on eHow or use outside sources like your blog URL or squidoo lenses.

If you are signed up for the writer’s compensation program, doing this won’t necessarily affect your earnings. However, indirectly they might because the reader will leave your page via your link and not one of the ads.

Promoting Affiliate Programs

Some people swear that putting affiliate links in the links section of the article can help boost income. While this may be true, I never felt quite right doing it. So, I never have. But if you were to use this strategy, it seems to me that the best way to do it would be to create a Squidoo lens or a blog with the links on it and use the same strategy I described in the “backlinks” section of this post. I just don’t feel right about putting a blind affiliate link there.

Don’t Annoy People

One thing – if you go on the site, make sure you don’t annoy people. The site has grown into a community and a lot of people, most especially the forum members, know each other well. There are some activities that are frowned on:

Friending people you don’t know and then jamming their inbox with messages about their latest articles, links to your websites, etc is a big eHow don’t. The forum includes a thread to share the latest articles of the day – put the articles in that thread and don’t mass message people.

Signing up for the forum and then dropping links to your site without participating in the community is a big no-no. Like an internet socializing, it is frowned on to Spam. This is considered Spam.

Ruining the community vibe by deliberately giving people a low rating out of spite, saying mean things on the forum, and spamming are all things you shouldn’t do.

Also, the eHow team goes through now and then and “sweeps” the articles and tends to delete things. Most people end up losing articles at some point so back up your work. I have the bad habit of not backing up my articles. Bad, I know. Don’t do what I do in this case. Following the writer’s guidelines will decrease the liklihood of having something deleted.

And that’s all I can think of. If you have any questions list them in the comments and I’ll go back through the thread and edit it or answer in the comments.

My Revised Money Making Plan and an Update

December 8th, 2009 4 Comments

I thought I’d share with you all my revised money making plan.

Content. I have decided that I need to bring in some income doing something that pays fairly quickly so I have vowed to write one piece of content per working day on sites like textbroker or even eHow.
Squidoo. My best lens is making me over $150 a month from my affiliate links. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
Blogging. I’ve revised my niche blogging plan somewhat. I’m starting with my current blogs and building them up. I will just work on one blog at a time. Having too many blogs can get confusing and I don’t think it makes a difference in terms of earnings.

What have I been up to?

Well, I’ve been planning like mad. I come up with plans, realize they are a lot of work, and then pitch the plan in the trash. It’s been a little frustrating.

So why does a plan I create go in the trash? Simply because I feel that I make things too complicated. What am I thinking? There’s no way I can sustain having a crazy amount of blogs and lenses and articles. I’ve proven time and again that the winning strategies are nearly single minded. Focus on one thing at a time. That’s what works for me. I wager that it works for most people.

Look at eHow. I wrote 7 articles a month for two years. Do you realize that my articles have gotten over 900,000 page views so far? My earnings aren’t bad either. Same goes for my Make Money Writing lens. I’m always working on it and it has a lot of great content on it. Frankly, it’s making me more money than this blog. So…

I’ve learned a lesson. It’s better to work on one thing and do it well than take on many projects and do a half-assed job at each of them. (And I never cuss, so you know I’m serious! LOL).

Yup. I can’t believe it’s taken me seven years of being a freelance writer to notice this pattern. It’s a little silly!

Resisting the Urge to Work on Something Else

November 22nd, 2009 2 Comments

Two days into my new challenge, I feel slightly impatient. I’m not making money yet. I’ve logged into all my affiliate accounts. I keep staring at my new blog. I’ve checked out my blog stats at least once. My traffic isn’t staggering. I maybe made a few cents on Adsense. Seriously, I’m a bit frustrated.

Not to mention the fact that I (briefly) entertained the idea that I was going to learn Joomla for my new recipe website. Then I started to think KISS (not as in KISS my you know what) but keep it simple… learning a new platform when I’m already functional at wordpress is just ridiculous. What was I thinking?

So I wanted to make money doing something stable – writing. So I almost logged into textbroker to do some writing. I would have spent an hour and made $10 with absolutely no long-term benefits. That hour would not have built up my blogging empire.

I’m happy to report that I resisted the urge. I didn’t do it. And to celebrate, I came on here to share my happiness with you. The only writing I will be doing is creative writing once my blogging starts making me a decent wage. I have books to write, screenplays to write, poems to write… but I’ve learned that staying focused is going to be… interesting.

I think I’ll go work on my novel now… just kidding. Or am I? Maybe I should just set a goal to write two pages a day. I can surely do two pages…

Okay I get the hint, I should go back to work on my new recipes blog before I get distracted again.

Cheers!

Success with Niche Blogging in 2009 – My Simple Plan

November 21st, 2009 Comments Off

Yes, I use Niche Blogger to help me make money online. For the past year I’ve been highly distracted. So many plans, so little time. All these plans resulted in a diluted effort. Now it will be Niche Blogging most of the time.

My plan is simple. I will work on my blogs each day. The minimum I will do is:

Write 1 blog post
Create 5 backlinks

With whatever time I have left I will write more posts, start a new blog, work on more tasks from the Niche blogger system, etc.

I know this is considered a “no-no” in the marketing world, but I am not creating a list, at least not now (or maybe not ever who knows). I will also not be working on any of my own products. Instead, I will focus on starting and building the blogs.

Also, I noticed that I’m not that into “putting a blog on auto-pilot”. I like to write the posts when I have the whim, which means that I need to have a smaller number of blogs to manage. Right now I have several with a Christmas theme. One of them is getting traffic from the search engines already.

I’ve been working on backlinks too and have only been using Xomba for now because I get a cut from the adsense revenue. He – gotta get whatever income stream going that I can!

Goal is still to be at the $5000 point by May 2010. Do you have a single goal for your business in 2010?

How to Make Money on Amazon

November 21st, 2009 2 Comments

I thought I’d share with you the fruits of my research. For the longest time I dismissed the Amazon affiliate program because I am currently only getting 4% commission. But if you think about it, 4% of a higher priced item is still pretty good. Let’s say something cost $300. 4% of that is $12 which is pretty good.

The benefit of using Amazon is that it is well respected. I don’t know about you but when I need to buy something online I first check to see if Amazon has it. Then I’ll look on other places to see if I can find a better deal.

In the end, I usually just go with Amazon because chances are, I hadn’t heard of the companies that are giving me a slight discount. That’s my shopping behavior – is it similar to yours? I think it’s similar to a lot of people which is why I’ve decided to start learning how to convert sales at Amazon.

Here are some links:

11 Lessons Learned … published on ProBlogger’

10 More Tips … also published on Problogger

How to Make Money with Amazon Associates … Squidoo lens made by someone who pulled in quite a lot in sales at Amazon

I haven’t processed or used the information yet. Truth be told I just glanced at the links. I can tell they’re gonna be a big help though.

Success Goals for the New Year

November 17th, 2009 2 Comments

I just read a great post at Internet Marketing for Mommies about using 2010 as a way to focus on one task so I could find success. Like most beginners (in my case, I’m a pseudo-beginner) it is easy to get overwhelmed by the sheer volume of information that is out there.

Instead of focusing on one thing until it becomes successful, I often feel like there is more I can be doing so I clutter up my routine with extra tasks. The end result is that I never really seem to get anywhere. I know, I know – I’ve heard this before. I’ve also known for a while that it was a problem but up until I read that post, I didn’t really do anything about it. I don’t know why.

Anyway, I thought I’d share with you my goal for the new year. As you know, I am still a writer so I couldn’t necessarily focus on “just one thing” because I have writing obligations elsewhere. So my plan is this – Each day I will spend time on three tasks

Niche Blogging a la Amy Bass to create the bulk of my income. (Goal is to reach the $5000 point in 6 months – so that brings me to the Middle of May 2010.

Writing Content and making money for it using sites like Textbroker, eHow, Mahalo, and Constant Content. I just recently sold some articles at Constant Content which renewed my resolve to put more articles on there.

Creative writing – I haven’t done enough of this lately so I’ve decided to make room in my schedule.

What are your goals? I encourage you to choose just one or two things to work on each day. The Niche Blogging is my biggest goal so each day I resolve to spend some time on it, even if I only have 15 minutes.

How to Create Backlinks with Articles and Free Blogs

October 7th, 2009 3 Comments

I thought I’d spend some time talking about my backlinks strategy. In my last post, I talked about Using Niche Blogger to Create Niche Sites. An essential part of my business model is to create backlinks which are basically links coming into my niche sites.

To create backlinks, I choose from a combination of methods.

Free blogs on blogger or wordpress
Create lenses at Squidoo
Create Hubs on Hubpages
Article marketing

A Note About Keywords

Each backlink you create should be optimized for one keyword. Put the keyword once in the title, once in the first sentence, once or twice in the body, and again in the last sentence. As mentioned in my last post, I just reuse the keywords I used to create the niche site.

Using Free Blogs for Backlinks

I know you can use wordress.com but I prefer blogger because you can put Adsense and other advertising and affiliate programs on your blogs without a problem. With wordpress you can’t do this because it goes against their terms of use and you could get your account banned and your blog deleted.

To use this strategy, start a series of blogs in broad topics like health and fitness, business, home improvement, etc. The topics you choose will depend on the niches that you have. Then, when you start a new niche site just make a post on the blog in a topic that relates to your niche and put a link to your niche site in the post.

Creating Lenses on Squidoo

For each niche site I create, I try to make at least one squidoo lens in a topic that relates to that site. If the niche is pretty broad, I may create a few more. But with Squidoo I believe that it is sometimes to create one lens per niche instead of several smaller lenses. I’m not sure what other lensmasters are experiencing but the lenses I have that are doing well are the ones that are a little longer.

I include two links to my niche site and one RSS module with the niche site feed URL in each lens. I also use other modules like the text module, youtube module, guest book, etc. I try to have at least four modules up and running before I publish it.

Create Hubs for Backlinks

When you set up your hubpages account, be sure to set up the affiliate programs too – particularly Google Adsense. They’re running adsense on your hubs anyway and if you want to get 60% of the earnings you need to enter your publisher ID.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking that hubpages is just like squidoo – it isn’t. For hubpages, write a 350 – 400 word article and copy and past it into a text capsule. I also include one photo, only one link to my niche site (they’re strict on that one) and a guest book. You may want to add some more text and another photo, too. But if you add more than one link Hubpages may consider it to be spam.

Article Marketing

This is one of the classic ways to get backlinks. For this, just write one article of around 400 words and publish it on article directories. Note that I write unique articles that only get published once and I don’t spin them (though if I find a good spinner I might start.) Here are some directories to try:

ezinearticles.com
ideamarketers.com
articledashboard.com
goarticles.com

There are hundreds more but these are the ones I tend to use.

The more backlinks you can create, the better. So in my niche site plan, I create 5 backlinks per phase. If you feel like creating more – go for it!

Using Niche Blogger to Create Niche Sites

October 6th, 2009 5 Comments

I thought I’d talk a bit about creating niche sites. My niche site plan has three basic levels and I ultimately use The Niche Blogger to teach me and keep me motivated. But the secret is that I don’t really use it at first. Let me explain.

Phase 1

In this stage, I think of a niche with some accompanying keywords. The first month of Niche Blogger gets into all this. But since I am adept at reserving domains and setting up wordpress, I skip all the other stuff in month one and just focus on finding a theme that’s passable (I used to obsess but just find one that’s “good enough” for now).

Then once it’s all set (I don’t really worry about widgets and the only plugin I install is akismet) I start writing. For this first phase, I write ten articles in advance and set them to publish 2-4 days apart. I find 2-3 income streams for the blog which could come from Adsense, Amazon, eBay, Clickbank, etc.

Once I do that, I work on creating backlinks using article marketing, Squidoo, and Hubpages. Once I create five backlinks, I let the site rest for a week or two and move on to another level of my grand plan. In this case it would be to work on one of my larger non-niche sites like this blog.

Phase 2

Once the new niche site sits for 1-2 weeks, it’s time to do phase 2. Basically all this level amounts to is writing ten more posts and creating five new backlinks. I forgot to mention that each post and each backlink should be optimized for one keyword. It shouldn’t be the same keyword – each one should be unique.

Phase 3

After the site sits for another week or two the next step is to go through The Niche Blogger method. This will basically amount to writing 30-40 more posts (which should take you through half a year) and setting things up to make money. Going through the method will also increase page rank and traffic.

I’ve tried a bunch of things including Blogging to the Bank. These are all good – really they are. The point isn’t that you use one method or the other but that you choose one that you want to use and then stick with it. I find that Niche Blogger is best for the niche sites and something like Blogging to the Bank is good to use for larger websites (like this one).

And that’s it.

Now, my business plan has me set up to building several different income streams. However, yours doesn’t have to be this way. Niche Blogging is just one tier for me.

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