For those who are considering starting a career as a freelance writer, you may wonder what tools you need to get started. While there are some tools that are required, there are others that are optional. Understanding which tools are a necessity and which ones are a convenience can often be an extremely fine line. From personal experience, there are tools I did not use in the beginning but I do use now.

Let’s first take a look at some of the tools you must have in order to succeed as a freelance writer.

Internet connection: it goes without saying you need a stable Internet connection in order to succeed as a freelance writer. Fortunately, most areas now offer high-speed Internet (at least in the United States). Contact your Internet provider and find out what they are “downtime” has been over the past 12 months. This will give you a great idea of how reliable it is. Unfortunately, regardless of how unreliable it might be you may be tied to that provider.

Computer: clearly your computer has to be dependable. Lost files can result in hours of lost work, loss of revenue, and even the loss of credibility. You may want to consider an external backup in the event of a crash. Whether you elect to work from a desktop or laptop, you will want your computer to be dependable.if you were going to be using your computer for personal as well as work use, you may even want to consider setting up multiple users. This will allow other family members to use the computer without accessing your work files.

continue reading "Work at home Requirements Part 1"

Why does it seem that the bulk of comments that show up in most blogs, are trying to sell pharmaceuticals, pay per click sites, and a variety of other “name”? I’ve long since been convinced, that most of this crap comes from bots. I’m not too sure how to avoid this stuff. Short of ending comments completely, there does not seem to be another way of dealing with it.

Like most WordPress users, I use Akismet, I put all comments in moderation,and I try to review new comments daily. One of the challenges, is that “Pingbacks” often wind up in spam. I’m not sure there’s an easy way to avoid this happening.

continue reading "Blog Spam"

Many freelancers take advantage of affiliate marketing as a way to increase their income. When considering affiliate programs, it is generally best to go with the ones you know and trust. Regardless of where you go on the Internet today, you will find somebody who is promoting one affiliate or another. As you may be aware, I’m not a particular fan of the typical “affiliate marketing plan”. In fact, for the most part I avoid them.

There are a couple of exceptions. I have had Google ad sense program’s running and not just my blog, but also in Hub Pages and Squiddo pages. I can tell you that Google ad sense works. Unlike some affiliate programs, they do not promise you $1000 a week, a month or even a year. My entire first year using this program netted a grand total of $108.

This isn’t to say that Google ad sense doesn’t work. What it tells me, is that I failed to properly market and utilize the tools that are provided free of charge. That’s my shortfall not Googles. This seems to be the one area that people do not understand about affiliate marketing.

Passive Income

One of the things I quickly discovered was that this “passive” source of income was like every other passive source of income. It flat out is not passive. The pure definition of passive is when you sit back and do nothing and things happen. I’m not a particular believer in the theory that doing nothing is going to earn me money. In fact, I’m convinced that doing nothing gets you nothing.

If you’re looking for an opportunity to sit back and wait for money to come to you, let me know how that works out for you. One of the bigger issues that I have with affiliate marketing, for the most part, is the “boilerplate” approach. All too often, these affiliate programs provide you with a “canned” website template, a series of “one-size-fits-all” approaches, and pretty much assure you that once you get the ball rolling, money will just come in. I have serious doubts about these types of programs.

Easy Ebay Affiliate Stores Video Training

continue reading "Safe Affiliate Marketing"

If you have not set your goals for 2010 perhaps it is time to think about them.  While we are a few days into the new year, not everyone took the time during the holidays to set their goals.

Goal setting should be done with caution. Do not set unrealistic expectations for yourself.  While you certainly want to stretch your limits a bit if you can, do not set goals that are unattainable (i.e. I’m going to make a million dollars in 2010).  Setting your goals should include:

A)  Monthly work goals – These would be the goals that you wish to attain each month during 2010. They should work hand in hand with your overall annual goal for what you hope to achieve financially.

B) Family goals – Don’t overlook family and friends in your quest to be successful during 2010.  It’s just as important that you spend time with your family and friends.

C) Earnings Goals – Set your earnings goals so that they are realistic.  Check all of your income sources and see where you can improve 2010 over 2009.

D) Savings Goals – You can set your savings goals based on your income projections.  Make sure you set goals that are realistic for your financial condition.  Saving for a big purchase, a vacation or tucking away a few extra dollars for retirement all go a long way towards keeping you focused.

E) Personal growth - Perhaps you feel that there is some aspect of you that you wish to improve upon this year.  No time like the present to begin working on it. This doesn’t mean you have to set a goal to lose 50 pounds or quit smoking or any thing that has to do with your health. Instead, decide what you want for yourself – It could be that your interest lies in writing about something you’ve never written about before. Do something that makes you feel that you’ve changed for the better during 2010.

F) Other laudable goals - While you are planning your goals for 2010, why not include some humanitarian work in there? It doesn’t have to be something huge. You can volunteer at your local food pantry, you can take part in loans to underdeveloped countries (as low as $25), you can do something else in the form of outreach. Whatever it is, give back something to others – it always comes back to you.

Summary

We are all busy with life and everything that it throws at us.  Set your 2010 goals now and you’ll soon find that you are more focused and you can accomplish more than ever before. Let 2010 be the year that you attain all of your goals.

There are thousands of blogs that are available online.  If you are a blog owner, chances are that you have had spam comments. What’s curious about them is what is behind them? Most of these spam comments are all about promoting something – whether it is an online dating site, a pharmaceutical site, or some other bogus website or link that can cause you nothing but grief.

In under two hours today I eliminated more than 50 spam comments from this very blog. What are these people getting out of this?

Chances are that someone is trying to increase their back-links.  You can stop enabling them and here is how:

1. Do not allow automatic approval of comments – Make sure that all comments need to be approved by a moderator before being posted to your blog. You could wind up very embarassed to find out that you are promoting a website selling the latest clone of Viagra or promoting some pornography website.

2.  Delete them as soon as possible! - Make sure that you first flag the comment as spam and then delete the comment.  If you flag the comment as spam and still let it sit there in your your blog, you have enabled the spammer by providing him/her with back-links. The comment sitting in your spam box will sit there and will still be accessible even if it’s not visible.

3.  Notify the email service – Check out the email address. If it’s a @yahoo or @gmail address, copy and paste the comment to your standard email and send a message to the email carrier.  Let them know that the person is spamming (this can be time consuming).  Don’t waste a ton of time on this because chances are that they are merely changing email addresses.

4. Google AdSense – If you are feeling particularly brave, go to the link in the comment and use “view source”. Get the persons Google AdSense number (usually near the end of the source code) and report them to AdSense as a spammer.  This may not stop them but it will at least slow them down (til they open another AdSense account).

Summary

It’s not bad enough we have to contend with spam in our email, but our blogs could be enabling spammers. Do your part to help stop them!

Just like any other internet site, you have to use common sense on Twitter.  There are thousands of Twitter users who are selling something – you can find them very easily.   They are promoting MLM programs (which personally I detest), they are promoting Affiliate Marketing programs (and someone is making money from these, I don’t know who, but someone is). Everyone has something for sale. I’m not an exception to that rule – and I won’t pretend that I am.  Recently I’ve been promoting an iPhone Application on Twitter.  However, I have no vested financial interest in this application, I am merely helping someone promote it.  I trust the person, I have confirmed that it really exists and to boot, it’s selling for a whopping $.99.

Nonetheless, there are some things that are inherent to usage of the internet that people think they can scam others. I often muse that if these people spent 1/3 of the time with legitimate work that they do scamming people that they’d be able to make an honest living.

I’m not trying to imply that everyone promoting on Twitter is scamming you. What I’m suggesting is that you use some caution when you are clicking on some of these “make money for free” offers.  In fact, most of them are NOT free. There are strings attached and they don’t tell you that up front.  In fact, go to some of the websites and see what you can see. Let’st ake a look at some of the common ones:

Get Rich Quick

I am not a believer in “get rich quick” schemes. In fact, I have a theory about these people who are promoting them.  They are definitely making some money from them, or they wouldn’t continue to promote them.  I wonder how much money they are making that allows them the luxury of posting the same link over and over to Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites though?  Chances are that these folks are making more from AdSense than they are making from their Affiliate Marketing programs or their Multi Level Marketing schemes.

Asking for Donations

There are plenty of great causes who are advertising on Twitter. They include Meals on Wheels, Kiva, Diabetes Awareness groups and many others. However, please use some caution. All of these programs are legitimate. But please before you make a donation, go to the real website.  Kivas website, the American Diabetes Association website, and Meals on Wheels website are always looking for help.  Go directly to a charity website to make donations.

Trial  Offers

Please use caution when clicking on trial offers through Twitter (or any other website) especially if they ask for your credit card.  Too often, these trial offers have fine print in them that commit you to some long term billing that you can overlook if you miss the fine print.  Always check out the Better Business Bureau for any company that is offering a free trial.

Increase your follower/Twitter Income

Check these programs out very carefully. I’ve looked at a number of them personally. Most of them are to sell you some sort of software.  The software WILL NOT do anything that you cannot do yourself if you put your mind to it.  Some of it is “pay per month” ( (I saw one recently for $30 per month!) and others are one time fees.  The fact remains if you want followers and you want people to buy your product or service, you need to be honest!  If you have something for sale, fine, be up front about it.  Forget about trying to make everything sound like the next best thing to sliced bread.  Sure, some hype might be needed, but I am convinced you will get far more customers if you are not trying to sell all hype!

Work at Home

I am constantly infuriated when I see work at home offers where someone tells you “we used to give this away for free but not enough serious people were applying”.  Folks, if you REALLY want to work at home, you can and YOU DO NOT HAVE TO PAY A DIME UP FRONT.  I have been working full time from home for nearly 4 years. It has never cost me ten cents to get a job!! Don’t do it!!  There are plenty of legitimate work at home opportunities without you having to pay for a data entry job.  No experience required my foot – if you are foolish enough to pay someone for a data entry job, you need a lot more experience – in identifying scams!

Summary

Call me cynical if you want. But, I’d rather do it right the first time than get taken in by the hyperbole on Twitter or any other social networking site.  Take your financial health seriously and don’t get conned on any social networking sites.

A couple of months ago I started watching Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn as potential sources of new traffic and earnings.  Frankly, I’m the skeptical type. I have to see that something works before I jump in with two feet.

Any of you who have read my blog posts here or on my other blog know that I tend to be practical with my time, I don’t go for pie in the sky and I don’t believe it’s possible to make a million dollars sitting on your rear end and doing nothing.  So let me introduce you to Twitter and share my thoughts/reflections with you.

I was really curious (and to some degree I still am) about why people follow you.  Here are some of the thoughts I have regarding how you attract followers:

• Your subject matter – Depending on what you are “tweeting” about people are going to follow you.  Most of them are really trying to “sell” you that their affiliate marketing package is the next best thing to sliced bread. What’s very comical is when you get the same affiliate message from several people in one day. There’s a good chance they are all part of the same affiliate program – in this case it’s a matter of who can “convert” you first!
• Common Interest – For these purposes I’ll use a genuine group of folks I know about – Helium Writers.  It benefits all of us to ‘tweet’ our own articles (I’ll explain more later) and if we “re-tweet” fellow writers articles our followers get those tweets. That adds up to pennies earned.  These are the most loyal of your followers
• Similar Interests – I am following (and am being followed by) writers from sites that are other than Helium.  These folks are here for the same reason – to promote their own articles. They gain if I re-tweet their articles and I gain if they retweet mine. That’s a “you wash my back I’ll wash yours” effect. These are the next most loyal group of followers.
• Corporate Followers – These followers are interesting. Let’s say that you have written many articles about Health topics and when you post your tweets you include #health. These followers are likely to “find” your tweets and begin following. The jury is out right now as to if these users are actually retweeting so it’s impossible to know if they are adding to your income.
• The “Auto-follower” – In my opinion these are the most annoying followers of all. They contribute nothing at all to Twitter.  They auto-message the same message multiple times in a day all the same message. They nearly always are full of “ALL CAPS” and they almost always have a typo.  These followers are best to just ignore and hope they go away!

Can you make money with Twitter? Absolutely.  Watch for my next installment on effectively using Twitter.

Thanks to MJ Logan for allowing me to use this.

Here’s some tips, I use these every day.

1 – Copy and paste the Marketplace Guidelines into your word processor.

2 – Go through the guidelines and single out specific requirements. For example, in recent marketplace titles for travel, the publisher wanted 10 subheadings. Start your article by making a section for each of those subheadings.

3 – If they give a URL to look at, copy-paste that into your word processor as well. Go visit the page. Look at examples of what is there. Read them because this is the style you want to use.

4 – Do a keyword specific search on the topic. Exclude any Wikipedia results. From your results, choose two or three informative pages and read them. Make *notes* in notepad as you go. By notes, I mean short brief notes, do not copy-paste anything. You can keep notepad on top of a web page as you read and make notes in it. If you are required to cite references, make notes on those as well. Copy any URLs you use into the notes, and later into the top section of your article in the WP.

5 – By now, you should have spent 10-30 minutes on research. It’s time to write. Look over your notes in notepad. Copy them into the top of your article in your word processor for easy reference, just under the guidelines.

6 – With it all fresh in your memory, start writing. Usually you want AP style. No first person, no jazzy words, no slang. Be rather generic in your writing. For good examples, go to the AP website (http://www.ap.org/) and read some news articles. This will give you an idea.
Set your word processor to formal writing and turn on the feature for writing and readability statistics. 8th grade is usually best. If your writing shows up as a grade level 12, you have to pare down your sentence length and complexity.

7 – Start by writing without checking your word count. After a while you get a feel for it. Make sure you use whitespace generously. 4-8 (max 12) sentence paragraphs. More sentences and you’re losing readers.

8 – When you get to the end, save it. Take a couple minutes without looking at it. I use this time to make an outline for the next assignment on my list. This clears your head a little.

9 – By now, if you type at a speed of 20 wpm, you’ve still spent less than an hour on a 400 word article. Open the article again and do a word count. If you’re over and I hope you are, it’s time to chop and be ruthless. Look for words you don’t need. Slang. Whole sentences are open to chopping if you don’t truly need them. If the word count is still over budget, chop more. Sometimes you need to rearrange sentences to get the count down. Do it. You do not want to be over or right on. Always 5 under for an assignment of 600 words or less. Ten under for more than that.

10 – Save and set it aside for a few hours or a day (usually a few hours on my schedule). Go back and re-read s l o w l y and carefully. Look for missing words. Fragments (happens if you chop a lot). Words the spell check missed because they are the wrong word, not spelled wrong (Their instead of There) stuff like that.

Save. Submit. (leave out the extra stuff like guidelines and notes you put at the top. Be sure to include citations at the bottom if required.)
Over time, you will develop a style and method that works for you. Things that help are fast, accurate typing, silence or noise (depends on you, I turn the music off when I write), choosing topics that you already know something about, using research you already did and wrote about (always rewrite, never copy, even your own work).
Give yourself deadlines and work to them. Make lists of what you are going to write. Slash items off when you finish and submit.