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Remember when I told you to Feel The Fear ...? Well, I took my own advice and submitted a few poems to RITRO. The first of them was published today. It's called Rain.
I get no money but a great deal of satisfaction, mostly at having had the guts to go for it. And hey, it's only taken 26 years. What have you got hidden in your writing closet that you should give an airing?
Last week I talked about whether Guru and Elance were really worth it for freelance writers. I concluded that they were not and decided to concentrate my efforts on Craigslist and other job opportunities. So far, it seems to be working.
This week, I've had emails from another paid to blog site (I'll tell you about that in another post - or you could search this one for a clue), a site that wants me to blog about freelance writing, and someone who wants me to write a parenting article and is prepared to pay decently for it. This week I feel as though my decision to go freelance was the right one. Whether I get paid or not (because I still could get scammed), there are at least a few people who think I can do a decent job and will pay me fairly. So, keep your fingers crossed; next week I might get paid.A couple of weeks ago I did a post on whether writing could be seen as art. The answer from all of the WritingUp denizens was a resounding yes. I expected that, as there are some very talented writers here, including those who don't see themselves as writers.
Today I went to the final session of the course that sparked the question and to my surprise, someone asked whether journalism was an art. The audience were divided on this, because for most of the people there, tabloid journalism was about as far from art as you could get. However, they did say that the best examples of writing which touch and move people, which spark a response, have artistic merit. Nice of them to admit what we already know, don't you think?
Sometimes it's difficult to keep the writing momentum going. With all the writing I'm doing for InspiredAuthor and other sites, I don't have as much thinking time as I used to. Plus, there's the not so small matter of my very active toddler. Thinking time is essential for writers. Good ideas often need time to percolate before being put on paper or sent out for public consumption. This is not true of everything, of course. Sometimes writers just have to write to meet a deadline. But for many of us, having the time to think and polish is essential. The posts I do here are a mixture. Some of them I've thought about, drafted and let sit for a couple of days. Others have come straight out of my head onto my blog. But in most cases, it's the ones I've spent more time on that you've liked the most. Have a look:
10. Alphabet Soup 335
9. Keeping Track Of Your Writing 353
8. Do You Give Good Headline? 385
7. The Color Question 423
6. Three Months Of Blogging 445
5. Freelance writers - four reasons to get on the net 497
4. Read Em And Weep 552
3. How I Get Paid To Blog - UPDATE 560
2. WritingUp Alphabet 648
1. How I Put My Site On Steroids 875
10. Do You Give Good Headline? 26
9. SHH Blogwatch 28
8. Read Em And Weep 29
7. Without Word: Free Online Tools For Writers 30
6. Alphabet Soup 31
5. How I Put My Site On Steroids 32
4. Do You Know Your ABCs? 32
3. The Color Question 36
2. How I Get Paid To Blog - UPDATE 42
1. WritingUp Alphabet 72
Compiling these lists was an interesting process, because I realised that people don't always comment on the posts they like. (That shouldn't really surprise me, as I don't comment on every post I read.) And some of the ones that I personally like best don't feature at all. Looking at what people are reading and talking about is instructive for bloggers and writers so they have some idea of what the audience wants. This is a key element of good, targeted writing. Thanks for reading.
I've been doing some reassessment of the way that I spend my time - and something's gotta give. Last July I signed up with Elance. I very quickly realised that if I wanted to have a shot at any decent jobs, I needed to move up from the basic level. As I had a bit of money in the bank, I decided the risk was worth it. I upgraded (at a cost of about $25 a quarter) to the next level - for which I received the princely (NOT) total of three free leads a month. Anything over that, I would have to pay extra for. OK, I thought, I'll give it a go. What did I get from that signup - zip, zilch, nada, bupkes (can you tell I like that phrase?). I was invited to bid on one project, bid on a couple more, but mostly couldn't believe how low some people were willing to bid for a skilled writing job. I mean, 100 SEO-optimized articles for $100 - come on!
I cancelled my Elance membership and moved on to Guru. Straight away I liked the setup better. I had to spend more time setting up my profile and resume, but the project notifications system worked well (with daily update emails) and there seemed more guarantees that you would get paid. Furthermore, for the about $80 a year (the exchange rate worked in my favour), I got 100 leads a month and MUCH better projects to bid on. The way the jobs are presented is better, with a lot more detail in most cases - and the site layout it good.
I've had some success with Guru (a couple of leads that turned into small jobs), but I noticed a few things.First, many of the jobs were the same as the ones posted on Elance. Second, there were still people expecting a lot of work for not very much money. Third, it was still almost as hard to convert a project invitation into actual paid work.
I've paid for Guru, so I'll keep my subscription going till it runs out in December, but I won't be renewing. The time I spend trawling through the job listings could be better spent on craigslist - another good source of job leads - or developing my website, which is where a lot of enquiries are coming from these days. Looks like my promotional activities have paid off.
So that's my take on Guru, Elance and work exchanges in general. Unless someone can point me to one that works, I'm not going to pay for leads any more. After all, one of my best opportunities has come from blogging here at WritingUp. I know how I'd rather spend my time.
Thanks for reading.
Shameless self-promotion
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I've had a busy week - and for once, I'm all out of inspiration for today's post. So here's a round up of what I've been doing this week on my other blogs and the sites for which I write. I've also included a brief list of the posts that have recently caught my eye on WritingUp.
Great Gadgets For Freelance Writers
How To Negotiate The Best Rate For Freelance Writing
Tips For Successful Proofreading
Want To Read Something Beautiful?
My Daughter Is Growing Up
Seeing My Name In Print
I Found Out What A Truck Rack Is
Mother's Day Dilemma
Shakespeare Never Had To Work Like This
How to Promote Your Book/Website/Blog Free and Increase Hits
What Moms Know
"Good heavens!" he ejaculated. "How many ways are there to say 'said'?"
Enjoy!
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Join the CrispAds Blog Advertising Network!As writers, we spend more and more time on the Internet, whether we're researching articles or story ideas, looking for work, or just browsing for fun. As we do this, we often find information or websites that we think will be useful later. The old way of doing this was to use your bookmarks or favourites to keep a list of these places. You could even use scrapbooking tools such as those built into Opera or available for Firefox to keep notes on useful pages. But these tools mimic an old style of working, which is not as intuitive as it could be. Enter social bookmarking.
Social bookmarking is a way of bookmarking the sites/posts you like on a website. The 'social' part is because the bookmarks are usually public. You can also see whether anyone else has bookmarked the same sites. If you're interested, it shows what interests you share with the rest of webkind.
It's fairly simple. You need to sign up for a social bookmarking site (these include Blinklist, Blogmarks, del.icio.us, Furl, Kaboodle, ma.gnolia, Simpy , Spurl and Wink, to name just a few. Other sites which work on a similar basis are reddit and digg, though these seem to be for submitting stories of interest rather than keeping track of your web life. You can then drag a little button to your browser toolbar which allows you to add pages to your public bookmarks list. On some of the sites, such as Blinklist, my personal favourite, you can keep some bookmarks private (which means that in theory you could use it instead of your offline bookmarks (after all, you only need them when you're online, right?)
The key to using social bookmarking is tagging. Tagging is using single words or phrases to describe the links you are posting. If you were to tag this post, for example, you might use the tags: social bookmarking, writing, writer's resources. If you thought it was important, you could even use the name of the author as a tag. The key is to keep tags simple, so they can apply to many things. And they don't all have to be words in common use, either. For example, I have a 'myblog' tag to help me find the posts I have done.
The other way writers can improve the usefulness of this tool is to use the notes and comment fields when they tag pages. This is a good place to put an excerpt of the page (some of the services do that automatically) or notes about why you thought it was useful in the first place.
Your profile on the social bookmarking site contains a list or cloud of the tags you have used. Click on these to see all the sites that have been tagged in a particular way. Want to do a more complex search? Easy. Put the terms you want into the search box on the page, and magically a list of all the items with both tags (such as 'freelance' and 'writing') will appear. In many of the bookmarking services, you also get a list of related tags you can click on.
As a writer, I find this a great way of keeping track of information and I use it more and more. What I've learned, though, is that it's only as useful as the tags you use. When tagging, I try to think of three or four words that describe the page, but I don't always get it right. Typos can really mess up the system, too. (The other day, I discovered that one of my tags was 'r' - I still don't know what I intended to type.)
Social bookmarking is also a way of bringing additional traffic to your site as there are many users who look at the 'what's new' page and decide what to click on. An easy way of tackling social bookmarking is to use Onlywire, which WriteWay has written about in his blog. Once you've signed up, this will submit to all the sites except reddit and digg.
Not all the sites tag in the same way. Some accept single word tags separated by spaces, others accept phrases separated by commas, which is far more useful.
As I've said above, I like Blinklist and now use that almost exclusively for my non-traffic-seeking bookmarks. Here's why:
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