Three Articles For Freelancers

I've been harnessing the power of RSS to subscribe to more blogs about writing recently. The trouble is that every time I check out the blogroll on a writing site, I find more stuff to subscribe to.

In my trawl through the writing sites today, I have found three articles worth paying attention to.

First, Angela Booth writes about the cumulative effect of writing for self promotion, making the point that you need to think long term when it comes to promotion. I agree with that, having recently seen one of my old articles find new life.

Second, the EzineArticles article writing blog has a good article template to give you inspiration when you're looking for something to write. Browse around that blog; there are other gems to be found.

Third, thanks to Anne Wayman, I have found this great article on contracts for freelance writers. This is a great article if you're new to freelancing, and even those of us who aren't could use it as a reminder. Enjoy.

Writing For Free Pays Off Again

Like any other freelance writer, I want to get paid fairly for my work. However, there are times when writing for free can be worth it. You get promotion and publicity and it raises your profile.

Here's another case in point. Nearly two years ago I wrote It's Your House, Don't Give It Away, an article on severance of tenancy (UK legal term for putting your house in joint names), for a friend who was running a legal services website. Since the object was to drive traffic to his site, I put it up on EzineArticles.

Now the friend has returned the favour, submitting my article to a UK legal services firm as part of the flagship content for their new blog. Although the blog is new, this firm is one of the fastest growing legal services firms in the UK, so it won't do me any harm to have my article there, with a link to my site and EzineArticles profile. I may not have been paid in money, but I have been amply repaid in promotion.

How Freelance Writing For Free Pays

Freelance Writing Is Not Easy

Freelance writing is not an easy job. You have to spend time writing things you are not interested in because you're getting paid, and you are always worrying about where the next gig is coming from, at least at the start. And if you're ghostwriting, you don't even get the credit for your writing. That's why promotion is so important for freelance writers. It keeps your name out there and keeps the freelance writing work coming in. I'm always saying that writing for free isn't writing for free if you get something out of it - and now I have a concrete example to show you.

Freelance Writing History

When I started freelance writing, I wrote an article called Freelance Writers - Five Reasons Why You Need A Website. Some of you may recognise it as Freelance writers - four reasons to get on the net. I didn't get a dime for this article. It was picked up by freelancewriting.com and has been read by more than 3,000 people. It has also resulted in 120 visitors to my site in the past year. That's 10 a month since I wrote the article.

Freelance Writing Promotion

That's one freelance writing article. I know that's not a lot on its own, but I have about 50 articles out there, at least 33 of them unique and all with links back to my site. That's potentially a lot of traffic and may be part of the reason that I'm now getting more than 1,000 unique visitors a month to my freelance writing site. I am also getting Adsense money because some of those visitors like what they see. And people are starting to contact me about writing work (in fact, some of them are contacting me FOR freelance writing work, but that's another story). My point is this, one free article has made a big difference to my profile and to the money I make from freelance writing. Why not try it yourself?

The Long Reach Of Article Marketing

Finally, one of these things that I can write about legitimately. Do you know that one of my most read free article marketing articles on EzineArticles has to do with funeral flowers? I'm not making this up, I promise. Here's how it happened. About four years ago my husband got into a new financial venture, selling prepaid funeral plans in the UK market. He had a partner and things went swimmingly for a while. I did a website for them and it seemed to do the trick. It was simple (which was just as well given my skill level) and professional.

A few years later, they wanted to drum up some publicity, so I suggested article marketing. I took the original website content, most of which I had written or edited and (with their permission) turned it into eight articles relating to funerals and funeral plans. One of them is about planning your funeral, including thinking about flowers for saying goodbye, as Dotflowers mentions.

Even though those articles have nothing to do with my main business of freelance writing, ghostwriting and teaching, they're still out there working for me. The reason is that part of the deal was that in the three link resource box, one of the links pointed to my site. Depending on the search engine you use, you can find the article (called 'It's Your Funeral: Why Not Plan It Properly') at least a hundred times. That's a hundred inbound links to my site. OK, so some of them are probably not the best quality, but at least they are there.

My point? Even if you write about something like funeral flowers and even if the article is old, you can still get some benefit for the resources and sites you are promoting.

How To Market With Articles: Shameless Self-Promotion

Now that you've made your site search engine friendly and submitted it to search engines and directories, it's time to up the ante and use a few more tried and true methods of raising your site's (or blog's) profile. If you're blogging here, you already have a head start, as you can use your posts to promote yourself, your site or your blog.

How To Promote Yourself With Article Marketing

Article directories are websites that have articles on almost every subject. Some are all-purpose, covering everything from family issues to healthcare, while others have a niche, such as computer advice or art. All of them are hungry for content. Here's how you can provide that content and promote your site, blog or business at the same time.

• Step 1: Write an article. This can be about almost anything, as long as it's useful. Your blog posts here are a good starting point. Keep the articles short (250-500 words) and remember to spell-check.
• Step 2: Sign up with an article directory and submit your article. Many article directories will vet your work before approving it. Whatever their guidelines, stick to them and your article should be approved. Avoid self-promotion or promotional links in the body of your article. Most article directories disallow this.
• Step3: Make the resource box work for you. The resource box is where you can put your bio and a few links to your site, blog or product.

Example:I have three different resource boxes that I use on EzineArticles - and I have changed the content a few times over the last few months. Click on a couple of my articles to have a look (try this one on interviews and this one on funeral planning ). In the first, I link to my WritingUp blog; in the second, to a resource I'm promoting.

Article Submission

Article submission services extend the strategy. Although I recommend EzineArticles, I have also found the Article Marketer service to be effective. Article Marketer is NOT an article directory. Like EzineArticles, you submit your article (with bio) and get it approved. The article is then sent out to hundreds or thousands of publishers and article lists, depending on the service you choose. I'm on a budget, so I'm using the free service, which claims that 3500 people see my articles. You can set release dates, which is great if you want to submit articles while on holiday, and they just KEEP ON SUBMITTING your articles. Another option for article submission is Isnare, but you have to pay for this.

How To Automate Your Article Submissions

Many of the article directories run on the Article Dashboard script, and there's a free article submission tool that targets these sites. It's called Article Distributor. It incorporates signup details and an article formatting screen and will automatically paste your article into the correct boxes on these sites. Don't worry, it doesn't allow spam. You still have to select the category and press enter on each site. (Please note: The Article Distributor developer has stopped downloads while he works on the next version.)

Multiple Article Submissions: Pros and Cons

Pros: Your work is everywhere, with links back to your site. Inbound links are GOOD.
Cons: your work is everywhere; Google hates duplicate content

Some of my free to reprint articles are published in 20 or 30 locations, and as far as I can tell, this hasn't affected my appearance on Google, Yahoo or MSN. Perhaps that's because the articles are all relevant to the locations where they've been reprinted. I don't really know, but so far the strategy is working.

In the next part of this series, I look at other ways you could promote your website or blog.

Related posts:
How I Put My Site On Steroids
How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Research
How To Optimize Your Website: Keyword Placement
SEO: What's Under The Hood?
There's Life Beyond Google

How I Put My Site On Steroids

I’ve previously given several good reasons why freelance writers should have a website. Once you’ve got that showcase for you and your work, you’ll need to make sure that people see it. When I launched doublehdesign.com in June 2005, I had 26 unique visitors (and I knew most of those by name) and a paltry 757 hits. By the end of January 2006, that had risen to 620 (Dec: 472) unique visitors and more than 16,000 hits. How did I do it?

I took some advice. Early last year, my husband bought and downloaded a book that promised to share the secrets of the super-affiliates. These are a handful of people who have made megabucks from the internet. Naturally, I was interested to see how this was done. What I didn’t anticipate was that Rosalind Gardner would show me free ways of increasing traffic to my site and raising my profile.

So what were the steps I took? First of all, I wrote some free articles for article directories, with a link back to my site. One of the best of these is ezinearticles.com, in my view. Signing up was simple and seven days after writing my first article for them, I appeared in the search results on Google. I also wrote reviews for a number of consumer reviews sites, which I then linked to from my own site.

I did some keyword research and found the best keywords for my site, using the tools she recommended. I followed some of her advice on site design, though I admit I’ve not implemented that as well as I might. I also got a blog and an RSS feed for my site and submitted both to several directories. I put a search box and a sitemap on the site and made sure there was a place for people to contact me. I also put some free-to-reprint articles on my own site. I also got an Adsense account.

So far, there’s just one recommendation I haven’t agreed with. Rosalind Gardner recommends Elance as a good place to find freelance work, but it hasn’t worked for me. Guru is far better, in my opinion.

So what’s the bottom line? Although Rosalind Gardner’s primary aim is to tell you how to build an affiliate marketing business, the content of her Super Affiliate Handbook works just as well for general profile raising. My stats (which have increased even more this month) prove that. And I’m not done yet. Every so often I go back to the book and look for the next step, and when I’ve got more money to spend, I’ll be carrying out some of her other recommendations. I’ll keep you posted.

Writing for ezines - a good way to build site traffic

Let me say up front that I have nothing to gain from this recommendation. Ezinearticles doesn't even have an affiliate program yet. But when they do, I'll be one of the first to join.

This is a site that features free to reprint content for websites, ezines and email newsletters. I use it mostly as an author. Creating an account with ezinearticles is as simple as filling out the one page signup form and replying to the confirmation email. That gives you a basic membership which allows you to submit up to 10 articles (again on a one-page form).

Each article is vetted by an editor and then uploaded. You can create a brief bio of yourself and can put a writer's resource box with a link to your site.

This site is fantastic - a week after uploading my first article I was able to find my site on Google - and is a must if you want to get your name known and build traffic to your website. There are two additional levels of membership: Basic Plus (up to 25 submissions) and Platinum (unlimited submissions).

Other features on the site include a weblog and members forum (which isn't accessible from the members' site for some obscure reason). As a publisher, you can link to the articles, pick up rss feeds in various categories and make use of the content.

I have found several of my articles reprinted on other sites with a link both to ezinearticles and to my own site - a win-win situation as far as I'm concerned.