Time To Fire The Client?

Here's the situation. Last year I found a client who wanted me to write keyword rich articles for him. They weren't too arduous, just a couple of keywords a few times each - and the pay was relatively good. He paid two weeks after invoicing and kept to that schedule.

Then came Christmas, and things changed. I did several jobs just before Christmas, so in January I still had three invoices outstanding with that client. All of a sudden I wasn't getting prompt responses to emails. I chased for two of the invoices and got various runaround stories (no-one's in to sign the check, we have paid it into your account [they hadn't] and so on).

So I got tough and when they asked me to do some more work, I said they needed to pay two of the three outstanding invoices first. They did, then they paid the third one and then they asked me to do more work. I did, because they had paid. But then I waited nearly eight weeks for them to pay me. I chased them several times.

In that time they asked me to do more work. I replied that I would only consider it after I had been paid, which they finally did last Friday. Now they have asked me to do more work. But I'm worried. How long will I have to wait for this payment? Can I really afford to spend the time to do the work and not get paid? I don't think so. At the same time I wonder whether I am jeopardizing a relationship with a client who was good, and might be again. My gut feeling tells me it's time to fire this client and find someone new to replace that income. What do you think?

Ghostwriter For Hire

I've been a big fan of Squidoo for some time, and have three lenses there, including on on site promotion. So it's no surprise when I find quality content that is just waiting to be discovered.

Today's discovery is a lens on ghostwriting. How To Hire A Ghostwriter is aimed at those who are intending to hire ghostwriters and answers some common questions in a clear and simple way. If you're starting out as a ghostwriter, it's a good way to find out what clients might be looking for and what you can charge, though there are other resources that do that too.

I've written a bit on ghostwriting myself, but I found this a really useful lens. Way to go, stevemcc.

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.

WLN May 2007 Preview

This is cross posted from my Writing Lab. The next edition of Writing Lab News is out in a few days. Here's what I've got planned:


-- How To Promote Your Way To The Top Of Google
-- A guest article on freelance writing success
-- Diary Of A Working Writer
-- Five Essential Reference Tools For Writers
-- An insight into a writing market
-- I Must Be Doing Something Right

and more.

Last month's issue can be found here.

If you want to make sure you get it as soon as it comes out, there's a subscription box next to this post (in the middle of the right column). So go on - subscribe. Lots of good content about writing and I'll only mail you once a month. You have nothing to lose so sign up now.

Professional Pay Please

When it comes to freelance writing, I have never been too proud to write for peanuts or even for free, but it's time for that to stop. Writing for free has helped me to promote myself as a writer. The articles I have written are still driving traffic to my website. I have also used them to land writing gigs. Writing for peanuts has helped me to pay the bills (when I write very fast) but it is not a good long term career strategy. Not only will I lose interest in writing, but I am likely to burn out quickly. So I need to earn more money from writing.

And why not? After all, I have 20 years' experience of writing for newspapers and magazines. I have been writing good web content of all kinds for the last two years. Sometimes it seems that I have written about every topic under the sun. Although I haven't really, my expertise includes writing on writing, online business, consumer finance, parenting, blogging, promotion and much more. So I think it's fair to say that I have something to offer to my writing clients. In addition, I write quickly, my work is virtually error free and I'm great at following a brief.

That's why I think I should earn more than one cent a word for my writing. I had an experience this week where someone outsourced a project I had given them to writers who were being paid half a cent a word (!). While I'm surprised the writers took it, I am not surprised that the quality of the work was poor.

To be honest, even on one cent a word jobs, I like to maintain my standards, but I won't give the job as much care as if you pay me a living wage. That's why I've decided to actively seek better paying work, where I get a professional rate of pay for a professional job.

And clients like the work they get as a result. One of my recent clients said he had rarely worked with a writer who got his brief so well. He also signed his email with kisses, because he was so happy. And that's the difference you get when you pay the right rate for the job. Am I the only freelance writer who feels this way?

Want A Free Database?

How would you like to get hold of a free online database? Well, it's easy to do with this new offer. You can try the new online database tool, QuickBase from Intuit. It's free for one month and you don't even need a credit card.

Intuit makes QuickBooks and is now getting into web apps - that's why we now have QuickBase. Not only is it a database, but it is also a customer relationship management and project management tool.

I think this will be especially useful for those who want these features without paying for a huge IT department, so small business owners might be especially interested. Once the trial is over, MavenMapper says that $249 a month will buy a ten person subscription, which is cheaper than some of the competition.

All support is handled by Intuit. When you sign up, a sales rep gets in touch and offers tutorial videos and other help so you can get to grips with the application and give it a real trial. That doesn't cost you a dime, so QuickBase has to be worth a look.

Serving Two Writing Masters

It's never easy to serve two masters, but when you are writing for search engine spiders and for human readers you are doing just that. As a ghostwriter I write a lot of content that is designed for the search engines. That means that my clients have rules about keyword density (the number of times each keyword is used) and about whether keywords have to be used exactly as written, including spelling mistakes.

The main goal when writing for search engines is to have keywords corresponding to the most searched for terms so that when people search for those terms again they find your site. And it probably works, though search engines are constantly updating their search algorithms so they can't be fooled. That's why the emphasis has changed from metatags to keywords to whatever the latest info is (I'll leave that for another time).

However, there is a problem. Content that is written primarily for search engines may seem turgid and boring to a human reader. After all, web content is about addressing the reader directly in a sort of conversational style, If you were talking about plastic containers, you would only mention it once or twice as you would both know what you were talking about - 15 times would make for a dull conversation.

Some writing clients have caught on to this and allow white noise around the keywords. This is words like 'the' and 'a' and prepositions which help to make the articles better for human readers while still keeping the keywords intact for search engine spiders. In addition, they realise that using the keywords only a few times can be just as effective as using them 15 times, provided they are placed correctly. Search engines want to see relevance. That means that whatever the article title is, you should have the keywords in the first couple of sentences. And if you also have them in the last couple of sentences, that will indicate that there's relevant content throughout the article. Of course, there's more to it than that. You need to think about your subheadings and the content that follows them too.

As a ghostwriter, it can be difficult to write for two audiences, but that's just what we often have to do with web content. Where possible, I try to write something that I would be happy to read, but there are times when you have to bite the bullet and do exactly what the client wants, even if it goes against the grain. The thing that bothers me most is spelling mistakes, so I always check whether the client really means to include them, pointing out that human readers will think less of the content if they are left in - it sometimes works. How do you handle writing for two audiences?