Capturing Chaos

Every time I look at my Associated Content content page, I’m reminded of why I left the site in the first place. The article that they finally published today was seven days in the review queue before they made an offer, and then two days processing. But I’m learning patience, and also the importance of timing.

I submitted an article on the ideal Christmas gift for a gardener, an idea I picked up from a quick glance through Helium. (By the way, Helium is an excellent source for ideas if you’re running dry.) At the speed that seems to be AC’s current mode, by the time it’s published, most of the timeliness will have passed because I submitted it so late in the month. Let’s hope I remember that lesson when the next holiday season rolls around. At least it’s an evergreen article that will be relevant every Christmas, so even if it hibernates for the next nine or ten months, it should collect some pages views for the 2009 season and thereafter. Continue Reading »

A recent post on Freelance Writing From Home reminded me how narrow people tend to be in their thinking. The author was addressing the idea that too many people seem to have—that freelancing means you spend every day, all day, writing. Aside from the deadliness of such a routine, freelancing doesn’t even necessarily refer to writing. “Freelance simply means being self-employed. It doesn’t mean writing. You could be a freelance photographer or a freelance consultant.”

As a freelancer, you’re running your own business, which is supposed to be a path to freedom, not a different kind of slavery. Certainly, you’re going to have to work hard if you intend to make a living at it. But along the way, you should be learning how to work smarter so that you don’t have to work as hard. Continue Reading »

The economic downturn is beginning to hit writing sites, and people are running scared. Forums are filled with moans and groans about changes that clearly indicate there is less money to go around. Back in September, Shared Reviews stopped paying for reviews, and announced that members could now compete for prizes. Now Ciao has done the same thing, after first reducing payments from $1.00 a review to .25. Understandably, not too many people are happy about having to settle for what is being promoted as fun and games as a substitute for being paid for their content. Continue Reading »

Here’s the final version of the original “off the top of my head free writing” chunk. I really should have kept this consecutive with the longer one, but so it goes.

“Why do so many unqualified people want to be writers? Words are all around us; they’re what we use every day, so it’s easy to think that there’s nothing special about them. If you can speak, you can write; for too many wannabes, daily conversation seems no different from what a writer produces and what ultimately shows up on the pages of books and magazines.

“It’s a very different thing, though, a different world, one you enter either prepared or unprepared. If you start out unprepared, and refuse to change that, you’ll eventually be cast out, whether rudely or politely doesn’t matter, except in how it affects your understanding. Too polite a rejection teaches nothing. It allows the incompetent to believe that if they just keep trying, the doors will open and they’ll be admitted to the inner sanctum and to what they mistakenly believe is an endless flow of money and adulation.

“If one of these aspiring writers looked at what I produced in a 15 minute writing exercise, they might be impressed, even awed. How can someone produce so many words in such a short time? And where do the ideas come from? They have no conception of what goes into becoming a writer, even one who’s just adequate. Even so, they’re convinced they can do it.

“At the opposite pole are those who think that they need to take courses, be instructed how to write. The great writers of the past would laugh at the idea, and so would most contemporary writers; their teachers were the writers of previous generations and those of their own generation worthy of their admiration. They might emulate those writers in the early part of the learning process, but mainly, they spend many years reading and absorbing the language and its uses.

“Reading is the foundation, the core. Without that foundation, it’s impossible to become a writer. The would-be writer who doesn’t read, who hasn’t been reading most of his life, is an empty shell, and all he will produce is the trite shorthand that makes up most of our everyday communication.”

I planned to post the edited version of the free writing excerpt today, but another topic started nagging at me, so get ready for a bit of a rant.

I’ve been coming across a lot of blogs set up to offer information to writers and would-be writers. Some concentrate on creativity and the mechanics of writing; other tend to stick with recommendations about where to write if you want to make money. What’s beginning to get my goat is recommendations that are rushed and uninformative, and even suspicious. Too often, the posts don’t indicate whether the writer actually has any experience with the site, or just ran across it in browsing the web. Continue Reading »

Some days, it’s incredibly hard to focus. Even with a Plan, temptations constantly drag me away, or problems come up that have to be solved before I can take the next step. Part of the distraction is the Stumble! button on my Stumbleupon toolbar. But it’s also such a rich source of information that I have to take the risk of distraction almost every day.

I’m planning to start building Squidoo lenses once I have my two new websites fully tweaked and running smoothly, so It was a moment of serendipity to stumble across Captain Squid , a blog by a guy whose lifework seems to be building Squidoo lenses (he has about 500 of them so far — boggles the mind, doesn’t it?) and making a very substantial amount of money doing it. I’ve bookmarked the blog for future reference, but I’m also trying to tear myself away from reading more than a couple of posts. Continue Reading »

When you start writing on the internet with no clear goals in mind, it’s easy to slip into a comfort zone that eventually becomes a trap. We tend to stay with what’s familiar and easy, avoiding even the thought of change. Even if we do sense that we could be doing better, we’re not sure what the alternatives might be or what challenges we might have to face.

I’ve spent years writing online, making a little money here, a little money there, and sometimes no money at all. My writing improved; I learned the difference between traditional writing and content writing intended for internet readers, learned how to create a snappy title and an enticing opening paragraph. People let me know that they admired my writing, and maybe that’s why it took so long to venture out of my comfort zone into a world where the standards of judgment are very different. Continue Reading »

The second trigger for my departure from Triond was an article posted by a member. It had a cheery “this site is wonderful, we’re all wonderful, and together we’re going to make this the most popular writing site on the web” tone that reminded me of the crowd-pumping speeches that are a traditional part of sales conventions, and that are so often and so easily parodied. What really clicked, though, wasn’t the article itself, though it rubbed me the wrong way and set off BS alarms, but the comments. There were dozens, and every single one was in agreement, cheering the writer, thanking her for her encouragement, etc. I added my comment, which disagreed about the potential popularity of the site, and discovered, a day or so later, that it had been removed.

To digress a bit — smart, hard-working people can make money on these sites, but if they have a real talent for writing, they could make better money elsewhere, and probably with less work. So why do they stick with these low-paying sites? There are undoubtedly many reasons, but here are a few that I think probably rank high.

1. They’re emotionally needy and get off on the applause and admiration of their followers.
2. They’re excellent marketers (and manipulators) who know how to appeal to the masses. On sites where income is tied to ratings and page views, this is a valuable talent.
3. Their writing is good, but not good enough for survival in the competitive world of professional content production. Continue Reading »

I removed my last few remaining articles from Triond yesterday. It was the end of my second try at using Triond for a little extra writing income. I thought that I hadn’t given the site a fair trial the first time, so I would try harder. And I did try harder. I posted roughly twice as many articles as I had the first time. I stumbled a couple of the best ones. I read and commented on other members’ work, and I made “friends.”

To its credit, Triond has made a lot of upgrades to the site since my first residence there. Friending people means that their latest work will appear on your community page, making it easier to keep up with them. Most recently, Triond instituted a long-overdue feature — making your user name a live link to your profile and content when you leave a comment. Continue Reading »

If you’re going to earn money by writing online, sooner or later you have to make decisions about where that money is going to come from. That may seem like a “Duh!” statement, but it isn’t. Consider how many blogs and websites depend on Google Adsense for income. How many decisions about where to blog are made primarily on whether you can or can’t have Adsense? If you’re hosting your own site, the question doesn’t come up, but if you’re using a free site, it’s very important. Debate over wordpress.com and Blogspot usually boils down to a choice between features and income.

For a variety of reasons, I decided that I don’t want to have an Adsense account or depend directly on Google for my income. I have no objections to Adsense or to earning money from it, as long as I don’t have to maintain an account of my own. The income from my Today blogs is based partly on Adsense, but the account belongs to today.com. The decision to write for either Hub Pages or Squidoo came down to choosing the one that doesn’t require me to have an Adsense account, and that’s Squidoo. Continue Reading »

I’ve been writing online for quite a few years, but without any sense of direction. I went where the atmosphere seemed friendly and where I could make a bit of money, but that’s as far as my thinking went. Over the last year, though, I’ve begun to think seriously about setting priorities, focusing my efforts, and trying to make more than just a few cents here and there. I always wanted to make more money, and I was pretty sure that I could if I put my mind to it, but I didn’t make the effort to work out what that would involve.

The bottom line is that I’m not cut out for a world in which SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the ruling force. Finally coming to that understanding means that I can stop thrashing around, trying this approach, and then that one. I have a sense of direction that I never had before, and real, long-term goals.

Changing your Stumbleupon topic preferences and then hitting the Stumble button fifty or sixty times a day can turn up all sorts of interesting information. It’s not always just about the subjects that people are writing about, but the various approaches, the number of people writing in a given area, and how much of what comes up is old but still good — the evergreens. Odd but interesting perspectives that developers of Stumbleupon didn’t necessarily have in mind when they started the site.

Two topics that I like to Stumble are writing and blogging. The most obvious thing that jumps out when you’ve been hitting the button for days and days is that most people have nothing original to say. The majority of blogs about blogging are there to make money by telling you how to make money. There must be thousands of them, most of them fairly obscure and probably struggling to fulfill their own promises — “How to get thousands of readers for your new blog,”  “How to use AdSense to build an overnight fortune.”

The majority of writing blogs follow much the same pattern; “How to get started in freelancing,” “How to promote your writing career,” “How to write a killer article, use ‘it’s’ properly, write an attention-getting title,” and on and on. Thousands upon thousands of blogs and websites, all trying to win a little slice of the attention pie. And they just keep coming.

So here I am, writing about writing, and handing out advice. What’s my advice? If you’re going to write about blogging or writing, do something different, for heaven’s sake!

Sometimes I think that the hardest part of writing online for money is deciding where to publish. With so many sites offering different opportunities, different pay rates, and different requirements, it’s easy for the beginning writer to bog down in a state of total confusion. There’s plenty of advice to be had. In fact, it seems that just about everyone who’s ever published online has an opinion. But are those opinions worth anything?

We’ve all seen “This site ripped me off and I’m warning every body to stay away because they’re a bunch of crooks.” And “You can make a fortune writing for this site. Just sign up under me and get started.” Who to believe, who to ignore? No matter what anybody else’s experience may be with a site, yours might turn out to be completely different. It doesn’t matter what site you name, every one has its haters and its lovers.

What I learned is that there’s no easy way to decide which sites are best for you. It really comes down to the equivalent of pounding the pavement and going door to door. First you read every scrap of information a site has to offer: how much it pays, when it pays, how it pays. About ownership of your material, about their format and their standards. What’s expected of you, and what you can expect from them.

If it all looks good, you sign up and start writing. This is the honeymoon, when you really get to know who you’re living with. Was the nice appearance a mask or the real thing? Give it a couple of months, but if the romance wears off too quickly, you may have to decide to move on and try again.