Well me hearties, last year I totally forgot about Talk Like a Pirate Day. It suddenly dawned on me a few minutes ago that the day is coming up yet again- and it's today! Avast!
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out the official site. The site has a good intro to the lingo here. Apparently the day has gotten so big that it's now referred to as International Talk Like a Pirate Day. It's come a long way in the past couple of years, ye scurvy bilge rat.
If you've never tried it, you should. A nice long aaaaaarrrrg for no reason while you're running errands somehow just feels right.
Because blogging is such a hot topic right now, I find myself writing about it a lot. For the past few weeks I've been writing about blogging far more than I have actually been blogging. You would think that's strange, really, considering that I have five blogs. I don't think it is. I think it's far stranger that one of my offspring looks just like Sarah Palin.
Anyway, the hot topic these days is how to monetize a blog. Actually, I think that recently it's gone beyond a hot topic and become more akin to peer pressure. I've written so many articles and point-by-point how to lists about how to make money with a blog that sometimes I feel the need to rebel a little bit.
I recently edited a great ebook about this very subject and I realized how incredibly lazy I've been with my own blogs. Could I make more money with them? Of course. Does that mean that I have to? Not remotely. There's an element of bullying these days from freelancers who think that keeping a blog for anything other than money is a waste of time. But personally, I don't think that entertainment or personal expression has ever been a waste of time.
This is the longest I've gone without posting on Ye Olde Blog, but it's crunch time right now. I had limited spaces for clients this summer, but I have to make up for it now. Project after project is coming and I'm getting it done. I'm almost out from under Giant Soul-Crushing Project.
GSCP is one of those projects that invades your waking thoughts and sometimes even follows you into your dreams. It's a project that has to be conquered head on and vanquished with the perfect set of words. Be gone, project of doom! Actually, I will probably miss it when it's over. Huge Nightmare Project from this summer stretched on for months and I really miss that thing.
After GSCP, I still have many smaller projects that are bite-sized and manageable. I like the small article-pack projects that I can sink my teeth into and then release them into the clients' hands. I've been working on one of those today and I actually enjoy watching each article come together and become a cohesive, persuasive unit. Back to it...
I've been on vacation for almost a week, but now it's back to the 'ole freelance grind. Actually, it wasn't so much a vacation as it was me insinuating myself into a business trip. Why? Because the business trip was six days at a spa/winery. You heard that right- a place that offers both spa treatments and makes its own wine. Why anyone would want to go to such a place without taking me along I simply cannot imagine.
Ok, so the question for a lot of freelancers is generally whether they should tell their clients that they will be out of town. I see a lot of people who insist that you should immediately tell everyone you ever work with that you will be gone, but I don't think it's that dire. If you will have Internet access and can stay in communication in case you're needed, it's not a huge issue. If you don't want to be bothered with work at all while you're away, well, being self employed is probably not your calling.
I generally tell the ones that need to know, and that works out just fine. I told every client but one this time. The one that didn't hear about it didn't need to because I have an end-of-month deadline with them. So, I don't really believe there are any rules set in stone concerning the issue.
If you go out of town a lot, which I don't, it might not be a good idea to mention it or you may be seen as someone who is frequently unavailable. If you rarely get a chance to go anywhere, like me, use your own discretion. If it comes to it- this isn't the Renaissance. There are laptops, hotel business centers and even Kinko's if you need to communicate while you're away.
You can also postdate articles to appear on different dates ahead of time, which I did with a couple of sites. For regular gigs like blogs or other regular postings, there may be a time-stamping option that will make it look like you never even left.
A writing acquaintance of mine mentioned the other day how important it is to toot your own horn when you feel you deserve it. I think that's a grand idea, so here goes:
I have gotten two Editor's Choice awards from Suite101 in the past three days. They aren't for the article that I expected to win one, but I'll take it. I thought that The Fair Use Doctrine was timely and important for bloggers to know about, and you rarely read about it, so I kind of expected, well, something. Nada.
The ones that did win were How to Sell Books on eBay and Today.com Paid Blogs. Weird. Someone at Today.com even found it and recommended it to the bloggers over there which I thought was nice. I still haven't figured out how he knew that I wrote it, since I use a pen name on that blog, but there you are.
I also lost TWO computers last week alone. The light went out on one laptop and the hard drive on my desktop crashed completely and I swear made a face at me as it did so. I had to rig my sad laptop up to a spare monitor to make the whole operation keep running. Third-string computer is waiting in the wings in case this set up explodes or gets hit by a meteor.
The message- always use web-based email. An email program on my desktop would have been useless after this incident. You can email yourself any essential files and they will then be stored there in the email. Gmail is a great system if you've never tried it. I often hear that people "won't take you seriously" as a professional if you use free email, but I don't think it's ever stopped me. There may be a rogue client out there who thought - hey! I love the samples, and she's available, but heck if I'll hire someone who uses Gmail!
Maybe so, but I imagine I'd actually be taken less seriously if I didn't use web-based mail and then lost all my data in a crash.
Yes, I haven’t posted in eight days. But you know what? That’s because I didn’t have anything to say about writing for a few days. There are blogs that look like they’re under extreme pressure to post every single day no matter what, even when the blogger clearly has nothing to say. If you've got nothing, wait until you do. But I’ve got a few things on my mind today, so settle in.
First, it occurred to me last night after far too many hours spent staring at a computer screen, that writing an article or piece of web copy is a lot like washing really dirty hair. It may not be the way that normal people wash their hair every day, but I think I left normal behind the last time I went to a convenience store and pretended to be English.
Anyway, the main concept is using shampoo, clarifier and conditioner. The blank screen is the dirty hair. You want to wash the blankness off the screen with the heavy-duty shampoo. The shampoo will throw all of your research and insight onto the screen and leave it covered in the basic shape of what you want to express.
For anyone who has never used a clarifier, it’s something you use to wash residue from styling products or heavy conditioners out of the hair. When you use it after shampooing, it can get rid of anything in your hair that shouldn’t be there. The clarifying stage for writing is exactly the same- clear it up and make it express the idea as clearly as possible. Get rid of anything that sounds too awkward or self conscious and clean the typos out of the copy.
Conditioning the hair is what makes it smooth, shiny and soft. You want the copy to be touchable and inviting for the reader. It should read smoothly and be easily managed by any reader who happens across it. Cut the sentence length if you need to. Break the work up into manageable segments.
Don't worry about blow drying your copy- that will probably just fluff it up and make it look like it's overdone. You want it to sound effortless and air dried. If you want to add a barrette sometimes, however, that can make the copy stand out. A link, a sidebar, a crack about how you're weird at convenience stores- those little extras may end up being what people remember most.
There are a number of writing blogs that I think are very good at what they do- inform and complain. Every blog should both inform and complain. Seriously. Think of your favorite blogs and I’m betting they do just that. In the freelance writing profession, information and complaints are particularly essential elements of the business.
Bad blogs beg you to read them. They constantly ask you to subscribe, to be a part of their community and to keep coming back. A bad blog tries to force a community and reads as extremely self conscious. A good blog tells you stuff and then complains for awhile.
I like Real Words for several reasons. For one, it is never dull. There is always something interesting and surprising around the bend. Even the posts that have little to do with writing are always interesting and well written. I also like it because the blogger writes books about ghosts which is possibly the coolest thing a writer can do. Another reason may or may not be because the blogger put my blog at the top of a list of 40 inspiring writing blogs.
A master of both information and complaining effectively about freelance writing issues, the blogger is simply fabulous. Every post has an issue that is pressing in the freelance writing world, and of particular interest to the Web writing world. She also has an ebook there for beginning Web writers. I’ve heard a lot of good things about it, so you should probably buy it.
This blog has always impressed me because the blogger isn’t afraid to get really in-depth and write long blog posts. Most bloggers tend to stick to the bite-size post nugget, but I do like reading long posts sometimes. It is mostly informational and with little or no complaining, but I like it anyway.
The Frump is the all-time grand champion of the complaint. What’s more, she is a secret blogger- very cloak and dagger. I want to be a secret blogger, but every time I start a blog of my own I end up telling everyone about it. Ghostwritten blogs I can keep a secret, but never my own. Not the Frump! She’s still going strong. Freelance Zone
I only recently discovered this one, but it immediately grabbed me. There is some very sage advice to be found there, and I was extremely impressed that Strunk and White’s “omit needless words” was mentioned. Yes, I did just use “very” and “extremely.” Anyone who can quote Strunk and White, Henry Rollins and Monty Python on the same blog has my immediate attention.
If you’ve never heard of Bob Bly, you are probably not a fanatical freelance writer. That’s actually probably a good thing, but I digress. Bob Bly is the most famous copywriter in the freelancing world because of his decades of experience and his many helpful books on copywriting. I have two or three of his books, each of which has invaluable information about sales writing techniques and effective copywriting.
What I LOVE about his blog is that I always find punctuation errors. Always. In every post. The best copywriter out there isn’t perfect, and that’s a grand thing to see.
All of these blogs tend to be well written and cover topics in an interesting way instead of a tired rehashing of the same old writing and freelancing issues. Does that mean you should read these blogs instead of mine? Yeah, probably. But then of course, none of them brings you goodness like this:
