The Praise File

As a freelancer, you don't have the luxury of a boss telling you that you've done some darn fine work. If you're freelancing at home, you don't get to see the face of someone reading your work so that you can see that you've made them happy with it, or at least that they haven't become angry, turned green and started ripping the place up. All you have is email.

The email can be an important tool for gauging how well you're actually doing at pleasing your clients. When I start to think that my work is basically crap and that there's no reason for me even to apply to a really good gig because no one would ever hire me, I go to my praise file.

The praise file is a collection of emails that I started filing about a year ago when I realized that I was actually doing pretty well and that clients were sending me nice emails about my work. The praise file currently has 30 emails in it, all complimenting stuff that I've written. Ok, one of them is an online compliment of some work that I copied and then emailed to myself, but the rest of them were actually sent to me. It's come in very handy when I need a confidence boost before applying to something or when I think up a new idea and wonder if I'm even good enough implement my own ideas.

If you don't have a praise file- get one. Start archiving those compliments. Pretty soon you'll have a nice email crop growing there to feed you when you're starving for a little resolve.

Tax Time is Coming

For freelancers, the end of the year means just one thing: paperwork. Well, paperwork and booze, but I digress. The beginning of tax season can be a confusing prospect if you haven't stayed organized with your paperwork over the past year. If you've never experienced a freelance tax season, here's how it will break down.

Any company that has paid you $600 or more over the course of the year is required to send you a 1099 form detailing the payment amounts. This is of course a simple way of keeping track, but not everyone you earn from will do this. The nature of freelance writing online means that many clients are middlemen who aren't keeping track of the amounts for you and won't be issuing you with a form.

I can think of two clients I've had this year that I have collected a few thousand from but that have never asked me for any tax forms and did not send me a 1099 last year. I'm not sure how that gets reconciled on the client's end, but on the freelancer's end, the records can be kept in any number of ways. The easiest is simply to use PayPal's own record keeping, if you are using PayPal to collect. They have an account history that can be used at the end of the year to see when and how much you have been paid. To make it easier, go through the payments tab to separate your income from the amounts that you've sent to others.

If you have a business license or are incorporated, you may have to fill out separate taxes for your business and your personal income. If you aren't operating under any licensing, the easiest method when you have multiple clients is just to file your income under "miscellaneous" income. This covers it all and is simple to do.

If you have an in-house writing job, take pictures of it. You'll want to keep those memories when the writing gets outsourced along with every other company's writing and PR departments.

Christmas Gifts for Writers

Last year I had a bunch of people come here to The Writer's Journey searching for Christmas gifts for writers. Then I noticed a bunch of other writing blogs pandering to the keywords by running posts about what to get writers, most of which was writing crap. This year I don't think anyone has come here looking for that, but I'm pandering anyway.

The main problem with buying a Christmas gift is that you are assuming that they want something that relates to writing. Much of the time, in the case of professional writers, they don't want pens or writing calendars or any of that stuff. I really could puke if I get another fancy pen or a book about manuscripts. A person who writes for a living may not want to be reminded about their job all the time- especially on one of the only days (or part of the day) that they take off from that job.

Here are a few things that a writer might actually like to get for Christmas:

This t-shirt is perfect. If you don't know anyone who will love it, I will. Get it for me.

This is a great album that is Christmas themed but that can be played at any time of year. Many of the Christmas songs on it aren't really recognizable as Christmas music unless you've seen the special a million times. Most of it is pretty catchy and the audience for it is wide. In other words, it won't get annoying like those barking Christmas dogs. Too predictable? I can be of assistance.

Here's a Coneheads action figure. Why? I don't know. But, everyone likes the Coneheads and you can be assured that your gift recipient won' t already be up to their ears in Coneheads action figures this year. If you can't stand the thought of giving the gift of Beldar, there's another action figure you might prefer. Or not.

You can also be assured that your writer friend or relative will not have one of these. These are useful for decorating, cooking and keeping the annoying neighbor kids away.

For the writer in your life that you're pretty sure hasn't actually written anything, but who spends a lot of time at home trying to, there's this.

Have a writer in your life that you hate but that you nevertheless have to buy a gift for? Try a set of these. Not only are they annoying, your writer "friend" will have to spend hours making them into something annoying.

Friend or foe, a gift should never tie in to a person's profession too closely. Imagine if we got doctors tongue depressors and preschool teachers tiny screaming things that throw paint for Christmas.

Here It Comes...

The Chicago Tribune's parent company, Tribune Co., has filed for bankruptcy. It's just chapter 11, but I can't remember the last time a "reorganization" actually saved a company. This just puts off the inevitable for a while.

Smaller papers with small circulations actually seem to be a little steadier than the big guys these days. I think that the local markets need advertisers more than the bigger, national advertisers who have other ad media at their disposal. Small local stores know they can get a lot of attention in their local paper but they may not have the budget for commercials and they may not have a place to put Internet ads that will get a lot of local traffic.

The big guys are apparently fleeing newspaper advertising, but magazine advertising is way down too. So where are these guys advertising? My guess is online. Web ad sales are still increasing, according to the stats that I saw a couple of weeks ago. That's good news for freelance writers who need that revenue and need their clients to keep making revenue.

What sucks is that I keep the idea of going back to newspapers in the back of my mind, holding it there as a safety zone in case I start having trouble getting freelance work or just start to hate it. I don't think that going back to print news is really a viable safety net anymore. I'm guessing that those still in print news probably hold freelancing in mind as their safety net.

Blogs and More Blogs

Holy crap, it's been quite a while since I updated Ye Olde Blogg. I hate to see the blog suffer from neglect since I'm quite fond of it. However, I have been having trouble with what I see as stilted writing. I was talking about it in my writing group just yesterday- I can see the way that other people seem to write effortlessly and my work just seems too stiff. This blog has gotten that way several times. The posts end up being informative and all of that, when that's not really my aim.

So, I admit it- I've been seeing other blogs. I keep up this one regularly because I use it in promotional activities for some other stuff that I do, and because I get paid to. I also recently started this one just to let off stream of consciousness stuff, most of which has ended up being about William Shatner for some reason. It's been a nice, freeing diversion because no one ever reads it, so I don't have to worry about what I'm posting. I'm also getting paid, but less since I'm not promoting it. I think this may be the first time I've ever linked to it. Bad blogger! Bad!

I started my professional writing career with four years of journalism school under intensive, often rude conditions with Ph.Ds breathing down my neck about every little misplaced comma or uninteresting lead. I think that years of that as well as years of work in print news have given me the ability to put out technically-correct work that's often bare and lifeless. I'm working on it. I'm always working on it.

Most Affordable Places

I just found out that my county was ranked number one out of Forbes' "Affordable Places To Weather the Downturn" earlier this month. I do find that interesting since I keep hearing people in town saying "what recession?" At least two people this month have said to me that you certainly can't tell there's a recession going on by the amount of crap people are buying. Stores are still packed and people are buying plenty this season. Here are some other crazy accolades.

In other recession news, however, the McNews is in trouble. I talked to a reporter from our local paper last week, and he was very antsy about layoffs in the industry. I don't think our paper has had them yet, but even a seemingly recession-proof area may not be able to weather what the new media is doing to newspapers. Of course, the McNews is owned by Gannett. It's not the worst chain in the world (I've worked for the worst one), but it's certainly not the best. Our local paper is owned by Newhouse, so I do expect them to fair better.

The Recession vs. The Web

And the winner is... the Web! If you've been worried about how the recession will hit your Web business, fear not. Online ad spending is growing steadily. Web advertising is forecasted to "withstand the storm."

That pretty much reflects what I've been seeing. There are plenty of ads to support sites, plenty of Web traffic and plenty of money still being spent online. Web writers should be able to continue eating and having electricity throughout the recession. (fingers crossed)

ALWAYS Save Your Files

I am just now calming down from an alarming experience. I emailed a half-completed file to my laptop and completed the file there. I then emailed the completed work to the client. I was paid and then a couple of hours later got an alarming message that the file was only half completed. At the very end there was some of my naked research and notes, just as it has been when I emailed it to myself.

No problem, I thought. I just sent the wrong file. Unfortunately, the actual completed file was never saved on the laptop and was somewhere squirreled away in a temp file that was almost impossible to get to. Getting to it actually took my shouting spouse awake to help me find it. I was sweating the whole time, thinking I'd have to do that part of the work again from scratch. Fortunately, it was found after about a half hour of searching and cursing. I was worried that the client might think I had done it on purpose or that I was really just that incompetent.

Normally I am less of an idiot, but the danger of losing a file is always there with any writer. I am going to be the most vigilant file saver in the history of the world from now on. If this hasn't happened to you, take this as a lesson. Point and laugh if you must, but always, always save your work often.

Smaller Search Engines

I'm generally a firm believer in only worrying about Google and Yahoo for marketing and SEO purposes. I won't mess with submitting to the 56,214 smaller ones and I certainly won't pay anyone else to do so. But, a reader sent me this page that lists a number of interesting, smaller search engines. I'm having fun with God Checker right now. One of my offspring is named after a Norse god, so I'm finding it interesting.

There is also PicSearch, which could end up being pretty valuable when trying to find specific copyright-free pictures, or when you're wasting time looking at crap online. Fellow freelance writers might also be interested in the Writer's Web search engine for quick information.

Some of these smaller, more specialized search engines can be good for finding specialized information quickly, but I'm not sure that they are much good for marketing. I may end up using a few of them, but I don't think that time spent submitting to them would be spent well. The vast majority still search using Google and Yahoo. Interestingly, more people apparently use Yahoo than Google. I don't know anyone who uses Yahoo, but apparently millions of people do. Who are these Yahoo people?

Wow

I guess we all expected Obama to win, but he really stomped McCain in electoral votes. I had expected a closer race than that, but I also had different expectations. I expected the independent vote to be far higher than what it was. This election had the lowest independent voting of any election I can remember. That last numbers I saw showed a whopping one percent.

I try not to post anything political here because politics is simply too complex and too convoluted for anyone to have the exact same opinions about anything political. There are simply too many aspects to look at and too many opinions regarding each one. But, I do wish that more people would vote for independent candidates.

The two party system means that you have two guys and each only has to show that he is better than the other guy. The candidates rarely have to resort to their actual voting records, their history of creating jobs or their economic viewpoint. As long as they are marginally better than the other guy, they will usually win. In a system with three or four main parties, however, I think the process would be a lot different. A campaign showing the faults of two or three other guys would look ridiculous.

The candidates chosen by each party would actually have to be good politicians who have done things with their careers. Parties would be forced to find better candidates and the campaigns would actually be run based on what the candidates have done with their political careers. They would have to be in order for a candidate to get enough attention to beat two or three other candidates.

I don't think that the Italian-style system of millions of political parties would work here, but three or four main parties is sorely needed in this country. So who is my candidate? At this point, with so little independent turnout, it doesn't really matter much. I can't vote for the bipartisanship, so I generally vote for the same candidate every time. Why? This is why.

"Editors" Who Don't Actually Edit

The problem with some of the companies that I write for is that they hire low-priced "editors" to look over the incoming articles. These aren't editors in any real sense of the world. They aren't required to actually edit anything and they don't have a hand in deciding the content for the site, they just look over incoming articles to make sure they conform to house style.

When you come from print publications and are told that every article you send through is sent to an "editor," you might be foolish enough to believe that these people actually fix the occasional typo or that they have any kind of idea about grammar, punctuation, at least one specific writing style, etc. This is no longer the case. When these companies hire people to "edit" an article for $2-$3 per article, what you get is random words being thrown in, the occasional ridiculous headline change and sometimes grammatical errors inserted into the text.

Just recently I discovered that one such article in my name was edited to add parentheses around a word in a subheading for no reason. Oh, and did I mention that a question mark was added in those parenthesis? Yeah. The subheading wasn't a question and there was no discernible reason for the additions. The crazy part is that the article wasn't flagged, i.e., I wasn't notified that an editor had any problem with it or that any changes were being made. So, I had an article sitting there for weeks with that crap on it and I had no idea.

On another site, I recently had an "editor" reject an article that was supposed to be a piece about what an internship is. The reason for the rejection? The article relied too heavily on the point that an internship is a way to get experience. Seriously. About a year ago on yet another site, I had an "editor" add a few words to an article, one of which she misspelled. She then flagged the article for me to fix the misspelling. Some days I'm almost as irritated as Otto.

Here's the thing- a lot of people are stupid. A lot of them have no business writing or "editing" anything. Those people often get jobs that I can't get and sometimes they end up having power over my work. Why? According to my brother, it's because my writing sample website doesn't have any graphics on it. Personally, I think that it's possible that it comes down to who may or may not be giving other people blow jobs, but that's just speculation.

PayPal Invoices

If you've ever sent a PayPal invoice, you might have paused a bit when it came to labeling the request. After choosing the amount of the invoice and the email address that it will go to, PayPal invoices require the one sending the invoice to label what is being sold. The choices are Goods, Services, eBay Items and Auction Goods (non-eBay). The eBay and Auction Goods options are clearly incorrect unless you've figured out a way to sell your writing services through eBay (and if you have- you rock!).

That just leaves Goods and Services. So which one is it? Sometimes I choose one, sometimes the other and for no real reason. I was sending an invoice today and really started wondering about this. Is it really a good or a service that we should be invoicing for? Legally, I'm guessing it's a good, since we are selling the rights to the material. But how do the clients view it? They may feel like they are purchasing our services and expertise rather than just the finished materials.

If you aren't selling the full rights, should you mark it as Services? I know that there are a lot of writers who sell reprint rights often or negotiate for usage rights. In those cases, labeling the invoice as Services might help to remind the client about the arrangement.

I think that after thinking about it way too hard this evening I'm going to start labeling invoices with that mindset- Goods for most items and Services for the very, very, very few times that I sell a reprint of something that I've already published elsewhere.

Freelance Writing Courses

I have a few words about freelance writing courses, not all of which are complimentary. I have a few opinions that not everyone will agree with, but they are nonetheless right.

Ok, I was kidding about that, but I do think that there are a lot of people who don't understand that writing and marketing are two different things. I am seeing more and more Web writers who are trying to sell their own writing courses, and to put it mildly, not all of them should. The way it is now, just because someone is successful does not mean they can write well. It also is no indication of their ability to teach anyone to do anything.

I have a glaring example in mind, but I'm not going to mention it specifically. Let's just say that there is a writing blog out there that doesn't really say much, but that it tries hard to offer insightful information about writing and the freelancing biz. Then let's say that it's always poorly written but that the blog is promoted relentlessly and has way more readers than I could ever dream of having.

Great! The blogger hasn't had to hone that pesky writing because he is a master of marketing. This blogger apparently does very well and is now running a writing course. Should you take a writing course from this person? Of course not. Should you take a marketing course from him? If he had one, I might take it, but I might not. Being able to teach things online depends a lot on how clearly you write, and let's hypothetically say that this blogger writes mainly to fill up a page rather than to actually communicate anything.

This is not the first time I've seen this. I've actually seen a number of freelancers over the past year who have decided to start teaching writing online as a sideline. I have only seen one who had any business doing so. Some of them don't have degrees and have poor writing samples, yet people seem to be interested in paying to be told how to write like these people. One in particular had a horrifying mix of steep course fees, bad writing and zero credentials of any kind. Were people interested? Apparently.

So, why are people falling for this? Besides poor nutritional choices, most of these people probably think that taking a writing course from someone who is monetarily successful means that they will be too. They won't. Learning to write badly is a waste of time and money. Now, learning Internet marketing is a whole different story. You don't have to have any particular talent for anything if you know how to market yourself. Heck, you don't even need to sell anything.

I know of at least three incredibly bad writers who are wildly successful because of this. That's what they should be teaching and that's what new freelancers need to learn. Heck, that's what I need to learn.

If a person wants to learn marketing, make sure that the "writing course" you're signing up for is about how to sell your writing. If you actually want a writing course to learn how to write, don't go through some dude's blog. There is a blog I can recommend going through, but that's because the teachers of the courses are actually qualified to teach writing.

The Renegade Writer has several fascinating-looking courses that hit on specific writing types. A real writing course will do that. A bad writing course teaches "writing" in general. The particularly bad course I mentioned earlier taught "writing" and had no other information. The blogger was pushing the course among my writers' group, despite not having any information about what type of writing she was going to teach.

Speaking as someone who took four years of specialized writing courses and did two internships, I can tell you that there is no one course that can teach you everything about writing. Anyone who says that this is possible is a marketer rather than a writer.

I've actually found that some of the most successful, visible writers are often the worst ones. Why? Because writing isn't their focus. Their focus is on promoting themselves. If you are serious about writing, I would suggest going back to school or taking online courses from either a highly-qualified writer or taking a college course online.

Here is a list of some of the colleges that teach them online as well as a few websites with credible courses. Some of these courses are free, so there's no excuse to instead seek out some blogger who promises that though he doesn't write well, he can quickly teach you to do so. If, however, he can teach you how to write poorly but become ridiculously successful by doing so, have at it.

Kontera

You might have noticed that I recently introduced Kontera to Ye Olde Blogg. If you didn't, you might have noticed the annoying little blue lines that seemed randomly placed around the page.

I have ended up writing about making money through blogging so many times that it seemed a little weird that I wasn’t really doing any of it. In much the same way that I can tell you exactly what you personally are doing wrong on your alpaca farm, I have ended up knowing a lot about how to monetize a blog even though I don’t do it myself.

Well, I decided to get off my tail and actually use some of the monetizing methods that I have written about so many times. So, I have an affiliate ad and I have Kontera and I increased the number of AdSense link units. Kontera is what’s creating the little blue lines that appear under certain keywords. The ads are keyword-based pay-per-click ads like AdSense.

There. Are the blog gods happy now? Now I gotta work on buying some alpacas…

You Know You Do Too Much SEO Writing When:

You find yourself adding keywords into an email to your parents.

You decide that a commercial on TV is keyword stuffing because of the number of times they say the product name.

You have a hard time using pronouns because, hey- that’s just a missed keyword opportunity.

You have a favorite keyword density checker and two alternate sites for when you get sick of the first one.

You find yourself shouting, “No whammies! No whammies!” when CopyScape is checking an article for duplicate phrases.

What is WRONG With MS Word?

If you were a kid in the late 80’s, you might remember the whole shebang about Deep Thought beating the super-brain chess champion. You may have also been wondering, like I was, what the big deal was since your home computer could beat the pants off anyone at Solitaire. But, I digress.

The real question is why so many millions could be spent on developing a chess-playing computer when there are no agencies working in a lab somewhere to develop a decent freaking word processing program. Seriously, think about this. If you use Word you may have noticed how frequently wrong it is. You might have had it give you green squiggles when there is no possibility of it being correct in its rude little insinuations.

Where are the government scientists in all of this? How hard could it be, after decades of word processing programs, to create one that actually works well 98 percent of the time? I’ve noticed that Hubble works pretty well most of the time. My car has never broken down. My toaster can make four slices of toast at once. But, a decent word processing program? Apparently that’s just beyond the world’s current level of technology.

Depending on Clicks

There are a number of sites that work on a revenue sharing model, and more seem to be converting to that model every day. The principle is fairly simple: you write for them, they publish your stuff on their site and you get paid a percentage of whatever they make from the materials. Some do a straight percentage, others offer an up-front payment and then a percentage after that. I do some work for sites that share revenue, most notably Suite101. The copy generates money whenever someone clicks the ads that are on the page, and the writers get some percentage of that, depending on their position with the site.

In general I try to stay away from forums because, well, they're forums. They suck up time and make you shake your head at how insane people are. Well, I recently wandered into the Suite101 writers' forum and it wasn't terribly insane. However, I did get a little freaked out by one thing.

The site gives you daily stats as to how much you are being paid per 1,000 views of your stuff. Once I visited the forum I found out that I was making 5-10 times as much as the other writers in that forum. In fact, I think I am actually pushing the curve. Apparently there is a site average for the $/1000 number, and my numbers are 2.5 times the average.

Am I bragging? Hells yes I am. Nah, my point is that I think I know how to get clicks when you are participating in revenue sharing or have your own site that depends on ad click revenue. The writers in the forum were trying to figure out why their numbers were so low, and I can tell you why. The articles they mentioned were articles about movies, books and recipes. Articles like that don't get clicks. Why? Because no one needs to click on anything. If you're reading a recipe, are you going to click on an ad for recipes? Heck no, because you already found the recipe you were looking for and read it.

The key is really to target an ongoing action. If you're writing about a subject that people are interested in hearing about, but that they will continue to research, you have a much better chance of getting somewhere with clicks. I mainly write about online publishing, Internet marketing, etc. Those topics are extremely broad, and my article will not be the last word about them.

Someone researching PPC ads or article directories is not going to read my articles, know it all and then never want to research it again. There's a lot to learn on those subjects, and it could take weeks to sufficiently learn everything they want to know.

That makes it far, far more likely that people are going to click on the resulting ads that are matched with the content. That helps me because I get paid and it helps the advertisers because it matches them up with readers who legitimately want to know about the stuff they're advertising.

So, if you are freelancing and write for a few revenue-sharing sites, or you keep a blog or two and depend on AdSense for the revenue, try an experiment. Contribute information about an extremely broad topic and see how you do. I'm guessing that you'll do well enough to continue down that path.

The Enemy

HTML has never liked me. Ever. The first time it laid eyes on me we simply glared at each other like two tigers staring over a single antelope carcass. It thought it would win, I thought I could take it on and win out with pure effort and logic.

Since that time, HTML and I have been engaged in a battle of wits that I usually win. Today, however, it kicked my tail all over the office. But, I'm not giving up. I will prevail over the enemy. I will continue in my fight to make HTML a logical way to do things that works the same way every time.

By the time I'm finished with it, it will never dare to leave gross symbols laying all over the place. It will clean up after itself. It will be too afraid to make pieces of code simply vanish into thin air. It will be cowering down, with its head lowered, too afraid to keep fighting me for control over my copy.

It's Talk Like a Pirate Day!

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.

Blogging About Writing About Blogging

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.