Have you picked up some new lingo recently?

Retweet. Blog. Hashtag. Friend. Like. New words, and old words with new meanings.

Freelance writers should pay close attention to these changes. Because words are powerful.

New words signal a shift in our culture. The way we communicate is changing — and I believe it’s going to transform how writers earn a living in the future.

What’s happening now reminds me a bit eerily of the old Twilight Zone TV series’ episode, “The Parallel,” in which an astronaut returns to find Earth is similar to — but not exactly like — the planet he left.

One notable change: He can’t read anymore, because the language has evolved in a different direction. His child has to teach him how to read again.

Otherwise, he’ll be left behind in a bewildering, familiar-yet-strange society.

This is where freelance writers who don’t know social media are right now.

There’s a new language that’s emerged, and a new way of connecting. If you don’t understand it, I believe you will soon find yourself in a parallel world — one where you will struggle to earn well.

Eventually, you may find yourself with a limited potential client pool, as social media spreads into every corner of media and business life.

A couple comments I’ve heard recently:

“What’s a hashtag, anyway?”

“My editor told me to send the related links with my story…what does that mean?”

When I see a blog-post headline like, “Another Day,” I know that blogger doesn’t understand Internet search and how important headlines are now.

What’s happening here?

Writers are getting left behind

These writers are slowly making themselves obsolete, because they don’t know how to communicate online.

I don’t tell you this because I want to scare you.

I want you to see this coming and get ahead of it.

Why you should learn about social media

Writers who aren’t on social media often tell me they don’t do it because they don’t get it. Where’s the payoff?

So here’s what social media has done for me lately:

• One editor I found on Twitter last year assigned me ten $2,000 online articles.
• I routinely locate hard-to-find sources I need by asking my network on LinkedIn and Twitter.
• I connected with the founder of a major corporation (unreachable through ordinary corporate-PR channels) whom I urgently needed to speak to for a book gig by commenting on his blog.
• I discovered business-finance sources I needed for one story no longer check email, and can only be contacted on Twitter.
• A top blogger contacted me for a guest post after seeing one of my posts linked on Twitter, which led to several awesome writing opportunities.
• I make $100 an hour training small business owners on how to socialize their blog posts.
• I got lucrative blogging gigs for both magazines and businesses based on my social-media audience and knowledge of social-media promotion.

It’s already an advantage if you’re social-media savvy

But a year or two from now, you may be unable to develop queries and get the interviews you need for today’s online markets. Which are growing bigger and more lucrative all the time.

So if you haven’t already taken the plunge, get started and learn it. There’s plenty on this blog about Twitter and LinkedIn (even more here), and more all over the Internet.

Yes, it can seem intimidating when others have thousands of followers.

But I can promise you, it won’t be easier to start next year.

Are you active in social media? Leave a comment and tell us about how you use social media as a writer.

If you’re like me, you get a lot of email newsletters from top bloggers. Many of them are awful pushy, no?

I’m not talking about the bloggers I really like. A few leaders in the blogosphere are honest about what it really takes to earn big money online, and give you practical tools that help you grow your income.

I mean the other ones. You know the type — they send you an email every freakin’ day (or twice or three times even!), and every single post is basically a sales pitch. Usually, for something expensive.

They send you almost no useful advice through their free newsletter. It’s just “buy my stuff and you’ll find out how to be awesome like me.”

I’m pretty skeptical of most of these “I’m jet-setting around the world while my blog earns on autopilot…let me teach you how!” types.

To be frank, I think many of these people are flat-out liars.

They’re really getting rich because thousands of suckers are paying them to explain how they’re getting rich. Which is only happening for them because you just paid for their ‘how-to-get-rich’ course!

Here are the red-flag messages from mega-bloggers that send me running the other way:

1. I’ll show you how I did it, and you can do the same thing and become a huge success. Here’s the thing: Most blogging-success gurus you run across made it big a while back. Many of them came up as blogging was just getting started, and the playing field was a whole lot emptier. Things have changed a lot since then. Back when, one guest blog post on a popular blog might get you 300 new subscribers — but I know few people who’re seeing that now. What worked for them back in ’05 isn’t going to work for you. Their system is out of date.
2. You can be just like me. Really, you can’t. Why? Because we are all unique individuals. You will never be this blogger. You can only be the best blogger you are, by exploiting your own uniqueness and your expertise to the maximum. Mimicking their blog topic, their marketing plan, and the products they sell is not going to work. You’ll have to slog through on your own and figure out your audience, what they need from you, and what they would buy. There is no copycat success in blogging.
3. With my tips, you will make money in your sleep on autopilot. I think a tiny number of people are actually making this happen. Hit blogs usually arise from a confluence of several important factors — a hot niche topic, celebrity-blogger friends who promote it, a killer product or two, relentless promotion, and finally a smattering of sheer luck. Most of the successful bloggers I know work like dogs. They have multiple sites, they constantly develop and launch new courses or ebooks. Sure, as their site gets more subscribers they can earn more with the same amount of effort. But reports that bloggers are lying about in a hammock full-time while earning bazillions are greatly exaggerated.
4. It’s easy to become an online millionaire. If this were really true, we’d all be rich by now, hmm?
5. Just affiliate sell my expensive thing, and you’ll be rich. Not necessarily, if your expensive thing isn’t a fit for my readers. But lots of affiliates helping sell your expensive thing definitely makes the star blogger rich. The reality: You have to be careful what products you affiliate sell, or you risk driving subscribers away.

How can you really attract more business with your site? Find out Wednesday, when I hold a Blog and Writer Site Review Webinar with whip-smart blogger Stanford Smith of Pushing Social. We’ll be using Freelance Writers Den members’ own blogs and writer sites to demonstrate simple changes you can make to get more visitors, subscribers, and buyers. You won’t get rich in your sleep on autopilot, but we’ll give you some proven, practical tools for growing your income. This event includes a report with our 20 best tips for a successful website.

Congrats to Shana, whose questions on Friday’s post about how to make her writer site stand out won her a 1-week free pass to the Den and a chance to get her site reviewed in the Webinar.

About two years ago, I spun off this blog from my writer site. I did it in large part because I thought Make a Living Writing had real money-earning potential.

I was planning to write an e-book…but in the meanwhile, I thought I could sell some other people’s products.

I’d never sold anything to anyone in my life prior to this. But I had a plan.

“I know,” I thought. “I could sell some books about writing on one of those Amazon carts!”

That was about all I knew about affiliate selling…getting an Amazon cart.

So I tried that. To date, I think I still haven’t hit $100 and triggered a payment.

Eventually, I took the Amazon cart down.

Clearly, there was more to being a successful affiliate seller that I hadn’t figured out yet.

I eventually figured out how affiliate selling really works, when I joined A-List Blogger Club. I got some tips in there on how to do affiliate selling that not only works, but doesn’t feel sleazy or obnoxious.

These days, I make a nice side income from affiliate sales. I’ve been told I’m a top seller for more than one of my products.

What turned it around for me? Here’s my guide to affiliate-sales success:

Get 1,000 subscribers. It’s unlikely you’ll have enough traffic to sell much below this level of readership. If you’ve got 20 subscribers and ads plastered all over, take them down. They’re probably driving people away.

Find out what your readers need. The first step on the road to affiliate cash is listening to your readers. What are their problems? Take polls or surveys, ask open questions on your blog posts that drive a lot of comments. I’ve even offered freebies in return for readers’ opinions. Without this knowledge, you’re not going to be able to sell anything, and your sales pitches will annoy people and make them unsubscribe. 

Get closer to readers. If possible, hold live events where you can talk live with readers, either in person or online. At one Webinar I put on, for instance, I made a very interesting discovery: While I thought most freelance writers have their own website up, in fact that’s not true. I’ve found about 75 percent of my readers don’t yet have a website or blog. In general, many had very nascent freelance-writing businesses. I also got that many freelance writers have small budgets for investing in their business — so selling some $800 marketing course wasn’t going to work.

Find out what they plan to buy. When you know readers’ needs, then you sell them things they are likely going to need and will probably buy in any case. My new-writer readers, I realized, need quite a few things to get their business going: Web hosting, accounting software, a payment cart, email marketing help, and a lot of information and support.

Watch out for junk products. The potential pitfall here: A lot of products you find online are stupid, crappy ripoffs. So how do you select the right products to try to sell to you readers? I had a major insight: I didn’t want to just go on ClickBank or somewhere, grab whatever I saw that was vaguely related to freelance writing, and slap it on here. I had a gut instinct that would be a mistake, and could put the credibility of my whole site at risk.

Test out products and services. I started thinking about the products I was using to make my freelance writing business successful — products I already knew were great. I started to recommend them, beginning with A-List. I tried it out, thought the resources and support were amazing, and quickly began making far more than my membership dues in affiliate sales. For me, selling monthly membership products where you get paid every month your referrals stay in is the bomb.

I also discovered that the National Association of Independent Writers & Editors (NAIWE) offered a free, hosted WordPress blog site with their $99 memberships. I joined, checked it out, and thought their offering was a great, one-stop, affordable solution for my readers who don’t yet have a blog and are boggled by how to get started — plus, your blog posts get promoted by NAIWE on its site and on Twitter, so it’s a marketing bargain, too. What a cheap, plug-and-play way to stop wondering how to do blogging, and get your writing portfolio out there, today.

Recommend your favorite products. Once you’ve identified the right items to sell, it’s time to share your enthusiasm for them with readers. My best strategy has been to do blog posts about my experiences with a product or service. That’s what I did with A-List, writing about how the community helped me improve my blog’s design, among other things. Show your readers exactly how you benefited from the product, and they get it right away. Live events are great for discussing products you recommend, too.

How to tell you’re selling the right stuff. I found that when I talked about products I personally use and love, I didn’t feel like I needed to take a shower afterwards. It felt perfectly natural. For instance, I learned many readers are on free blog hosting such as Blogger and will probably want to switch to paid hosting at some point. They’ll need a good web host with great support staff, and I use one — Dreamhost. It’s more like you’re helping readers out with your recommendation, and less like you’re forcing something on them.

Find better-paying programs. While Amazon gives you a pittance on each book you sell (“it’s failtastic,” as one blogger described it to me), reaching out directly to authors and publishing houses can get you commissions of 30 percent or better. Finally, I began making some actual coin on books writers bought through my site.

Find free-to-pay offers. One of the offer types I like best is selling products or services that start out free. One I sell here is email-marketing service Mailchimp (free to the first 2,000 subscribers). I think of these as no-harm-no-foul — your readers can try them out and if they don’t like them, they leave, having spent nothing. If they like it and it helps make their business grow, you end up profiting. Win-win doesn’t getting any more winning than that.

Create a Products I Love page. I soon realized I didn’t want dozens of ads cluttering up my sidebar. Also, blog posts you write about your affiliate products soon disappear in your blogroll. So I grouped my affiliate recommendations on a Products I Love page. I’m happy to have a chance to thank Tammy Strobel of Rowdy Kittens for showing me this approach. Not only does this keep ads from junking up my home page too much, it allows me to link to that page and leave one affiliate-sales disclosure (required by FCC law) over there, which is more elegant than having to mention it in each blog post where you talk about a product you affiliate sell.

Keep updating. As your blog and business evolves, your readers may have different needs. Review your affiliate products and services regularly to see if it’s time to add or drop products. Personally, I recently got more organized about tracking invoices and payments and got Freshbooks, which is affordable and super-easy to use — and which is free for the first few clients you track. I immediately realized this would be useful to lots of other writers who need to get better organized financially, so it got added to my affiliate services list.

What’s your experience with affiliate sales? Leave a comment and tell us what’s worked — or not — for you.

In the beginning, most bloggers are just having fun. You blog about whatever strikes your fancy on any given day.

After a while, you realize you want to get serious about your blog. You want people who see it to hire you for good-paying blogging gigs — or maybe you want it to become a money-earner of its own. You start sticking to a niche topic, adding photos, and trying to improve your blog’s design and usability.

That’s when you need to get serious about the tools you’re using to make your blog look great, and to get the word out about your blog.

I did a post recently about some of the tools I use to run my writing business, and got requests for a followup on blog tools.

As it happens, we got a lot of questions about the best blog tools and plug-ins at the end of the WordPress Crash Course I recently held on Freelance Writers Den…so here’s a recap of the conversation I had with our two WordPress experts — Brandon Yanofsky of B-List Marketing and Joseph Putnam of Blog Tweaks.

Here’s our list of the coolest plugins and other tools for serious bloggers. Most of these are free, but a few cost a bit. If you’re serious about blogging, you’ll need to invest a modest amount to look pro — and it’ll be worth it.

1. A paid host. Free hosting is lamesauce. Your free host could change the rules, kick you off, go out of business, or otherwise mess up your life. Plus having .blogger or .wordpress in your URL brands you as an amateur. As Joseph pointed out in the Webinar, there’s another dark side to staying on free hosting: One day, when you get serious, you’ll have to transfer your site over to a paid host, a process in which your RSS subscribers have to subscribe over again. So you may lose some or all of them. If you’re on a free host, get a paid one now, while your blog’s subscriber base is still small and you have less to lose. It won’t get easier later. Joseph and Brandon both like BlueHost, and I’ve been using Dreamhost. But whatever host you look into, make sure they have terrific, 24/7, rapid-response type support help. That’s the key to sanity.
2. A paid theme. I learned this one the hard way with Make a Living Writing, which is still stuck on a free theme, which I discovered can’t do a very nice-looking tag cloud and loads a bit slow, I discovered. Brandon likes the StudioPress themes, while the Den and my writer site are now on WooThemes, which I’m liking. We agreed buying a theme from one of the big providers with good support and a big family of different themes created on the same platform is the best way to go, as it makes it easy to switch to a different theme later.
3. Mailchimp. Monetizing your blog is all about collecting email names and then marketing to your email list. To do that, you need a pro email-marketing provider. Mailchimp is free for your first 2,000 subscribers and has a ton of features. It’s easy to understand and use, and you can style your emails with your blog site’s colors, embed links easily, and much more. Honestly, I don’t know why every startup blogger in America isn’t using them — you just have nothing to lose. Plus, their techs work for bananas and sign their emails “eep!” They’re more fun.
4. Paypal. I’m still surprised when I find writers who don’t have a PayPal account hooked up to their bank account. Increasingly, clients want to pay through PayPal, and you can use it to sell your own products, too. I also sell some through e-junkie, which has more flexibility for setting up limited-time discounts.
5. MorgueFile. We got into a big conversation about where to get free photos, and my recent favorite is MorgueFile. Why? You don’t even have to attribute the photos, which is nice as that little credit line clutters up your blog post. I can’t always find what I want on there — but the photo above is from MorgueFile. Nice, huh?
6. Akismet. Now we come to the free WordPress plug-ins you need to make your site work well. Akismet is the best spam-killer out there.With Akismet, you should be able to set your comments free — that is, get rid of Captcha and other barriers, or having comments ‘awaiting moderation.’ Akismet will kill 99% of your spam and you can just relax.
7. WordPress Popular Posts. Many bloggers make the mistake of having a “recent posts” widget, but that’s not what you want. You want popular posts. We don’t care what you’ve done for us lately — we want to know the most amazing and commented-upon posts you’ve ever created. This plug-in will keep your best stuff at the top of your home page forever. I can testify I still get about 800 hits every month on my most popular post thanks to this plug-in.
8. CommentLuv. This little add-on automagically pulls up the headline of a commenter’s own most recent blog post and puts it at the end of their comment on your blog. In other words, CommentLuv makes people dying to comment on your blog because it gives them a really useful link. It greatly ups the number of comments you will get on your blog.
9. Sexy Bookmarks. You’ve seen it everywhere — the one where a row of social-sharing buttons is half-hidden at the bottom of a post, and as you mouse over it, they pop up. That’s sexy! Which is why they call it Sexy Bookmarks. Unfortunately, I can’t get it to work on the free theme here (see why you want a paid one?)…but if it’ll work on your blog, use it. Really encourages people to spread the word about your blog.
10. Wibiya toolbar. If for any reason you find Sexy Bookmarks doesn’t work, you can use the social sharing bar I use on this blog, the free Wibiya toolbar. You can customize it a million ways…you’ll note I just added Google+ to mine since it’s the new, hot place in social media. It also appears in an animated way just after your page fully loads, so it’s a little bit sexy, too.
11. Intense Debate. Brandon informs me Intense Debate now works with CommentLuv (I used to have ID and it didn’t a while back, which is why I got rid of it). But I gather they’ve made friends now, so check it out. Intense Debate allows you to easily thread comment responses and otherwise style up your comment area.

What are you favorite tools for awesome blogging? Leave a comment and let us know.