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.

By Brandon Yanofsky

Have you ever picked up a book and started reading just because the cover was interesting?

If you have, you’ve experienced firsthand the power of design. Beautiful books just beg to be picked up and read.

Likewise, your website’s visitors are more likely to read your articles if they are well-designed.

That’s why freelance writers need to learn design — especially writers who have their own blogs.

Below, I’ve laid out five design basics that will improve your blog and attract readers.

1. Whitespace

Readers hate blocks of text. Just look at the following passages:

Über den „toten Bühl“, einen Teil der Hochebene im südlichen Schwarzwald Badens, braust der Herbstwind in langen Stößen; es seufzt der Tann in den niederen Lagen, oben aber auf der kahlen Höhe ächzen die wenigen alten knorrigen Buchen und am einsam ragenden Kruzifix bebt die Holzfigur des Heilandes, nachdem Regen und Wind die Holznägel gelockert und die Befestigung mürbe gemacht haben. Öd und rauh, unwirtlich ist dieser Strich badischen Schwarzwaldlandes, den der Volksmund selbst bezeichnend den „toten Bühl“ nennt, weil die Hügelreihe wahrhaftig an den Tod der Natur gemahnt, heimgesucht von scharfem Westwind und häufigem starken Schneefall, der schon auf die alten Strohdächer der Walddörfer fällt, wenn drüben am glitzernden Rhein, im sonnigen Garten des badischen Unterlandes Wiesen und Matten noch im spätsommerlichen Glanze prangen.

versus

Über den „toten Bühl“, einen Teil der Hochebene im südlichen Schwarzwald Badens, braust der Herbstwind in langen Stößen; es seufzt der Tann in den niederen Lagen, oben aber auf der kahlen Höhe ächzen die wenigen alten knorrigen Buchen und am einsam ragenden Kruzifix bebt die Holzfigur des Heilandes,

Nachdem Regen und Wind die Holznägel gelockert

und die Befestigung mürbe gemacht haben. Öd und rauh, unwirtlich ist dieser Strich badischen Schwarzwaldlandes,

Dden der Volksmund selbst bezeichnend den „toten Bühl“ nennt, weil die Hügelreihe wahrhaftig an den Tod der Natur gemahnt, heimgesucht von scharfem Westwind und häufigem starken Schneefall, der schon auf die alten Strohdächer der Walddörfer fällt, wenn drüben am glitzernden Rhein, im sonnigen Garten des badischen Unterlandes Wiesen und Matten noch im spätsommerlichen Glanze prangen.

Both are the exact same paragraphs, in German. The only difference is one has whitespace, and the other doesn’t.

Whitespace is basically parts of a page that have nothing there (like the white of a blank piece of paper).

An article that’s one giant block of text isn’t attractive to the eye. Your visitors are less likely to read these articles.

2. Visuals

Just as you can use whitespace to break up blocks of text, you can also use visuals. A well placed visual will make your text more appealing and inviting to readers.

However, don’t limit yourself to images. Lists, italicized text, and checkmarks are other ways to add visual appeal. As well as blockquotes, such as the one below:

This is a blockquote.

3. Headers

In addition to whitespace and visuals, consider using headers so your articles have sections.

I’m using headers in this article. Each design point is divided into a section with a bolded, large header.

By sectioning your post with headers, you make your post easier to digest, and therefore more inviting.

4. Font

There are two basic “families” of fonts: serif and sans-serif (there are more, but the others are for decorative purposes).

There is one difference: serif has the little tails on the ends of strokes for each letter. Sans-serif does not. (Click here to see examples.)

When deciding which to use, you need to balance readability and design.

Serif is much easier to read, especially for long form writing. That’s why novels use serif fonts.

However, sans-serif has a more modern look. That’s why many websites (including this one) use sans-serif.

When deciding which to use, consider your reader. While the sans-serif fonts may be more appealing, if you write long posts, it may be beneficial to use serif fonts.

5. Color

Colors are a challenge. But here are some tips when choosing colors for your blog.

Generally, pick only two or three colors for your blog (a great tip from Pamela Wilson). If you have more, it can get chaotic and distracting.

Also check out Colour Lovers for some great color tips and palettes.

One important thing to keep in mind with colors is readability. The reason black text on a white background is used so often is because it contrasts and makes it much easier to read.

Black text on a dark red background, on the other hand, doesn’t offer much contrast and is very hard to read.

When choosing your text and background colors, find something that contrasts.

Two Words of Caution

Design is about balance.

Too much whitespace is just as bad as no whitespace. Too many visuals can distract from your writing.

Let your intuition guide you. If you think it might be overboard, it probably is.

Rules Are Meant to Be Broken

These rules are, like all rules, meant to be broken. There will come a time when a block of text may be appropriate, or your blog may need 10 colors. Again, use your intuition.

Remember: design matters. People do judge books by their covers.

I’m on vacation this week. I wrote this back in 2009, when I was answering a lot of online job ads and struggling to keep my income up as the economy tanked.

It created controversy in some quarters, and became a rallying cry for others. I’m sad to see how relevant this topic remains…think it’s time for an encore.

A while back, I had a disturbing phone call with a prospective writing client.

I had responded to several online ads for writing gigs in the legal field, as I am a former legal secretary. Two of them got back to me.

One paid $20-$40 per 400-600-word article. The other, an agency which claims it has more than 200 law-firm clients, paid $15-$30 a blog. This second guy had called on the phone and was clearly serious about hiring, unlike the many flaky email nibbles I get off resumes I send.

After I informed him that I did not work for remotely those rates and hung up…I thought about it a lot. I wish I had kept him on the phone so I could have asked this recruiter some questions.

Questions like, “Are you serious?” and “Is that even legal?”

And “Do you actually find qualified people willing to write legal content at those rates?” and “Don’t you feel ashamed to be offering what will work out to less than the minimum hourly wage (more than $8 here in Washington State) for a very specific writing skill that requires years of experience?”

He let me know his current team was “pretty maxed out” – yeah, I’ll bet. More likely that was code for “It’s really hard to find anyone who can do this work competently at these rates.”

To which I say, good.

I thought a lot about this call because for a tiny moment, just an instant really, I considered taking this gig.

Legal is easy for me…OK, I’d have to work a LOT of hours to make it into anything like a living…if each post took an hour, it would take me all day and night to earn something like my normal hourly rate…but this firm has a lot of clients I could connect with. Maybe I should take this and hope to build the account into some better-paying work.

Then I snapped out of it, and wrote this:

7 Reasons Why I Won’t Write A $15 Blog Post

1. I’d rather quit writing. If that’s all I’m going to make, I’d rather go out on the lawn and play Frisbee with my kids. They’ll only be young once. If I can’t really pay the bills writing, I should pack it in and enjoy life.

2. I won’t be part of the problem. I won’t contribute to the current downward spiral in pay rates by accepting insulting pay. If I accept this kind of work, it reinforces the idea that high-quality content on specialized topics can be obtained from professional writers at one-tenth or less of what was, until recently, market rates. I refuse to encourage this trend.

3. Low paying work begets more low-paying work. Say I worked for this legal content sweatshop, and managed to convince one of their clients to work for me directly. Even if the connection helped me land other clients and I cut out the middleman, I’m doubtful the wages would be appropriate. Any client I got through my association with this low-payer would likely also want to pay me joke wages. Once customers have the impression you’re cheap, it’s hard to convince them you’re not.

4. I’d rather get a day job. At those rates, I could make more money as an assistant manager at a fast-food place, and work on that novel in my off hours. So if it comes to it, I’ll do something else to pay the bills. My creativity will be fairly compensated, or I’ll earn money another way. I type fast – I have made a living as a secretary in the past, and could again.

5. I want to take a stand. I believe we’re at a turning point in the world of online content that requires accomplished professional writers to take a moral stand. Thousands of scam operators have flooded into the marketplace, hoping to get writers to write for peanuts and then monetize that content, or sell their whole Web site to someone else and make a killing – all off our backs. What they’re doing is morally wrong. I want to resist this trend. Accepting low-pay assignments may pay a few bills in the short term – emphasis on a few – but in the long term it will foster more exploitation. That’s why, for the sake of our vocation’s future, it’s important to me to refuse this work.

6. I have good-paying clients. Contrary to what you may have heard, there are still magazines and corporate accounts out there that understand that writers who freelance need to make an appropriate wage, or they’ll soon leave the vocation. Maybe there are fewer good-paying markets, but I know they still exist. That knowledge makes it easier to turn down slave-wage gigs.

7. Market forces will raise rates in time. As the economy improves, I believe the pool of good freelancers willing to deliver sophisticated, quality content for pennies is going to shrink dramatically as many find new jobs. The number of quickie-post assignments for writers who speak English as a second language is shrinking rapidly, thanks to the Google update. I’m expecting rates will naturally be driven back up as it becomes harder to find qualified writing help. The fact that Demand Studios now offers some of its writers health care is a sign that we’ve hit the saturation point. These sweatshops are struggling to attract the talent they need, so their compensation will have to rise.

I believe this is a momentary market glitch in our industry that’s flourished due to the downturn. Meanwhile, people are not going to stop reading quality publications, and companies will still need to communicate clearly with their customers in the future. The economy will recover, many content-mill writers will probably get day jobs again, and rates will rise.

If you’re with me that sweatshop wages are wrong, make a commitment to yourself not take any assignment that pays less than $50.

Why $50? That’s what I got paid per article when I first got into freelance writing in the early 1990s. Rates shouldn’t be lower now, accounting for inflation. So I think that’s a good cutoff.

I’d love to see writers organize around this issue. Who knows? Maybe Lance Armstrong and his Livestrong site or Amazon.com (have you seen their mill, Amazon Mechanical Turk?) would improve their pay rather than face public embarrassment over their rates.

But in any case,  not taking super-low paying gigs leaves you more time for marketing your writing and finding fair wages.

You can use your blog posts to attract paid blogging gigs.

Good-paying ones, too — not $20 a post.

Ever wonder what company marketing managers and publication editors look for in a personal blog, when they’re checking you out and thinking about hiring you?

I’ve done a lot of paid blogging… for companies, publications…even a TV network.

In my experience, there are some basic elements prospective clients want to see on your blog that make them go “Aha! This person is a pro blogger who could help me build my audience.”

Many blogs have some of these features, but most blogs don’t have them all.

How does your blog stack up? Here are seven features that in my experience really help you get hired off your blog:

1. You physically know how to do it. Most of you will have this one nailed, but to take it from the top, they want to see you know how to put up a post. It looks nice and clean, in a big readable font that’s consistent through your blog. They see you’re posting regularly — at least a couple times a month.
2. Your design is uncluttered. There aren’t a bunch of goofy widgets, flashing ads, mutiple sidebars, or dark backgrounds with white letters. Clean design also means not having .blogger or .wordpress or something in your URL. Pay the tiny fee and get hosting — it really makes you look a lot more pro.
3. You understand blog style. Your posts are short and scannable, with numbered or bulleted points, or useful subheads that guide the reader through your post. Paragraphs are short, too. Each post has several links to other useful information that are anchored to appropriate key words. Let your links be neither dead (non-working) nor naked (typed out in full as in http://www….whatever… rather than linked to anchored words).
4. You stick to a niche. In my experience, it doesn’t really matter what your niche topic is (as long as it’s not your love of porn or something). I’ve gotten gigs writing about surety bonds, unsecured credit lines, and other business-dorky topics off this writing blog. What matters is that you show you understand niche blogging and the prospect can see you know how to develop a lot of post ideas on a single topic. You’re not blogging about what your cat ate or whatever comes to mind that day or weird YouTube videos…just about your chosen subject. Every paying client will want you to stick strictly to their niche, so it’s really important to show you get this.
5. You know how to find, add and properly attribute images. They should be simple, clean images installed at the top of each post, nice and big, half-column width (not taking up the entire top of the post so that the first paragraph is pushed down below it). If you’re really slick, you understand sightlines, and eyes in faces or diagonal lines in photos point readers toward your copy, not away from it. If they’re not paid photos, you have a citation and link to where they came from.
6. You use social sharing buttons appropriately and are active in social media. Most paying clients are hoping you’ll know how to retweet your posts and help promote your content. Buttons on your site (that are hopefully getting used by your readers) show you get social-media marketing, while a lack of buttons leave them wondering.
7. You get and respond to reader comments. Prospects want to see you know how to write the kind of posts that can draw in readers and engage them enough to leave comments. If people do leave comments, they can see you respond appropriately.

You might also want to add a “hire me” tab to your blog to make it plain that you are interested in paying work. I’m hearing from some writers that helped them start getting nibbles from prospects, though it can work even without one. I had clients contacting me before I put one up.

Are you using your blog to get paying gigs? Leave a comment and tell us your approach.

Blogging and making money seem to be on my mind this month, as I look at the best-of list below. It’s a tantalizing mix of some of my most-featured writers on these monthly lists, as well as a few tasty new voices from some places you may not be looking. Always nice to broaden our horizons.

Feel free to add to my list in the comments below with some more great posts you’ve seen this month. No fair listing your own, though.

Enjoy!

1. 6 Reasons Why I Can’t Tell You How Much to Charge by Anne Wayman on About Freelance Writing. This question is always coming up…and here, Anne explains why there is no one, universal, magical answer.
2. 8 Ways to Increase the Joy of Writing by John Soares on Productive Writers. In case you’ve lost the magic, a nice step-by-step guide to ways to rediscover your love of the craft.
3. The 13 Blogging Master Post Templates You Can Use, Part 9 – Resource Posts — by Michael Martine on Remarkablogger. If you haven’t been following Michael’s series on great post types that get the most traffic, comments, engagement and sales, start getting caught up. You can read back through the series from here.
4. The Art of Keeping Your Audience Coming Back for More by Robert Bruce on Copyblogger. Robert is a master at bringing you great advice and perspective from outside the world of copywriting to use in your writing biz…this piece is a classic example.
5. How I Got 3,000 Visitors From a Single Tweet by Gloson Teh on Gloson Blog. I’m setting a new youth-blogger record here on my best-ofs — Malaysia resident Gloson is 13. Thanks to Onibalusi Bamidele for introducing me to his very cool and inspiring blog. Now, fetch me my cane…
6. How to Turn Bad Clients into Good Ones: Nonpaying Clients by Brice Lucas of Blue Fountain Media, on WM Freelance Writers Connection. Another good series-in-progress you might want to check out. We’d all like to whip those loser clients into shape, eh?
7. The Most Overrated Piece of Blogging Advice I’ve Ever Heard by Ali Luke on Daily Blog Tips. I’ve been reading Ali for a while…she’s popping up everywhere lately with great posts. Check her out as well as Daniel Scocco’s blog, if you’re interested in blogging success.
8. Never Sell Anything Again — and Watch Your Business Soar by Barry Moltz on American Express OPEN Forum. I met Barry at SOBCon, and he is a great source of business advice. I realize it’s news to many freelance writers that you have a business…but you do. So listen up.
9. Think Twice About Writing for Revenue Share by Jenn Mattern on All Freelance Writing. This is another question I get all the time, “This revenue share site, should I write for it?” Jenn’s been there, and brings you this bracing bucket of ice water to the face on revshare’s realities.
10. What Bloggers Can Learn from Porn Stars by Brandon Yanofsky on Problogger. Oh, Brandon, get your mind out of the gutter…right after you teach us something useful with this fun post.

Image via stock.xchng user yirsh

By Ollin Morales

If you’re a fiction writer with a blog, you might have noticed that there’s millions of author blogs out there with the exact same message as yours:

“Hey, I’m a new author! Follow me as I write my first novel!”

Now, Carol and others have famously said that you can’t be successful at blogging if all you talk about is you. They’ll point out that many blogs that focus just on an individual’s journey fail miserably.

That’s mostly true.

But in my experience there’s one exception to that rule, and it’s the secret that has made my author blog stand out among the millions of others—launching me from obscurity to Top Ten Blogs for Writers status in less than year.

Here’s the secret to making a blog that’s “all about you” successful:

You need an angle

There’s something about your journey that’s different from the millions of others. The difference is that your journey is yours. Focus on what makes YOU so interesting. What challenges do you face that make the writing process exceptionally hard for you?

Your angle could be a combination of personal interests

For instance, my angle is looking at the intersection between writing and life. The reason why this works for me is because I’m constantly reading writing and self-help literature. I combined both of these loves and voila: Courage 2 Create was born.

You need to have passion

I’m deeply passionate about writing and life. If I didn’t care much about either topic, I’d be less driven to write great blog posts.

You need to be willing to “go there”

Many “writing journey” blogs fail because all they do is scratch the surface of anything real.

So, if you want to be successful, you need to be more open and vulnerable about your personal life.

Even though your blog APPEARS to be all about you—it’s still all about your reader.

Even though your blog will focus on your personal journey, you still must have your readers in mind every step of the way.

Your personal journey is a metaphor for your reader’s journey, so make sure to share a personal story only if you think it’ll be helpful to a broader audience.

You need to be an exceptional writer and storyteller

I’ve studied storytelling with one of the best writing mentors in the world. That’s why I’m so great at what I do. If you struggle with this, I provide a writing consultation service that both tutors writers and edits their work in order to drastically improve their writing.

You need to be active

Lastly, if you want to make your author blog successful, you have to put yourself out there by writing guest posts, entering contests, giving your readers challenges, and marketing yourself like crazy!

Because if you truly want to stand out above the rest, then you’re gonna have to stop just standing there—and get yourself some stilts.

Ollin Morales is a writer. His blog, Courage 2 Create, chronicles the author’s journey as he writes his first novel. The blog offers writing advice as well as strategies to deal with life’s toughest challenges.

Pushpin photo: Stock.xchng – talk2frank

The amount of technology freelance writers need to know about in order to earn from their craft has just exploded in recent years, hasn’t it? I can remember when knowing how to turn my computer on, use Microsoft Word and a fax machine pretty much covered me.

Now, the list of tech stuff I need to know in order to earn well as a freelancer is a long one and seems to grow with each new gig: Campfire, Google Chrome, WordPress, Box.net, Movable Type, Blogger, Picnik, and on and on.

Regular readers will recall that I am not a lover of technology, nor naturally good at it.

In fact, I find it incredibly frustrating and it often makes me cry like a baby.

But over the years of being compelled to learn all this sparkly new technology, I’ve developed a system that makes it easier for me.

Here it is below. Proceed through each step until you reach one that gets the technology working:

1. Try downloading the thing. Try a few more ways, on different browsers.
2. Update all your existing software in hopes that will somehow make the magic happen.
3. When you have it downloaded, try installing the thing. Try a few more times until you think you’ve got it.
4. Once you finally figure out how to download the thing and install it, try to use it.
5. When you can’t understand how to use it to do what you want, you have your choice of: rip hair, cry, curse, lie on floor and suck thumb, play Bejeweled and forget about it, or go for a walk and try again later.
6. After recovering your composure, do Google searches to find what other people who couldn’t make the thing work have said about how to fix it. Try their ideas.
7. Read every page of the online help manual. Weep softly as you realize much of it is like Sanskrit to you.
8. Read the forums and wikis about the thing. Continue weeping.
9. Tinker randomly in hopes of making it all just suddenly decide to freakin’ work.
10. Submit a series of email help ‘tickets’ and pray the Ukrainian or Irish or Indian support techs will take pity on you and help you.
11. Ask on writer and blogger chat forums if anyone has successfully used the thing and could help you.
12. Take a class at your community college or through Biznik or a Chamber colleague you met in how to use the thing.
13. Experience all five stages of grief defined by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: Denial that you will not be able to get the thing to work. Anger that you cannot get the thing to work. Bargaining with your deity to be granted special tech powers that will enable you to make tech things work easily. Depression that you are not the sort of person who rocks at tech stuff. Finally, acceptance that you suck at technology.
14. Beg your teen to teach you how to do it, or your neighbor’s teen. Realize that although he knows all about it, he is too lazy to help you.
15. Hire a professional to install the thing and teach you how to use it.

How do you cope with new technology? Leave a comment and let me know if there’s one of these steps you usually end up at, or if you have your own system. Coming up next week, I’ll tell you my favorite tech tools for making my freelance-writing business, and my blogging life, run smoothly.

When I’m stuck on tech stuff, I usually get help on the forums in A-List Blogger Club (yep, I proudly belong, recommend and affiliate sell A-List memberships — the place to be for people who really want to earn from their blog). Join through me before Wednesday and I’ll send you a link to the 90-minute Webinar recording and PDF report 30 Design & Content Secrets to Skyrocket Your Blog (usually goes for $24.99).