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.

I just have to say — there’s been some tasty articles about freelancing out there this month! Most of these folks I’ve been reading quite a while, but some of them haven’t popped up on my monthly best-of lists until now. There are a few fresh new faces, too.

I’m seeing themes here of blogging best practices, and marketing tips. Enjoy!

1. The #1 Reason You Aren’t Earning at Least $100/Hour by Ruth Zive on The Freelance Writing Blog. Ruth has only been freelancing a few years, but she’s a longtime writing pro who’s already giving back and helping folks out with some inspirational posts.
2. 5 Social Media Myths Disproved by Dan Zarella on FixCourse. This site is new to me, but Dan Zarella isn’t — watch for his interesting, data-backed advice to pop up all over the Interwebs.
3. 12 of the Best About Pages on the Internet by The Blog Tyrant on Blog Tyrant. If you haven’t discovered the mysterious, 25-year-old Australian Blog Tyrant, I’ve been reading him for quite a while and he has some solid information, so happy to find a chance to include one of his rants here.
4. Attention Writers: These 3 Simple Tricks Will Help You Make More Money with Less Effort by Sean Platt on GhostwriterDad. Sean is one of the hardest-working helpers of freelance writers out there. He’s actually madly busy writing his serialized apocalyptic novel Yesterday’s Gone with David Wright, but still takes time to help you make more money. I think that’s awfully nice of him.
5. How to Battle Scope Creep in a Writing Assignment by Linda Formichelli on The Renegade Writer. Now that I’ve brought Linda on as the Other Den Mother in Freelance Writer’s Den, I have a bit more free time…to read her great posts! This one’s got practical help for coping with one of the biggest problems in the freelancing game.
6. How to Write What People Actually Want to Read by Mary Jaksch on Write to Done. I think this is Mary’s first appearance on my monthly best-of lists, which is really weird, since I always devour everything she posts. Just a reminder to stop guessing what to write about, and go find out what people actually want to know. Seems simple, yet so many bloggers don’t do it.
7. Make Your Blog the Event of the Year (and Have People Clamor to Attend) by Tea the Word Chef on Problogger. Tea sets up a tasty analogy here on how blogging is like a dinner party, and makes it really work all the way through. Memorable post.
8. Moving Beyond Job Boards by Jenn Mattern on All Freelance Writing. Jenn has responded to the crash in available assignments at Demand Studios with a whole series of articles on how to move on from mills. We’re of a mind about online ads — stop wasting so much time on those and work on more productive types of marketing, folks.
9. The Ultimate Guide to Getting More Referrals and Increasing Word of Mouth by James Clear of Passive Panda. I discovered James at International Freelancers Day back in September. This is a long post that’s packed with great tips. Hoping to have James come guest on a Den Meeting call before the end of the year, but until then, you can read this for some sound advice on how to  get the clients coming your way without having to market your ass off.
10. What a Painted-On Bikini Can Teach You About Writing Words That Sell by Danny Iny on DIYThemes. Danny writes a good headline, hmm? The article is just as good. Great tips for writing persuasive sales copy here.

Read any good articles online lately? Feel free to add to my list.

Ariella rides one all the way to shore

On my vacation last week, I got some freelance-writing inspiration from a fun activity I haven’t gotten a chance to do since I was a teen: I went bodysurfing and boogie-boarding with my kids, in southern California.

Those waves keep coming, and they can be fun to ride — or they can pick you up and pile-drive your head into the sand. (I got to experience some of each.)

The ocean is ever-changing…just like the freelance-writing scene today.

We’re seeing waves of change that seem to come faster and faster. The recession. New media. Social media. Content mills. Bidding sites. Magazines folding. New online sites.

As in surfing, there are a limited number of responses you can make to the approach of the oncoming change-waves in our industry:

1. Get out of the water. If you can’t cope with learning social media and writing online content, you might want to go into another line of work. These changes are here to stay. I think many writers have simply moved on in recent years.
2. Stay where you are and take a pounding. If you’re halfway into the water, you’re going to just keep getting smashed into by a terrific force. It won’t be easy to hold your ground as it will be sucked out from under your feet and drawn toward the wave. You can keep doing what you’re doing, but you’re basically fighting the tide.
3. Swim as fast as you can toward the wave. This option gives you a chance to get on top of a wave before it gets any bigger or crashes down on you. It carries the risk that you will fail and be mauled by a wave that breaks right over you and rips your boogie-board out from under you…but also holds the promise that you could rocket past the wave into calmer waters.
4. Move sideways across the wave. This is what boarders do when they shoot the curl — instead of fighting the wave, they ride across it and let its energy carry them along parallel to shore. In freelance writing, I’d compare this to learning a new specialty niche such as technical writing or white papers.
5. Dive under the wave. If you swim along the bottom of the ocean just as the wave approaches, the wave’s force will pass right over you and you can come up on the other side. It might not be pleasant, and seawater could go up your nose. I’d liken this to getting a day job for now, in hopes that the freelance markets will improve later.
6. Get out past the waves. It’s not easy to do, but once you’re past the breakers, life is fine. You can float along, enjoy the sun, and then pick which wave you want to surf back to shore. It’s like being a fully-booked freelancer — you’re in control and pick and choose your clients.

Both in the surf and in freelance writing, I liked that third option — swim hard, straight into the wave. Often, you can surprise yourself and get over the crest in time.

Sometimes I feel like I’m out past the waves. For example, I haven’t had to do much active marketing in the past year, as my passive marketing strategies — referrals, SEO for my writer website, my LinkedIn profile — have sent me enough business. But then a new challenge tumbles me back to the beach, and it’s time to fight the swells again to get back out there.

When I was having trouble getting past that final set of far-off waves, my teenage son Evan gave me the answer: “Sometimes, you’ve just got to let the waves beat you up, mom. Just keep fighting your way out there.”

What’s your approach to the changing world of freelance writing? Leave a comment and describe how you’re surfing the waves of change.

By Alicia Rittenhouse

You have heard the buzz surrounding Facebook Pages and Facebook custom landing pages, but are you confused with what you should include as a writer? First off, you should have a Facebook fan page. Then, you should have at least the following on your page:

1. Complete About Section – This is often an overlooked area, believe it or not. You can add this in a matter of minutes. You don’t want someone to land on your feed page, click on your About section out of interest to know exactly who you are and what you do, and have it be blank. What does that say about you — especially as a writer!

Your About Section should have:

• Bio or About Summary – The who, what, where, and whatever important information about your company
• Contact information and/or consultation scheduling link
• All of your websites and blogs with links

2. Opt-In Form and Pink Spoon – This is another way to capture email addresses and build your list besides on your website. If your Facebook Page disappears for some strange reason (remember Facebook owns your page), your emails are the only way to contact your peeps to let them know.  If you do not collect email addresses, you have no way to contact them. Those contacts are just gone.

Your “pink spoon” is an incentive that encourages people to sign up and lets visitors sample your writing and style. A pink spoon is generally a FREE ebook, audio or informational product that you give your visitor in exchange for their email signup on the web form. You want to make sure that you include a signup form with a pink spoon on your Facebook page and your website. This is uber important!!

There are applications out there that will help you create a custom landing page.  For DIY apps, my favorite is Wildfire, but here are a couple others that you can check out TabSite, IWIPA,  Hubze, or Lujure. Or you can hire someone to create a customized one for you.

3. Video – Make sure to include any videos you have on your landing page AND the video section of your Facebook Page. Click here to get the YouTube application to pull any videos you have posted on YouTube into Facebook. Your readers love you for your writing, but video gives them a 3-D view of who you are as a person and business owner. Your personality and passion for what you do as a writer will shine through on the videos.

4. RSS Feed – Import your RSS feed into your page via your Notes or NetworkedBlogs. Networked Blogs is an application that will auto post your blogs and give you the ability to create a page with your archives. This is simple and gives your blog posts the added exposure that they need. It is hard to keep consistent with posting your blog posts over to Facebook by hand, so make sure they are receiving maximum exposure.

5. Links to Your Other Social Networks – Have your potential customers feel like they can reach out to you on the various social networks. Make sure to include links to your Twitter Page, LinkedIn Profile, and wherever else you may have profiles at. Remember to only include those you are active on. You do not want someone going to a social network to connect with you when your last post was four months ago!

Another suggestion that will allow for you to send people to one place is to create an About.me page. This is a customized landing page that allows you to connect all of your social hangout spots with a bio and an image.

What have you included on your Facebook Page? Share your Facebook Page below, and we’ll check it out.

Alicia Rittenhouse teaches entrepreneurs to become tech savvy in their business and use social media to grow their online presence.   To receive her easy-peasy social media tips, click here.

In honor of Alicia’s guest post, I’m donating $50 to InvisiblePeople.tv. Learn more about how to guest post for this blog and get paid $50.

Facebook graphic: Flickr – stoneysteiner’s photostream

Of all the types of social media out there you can use to promote your freelance writing, I think LinkedIn is one of the most useful. In working with writers in my mentoring program, I’ve discovered a lot of writers aren’t making full use of this platform.

Folks seemed to appreciate my recent Twitter tips, so I thought I’d do a sequel on how to get the most mileage out of LinkedIn.

First off, here’s why I like LinkedIn and recommend you become active on it: Unlike Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and many other platforms, LinkedIn is all business. There’s nobody on there with a photo of themselves half-nekkid with a drink in their hand, where their bio says they just wanna par-tay, or that they watch Glee.

Folks are on LinkedIn to further their careers. Period. So that to me screens out a lot of the bullcrap that often turns social media into such a time suck. Nobody’s playing Farmville on here or asking you to watch some dumb video. The audience may be smaller than Facebook’s at about 100 million, but it’s a higher-quality group.

LinkedIn also offers quite a few interesting features that are particularly useful to freelancers.

How can LinkedIn help you as a freelance writer? Let me count the ways:

1. Key words in your profile. Start by fully filling out your profile and stuffing it with key words about what you do — mine currently says “freelance writer, award-winning blogger, copywriter, and writing mentor.” Why? Because companies and publications that need a freelance writer search by key words for the type of writer they’re looking for. My profile also names my nearest major city, useful for people searching for a local writer — that’s how an airline magazine based in my town came to call me recently to write a $500 business-finance article. They’re not the only major company I’ve had call me cold off my LI profile, either. So fill out your profile, people. Your profile converts people into buyers the best of any page on LI. People like to hang out in the groups (more on them later), but filling out your profile completely may be your most efficient use of time on LI.
2. “Who’s viewed my profile?” A lot of people don’t realize you can click on this little sidebar widget and get more information about who has been looking at your LI profile. Yes, if you’re only on the free level, sometimes it won’t show you much — some of the information will be hidden. But sometimes, it will reveal contact names. If they smell like a prospect, I then send them a message: “Hi, were you looking for a freelance writer? I noticed you were looking at my profile. Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help!” If I have a particular expertise relevant to their industry, I mention that as well. I get a lot of responses to this, as people are amazed you knew they were checking you out.
3. The blog tool. This one’s pretty obvious — use LI’s BlogLink tool to pull your blog onto your LI profile page. That will make it also appear in the blogrolls of all your connections that use the blog tool, too. Presto: Instant promotion! Great way to spread your blog around.
4. The editor connections. I find LI is the place to look up all your former editors. Search for them and ask to connect. Shmooze, catch up, find out what they’re doing now. Do they need a job? Send them leads. Do they have a job? Maybe they can use you again, or know another editor using freelancers and could refer you. At one point when I was really needed a few new clients, I decided to reconnect with every editor I’d ever liked. It was fun! And one I hadn’t written for in a decade ended up referring me a great new global client that I did $1,000 of work for last year, and they’re still calling me.
5. The jobs. If you’re going to look at online job ads, LI is one of my favorite places to do it, as an increasing number of their ads are exclusive to LI. Their ads cost money, and the companies tend to be high-quality. I use one of my favorite ad-hunting tricks and look at LI’s full-time job ads. In my experience as a staffer, the appearance of a staff-writer job ad means a crisis situation — someone usually left months back. My strategy? Apply to any publication or company of interest, and just let them know you’re a happy freelancer, not looking for a full-time job, but I’m so right for you, look at my experience…do you perhaps also work with freelancers? I got one $1,500 assignment last year this way from an interesting national trade magazine.
6. InMail for prospecting. I have yet to try this, but it appears that sending a paid-level InMail on LI has a response rate of 30 percent and up. In fact, InMail does so well that LI now guarantees you’ll get a response — or they give you another InMail message to send free. Sort of a no-lose proposition. Apparently there’s a real novelty factor at this point in time to sending these, so people often will get back to you. Target your dream prospective clients, write your pitch, and then fire away on LI.
7. In-person networking. Many LI groups also meet in person — my local Linked:Seattle chapter has networking events with more than 500 attendees. If you’re interested in small-business clients, these can be a gold mine. One of the best ways to make social media work really productive is to deepen those online connections by going offline. If you have a location-based LI group that isn’t meeting live, consider starting a live event and serving as host.
8. The groups. You don’t necessarily find gigs in groups, but the writer groups on LI are one of the best free places I’ve found to discuss rates, negotiating, and other client issues. The biggest and busiest is LinkedIn Editors & Writers. I’ve made some nice friendships through LI groups, and we can all use the support. There’s also Writeful Share, a group where people post overflow jobs and try to share leads. Active participation in groups where you share your expertise can also lead to some nice new traffic to your blog.
9. The jobs inside the groups. As Writeful Share’s model shows, job leads do sometimes get passed around inside of LI groups. Besides searching the main, full-time job postings, this is probably the next-best gig-finding opportunity on LI.
10. Answer questions. I haven’t spent time on this, but I know many people who’ve done well answering and asking questions on LI’s main Answers tab. Yet another place on the platform to share your expertise and attract interest.

Got questions about how to find good-paying writing gigs online? I’m planning an upcoming Webinar on that topic, and it’ll help me design the material to deliver exactly what you want to know if I hear first about your biggest obstacles to earning well online.

Leave your feedback in the comments below, and I’ll make it worth your while. All commenters in the first 48 hours get a free link to my previous one-hour presentation with Angie Atkinson of WM Freelance Writers Connection — The Insider’s Guide to Online Writing Success. Most interesting comment or question wins a free ticket to the upcoming Webinar. I’ll announce the free-ticket winner on the blog Friday.

Photo: Flickr Creative Commons: smi23le

As I work more and more with both freelance writers and small business owners looking to build up their blogs, I find these two groups have the same problems. Their blogging journey generally develops like this:

• Start a blog. All excited!
• Write a few posts.
• Write a few more posts.
• In the case of the businesses, they sometimes hire me at this point to write more and better posts.
• Soon, frustration sets in. They start to wonder why nothing’s happening — why they don’t get many readers, comments, or subscribers. And why, ultimately, they don’t get customers — either new business clients, or paid blogging gigs, or eBook sales.

I find this happens because of a basic disconnect people have about blogging.

Here’s why nothing’s happening with your blog:

When you write a blog post, you have created a tool. It’s like you’ve built a bullhorn for broadcasting what you know, who you are, and what you do.

But if no one picks up the bullhorn and talks into it, what will happen?

Nothing.

If you haven’t properly built your bullhorn, and it isn’t strong and sturdy and useful, what will happen?

Nothing.

No one is surprised that a silent bullhorn doesn’t accomplish anything. But people continue to be shocked when their unpromoted blog doesn’t make them an overnight millionaire.

What is the missing element in so many blogs?

Someone has to use the tool.

I know — blogging is so much work by itself! But it is actually just the first step in the process of using your online articles to draw people to you. Once you have that bullhorn,  you’ve got to pick it up and start talking into it. Do that enough, and some people will notice and come on over to visit the blog.

As we saw earlier this week with one blogger’s bafflement about Twitter, many writers (and companies, too) don’t understand how to promote their blog. They aren’t using social media. They’re not sending out an email newsletter with their blog posts in it. So no one is discovering their posts. I’ve actually had clients sending out newsletters…but without including any links to their blog posts!

Another example: I had one client hire me to do two posts a week for two months, for instance. After six weeks, they hadn’t even bothered to read, approve, and post all the pieces I’d written. No one at the company was tasked with regularly promoting the posts in social media. So naturally, they were ready to pull the plug because “it just isn’t monetizing the way we expected.”

They expected their bullhorn to shout by itself. No surprise that didn’t work.

How to make something happen on your blog:

The good news is, you can fix this. The skills needed to succeed in blogging are not hard to learn. There are four basic elements you need:

1. Spectacular content that works online
2. Great design that delights and engages visitors
3. An understanding of social-media marketing and a commitment to promoting your blog regularly
4. Workable monetizing strategies for turning your growing audience of readers into buyers

More good news: Two Webinars coming up will teach you exactly these four skills. The first one coming in March, 30 Design & Content Secrets to Skyrocket Your Blog, will deliver critical insight into how to get your blog ready for company. I’m co-presenting this 90-minute, interactive event with blogging expert Judy Dunn of Cat’s Eye Writer — another Top 10 Blogs for Writers winner! Important thing to know: The first 30 next 10 registrants for this Webinar only will get their very own blogs reviewed during this event! It’s a chance to get expert feedback on your blog at a ridiculously low price. We asked you what you wanted to know to improve your blog, and then designed this class to deliver exactly what you need.

Once your site is whipped into shape, you’re ready for the second one in April, Secrets of a Money-Making Blog, which will lay out how to market your blog and turn it into a source of income. I’m presenting this one with longtime successful blogger Anne Wayman of About Freelance Writing.

Want to make something happen on your blog? Now’s your chance. Pre-registration opens today, and we’ve got a special, limited-time deal for bloggers who sign up early.

Register for both Webinars by President’s Day and pay just $65.99 — 20% off the $83 regular price for buying these one at a time. Learn more about 30 Design & Content Secrets Webinar. Learn more about Secrets of a Money-Making Blog. Or just sign up now.

Recently, I peeked in my mailbag and spied an urgent email from a reader of the blog. She was having trouble getting any traction in promoting her paid blogging gig on Twitter:

I write for this site, and most of the hits or “recommendations” stories get are from the writer’s social media and personal website followers, as well as friends and family. So mine don’t get a ton of hits comparatively, which makes me very nervous about my position on the site.

I signed up on Twitter a little while ago and followed who I could, but still only have like eight followers. I linked Facebook too I believe … And yes, I still need to make a web site for myself.

But otherwise, do you know a way to get followers fast for Twitter, to bump up the hits for my stories on a site? Most visitors aren’t just going there because of the site as much as the writers they already know.

I guess I dread social media but I know it’s essential. I don’t think I’m entertaining enough to tweet enough to get a following about anything. It’s the last thing I enjoy doing

I took a look at her Twitter profile, and this is what I discovered: No one is following or retweeting her because in the world of Twitter, she is no one.

She has no bio filled out, no URL link, her Twitter handle is not her name, and her image is that lame egg graphic Twitter hands out as a default. She had sent a big 25 tweets, and they all seemed to be links to her own blog posts. She was following 16 people.

This experience reminded me that only about 8 percent of people are yet on Twitter. Those of us who’ve been cranking along on it for a while tend to forget that not everybody understands how Twitter works yet.

It’s worth taking the time to do that, because Twitter can be a powerful tool for spreading the word about what you’re doing, and for meeting great, useful new people. I ended up guest-posting on Copyblogger from promoting my blog posts on Twitter, and meeting a $2-a-word assigning editor at a high-profile website who’s still giving me assignments.

So here is a 15-step crash course in how to win on Twitter as a freelance writer:

1. Get a useful handle. If your name is already taken (this reader’s problem), maybe you have a cool branding thing you could do, like my tweep Stefanie Flaxman @RevisionFairy, or my franchise-consultant friend Joel Libava @FranchiseKing. Or you could put an underline in your name like @Carol_Tice. Takeaway: You can put key words about what you do right into your handle, like mine: @TiceWrites.

2. Fill out your profile completely. Really, it takes maybe five minutes. And it’s so, so important. Why? People search on words they’re interested in on Twitter, and if you have them in your profile, you will appear in their search results. Stuff it with key words about what you do, up to the limit of what it will accept. Mine includes: freelance writer, copywriter, journalist, Top 10 Blogs for Writers winner, writing, helping writers earn, business. If you want to connect with people in your town, include your location.

3. Provide a link to your Web site. If you do not have a writer Web site yet, link to your LinkedIn profile, or your ZoomInfo profile, or your Facebook page. Something — anything! Profiles with no links people can follow to learn more are ignored. There really is no excuse for not having a writer website these days, when you can have a WordPress site for $99 from the National Association of Independent Writers & Editors (NAIWE) up and running in about the next 10 minutes. But whatever you do, get your clips organized somewhere and post a link to that site on Twitter.

4. Put up a photo. Preferably, a good little photo of you. Or maybe a fun cartoon gravatar of you. But kill off that egg — spammers all have those (I actually just blocked three of them this evening), so you’re giving your profile a very bad connotation sticking with the egg.

5. Don’t use robots to get followers. If you search on “get Twitter followers,” you will find lots of offers of products that promise to automatically get you hundreds of followers overnight. Don’t use them. Why? These followers are useless — they don’t really want to follow you, and won’t retweet your links.

6. Search for influential people in your niche, and follow them. There are thousands of people this reader could be following on Twitter. You’ve never followed “all you could.” Many of the top people automatically follow you back if you follow them. Identify the key people and start building a list.

7. Stop constantly marketing yourself. Twitter isn’t a channel to constantly blare about what you’re doing — it’s just considered bad form. You’ll need to mix links to your own blog posts in with other useful information from other sources in your niche. Once you’re following thought leaders in your topic, you can just scan down your Tweetstream and quickly find things to retweet. Or use SmartBriefs to find interesting articles, or Google Alerts. Presto! You are interesting enough to get followers now. But stop making it all about you, because that’s why no one is interested.

8. Watch your follower/following ratio. Once you start to accumulate a few hundred followers, it’s time to cut back your list of who you’re following. That’s because just like the ratio of good to bad cholesterol, your ratio of followers to people you’re following is important. When you have substantially more followers than you do people you follow, it tells people you’re interesting. You don’t have to follow people to get them to follow you. That attracts more followers.

9. Promote other people. Thank people (with a link to their Twitter name) for retweeting your content, RT their links and rave about them…and you will find new friends.

10. Use hashtags. Know how to help your content get found by using hashtags. For instance, if you’d like other writers to see your link, you might post it on #WW (Writer Wednesday), or if you’d like to flatter someone else by promoting them you could mention them on #FF (Follow Friday). People search on these hashtags for content they might be interested in, such as #writer, #business, #blog.

11. Use lists. One great way to stay connected to people without having to follow them is by adding them to your lists. For instance, I have probably 800 writers on lists, and 150 thought leaders that might be good future story sources in a “gurus” list. Many people are flattered by getting into lists, so this is another weapon you have besides following.

12. Get a nice background. People who really operate on Twitter take the time to at least grab a free, unique Twitter background to spice up their site. The really together people have pictures of their products, website logos, and other cool stuff.

13. Understand how other forms of social media work. When I read “I linked Facebook too I believe,” it leads me to suspect that you don’t understand how other social-media channels work, either. Since coordinating your work in several social-media channels can save you time and help accelerate the level of help you get, you’ll want to learn how Facebook works, too.

14. Social media — love it or leave it. If you loathe social media, I’m going to put on my fortuneteller’s hat here and predict that you aren’t going to be successful using it. If you really hate it, do in-person networking or send email to people you want to come “recommend” your blog posts. If you hate it, people will pick up on that, and it won’t be a useful marketing channel for you.

15. The secret of being a writer on Twitter. Let you in on a little secret — umpty-million people on Twitter want to connect with writers! Especially journalists. If you say you are one, you will start to get followers rapidly. At this point, I follow very few people back…because I don’t have to. You should be able to fairly effortlessly achieve a good ratio with more followers and fewer following.

To sum up, take social media seriously and learn to have fun doing it if you can…it could really help your career. I’ve had a couple of Fortune 500 companies hire me through my LinkedIn profile — take a look at all the key words I’ve stuffed in there.

Need to learn more about how to market your writing? Join my learning community Freelance Writers Den, where high-earning pros answer your questions. There are e-courses, live events, private forums, and much more.

Photo via Flickr user Rosaura Ochoa

How do you market your writing? Some freelance writers might use a few different methods — maybe you’ve sent a query or two, used social media, and hit a networking event. Or maybe you don’t do any active marketing at all.

As the New Year comes into view, if you’re not earning as much as you’d like, it’s time to map out your writing-market strategy for 2011. The luck fairy is not going to bring you an assignment from that national magazine, or a lucrative copywriting gig from a major corporation. You’ll have to actively seek those opportunities, and navigate today’s fast-changing freelance writing market.

How many ways are there to market yourself? I recently pondered this question with another successful freelance writer, About Freelance Writing’s Anne Wayman.

Together we came up with 40 different marketing techniques you can use to spread the word about your freelance writing services. And we’re going to offer you a chance to learn them all in a single fun, fact-filled, one-hour Webinar.

After I did my survey post last month and asked what you would most like to learn, I saw the majority of the questions you have are about marketing. So Anne and I have designed this Webinar to give you a major injection of marketing knowledge one hour flat.

I am so excited about this opportunity to empower freelance writers to sharpen their marketing and earn more from their work! Here are the details:

40 Ways to Market Your Writing takes places Tuesday, Dec. 7 at 9 am PST. NOTE: Only 150 people will be able to participate.

What’ll be happening in the Webinar? Anne and I will discuss the 40 ways in two sections — online marketing techniques and offline, 3-D world strategies. After each set of marketing ideas, we will take live questions from participants.

If you’re already marketing actively, we bet you’ll still find quite a few great ideas here. If you’re new to marketing, this session will be jam-packed with new strategies you can put into use right away.

Besides a chance to learn a lot about marketing your writing in a short time, this teleclass is loaded with freebies and discounts, including a 30% discount on my 200-page eBook, Make a Living Writing: The 21st Century Guide, for all participants. Everyone will also receive a free special report after the Webinar on the 40 Ways, so you don’t even have to take notes!

We’ve got four door prizes we’re going to give away for the best questions sent in on the registration forms:

• 1 FREE copy of Make a Living Writing, The 21st Century Guide
• 1 FREE, 1-hour writing-business mentoring consultation with me
• 1 FREE copy of Anne’s book YOU Can Make Money Writing ebooks
• 1 FREE copy of Anne’s book How to Write a Non-Fiction Book Proposal That $ells

One final discount — get $20% off admission if you register before Thanksgiving Day. Until then, the Webinar is just $19.99. The discount expires at midnight on Nov. 24. (If you’re reading this now, the discount has expired, sorry…but you can fan this blog’s Facebook page for possible new offers.)

If you’ve been looking to learn more about marketing, here’s your chance. I can’t wait to talk with you live and offer you personalized help building your business.

You can purchase the Webinar here. Your receipt email will give you all the details on how to register and participate.

Any questions about the Webinar? Please leave them in the comments below…or come over and discuss them on the discussion tab at Make a Living Writing’s fan page on Facebook. Here’s your chance to shape the content we’ll deliver Dec. 7.

Social media — is it getting you gigs? If not, let’s take a look at some possible reasons. Social media takes a pretty substantial time investment, so if you’re putting in the time, it darn well better bring you some real business. Or you should send direct-mail letters instead.

Social media is not rocket science. Once you know the basics, you can do this.

I’ve only had a serious focus on social media for a couple of  years, and it’s been delivering solid results all this year. I recently did an analysis of my social-media wins so far in 2010, which included connecting with editors on Twitter and LinkedIn who gave me lucrative assignments and a great guest-post blogging opportunity. Yesterday, another new editor cold-called me after viewing my LinkedIn profile, and I signed a new client who found me on a Google search for writers (in part because of the prominence of my social-media profile pages in search results).

So social media works, if you work it.

Where might you be going wrong in social media? Here are 10 common problems:

1. You’re unknowable. When I scan daily through the dozens of email notices I get from new Twitter followers, I’m blown away by how many of them have no listed Web site, no photo, and an utterly blank bio. Really, how hard is it to fill that out?
2. You’re uninteresting. You’re tweeting or updating your LinkedIn status to say you’re at the dentist’s, or going to sleep…or other random stuff that’s useful to no one. Your blog posts are dull and full of typos. Make your posts funny, informative, thought-provoking, or uplifting.
3. You’re always selling. Every blog entry you write ends with, “So call us today!” Every tweet is about your company, or your clients. Zzzzzz…. Social media is just not about that.
4. You’re not very social. Even at well-funded companies, I find blogs with no social-media buttons, and company Web sites with no social contacts on the home page. Make it easy for others to spread the word about you, and they will.
5. You’re mysterious. Do your social-media profiles contain every key word a prospect might search on when they want to hire someone like you? If not, stop hiding from clients and go fix that right now. It might seem retarded to you to put “freelance writer, blogger, journalist, and copywriter,” but those are all different search terms a prospect might use to find me.
6. You don’t visit. Drop by some of the busiest sites in your industry, and see what they’re writing about. Subscribe to their blogs so you know what’s happening. Now and again, leave a comment on one of their blogs or forums. It’s fairly easy to get known as an authority voice in your industry this way.
7. You’re not helpful. People ask questions in social media, both across social-media sites and within specific forums and groups. Are you providing answers? It just takes a minute to share something you know, and people truly appreciate and remember it.
8. You’re not questioning. Social media is a fantastic place to learn, especially about all things new-media and Web. Don’t be afraid of looking dumb. If you don’t know how to put images in blogs or which print-on-demand publisher has the lowest fees, ask and find out.
9. You’re not a joiner. If you’re not participating in industry-specific groups in social media, you are missing the party. My main hangout is LinkedIn Editors & Writers for building my blog and ebook audience, but I have a half-dozen others as well. There are fewer people in each group than on the whole of LinkedIn, but they’re exactly the people you want to know. I’ve already made some great new friends in groups who I’ve talked to in the 3-D world.
10. You’re invisible. A little in-person networking where you meet a few of those tweeps live really helps cement those connections and turn them into real relationships. If you can’t get to a big event like BlogWorld — which I can’t manage this year — at least get out locally and meet some of the people you’ve connected to on social media.

If you enjoyed this handy checklist of social-media mistakes, get the Make a Living Writing blog free via email. Don’t miss any tips for earning more from your writing.

Photo via Flickr user webtreats

Lots of freelance writers use social media — LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and the like — as a way of finding clients, finding sources, and staying in touch with other writers. But I think few are aware of the emerging writing niche of getting paid by companies to write on social-media platforms.

The most basic social-media jobs involve writing Web content or doing social-media strategy for corporations, helping them with their social-media presence. Many companies are at the stage where they know they should be in social media, but they don’t really know how to do it, and they are turning to outside experts. It’s sort of a gold-rush moment in the field, since it’s still an emerging medium.

If you’ve been using social media yourself — you’re blogging and posting on community forums and major social sites, or running your own niche site and optimizing it for search — you should realize you have expertise that companies are paying for.

Because it’s such a new field, pay is all over the map. You can tell it’s starting to be a real job niche, though, because niche job Web sites have already sprung up to aggregate these jobs, such as jobsinsocialmedia.com. Recruiter Jim Durbin, the site owner, says pay depends mostly on your credentials and job history. If you’re a brand-new writer with your own blog, you’ll probably start out not making much. If you have copywriting experience or an agency or big-company marketing background, you could find yourself making $120,000 a year in a social-media strategy job.

Recent trends on Indeed.com show jobs that include the phrase “social media” in the description have gone from basically nothing a couple years ago to nearly 1 percent of all jobs listed on the site! I got more than 18,000 job listings for that keyword on a recent search, many for major companies including Radio Flyer, Avis, Hewlett-Packard, Coca-Cola and Office Depot. Big nonprofits including World Vision are looking, too.

Here are some of the major jobs in social media and descriptions of what they do. Maybe there’s a great new area in writing for you to help grow your income.

• Blogger. Most writers are familiar with blogging by now, but may not realize that companies and publications are paying well for blogs. Personally, I made more than half my income this month from blogging for companies and major publications. Pay ranges from squat to more than $100 a post.  To earn more, think about specialized, unusual expertise you can leverage, and target bigger companies and publications that need to project a top-quality image.
• Community manager. I wrote recently on WM about my cool friend Tony Kehlhofer, who landed an amazing part-time, work-from-home gig as a community manager for Lego’s new massive multiplayer online game for tweens, Lego Universe. You can read over there about the training he got so he can now monitor and respond on behalf of Lego to kids as they’re playing the game. I talked with a recruiter recently at a division of Spherion for my AOL story who said he’d recently filled a similar full-time community manager gig for a big company that paid $120,000 a year. Generally, if you’re already making a big-time marketing salary,  you can command these kind of rates.
• Social-media strategist or digital strategist. If you’re someone with a LOT of social-media experience, who understands what works and doesn’t in drawing people to a Web site, you can earn big in this role. Social-media strategists often oversee a social team developing on a company’s online marketing strategy. This person decides what the company needs to be doing in social media — what messages they should be sending, what sites they should be active on, the works. Copywriting coach Chris Marlow says most of the work is still freelance — but it’s going for upwards of $200 an hour. Working under this top-dog can be social-media marketing specialists and associates who help execute the strategy, tweeting, setting up Facebook fan communities and keeping them active, and so on.
• Online customer service representative. This can be a bottom-rung place to get started. It’s like the social-media version of a call center worker. Online reps troll social sites for mentions of their company, and then respond if needed. Had an interesting personal experience with this recently — got to jawing on Twitter with another writer about taxes and how we’d gotten IRS notices. I mentioned TurboTax didn’t seem to know how to do the adoption tax credit, I’d gotten a revision letter both the years I took it using the software. Next thing I know, a TurboTax rep DM’d me on Twitter to ask if I needed help! I told him about the problem and he said he’d report it to the company. What a feel-good customer experience! Somebody got paid to reach out to  me on there…and you could, too. These folks are also sometimes known as “online reputation defenders,” crusading online to burnish their brand’s image.
• Search engine marketing associate. SEM associates work with a Web site to make sure it’s optimizing its results in natural search on Google and other engines. Some of you are already doing this for your own sites, and could apply what you know to a paying gig.

Photo via Flickr user webtreats