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.