It’s been awhile since I’ve been active on this blog. My activity here seems to go in spurts. The reasons for delays are many and varied, of course. Recently, there have been two big causes for being quiet on the blog. The first is that I ended up going out of town and didn’t have a lot of time to be online while I was gone. The other is that I’m working on a new writing schedule and I’m still trying to figure out where my personal blogs fit in to that.
I’ve got some new plans and goals for my writing life. I’m still in the planning stages of setting those goals. As I create them and commit to them, my need for a more efficient writing schedule is changing again.
Messing around with the schedule that I keep is something that I do regularly as a freelance writer. I do my best work in the morning so I try to get a lot done though. What “a lot” means changes, however, depending on whether I’m currently more focused on blogging, bigger writing projects or social promotion stuff. I also play around regularly with which 2-3 days off per week I want (weekends vs. weekdays is always a big questions for me). And finally, I’m hoping to take some extended vacations in the next couple of years so I’m trying to schedule for that as well.
The new schedule is almost worked out. When it’s ready, I’ll be back to writing regularly again here. And I’ll have a lot more to say about my specific goals and plans as a writer.
In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you about your thoughts on a writing schedule. Do you keep one? What’s the part of it that changes most often?
I’ve been doing a lot of guest blogging lately on frugal living blogs and green blogs. A lot of bloggers enjoy doing guest blogs because they give you so many benefits as a blogger.
Some of the benefits I’ve gained from guest blogging include:
- Corresponding with great bloggers. My favorite part about the experience is getting the chance to exchange thoughts on topics with the bloggers I write for.
- Feedback. These bloggers give me feedback on what I write for them which is nice since I usually only get that from people who comment on my blogs.
- Writing on fresh topics. My guest blog posts are usually on topics that interest me but that I don’t write about much on my own blogs. It’s nice to get to write on these things.
- Links and traffic. The main reason that most people guest blog is to get incoming links and new readers for their own blogs. It’s certainly a nice benefit of guest blogging.
Please check out some of my recent guest blog posts:
- Five Life Changing Benefits of Frugal Living.
- Where to Find Celebrity Styles for Less.
- How the Recession is Affecting Relationships.
- How to be Green with your Writing.
- 5 Key Sacrifices to Make if you Really want to Save Money.
- Smart Budget Travel Ideas for Summer Holidays.
- Cheap Alternatives to a Hotel.
- Frugal Living tips for Professionals from College Kids.
I write across a huge range of different topics. Drop a line if you’re looking for a guest blogger and maybe we can work something out!
Today is the second annual Writers Worth Day, a day that was created by fellow blogger Lori Widmer as a way to raise awareness of the importance of valuing the work that we do as freelance writers. Many freelance writers sell themselves short by accepting low-paying jobs, doing writing for free and agreeing to ceaseless unpaid edits. This day is a day to help those writers learn to value their own time and talents enough for them to stop accepting inadequate pay for their work.
Freelance writers across the nation should support this issue because of the fact that those writers who do accept the low-paying jobs are impacting the industry for all of us. Every field has an average market value that customers are willing to pay for the work that they want done. When too many writers accept low-paying work, the market value goes down and it becomes more difficult for the rest of us to find good clients who are willing to pay a fair wage.
Learn more about what you can do to get involved in Writers Worth Day here.
And a thanks to About Freelance Writing which is how I learned about Writers Worth Day.
I recently came across an old article with 101 Ways to Monetize your Blog. The truth is that there aren’t 100+ unique methods of monetization in this article because many of the items fall under the same category. (For example, CafePress and PrintInfection options are listed as two separate items when really the method that you’re using is selling merchandise on your blog.) Despite the somewhat misleading name, there are indeed over one hundred specific options here contained within different categories that should give you a good idea of how to start making money off of your blog in ways that you might not already be doing.
One of the suggestions that I’m really interested in here is ShareAPic. This is a site where you can host your own photo galleries and make some money off of them every time that they get viewed. Most bloggers use photos on their blog posts so that’s a simple way to use your blog to promote your photo gallery and make a little bit of extra cash. That’s one of the more interetsing options for monetization that I’ve looked at in awhile and it’s an idea that I’d like to explore more myself.
I’d also like to add a new method of blog monetization that isn’t on this list although the category it falls into is which is making money via Twitter. This would fall under the “begging” category on the original post which includes options like adding a PayPal button or a “buy me a coffee” option on your blog. The idea is the same; add a blog button through a site like TipJoy so that your blog readers can Tweet donations your way.
I try to keep my own blog monetization limited but I do like some of these ideas. What are your favorite ways to make some money off of your blog?
People who don’t naturally write well often tell me that I’m lucky to have such a gift. I usually brush this off because I believe that each of us has different talents and mine just happens to be that writing comes easily to me. However, I’ve noticed that there is some truth to the fact that my writing is a gift in a much more literal sense of the word.
You see, as a writer, I often give the gift of words to others for holidays and special occasions. Because writing is what comes naturally to me, it makes sense for me to use that to create handmade thoughtful gifts for the people that I care about. These gifts include poems, letters, quote journals, scrapbooks with captions and even the start of a book for one person.
There are several reasons that these gifts are treasured (I hope) by the people that receive them. The most important reason is that these are personal gifts that took time to make by hand. Everyone loves a homemade gift. The nostalgia / memories involved and the fact that these gifts often go to people for whom writing doesn’t come naturally are other reasons people enjoy these gifts.
As a writer, do you use your writing as a gift to others?
See my articles on 7 Things to Write Your Mom for Mother’s Day and What to Write for Someone You Love to get ideas of the types of things writers might write as gifts to others.
Yesterday I wrote about the fact that I really don’t mind typos in the work that I’m reading and that I even kind of like them because they add a little bit of humor and surprise to my reading. However, I will say that there are some typos and writing errors that annoy me when I see them. There’s nothing inherently more wrong with these particular typos than with other types of errors. They just happen to be my own pet peeves in writing.
The typo pet peeve that annoys me the most is when people put apostrophes in front of an “s” for no reason. I recently saw an article titled Way’s To Save on something or other. The article was fine but that random apostrophe in ways made me not want to even read it. You can never tell if this is a typo or if the person doesn’t understand the use of apostrophes but for some reason this one always grates against me.
It also annoys me when there are accidental capitalizations in writing. FOr examplE. This isn’t the same as when people to choose to write in ALL CAPS. That annoys me a bit too but it’s not really an issue. But then random capitalizations that are clearly a mistake annoy me. It just seems like something that you should easily catch when glancing at your screen. In contrast, accidentally failing to capitalize something doesn’t annoy me at all. Funny how we are about these things isn’t it?
What are your pet peeves when it comes to errors in the writing that you’re reading?
Proofreading seems to be a topic that people are talking about a lot around the web right now. Deb Ng mentioned her problems with proofreading her own blogs when she put up her job leads today. And About Freelance Writing has 6 tips for self-proofreading. I always think that this is an interesting topic because I feel completely the opposite of it as almost everyone else but have had to conform to people’s views because of the nature of my work.
You see, I don’t care about typos. Don’t get me wrong - if something is completely filled with typos and misspellings then I definitely start to wonder about the person who wrote the article. But if there’s just one or two typos in a piece then I really don’t care at all. I assume that the person was typing to quickly and didn’t catch the error when proofreading. This is particularly true of blogs and posts and social networks.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that sometimes I really like seeing other people’s typos. They often make me laugh. I’ll see typos in printed books sometimes and they always make me do a double take and think “hm”. Sometimes the mistake itself is humorous and sometimes it’s just nice to see that other professional writers make mistakes too.
But I know that most people don’t agree about this. I’ve read plenty of articles on the topic and I know that almost everyone makes some really bad judgments about writers who have typos in their work. These writers come off as unprofessional, lazy, careless … etc … And because of that, I work really hard to proofread my work when I’m posting for a client. I don’t want that image of me as a writer being put out there even if I don’t care about typos myself.
But the truth is that I still struggle to proofread the work that I do for my own blogs. I kind of figure that if a typo slips in now and then, I don’t really care. I like to connect with people who have a similar laidback attitude as me towards writing and life in general. I believe that content matters way more than a few errors and I like meeting people who feel the same way. However, Deb’s post today does point out that our personal blogs are seen by potential clients and so it may be important to proofread even if I think it’s kind of silly.
What do you think? Do you abhor typos? Do you proofread your own blogs before they go live?
I use Twitter regularly although not nearly as actively as many of my fellow online writers. I post all of my blog updates and HubPages articles to Twitter so that my friends there can see what I’ve been writing lately. I try to follow what the people I’m friends with on the site are posting. And I ReTweet a few things here and there to pass on what I think is really interesting information. I’m not a prolific user of the site but I’m active enough.
That alone isn’t enough reason for you to want to follow me, I’m sure. But you should know that others think I’m worth following. The oDesk blog recently listed 25 writers to follow on Twitter and named me on the list. I’m there with some really great company so check out the post to see who else you should be following. I’m also included on a second great list of 39 Writers to Follow on Twitter that was posted by Get Paid To Write Online.
I can be followed at http://twitter.com/kathrynvercillo.
We have all had that awful moment when we suddenly realize that the computer has eaten our work. It’s a moment of panic. In many cases, you can do a simple “undo” move and get your writing back on the screen but for that moment before you figure out that the work can be saved you feel this terrible sinking in your gut.
And sometimes, the feeling is even worse because the computer has won and there is not going to be any saving of the work.
This problem doesn’t happen to me often. Since I write all day long for a living, I’m really good about doing frequent saves and backing up my work regularly. I’m meticulous about it. But things go wrong sometimes. And every once in awhile I experience one of those situations when I’ve lost a big chunk of original writing and there aren’t many options for getting it back.
That happened to me about a month ago with the book that I’m working on. I’m writing a San Francisco travel guide based on my blog San Francisco is Sexy. Or I was until about a month ago. What happened was a stupid error … I was getting ready to reformat my laptop so I saved all of my work to my desktop computer. Only some things delayed me and I didn’t get around to the reformatting for a few weeks. At that time, I went to save the work to the desktop again. And I made a mistake.
For some reason, I just didn’t re-save the file that had the book in it. I saved everything else. Bookmarked sites I don’t need, work that is already online and doesn’t need to be backed up … but I simply missed that file. I had done a lot of work on the book in those few weeks. When I went to move the files back to my newly formatted computer and saw what I’d done, I felt this terrible disappointment in my gut.
The truth is that it’s not that bad. I still have the previous draft of the book from the first save. I know where all of my research came from. It’s not going to be that difficult to write the original copy again. Although I could pay money to try to get the most recent draft back, I don’t think it’s worth it because really it’s not that terrible to rewrite the thing again. In fact, I tend to think that it’s a chance to start with fresh eyes and to do a better write-up this time around.
However, I can’t seem to get my brain to move through the writer’s block that was caused by this setback. I know that it’s not a big deal and that it’s an easy re-write and that it might be better this time. I know that the only way to get it done is to get going on it. And yet every time I open up the document and see the missing pieces that I know were once there, I freeze up … I just don’t want to write it again.
I’m not sure what this means. That I’m not as committed to the project as I thought? That it’s not as exciting or appealing to me as it was originally? Maybe. Or maybe I’m just still sulking that the computer beat me this time. Since books don’t write themselves, I’m going to have to get over whatever it is. I’ll do that. Tomorrow.
I scan the Internet almost every day in search of new job leads. I like to see what’s out there and to dip my writing fingers into different waters as often as possible. However, I actually don’t apply to new jobs very often.
Some of the reasons that I typically don’t apply to a lot of jobs include:
- Most of them are low-paying. A lot of what’s actually advertised is either no-pay, revenue-only or low-paying work and I’m not at a stage in my freelance career where that’s what I’m looking for.
- Many of them are not for the writing that I do. I am a freelance writer with a diverse background and I’ve written lots of different types of stuff but these days I primarily stick to blogging for businesses. That’s what I most enjoy doing. As a result, I don’t tend to apply for jobs to write web content, ghostwrite ebooks or any of that stuff which severely limits the number of jobs that I’m interested in applying for.
- Many of them are one-time jobs. Occasionally I’ll take on a one-time writing gig if I think that it sounds interesting. For the most part, though, I like to apply to jobs that will provide a steady ongoing source of income. A lot of what’s advertised out there doesn’t fall into that category.
- I don’t bid on jobs. Many times I’ll follow an interesting job lead only to discover that it’s on a site like elance where you have to bid against others for the work. I used to do that and don’t find that it suits me very well. It’s great for many writers but it’s not an approach to finding work that works for me so I ignore those leads.
And then there are those ads that you look at and you just know that they are some sort of scam. Like this one on Craigslist right now. The link is surely going to get flagged soon so I’ll share with you what the ad is in full:
Wine gig for blogger: $10K/mo (financial district)
“Blogger to get $10K/mo for wine gig.” B at Market St/Hyatt SF 1130 am 4/28 Kiosk 2 beat pack
Compensation: $10K/mo for six months gig; housing included
I have to confess that I’m really curious to know what this is really all about. They’re offering you housing and ten grand a month do blog about wine. Obviously that’s not really true but there must be some reason that they want you to go to that kiosk. I’m curious as to what that reason is and what people are going to find when they get there. And I’m really curious to know if they are actually going to get anyone interested in whatever it is that they’re really offering.
Mostly I hate seeing ads that are clearly scams but sometimes it’s neat just because it gets your imagination going as to what they’re all about! There’s nothing wrong with a stirred imagination - especially when you’re a writer!
