Real Words

One of the things that I’ve thought about doing off and on is hiring a social media person. This would be someone who would have the job of doing the social media promotion for all of my work as well as for all of the posts that I do for my clients. It’s a tempting thing to consider doing but in the end I’ve decided that the cons outweigh the pros so I’m not going to do it.

Benefits of Hiring a Social Media Person

There are a lot of good reasons for me to hire a social media person. Doing so could benefit my own blogs as well as increase the traffic that I’m getting for my clients. The core benefits of having someone else do this instead of myself would be:

• That individual would be sole focused on social media promotion. Social media promotion is only one of the tasks that I perform as a blogger. Things I do as a blogger include defining the content, writing the content, adding images and videos to the posts, scheduling the posts, doing internal and external linking and then promoting the posts through various methods. When time gets tight, it’s hard to focus completely on social media. Hiring someone to do that would guarantee that the time and focus was on that regularly.
• It would mean I wouldn’t have to do social media stuff. The truth is that I don’t like doing a lot of social media promotion. There are things that I like using Facebook and Twitter for. I am starting to get into LinkedIn for various uses. However I don’t particularly enjoy the promotion of my own posts on these sites. Hiring someone to do it would mean I wouldn’t have to.
• I’d get an outside opinion on my social media strategy. Working alone means that I end up doing everything on my own and can get really stuck in my own way of doing things. This isn’t as bad with my clients’ blogs because I get their feedback on the social media strategy that I plan out for them. However it can be bad for my own blogs. It would be nice to have that second person giving me suggestions and feedback on how I approach my blog promotion.

I wanted to share a great link today. oDesk (a terrific resource) has posted a new set of 40 Freelance Writing Blogs to follow. They don’t just list them either – they give a really great breakdown of who each blog author is, why the blog is a great read and what specific pieces to check out on the blog.

I personally haven’t checked out all of these blogs yet but many of them are ones that I’m already following. Out of the ones that I am familiar with from the forty on the list, my top ten favorites are:

1. All Freelance Writing.
2. Bizzia.
3. Freelance Writing Jobs Network.
4. Get Paid to Write Online.
5. Men with Pens.
6. Poe War.
7. The Renegade Writer Blog.
8. Thursday Bram.
9. The Urban Muse.
10. Write to Done.

Which is your favorite freelance writing blog?

I have always loved memoirs. I like personal stories that share insight into the different ways that people live. Memoirs work better for me than biographies or autobiographies because they are more poetic and usually more personal. I don’t care about the facts and stats of someone’s life; I care about their thoughts and passions. Memoirs give me insight into those things. Great memoirs that really resonate with me also give me new insight into myself.

One memoir writer that I just recently discovered is Sue William Silverman. Her first memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, is the story of her years growing up in a childhood where she experienced sexual abuse. Her second memoir, Love Sick, is about her struggle with sex addiction which resulted from this abuse. I haven’t read her first book yet but recently finished Love Sick and definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the topics of abuse, addiction and relationships.

But what does this have to do with writing? Well, Silverman’s most recent book is all about the art of writing a memoir. The book is called Fearless Confessions and it looks like it’s a great book for people who are interested in learning to write their own memoirs but who aren’t quite sure how to go about it (or who simply need a bit of inspiration for that). I haven’t actually read the book yet but I’m awaiting my copy of it in the mail and will return here with a full review once I’ve read it.

The reason that I wanted to bring it up now, though, is because Silverman is currently in the midst of a blog tour. Fearless Confessions is being reviewed, discussed and given away on different blogs all throughout the month. I love following blog tours and I think that this memoir looks really good so I wanted to share that information with others. The details for that tour are here. If you check it out, do come back and let me know what you think!

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!

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?

The oDesk Blog has published a list of the top 100 blogs for freelancers. It’s an interesting list that’s somewhat unique from the other lists of this nature that I’ve seen. It includes selections for freelancers from multiple areas of the web.

I found it interesting that it was necessary to separate “freelance blogging” and “freelance writing” into two categories. Most articles will just lump them together even though they can be quite different. In fact, I tend to lump them together since I do both myself but I actually do think that the information most important to one group isn’t necessarily that which is most important to another group.

I was excited to discover several blogs here that I hadn’t known about before. The ones that interested me most were actually those that fell into the “freelance lifestyle” category. Whatever the differences between various types of freelancers, what we have in common is that we need to deal with the pros and cons of working from home in a productive way. I read Zen Habits regularly but there were many other blogs in this category that I didn’t know at all.

Good stuff. Happy reading!

Real Words is a blog that I keep for a few reasons. Mostly, I like to share the insights that I have about being a writer because I believe that these insights may be of some use or interest to those other people who are doing this work from the sometimes-lonely spot in front of a solitary computer. I don’t do this for money or attention or success in any traditional form but rather because it builds great online relationships for me with other writers and bloggers doing similar work.

This fact was recognized recently when I was given the honor of receiving an award for my work by a great writing blog called the Incurable Disease of Writing. I need to pass that award along to other great blogs and I’ll be doing that soon but first I wanted to give some attention to the other blogs that received this award at the same time as me. None of these were blogs that I knew about before this award came to me and yet all are ones that I find to be of interest. It is exactly this kind of sharing and support that makes me want to write Real Words.

Here’s a look at the other blogs that were included:

• Angelawd: The Writer Gets the Last Word. This is the ongoing story of one writer’s attempts to live a life filled with laughter and beauty. A great recent post to check out is this one on two perspectives for one story.
• A Gentleman’s Domain. The blog of an Englishman in Florida who recently wrote a good post on the ending of blogs you like.
• Ramblings of Maggie. I’ve never met a “ramblings” blog I didn’t like and this one is no exception. Not only is the blog good but so are the Twitter updates.
• West of Mars – The Meet and Greet. This writing blog is truly different. It’s not a blog about writing but instead a fiction blog so you can read stories here and see the process of writing at work.
• Thoughts of An Aspiring Writer. My favorite part of this blog so far is the updates on what the writer is reading.
• History is Elementary. This one is for history buffs. I don’t usually fall into that category but it’s an interesting read because of the great writing style. And I kind of just love teachers who write.
• Amy Sue Nathan. What I see here is a woman who is honest about her life in words. And she applies it to writing. Check out What’s In Your Purse.

Thanks to Incurable Disease of Writing for turning me on to these blogs. Now I have to think about where else I want to share the love!

I spent the past weekend reformatting my entire computer. This was not a short process. It involved backing up all of my files which I don’t do nearly as often as I should considering how important it is for me to save many of the documents that I write. Then I had to do the actual reformatting and then the updating and then the transfer of important files back to my computer.

Mostly, this process went smoothly (due in no small part to the fact that I had help from my IT guy and didn’t even do a lot of it myself). And the computer is now in really good shape without the problems that it was having before and with increased RAM which makes it easier to do many different things from my laptop.

The one thing that didn’t go smoothly though was that I somehow managed to fail to save my Feeds. I saved my favorites and my files but I forgot my feeds. This means that my long list of writing blogs that I check daily to read is now gone. I am in the process of recreating the list now. Many of these blogs are blogs that I love enough to remember them easily but some were ones I just read now and then and who knows if I’ll ever remember them and read them again.

I’m sad about the loss. But when life gives you lemons, right? I decided that this was a really great time to learn about new writing blogs so I’m putting a call out to all of you. Please send me the links to any blogs about writing, blogging and freelancing. Include your own blog, of course, as well as the blogs that you read regularly on this topic (let’s share the love and support our favorite bloggers!)

Leave it in the comments.

As mentioned briefly yesterday in my blog carnival round up post, I have started a new blog called Diary of a Smart Chick. The purpose of the new blog is to serve as a place where I can compile information about my writing across all of the many different topic areas that interest me.

For a long time I have been trying to figure out the best way to keep an ongoing online record of all of my work. I write across so many different websites and topics that there’s never seemed to be a great way to do that. Although I’ve started using social networking sites like Twitter to let people know about blog and article updates, I haven’t found a good place to keep that information stored online.

In some ways, I’ve tried to do that from this blog. This blog is primarily about my experience as a web writer so it makes sense to use it to link to my writing around the web. However, I have always wanted this blog to be more about what it means to me to a be a writer each day than to serve as a showcase for my work. So I’ve tried to limit how much I link out to my other writing, especially writing that isn’t about writing and blogging and Web 2.0 issues.

I realized recently that I could create a whole blog devoted to the different topics that I cover regularly in my work. This coincided well with realizing that I wasn’t going to follow through on another project that I’d been toying around with for about six months. You see, Diary of a Smart Chick originally started as a website that was going to pull together news feeds from my twelve favorite topic areas. I was planning to discuss that news there and then allow for social networking about those topics on the site. But the logistics of doing that stopped making sense and I never finished creating the site. Now the site will serve the purpose of discussing those same twelve topic areas through the lens of my work around the web.

I hope that you’ll check it out as it develops. It’s only just launched so March is the trial period of beginning to post and discuss my work links. I’d love some feedback on what other writers think about blogs that are designed primarily for the purpose of compiling links to your web work in one place. How have other writes been doing this?

I’ve been lucky to be included in a lot of really great blog carnivals this week. Take a look:

My Writing Posts:

• My post on Reasons to Date a Writer was part of the Everything Worth Reading Carnival. Cool posts from that carnival include those on public speaking, love poems, blogging and stress.
• My Thoughts on Revealing your Writing Rates were included in the Make Money Blogging Carnival along with a whole slew of others posts on important blogging topics such as google adsense, word press, site indexing, niche marketing, keywords, Twitter and other social media. This same post was included in the carnival of struggling bumbling newbies.
• My opinion on A Writer’s Weekends was part of the business freelance writing carnival along with posts on article writing, book writing and marketing, doing reviews, building a portfolio and even some thoughts on defamation.
• My links to Hundreds of Resources for Writers were included on the Free the Internet carnival. Other interesting posts there were on blogging, eHow, search engine optimization, meta tags, web hosting and web traffic.

My Posts on Freelance Taxes:

• My Freelance Tax Writeoff Tips were included on a huge carnival of government and money under the tax situation alongside other tax topics such as tax software reviews, tax preparation, tax filing and tax refunds.
• My Freelancer’s Guide to Important Tax Deductions was in the Working at Home Blog Carnival. It was featured in the business section of the blog carnival along with some great posts on IT careers during the recession, budgeting software, passive income, marketing optimism and entrepreneurs. This carnival also had posts on many other topics including home organization, investment, filing taxes, choosing good opportunities, setting goals, business book writing and marketing, article writing, email interviews, health care, Roth IRAs, productivity , frontier living, making money online (and getting paid), computer inventions, teleseminars and even VoIP (a topic I used to write about).

Other Posts:

• My Ideas for Sticking to a Personal Budget were featured in the budgeting section of a personal finance carnival along with posts on the economy, scholarships and tracking living expenses. This money blog carnival also had posts on economics, financial planning, home financing, income, debt and spending.