Master Dayton | Freelance Writing | How to Be a Freelance Writer | How to Become a Freelance Writer

And The Times They Are A Changin'

2011-09-12T02:21:00.065-05:00

Freelance Writing in 2011: What to Do Now?

Hey all. This freelance writing blog post has been long overdue, but I've felt for several months now that there have been some huge issues that not only do all online freelance writers need to deal with and then there are also the questions I've been wrestling with as far as what to do with this blog. I'd like to say I have everything figured out, but that wouldn't be true. This is going to be a long marathon read, so grab your caffeine and snack and settle in and dig in because I'm tackling everything at once this time.

First of all, if some of this post seems redundant or a little circuitous, please cut me a little bit of slack. Organization isn't my biggest strong point to begin with, and some of the things I want to talk about right away also have relevance to multiple freelance writing topics being covered in this post. Basically this blog post can be broke down into three overarching topics that will each have plenty of subheadings:

How the freelance and Internet markets have changed dramatically in 2011
What you should do NOW as a beginning writer or Internet Marketer (as opposed to a lot of advice that is now obsolete due to #1)
What's the future of this blog?

These three topics are going to cover a lot, but there's no argument that the online world has changed immensely. It's always going to, and Google's Panda updates and (although they deny this many search results say otherwise) decision to jump into bed with giant companies and retailers in the search results has only added to the chaos. Advice I've given for the last two years for beginners and part timers, advice that worked for the last two years, often doesn't work anymore.

A lot has changed since I started this blog. HubPages is not the place to send beginners anymore or a place to make easy online income. eHow no longer exists and there's a lot of signs that Demand Studios might be in trouble. Constant-Content is still a potentially great place, but the long waits are getting to the point of being intolerable. But demand for independent freelance writers for web content is also at an all time high. The Keyword Academy is moving from TKA 1.0 methods to TKA 2.0 methods - the online world is changing and what's being created isn't going to look anything like what's been there in the past. This doesn't mean that the ability to make a living online is harder - if anything it's easier in certain ways and the best strategies are more sustainable from a business and personal stand point, but let's not kid ourselves at all: you have to adapt to the changes to survive, much less to thrive.

This blog has been about passion since the beginning. I love being a freelance writer, I love helping other people, and I wanted to really teach what I had learned to others so they could take advantage of this stuff far earlier than I did and also skip a lot of the learning curve that causes so many to quit. Figuring out you can make a living online can be a life changing proposition and so many college students, college grads, and young adults are struggling at a time when even a part time income from online writing could make all the difference in the world. I've done my best to provide excellent advice, and a lot of it still applies. Unfortunately because of the ever changing nature of the online world, and 2011 was the mother of all years even by normal "change" standards, a lot of the old posts are outdated or even worse, give advice that is not only outdated but now flat out wrong.

Does this freelance writing blog have a future?
The hardest section to address will be what the future of this blog is and what the future of my efforts helping others as freelancers is going to look like. Because of that, it's also the section that will be the most broken up. For one, this is a Blogger blog, which means I don't own it. If Google decides to shut this blog down and erase all the posts tomorrow, they could. This doesn't mean it will happen, but someday it could. So what would I do at that point? What about my readers? Where do I want to go with this blog I started (more than a little naively) back in 2007?

Depending on when you read this, the "Sign up for Updates" form may or may not be on the right hand side from Aweber yet, because my first priority is getting the post up and then following up with possible future transitions. Basically I'm going to start collecting e-mail addresses because in all likelihood eventually I'm going to have to move my blogging efforts to my own URL that I actually have control over. The e-mail addresses will allow me to update whenever there's a new blog post, point you to that rare blog post or program that actually does kick butt, and when I start publishing e-books and kindle books ya'll would be the first to know. In the eventual situation if Google ever decided to eliminate this blog, then I would be able to tell you where to go to find my long winded blog posts :)

So if you want to stay in touch, keep an eye for that box and sign up, and from there it's onto our huge array of topics. And while the Social Proof will be more important for my future blog site, if you don't mind giving this post (or blog or both) a +1 on Google Plus or posting this on Facebook with a "Like" I would very much appreciate it - but only do so if you really find value here. I would never ask for any support you don't think I deserve.

Is HubPages worth writing for Post-Panda?
I supposed I can't get away with just saying "no." Well: No. I can no longer recommend HubPages to beginners or anyone really for that matter. Some of my hubs are staying up because I just don't have websites where some of those articles will fit, and you can still get an occasional backlink but based on a lot of reasons, I would recommend not spending your time here. Sign up for The Keyword Academy, even if you can only afford the one free month at first to learn what you need to learn and work on your own sites. That's the way now of building a great passive income, and two years ago HubPages ranked quickly and acted like a "short cut." All the work I've done this year shows me that there are no more short cuts to ranking quickly. Going with your own sites is the fastest way to go.

Ever since going to the subdomains, here's the pattern I see with HubPages: traffic shoots up for 4-5 days, then plummets to near non-existence (this means from 2,300 a day to less than 300) for the rest of the month, then 2-5 days where for no reason they shoot up in rankings again. So far despite a lot of testing, there's no rhyme or reason and until it stabilizes, if ever, I can't recommend them. The general HubPages' admin reaction to Panda and how they decided to run the business were also atrocious and often misguided and in my opinion did more damage than even the Google Panda update did to HubPages. If you want a fuller scoop, then check out my blog post on HubPages for the full story.

Otherwise, it's enough to know that I no longer support HubPages and have already removed 35+ hubs and counting, and anticipate only having 30-40 there by the end...all backed up if (when?) HubPages eventually closes.

Why are you pushing the Keyword Academy so hard?
I know what it's like to start in the hole. It sucks. I've worked my way out of homelessness twice and despite what a lot of people in the States think (excuse the language) - it's next to fucking impossible to do. Think about it: I started off with a really crappy laptop, but I was a homeless guy with a laptop. Without it, I have no idea how people dig themselves out. But that's a 10,000 word post for another time, you can get the abbreviated version of how I became a freelance writer there, but the long and short of it is: I don't have a lot of time to waste because I have medical bills, student loans, credit cards, and basically a ridiculous amount of monthly bills that require many hours of freelancing to cover even at $30+ an hour, and then there's that expensive travel habit. If you're looking for long term passive income so you can live a life a la The 4 Hour Work Week, or looking to make yourself a safety net for after college (never been a worst time in history to be a college grad entering the job market), then The Keyword Academy is the best method.

It's NOT a get rich quick scheme, it does NOT work overnight, but if you're looking for passive income, they teach the best stable long term methods, give the best tools and advice, and will show you how to succeed if you're willing to work for it. There is no short cut using Amazon or AdSense anymore - so stop trying to game Google and learn how to make your websites Google's darlings instead. That's why I strongly advise joining The Keyword Academy (yes, that is an affiliate link, because I do believe that much in them to put my reputation on the line) if you are looking to build passive income. It's the best program, and they're going to offer you more than I ever could.

Is Demand Studios Finished?
If you've been coming here as a freelance writer and you don't have any interest in online passive income, then the section on HubPages doesn't really affect you at all. However this next one will. I've long been a proponent of Demand Studios as a great place for college students, busy moms, people with disabilities, or basically as a place a beginning writer could go and get experience in the writing world and make some decent money. A lot of people argued on this point, but $15 per article for a writer with no experience isn't bad, and if you've looked at the economy lately, for a lot of people it was good. Especially since there was no reason to do less than 2 an hour once you got the hang of what DS wanted, and voice recognition software could move that up to 3-4.

But traditionally Demand Studios would also have tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of articles and in the past three months they fell dramatically down to 10,000 area, and have consistently been 3,000 or less recently. This is not a good sign for them at all, and considering the timing of when former eHow writers agreed to their buyouts, often at 8-12 month's worth of royalties (which was before the Panda update) and then DS having to pay writers for the contracts that were agreed upon at Pre-Panda earnings levels, and then the Panda update slammed Demand Studios properties during this time. Traffic losses were anywhere from 40 to 80 percent depending who you talked to, and this is from a company that has produced one quarter of profit (end of 2010).

Even before Panda, Demand Studios warned they expected to lose between $8.5 million and $16 million in the first two quarters of 2011, and that was Pre-Panda. The actual numbers according to the released statements for 2011 was $8.0 million - but we know traffic numbers are down immensely and the company is already buying back stock from its public offering. Even if the company itself isn't "finished" in the traditional sense, I'd be extremely surprised if the freelance writing section survived. With tens of thousands of authors competing for 3,000 articles, it's no longer worth your time anyway.

So what's this mean? Frankly, if you haven't begun finding private clients on and off line, now is the time. The good news from the Google updates is that poorly written $1 articles from India, China, and the Philippines are not making the money any more. More than ever the very well written and crafted articles are scoring well in Google, meaning the demand for English speaking freelance writers to write excellent web content is shooting for the roof. And people are willing to pay a lot more for it than even a year or two ago.

So ditch Demand Studios. Like HubPages, they're not coming back. It was a good ride while it lasted.

Wait a minute, Squidoo is back in?
This is a harder one to answer that falls into the "yes and no" category. I am making some excellent money from my early efforts at Squidoo but I have several things going for me:

I was there in the very beginning and so have followers, a forum presence, and several aged and well ranking lenses
I understand exactly what types of topics work best now on Squidoo and which should be saved for my own sites
I know how to set up the features on my Squidoo lenses to get A LOT of affiliate sales from Amazon and eBay

Does Squidoo have a ridiculous amount of potential for the future? Absolutely! Based on traffic numbers I'm getting, I think it's only a matter of time until they expand the tiers and I expect the value of each tier to continue to grow. That said, is Squidoo for the inexperienced or pure beginners? I don't think so. If you want to build some online passive income and absolutely refuse to create your own sites, then Squidoo is better than HubPages now in my opinion, and use a site like InfoBarrel to dive into AdSense.

Free reports coming soon
As an English major I have been trained to hate cliches with a passion, but as a blogger they can come in handy. In case you somehow have never noticed, I can get long winded in the old fashioned Grizzly style of blog post. I have a lot to say about freelance writing, and I want to share my online writing experiences in as much detail as possible to help out. So the cliche goes "Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater," and that's how I feel about a lot of the old posts on this site. There's still valuable information, but there's also a lot of outdated stuff mixed in.

I figure using those posts as the basis of some free updated reports will not only be helpful to everyone and help me sleep better at night (not kidding, I get some weird OCD sometimes and once I started worrying about people getting old info from my blog - it kept me up), but help convince of ya'll to stay with me once I check into a new URL location :) I'll be updating on Constant-Content, Associated Content, Squidoo, and some of the less site specific and still very important "general" topics like finding online work and private clients.

And by soon, we'll say next two months. The end of this year is looking pretty crazy. Following that will be an e-book on making a living as a freelance writer: updated for online, offline, and passive income. I'm thinking about releasing it as a Kindle e-book, but am not completely sure yet. Might do a PDF online version and a Kindle, though the obvious potential issue there is people without a Kindle paying more than those who do. Anyone who has thoughts on this one way or another feel free to comment: I'm curious to see what the feedback would be.

Updating the 4 year plan for college students
This is a big one. My original post on a 4 year writing plan for college students to turn them into full time freelance writers (with passive income) by graduation was one of my favorites to write, and that was almost 2 years ago. The problem is, out of the 6 or 7 sites I recommended for college students to sign up for, now I would only recommend one of them (well maybe two, but only one solid) and several of them don't take new writers any more. In other words, while the concepts behind the 4 year writing plan are sound, the specific actions mentioned are terribly outdated. I could see this one being a report, it could be a blog post, it could probably be expounded upon into a Kindle e-book, but one way or another an update will be coming. Like I said in the original post, I'm really passionate about helping college students because it's not that long ago I was there - and this is stuff all of them should know to create a much more stable future than what the job markets are going to give them.

Hasn't the Keyword Academy Changed?
Yes, and for the better. But wait, I hear you saying, didn't you fully support The Keyword Academy for almost a full two years now? Yes. This isn't contradictory, either. What is now being called the TKA 1.0 was completely effective when The Keyword Academy started, and to an extent it still is completely effective. None of the moderators or people running the Keyword Academy say otherwise, but the risk of being de-indexed by Google and of wanting to stabilize the passive income is what leads to TKA 2.0, the new methods.

If you notice one of the constant themes of this post, it's "update, update, update" followed by the explanation of "the writing world changes, things aren't the same anymore, the writing world changes, things aren't the same anymore." So doesn't it make sense that if a great online passive income course is going to STAY RELEVANT that it must change?

The simple state of it is this: there is one and only one course online (and there are many trustworthy people, writers, marketers online, so don't mis-quote me here) that I would attach my reputation to without worry. Going by the honor code I was raised by, I would give my word to vouch for The Keyword Academy without hesitation. That's how much I think of them.

Super quick list of site changes

eHow - no longer accepts writers
Demand Studios - no longer recommended by me
Xomba - no longer recommended by me
Associated Content - okay for pure beginners, but much colder on this than before
HubPages - you might be able to make something, but no longer recommend
Squidoo - still torn on them, but better than HubPages
InfoBarrel - best option left for AdSense share article directory
Constant Content - great for beginning writers, can make some good money, but the wait times have become ridiculously long. Cools me a little on the site
Helium - never liked them after test, still don't. Stay away.
Guru.com - you need to be committed to this site, but good for pure freelancers
Elance - see Guru.com, though some will like Elance better, some will like Guru better
Rentacoder, oDesk - lots of good reviews, I don't know enough first hand to give you advice either way on either one of these sites
The Keyword Academy - Hells Yes
Master Dayton - Do you even need to ask? :)

So what else are you up to? (aka why you've been away so freaking long?)
Between personal life, friends getting married, and literally 1/2 the summer traveling, I've been busy. I'm working on multiple businesses, looking forward to the premiere of an independent film I helped produce (I try not to do more than one Hells Yes a post, but this is definitely worth another Hell Yes), and am about to set up a professional website - the new blog may or may not be attached to the professional site - still deciding on this. Might be a good way to go since ya'll could find me and see how a professional page is set up - once again if you have any comments on this feel free to comment, I'd love to hear it!

This is also another point of why I want to move off of Blogspot. SEO is MUCH easier on an owned URL than a blogspot blog. In other words, I could post shorter posts more often along with these super long ones and get more traffic with less effort. If I don't have to spend a lot of time getting links, I can spend a lot more time writing and helping others.

So what is the future of this blog?
As far as the exact blogspot blog, I'm going to keep it up. I know I could get a lot of juice to a new site doing a 301 direct to a new site with the 2,000+ links pointing to this one (by the way, a HUGE thanks to everyone out there because I have NO IDEA how I got to that number!), but I'm terrible with technical stuff and I'm traditional. This blog has done well and helped out a lot of people and I talked with a lot of you and enjoy these friendships. Even if almost all new posting goes to the new blog when it's up and going, these are going to stay here.

Second, I'd be lying if I said there wasn't some money involved. Not in a "I'm a greedy bastard who wants to steal everything you own" sleazy Internet Marketing sort of way, but according to my stats over 60 people a month search for "Master Dayton" in Google. I've gotten some really good work from this blog, and the self-deprecating name is not only funny, but it's a pretty damn good brand. And I'm not taking advantage of that at all. I think there's no question I'd have more consistent readers, more searchers who stay longer, and that I'd help more people with a more professional looking blog. That's certainly going to look a lot better than a blogger blog, and there's a lot I do outside of freelance writing with creative projects I'm excited about...and having a blogger blog is a huge liability.

At the end of the day, there's a lot of benefit for me switching to a blog off of a professional page, or have a blog on its own URL completely. Don't read this as an end or good-bye, but it's time to move forward, and by taking the first steps myself I'll also be able to teach others how to do the same. Opportunity has never been greater....so let's go grab it together!

Freelance Writing Advice: Jumping at Opportunity

2011-07-26T23:34:00.018-05:00

The Importance of Jumping Quickly at Major Opportunity

One of the major pieces of advice I can give beginning freelance writers is the importance of jumping to take advantage of an opportunity when one arrives. Sometimes you see a potential to make a lot of money, or potential to really take advantage of how a writing website is doing in order to build up a great residual income for yourself. If there's one thing I've learned from several years writing, it's that diversification is important but when you see a clear opportunity, you need to put the majority of your efforts where you're going to get the majority of returns. For other 4 Hour Workweek fans out there, this is referred to as the Pareto Principle or 80/20 Principle. Spreading yourself out in the name of diversity doesn't make sense if you have one clear winner. Invest most of your energy in the open writing opportunity, and come back to diversify later.

So what do I mean by this? I'm going to give you two obvious examples from my own time writing online, and the reason I believe they both work is that even though both opportunities have more or less closed, meaning they wouldn't pay long term now the way they used to, if I had taken heavier action early on in both situations, I'd be far better off financially not only now, but heading into the future as well. Sometimes it's easy to say "well it's a good thing I didn't invest too much in that because now they're gone" - but that might be taking the easy way out and preventing you from learning from a missed opportunity. And if you want to make a living freelance writing online, you definitely need to learn from mistakes and learn to adapt and get better along the way.

So the first example: eHow. I wrote for eHow's now defunct writer's compensation program when I was just getting started with online writing, and it did very well for me. With around 150 articles I made about $160 to $190 a month every month, with the majority of that income coming from the last 30 articles I wrote. The reason was that when the original version of the 4HWW came out I listened to the audio book, did the 80/20 looking at which articles and topics were making money for me on eHow, and then my last 30 were only on those topics. All of them made at least a couple bucks a month, while some of my highest income articles came from this batch. In fact, I would say those last 30 averaged $4 a month each with some higher and some lower, as always.

This might not sound like much, but based on the subject matter that was doing good for me, I had a list of over 600 more topics which based on my research would probably have evened out to the same $4 an article per month rate. But I was also writing for Squidoo and for HubPages and for Associated Content and for my former employers and on Blogger blogs and building my own sites and pulling myself in a thousand other directions. Then the WCP closed.

Between when I had the article list and when the WCP closed was three to four months. In that time, I could have easily completed all 600 articles which not only would have led to several thousand a month in passive income for another year or two, but when Demand Studios decided to buy out articles, the buy out would have been worth virtually a year's salary as opposed to the almost one month's income my buyout was (I can't disclose actual amounts due to the confidentiality agreement). One month is nice...but imagine what I could do if I was holding a payment equivalent to 10 months or a full year? I could outsource for entire mega-sites, pay off a lot of outstanding debt, and work on anything I felt like for several months knowing all my bills were taken care of. Or I could even buy several aged sites already earning passive income and continue to build on them. The point is that instead of staying spread out, had I taken those three months to just "kill it" on the eHow articles not only would I have made far more passive income the past couple years, but I'd be setting myself up for an early retirement right now investing the severance payment.

That's one example where I should have really busted my back to completely finish off that list and to get up to a decent income as quickly as possible - then I could have spent a lot more time diversifying when I didn't have to worry about bills or anything else on a month by month basis. By delaying, I missed a golden opportunity which turned out to be two (when including the buy out).

Then there's HubPages. While my last blog post on Hubpages being finished might have been a touch premature...although I'm still not convinced it isn't...there was a time not so long ago when it took very little work to get your hubs to rank ridiculously high for any decently researched keyword. So what was my missed opportunity here?

Once again it was seeing the power they had, and not focusing enough energy on HubPages while they were extremely profitable. While the Panda slap would obviously still hammer me, there's still a good reason to see this as a missed opportunity. I was making about $350 a month from one HubPages account and $250 a month from another account. $600 a month isn't bad, but I was averaging only about 7-10 hubs a month with my attention split in multiple directions all at once. The $600 a month came from 200 hubs, but once again the majority of the income came from 50 hubs, many of which were some of my newest at that point. Had I focused first and foremost on hubs, there's no reason I couldn't have produced 100 a month for a few months. In three to six months, that would be near a full time income (on the low end).

While Panda would smack that number down like it did with the hubs I had, there's a very good reason I still should have put more work right into the HubPages when they were ranking so easily: because even at six months or one year earning a full time passive income I could spend all my time on diversifying, on building my own sites, or investing all my actual freelance writing income back into my own business. In other words, the gain I could have made in those months would have really pushed forward my business and my passive income even before the Panda smackdown.

Add in the new Hub Ad program, and the bounceback with 500 more hubs than I currently have and even now I would still be in better shape.

Don't get me wrong, I'm doing fine when it comes to building my residual income and my recovery from Panda is going great. In addition, I'm making more freelancing than ever which definitely makes things easier. But the point remains: I could already by at my goals, be sitting on a year's pay from a buy out, and still be a couple hundred a month more ahead right now had I taken advantage of those two online opportunities while they were there for me.

Now there is one extremely important point to make when talking about putting most of your energy into one source: I wouldn't just stop and rest on my laurels. I would take advantage of the situation to diversify AFTER getting my full time income, then with my freelance income I would invest in my business to diversify FURTHER. I'm just saying instead of spreading yourself too thin and spread out early on, get your money and your income and then with your renewed freedom and extra income you diversify.

The point is, when you're writing for multiple sites, or maybe you're setting up multiple sites for yourself, look for that opportunity. When it shows itself, don't be afraid to take advantage of it. Work your butt off, race to your monthly passive income goals as quickly as possible, and don't worry about diversifying until you get to your goals. While some people might find this controversial, the more you think about it, the more it makes sense. Diversifying is what you do to protect income, but until you have a major income to protect, what's the point?

Right now for me this means taking advantage of what The Keyword Academy has to offer, building my own sites while they are ranking the easiest compared to Web 2.0 properties, and jumping on the BMR train while it's still showing results. If there's one thing the past few years of online freelance writing has taught me, it's to take advantage of every opportunity!

Freelance Writing Opinion: Why HubPages Is Finished

2011-07-12T23:09:00.026-05:00

HubPages Ain't What It Used to Be

Well this is a freelance writing post that's somewhat painful to write, and I'm sure there's going to be a lot of flak back about it, but one thing I've never been afraid of in this blog was calling things as I see them (you should have seen the level of hate e-mail I received after my negative Helium.com review) so I'm not going to sugar coat this freelance writing blog post. I will add the caveat that a lot can change over time, and things could very well change in a year or two, or even less. But as things stand right now, I'm not going to pull any punches on what I'm feeling about HubPages because as much as it hurts (I've made some very good money and wonder at the potential had they lasted out one more year) they're a mess. Or as Lissie put it, HubPages is a train wreck. Folllow that post up with her earlier HubPages Earnings Update, and you can see pretty easily that a lot of previously profitable and prolific hubbers seem to be jumping ship, and it's hard not to see that trend continuing. Part of the reason I finally wrote my Keyword Academy review is because there was no doubt in my mind that even for beginner freelance writers, it was time to jump ship from HubPages.

So let's get down to it. A lot has changed in the past few years since I started this online writing blog, and a lot has changed since Google rolled out Panda, not the least of which is the general opinion of many people I talk to that their 1st page rankings are total shite. Nothing like typing in a term that should scream "informational request" and getting 10 shopping links from Amazon, Target, Wal Mart, Home Depot, JC Penny, KMart, and eBay. Note to Google: If I wanted to buy from a top 10 retailer, I would have typed in their website name myself. But I digress. This is about the changes in HubPages, and why I think the ship is not only going down, but it might already be 100 fathoms deep. So let's jump into this, and remember that this is my own two cents as of 07/13/2011.

Starting with the ELEPHANT in the room
I thought about having this further down on the list, in the traditional "4th spot to hammer the point home for good" slot, but this time the Elephant in the room is so big it really stays as my number one reason why I'm dubious HubPages will recover. First of all, if you've been in Internet Marketing at all and you've dealt with SEO you know there's one major rule for attempting to stay out of Google's cross hairs: Don't Embarrass Google!

This is a big one, and the way you embarrass Google is by intentionally and blatantly gaming the system and taking advantage of Google's algorithm to rank your site - especially if it's duplicate content, poor quality, thin content, or any of the above. And HubPages was blatantly gaming Google's algorithm. How? Internal linking. Anyone who has done Internet Marketing knows that keyword anchored backlinks are the key to ranking high in the search engines, and that external links are far more valuable than internal links, which are still important. So what was the problem with HubPages? The problem was the internal linking was so strong that it was easy to get duplicate content, lousy content, or thin content ranked in the top 5 in Google for relatively little effort based entirely or almost entirely on internal linking alone.

Take for example my old hub on Vaser Liposuction. When I wrote this all 100% of the content is original, I worked to provide a lot of information on the procedure, there were over 1,200 words of content in addition to links to authority sites (which Google claims to like). I also built nearly 30 backlinks to this page. At the time, a hub did indeed end up #1 in Google searches for the term "Vaser Liposuction." But it wasn't mine. It was a bland 400 word hub full of fluff with little original value and 0 external backlinks. So how did this page out rank mine? It drove me nuts, but finally with an SEO tool I saw only one major measurable difference: that hub had 60 internal links while my page only had 2 internal links. So I managed to get my hub ranked a little higher score wise, which got the internal links from HubPages sidebars pointing at me. With 30 of those I ranked #1 for the term at the time.

Knowing this, I tested my next two hubs and easily got their scores high enough for the internal links to kick in (they were based somewhat on hub score - so getting over 70 was critical and over 80 was excellent), and with 2 Ezinearticles to each and internal linking alone, they both way outranked pages with nearly 100 backlinks and which had more content.

How could this be seen as anything other than gaming the system by Google? Add in the fact that these out of control internal linking practices have NOT been changed at all by HubPages - despite making many others in response to Google that don't really make sense - so they might be changing a whole lot, but they've done ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about what clearly (and glaringly) stands out as their biggest flaw. Until that is dealt with, I don't see any serious recovery, and yet among many ridiculous changes, no mention has been made of this at all.

Time is not healing
You know that old saying "time heals all wounds?" Well according to HubPages traffic numbers and Google Analytics, that's not happening with HubPages' attempt to recover from the Panda update. For something like the fifth month in a row I'm still losing traffic and rankings. Some of my well back linked hubs are maintaining okay search engine positions, many others aren't. But either way, it's easier now to rank a brand new website from scratch and rank it for a keyword than it is starting a hub from scratch and ranking it for the same keyword - so why give up 40% when there's no advantage to doing so anymore? While I understand changes take time, there have been several more roll outs of post Panda adjustments, and I'm not seeing any positive changes.

The Amazon/California Situation
This is a huge deal. Maybe HubPages gets this sorted out, maybe they're okay with allowing hubbers in non Amazon affiliate banned states to continue profiting from Amazon modules on HubPage while they're not, or maybe they can move their corporate offices to allow themselves to become Amazon affiliates again. These are all viable options, but they also don't help individuals who are in states like North Carolina, California, and Illinois where Amazon won't allow individuals to sign up for their affiliate program (and a general "sorry" goes out to you folks). Then there's the chance that HubPages can't work in a way for themselves to profit off of Amazon and so shut it down. Since there's no way of knowing which of these scenarios will actually take place, that adds in a lot of uncertainty, and not a lot of "everything will be all right" options compared to further hammering on the HubPages model.

Baffling Official Response
Even with the disaster that was Panda, I'm with many online Internet Marketers who agreed that HubPages response was more damaging and damning than even the update itself. After the update they should have restructured the internal linking to make it far less powerful (which they didn't do), ban duplicate, spun, or low quality content (which they did), and then waited out the after effects to see how they would do with the next update before making any rash moves (which they didn't do).

So the changes like banning links to popular affiliate sites like Clickbank: terrible idea that chased away a lot of the best marketers. In fairness, I understand their thinking in that this idea looks good on paper, but it doesn't work in reality. Yes, Clickbank has many products that encourage spam, and they also have some excellent programs which used to make hubbers a lot of money. Now that all of that is out the window, and while trying to keep spam topics away is admirable: you could just ban spam topics or spammers. Just a thought.

Then there's the ban on pixelated images. WTF? Really, what's that have to do with anything?

Limiting capsules to content: I don't have a huge issue with this at all although they may have overdone it a bit.

Changing the AdSense layout has absolutely demolished the clickthrough rate (I can't give my CTR % because that's against Google's TOS, but I can tell you that my current rate is less than 25% of my old one). You were penalized for things other than ad layout - I'm not sure how cutting AdSense revenue by 75% further is really going to help at this point.

In addition, rampant complaints of the tone of interaction with moderators and administrators changing is giving off a lot of smoke. There are major complaints of much ruder responses, a shift in philosophy from "all of us together" to "we're talking to you." There are also the less friendly and longer responses, like promising a blog post in a "couple days" in response to the Amazon situation and the community waiting 14 days later and counting for a response. I understand when nothing happens, but then give an update along the lines of "we're working on it." Freelance writers who helped make your site deserve at least that much.

Because of the Marketer Exodus
When some of your best writers who know SEO, keyword research, and backlinking/marketing all leave, who exactly is going to rebuild your rankings? Many of the best marketers and writers are already leaving HubPages - and with no one promoting your site, how exactly are you going to rank in the future? If everyone who knows what they're doing are leaving and even taking down their hubs, it's not going to be good. Especially when Google notices all the backlinks going to pages that no longer exist, and all the internal or broken links to other hubs that no longer exist. This is going to make HubPages appear even uglier in Google's eyes. So freelance writers, beware. HubPages is not the sweet deal it used to be.

So what now?
So can you still make money on HubPages? You can, as long as they stay afloat (and many of us wonder if they're bringing in enough now to do that - although in fairness that is pure speculation), but the effort is MORE than building your own blogs or websites. So why would your bother with HubPages? If you're serious about the passive income, The Keyword Academy is the way to go. They adjust to changes, give amazing education, and provide all the tools needed to build up a long term passive income. Now that starting your own sites from scratch is faster than HubPages, and more stable and successful, it only makes sense to go with them.

As for which sites work for active income, or for a passive income split, it's probably long since time for me to put up another update, but that's coming next. For me, I'll keep an eye on HubPages, but I'm not holding my breath. Even the HubPages Ad Program has gone down considerably every month I've been in it, not only as total income put also $ per 1,000 so it'll be interesting to see if they can recover the way Squidoo did or not.

But for now, I have to stick by The Keyword Academy as the best passive income option and at this time I simply can't recommend HubPages anymore.

The Keyword Academy Review

2011-05-30T17:21:00.022-05:00

Reviewing the Keyword Academy

This blog post is probably way past overdue, but with the now infamous "Panda Update" from Google and a little more time to see how some of the so called "content farms" panned out, there's been plenty to do and test. And seeing how everything works now, I'll be the first to say I was wrong with one of my last posts: HubPages is good for nothing other than backlinks now, and you shouldn't spend a lot of your time putting original content on their site. But I'll get to more on that in a bit. The reason I want to review The Keyword Academy now is because based on what I'm seeing, honestly the best way to make passive income is to go with your own site. It takes less effort now to build your own site in the rankings than it does a HubPage or a Squidoo lens...so why split the profits with someone else for your hard work?

Many of the advantages that Web 2.0 sites used to offer are gone or highly diminished. At one point I had no problem with advocating that individuals start on HubPages, learn how Internet Marketing worked as they wrote hubs (which was so powerful as to virtually guarantee rankings in the search engines) and then made some good quick money on the way to learning everything you needed in order to apply those lessons to your own websites. But based on what's happened since the now named "Panda Update" and perhaps even more importantly HubPages reaction (and that second one is truly the key), I don't believe they'll make a bounce back any time in the near future, and the fastest way to success is now through building your own website, BUT you need to understand exactly how to do it the right way.

This includes understanding:

Keyword research
Website set up (including the best WordPress plugins)
Backlink building time line and strategy
Monetizing methods
Importance of consistent work/effort
Knowing how/when to test ad lay outs

The reason I gladly promote The Keyword Academy (and yes, these are affiliate links but as I've said before, I don't put in an affiliate link unless I believe in it - notice the lack of HubPages affiliate links in this post) is because they teach all this in really clear video tutorials in addition to providing a wide range of services to members which really makes making money online much easier. In fact, if you're getting into Internet Marketing and you're competing against Keyword Academy members, you're at a huge disadvantage. So buckle in for perhaps the longest Keyword Academy review on the net.

Introducing the Basics
There was a time where I hesitated to recommend this program to pure beginners since I've been in a place where $33 a month seemed like a major investment, especially with another $12 for each domain name and another $10-12 a month for hosting. Especially early on when you could build up $100 a month in a few months using HubPages or writing eHow articles. However, now after a lot of testing the quickest way to get rankings is your own website, and that changes things drastically.

For the beginners, the keyword academy has a clear "First 100 Hours" plan which basically takes your hand and helps you go step by step through 100 hours of work to get you on the right track, get you building niche sites that rank, and earning money. This is a very labor intensive business, so having a 100 hour guide is a great help to beginners who can just look down, work the next step, and start seeing results as quickly as possible to keep from becoming discouraged.

In fact, there's even a "New Members Welcome Page" to get you all the e-mail support you'll ever need and to point you to the most important lessons for beginners to start out with. The e-book in the members area has chapters that come in both print and video form, giving you a very effective tutorial ranging from the attitude and perspective you need to succeed to specifics about setting up websites and videos giving all the technical details for those of you (very much like myself) who are absolute dunces when it comes to the technical side of things. In other words, you can re-watch set up videos again and again to make sure you learn how to set up a new WordPress site inside and out. I can't over emphasize just how easy and simple they make it for people to learn absolutely everything you need to set up your online websites and to build the rankings you need to succeed.

The Niche Refinery Tool
The niche refinery tool is one of my personal favorites among any online tool I've ever used. This tool uses the mathematical formula the Keyword Academy teaches to determine the value of keywords, but instead of having to hand check every single keyword and run the mathematical formula over every single keyword (a process that could take many many hours if you were checking out 100 keywords), the tool allows you to import several hundred or even thousand keywords from the Google AdWords tool and allow the program to run through all of them while you go and write content, gather new keyword lists, or do something else that's productive.

The information is then given to you in a spreadsheet format where you can organize all the keywords by difficulty level (judged on a number scale from 10 on up) or on the projected value of the keywords. These can be arranged from lowest to highest or highest to lowest, making it very easy to analyze the information and target the easiest keywords first, followed by the ones with the highest money making potential. This tool allows you to run multiple lists of keywords at once, meaning in one day you can easily run enough data through the tool to find more good keywords than you could possibly work on in an entire year.

This tool is not only an incredible time saver, but it saves on the tedium of having to do all the keyword research by hand and makes it very easy to see what keywords in a niche are the most worth going after, and what the "low hanging fruit" are that should be easy to pick off and gain rankings for. This tool alone is worth the monthly subscription, IMO.

The PostRunner Tool
The PostRunner tool is definitely the crown gem of The Keyword Academy's tools. Anyone who has been in SEO or Internet Marketing for any amount of time, or found a single accurate resource on the topic, knows the importance of backlinks. A few years ago outside of article marketing or investing the time and money to create your own long list of websites, getting those links could also be very difficult and very time consuming. The PostRunner tool puts hundreds, if not eventually thousands, of different blogs and websites at your disposal who accept guest posts. These are spread across hundreds of different hosting IPs, different hosting companies, and belong to over a thousand different people. In other words, it's a blog guest posting service on steroids, and unlike article marketing which only allows side bar links, most of these places allow two keyword anchored backlinks in the post - which are the most effective backlinks and also the hardest to get.

There are hundreds of niche sites which only take posts on specific topics, and as anyone who has been working towards passive income online knows, those types of links give the highest amount of benefit when it comes to ranking in the search engines. The site owners get free content in the form of articles, while you get two backlinks per article to your own sites.

Whether you call it guest blog posting on steroids or article marketing on steroids, the ending result is the same: you have hundreds and hundreds of sites at your finger tips just waiting to give you a perfect keyword anchored backlink. This tool alone is worth twice the monthly fee for the entire Keyword Academy, and a push for more niche sites and more high quality sites means that PostRunner is going to remain an extremely effective tool for ranking in the search engines.

Many people (including myself) have ranked niche sites in the top 10, top 5, or even the top of the search engines only using PostRunner and nothing else - including myself. This is an extremely effective tool, and if you combine it with article marketing and a few link exchanges then you might be amazed how quickly you can effectively rank a niche site high in the search engines and get those AdSense clicks or Affiliate Commissions coming in. You also have the ability to add your own sites to PostRunner and thus take advantage of the free content people are willing to provide.

Streamline and WorkTracker Tools
As if those two tools weren't already more than enough to justify The Keyword Academy's monthly membership cost (which really is pretty ridiculously reasonable for what you get) there are organizational and motivational tools as well. I know for me personally a chart tracking my daily word count really does encourage and motivate me - as odd as that might seem. Using the Work Tracker is simple: put in your daily word count and the graph charts it on a seven day rolling average while also telling you how many words you've written in the past month and during any of their publishing challenges. You can also join groups and make your graphs available to a number of other TKA members. This can be a great motivational tool for a group as you can compare your publishing rates to those of others in the group. This can be a great motivation to publishing more, and to prevent you from taking a few days off knowing others will see those 0 word days.

Streamline is a neat set up which allows you to assign main keywords and cousin keyword to the websites you're working on. Streamline keeps track of these, keeps track of how many articles you've written and how many keywords used, and then can be used to create a "Project Task List" which will show you how many more articles to write for each term as a basic start, and lists them so you can refer to it as a list of which articles to write next. Streamline keeps track of how much work has been done and shows the % completed for each cousin keyword and main keyword. If you tend to get overwhelmed when there's a lot to be done, this tool gives you the ability to make a very clear list telling you exactly which articles should be next and how many more are needed.

For the organizationally challenged, this tool along with Work Tracker, can be a life saver.

Webinars
There are monthly webinars provided from TKA (and if I call it KWA at some point it's the same thing, just and odd eccentricity of mine) which can cover everything from "what to do after 6 months," "how to hit the next level," or other strategies about link building and the importance of getting the most out of your PostRunner site. In other words, the excellent teaching and content doesn't stop once you sign up, there's new information and training coming every single month and you're getting trained by people who know the Internet Marketing process through and through. I attend most of them because I know there's always an additional nugget or bit of information that is going to help speed up the process for me.

The Forums
I'm with many people in this business who argue that forums can be one of the greatest time wasters of all online activity. That being said, a really good forum can also give you access to expertise, support, and ideas which speed up your ability to make a living online and give all the support you need to make it through the tough times. In my opinion, the TKA forums are the latter, as you will find many people on there making $10k to $20k or more a month who are still more than willing to give advice on how they did it, help out newbies, and also provide alternative information like other methods of getting ranked in the search engines, how to sell an e-book, or many other issues. While you should spend only a little time here and most of your time writing content, the forums are an invaluable resource and even provide an "Inspiration" thread with tons of stories of how KWA members started at $0 and made it to $1,000 a month or more. It's a great addition to the whole KWA bundle.

The Trial Period
Oh, yeah, the first month is free and you have UNLIMITED access to The Keyword Academy during that time. You can use all the tools, gain backlinks, do your keyword research, and if $33 a month just isn't feasible at that point (and I've been homeless twice so believe me, I understand) then you take your information, move on, and come back when you're stable enough to afford it. If you stay, the price is $33 a month although discounts are available if you choose to buy a yearly subscription which is $396 for 14 months, or basically 2 months free when you pay for 12 months up front. Either way, it's a very good deal.

Contests & Awards
There are often 3-4 publishing challenges a year, and these challenges often have multiple awards given out through drawings. You get so many entries into a drawing often based on number of words published, number of days you publish, or other similar measurements. In other words, the more you work on your business, the more chances you get to win a prize on top of everything else.

What makes this especially intriguing is that the prizes include $1,000 cash prizes, year long subscriptions to TKA, or even free credits to article writing services. All of these can be an enormous help to speeding up your Internet Marketing Career, and you get a chance at these prizes by working to build up your own business: that's about as win-win as it gets.

Affiliate Program
Current subscribing members to the Keyword Academy can enroll in the affiliate program, which pays very handsomely. For each person who signs up for the Keyword Academy through your affiliate link and stays subscribed, you receive 35% of their monthly dues, which comes out to $11.55 a month. So if you get a mere three people to sign up and stay with TKA, that will pay for your own monthly subscription.

So Final Thoughts
This is by far and away the most commercial blog post I've ever written, and will probably stay that way. However, if you want to win in the online world in making residual income, this is the way to go. I have tested out a lot of products and membership sites online, and several of them were very high quality but at the end of the day, this Keyword Academy review hopefully explains what I honestly believe: this is the best possible program online for Internet Marketing for both beginners and even for the experienced. This program brings years worth of education down to easy to understand videos and lessons that can have you on the right path in days. That's why I strongly suggest if you haven't become a member that you start out with The Keyword Academy Trial month.

I have more to say on why I've changed my mind about HubPages and why I would suggest a completely different strategy for building an online passive income now than I did 12 months ago. That's because this is a changing game, and while I'll get into more of that, I'm going to end this post as a Keyword Academy review and hit the rest later.

Freelance Writing 2011: So What Now?

2011-03-23T21:15:00.046-05:00

Freelance Writing Online Never Stays the Same

If you've been freelance writing online for any amount of time this spring then wow, you know how crazy the landscape has been changing even by online or writing market standards. If you're hoping for a quick read, this isn't the post. So feel free to bookmark and come back later, or get ready for a marathon run. But first a very important announcement: to those who took me up on the offer of buying my friend Ashley Cowger's first book "Peter Never Came," the report I was finishing for all of you become very outdated with the most recent Google Change and the reaction of Xomba, HubPages, Yahoo Contributor Network, and others towards them. So instead of giving a report that was half obsolete, or making you wait for just a few updates, instead I'm going to finish the freelance writing e-book I'm creating and giving you all the whole thing, including the bonuses.

So it'll be even better than what I promised, it will be completely up to date, and it'll be about two more weeks - but it'll be worth it. I'm very sorry for the delay, this was a prime example of "life happens" along with "Google happens." So since all of you have been so nice and patient with me, I'm just going to give you my entire freelance writing e-book for free.

So onto the long delayed blog post. There's a lot to cover, so this will be a long one and I'll try to cover how freelance writing online has changed, the HubPages ad program, residual income, and everything else that changed/shifted or didn't with the last big Google change.

Xomba updates their policies
Xomba has recently updated their online writing policies, especially in regard to bookmarks. Previous to this, one of the best ways to use Xomba was to bookmark your articles and blog posts, as Xomba bookmarks tended to get amazing rankings in Google all on their own (while their articles didn't which I still find strange) and even better, pretty much guaranteed indexing of whatever you linked to. For those of you who know the frustration of writing 100 backlink articles and hoping they get indexed, you know how valuable it would be to be able to link to every one with a Xomba bookmark and know that those articles would then be crawled. That's very powerful when you're trying to build your backlinks. Now you can't do that. You can't link to your articles, you can't link to your blogs, and well you can't really link to anything. So what does this mean? From my point of view, it means that Xomba no longer as any place in my online portfolio. A 50/50 AdSense on articles on a site that doesn't have the juice of other options out there (options who share more of the pie) doesn't appeal.

Because of this I no longer recommend Xomba as a place to write for online freelance writers looking to make money online or use it as part of a passive income campaign. If writing is just a hobby for you and the money is bonus, then that might be the best place for Xomba, but without the bookmarking benefit, it's just not a good ROI on effort as opposed to benefit, in my opinion.

So where to go now to help stack links and get your articles indexed and keep them that way? If you're an old hat who knows how to use Bookmarking Demon software, then you're already set. For the rest of us, I'd probably recommend two bookmarking site who have revenue share programs: Snipsly.com, and Shetoldme.com. I don't expect these to have the same impact as a Xomba bookmark did, but it's much better than nothing and Snipsly especially is pretty painless to use.

If you have no idea what link stacking is, then take a look at this video blog on the importance of link stacking. It's a great introduction, and Blogger Illustrated is a great marketing blog to get familiar with anyway.

The big Google update - is it time to panic???
The short answer is absolutely not. Google updates are going to happen, and they're going to happen every year. This time sites coined as "content farms" were hammered (how eHow escaped this designation is beyond me), and the cutting down to size of HubPages is the one that really got a lot of attention of online freelance writers and beginning marketers. Part of the reason for this is that HubPages had a ridiculous level of authority in ranking new hubs, which made it attractive for marketers, writers, and unfortunately also douchebag spammers.

My suspicion even early on after the big time slap HubPages received was that the main action was to discount internal HubPages links. The internal linking structure of HubPages was too effective. Sometimes you could get page one rankings for decent keywords with nothing but 30-50 internal links and not a single external backlink. It was only a matter of time until Google did something about this, because that type of system is too easy to abuse. Now don't quote me as Gospel on this is what happened, but others who are much better at analyzing technical data then me just in the past week or two are starting to say the same. Personally, most of my hubs with a lot of external backlinks still rank very well. The hubs whose main strength was strong internal linking were absolutely decimated.

So are HubPages still worth it? For true freelance writers (ie those of you not into Internet Marketing but whom still want passive income) HubPages is great, and the backlinks are still solid even after the Google Algorithm change. Squidoo was declared left for dead three years ago when they were slapped much harder by Google - and my earnings from that site are four times what they were back in 2008. HubPages is making some major changes, and I fully expect them to bounce back over time. Now there are no shortcuts and you need backlinks, but hubs can still rank very well, and you can backlink a lot quicker to hubs than completely brand new websites.

So what happens if you were building original niche sites with solid original writing, good articles, and keyword based URL names? In my case, and the case of hundreds of others, the keyword rankings for my niche websites (especially the long tail keywords) jumped. In other words, if you were concentrating on your own sites which you have full control over, then this last update probably actually helped you out. And if you spent a little too much time on HubPages building easy income instead of investing in your own websites (and I'm not judging - I'm nailed based on this criteria), then take this Google update not as a step back, but as the kick in the pants you needed to do what you should have been doing all along.

At the end of the day this confirms that in the online world change is constant and that people writing high quality original content and who build solid (not thin, not spammy) sites the right way pretty much still have nothing to really worry about. Keep at it.

The HubPages Ad Program
One of the major programs rolled out after the Google-content farm smack down was HubPages' news that they were rolling out their own advertising based program. This was planned even before the Google action and is being rolled out in waves starting with the most prolific and trusted hubbers and as the bugs get worked out the rest of the community will eventually be able to take part.

The earliest beta test only involved 9 hubbers, so take the early results worth a grain of salt, but they reported that AdSense + Hub Ads combined to equal a lot more than what just AdSense alone from Hubs earned. Everyone reported double digit % improvement, while some saw jumps as high as 40 or 50%. This was before the Google slap, but I've been with the program most of March and while it's still early to say anything too definitive (there's just not enough data at this point), I can say that while my Google AdSense coming directly from HubPages has plummeted, the Hubs AdSense + HubPages Ad Program = 6% income increase for me which might not sound like much, but considering that over 80% of my AdSense income came from HubPages, and all of March was post Google slap for HubPages, then a 6% gain is actually pretty damn impressive. And yes - I projected February as a 31 day month to match March so the three day difference has nothing to do with the 6% increase.

However I still have a couple of reservations. I had a couple uncustomarily big days with AdSense that ramped up the monthly earnings, while the overall number of double digit dollar days from AdSense plummeted. However, with the Hub Ad Program there might not be a lot of high days, but daily earnings are consistent which helps bring up the bottom line. The biggest problem is without those two really big days my combined earnings would have been lower. In fairness there's a chance that if I stayed all AdSense on my Hubs, the March numbers would have been even lower than projected. This will bear some testing.

I'm going to be watching through all of April and all of May to collect more data. On the plus side, as this program gets stronger and the changes being employed to HubPages should only make them stronger in the search engines, the Hub program pays directly via PayPal. This means you can still earn AdSense and Amazon from Hubs and build them independently from niche sites, but you also now can have a new income stream from HubPages which definitely helps the diversification process - and add in the bonus of building links and getting a little AdSense and Amazon action on the side and HubPages could really end up ahead on this one. As much as I dislike where Xomba is going with their remodel, I really like the direction HubPages is going for online freelance writers.

Good news - markets are getting better
Granted, this evidence is anecdotal, but on the good news front is I'm finding work much easier to find since before the big recession/economic crash in 2008. Overall many people I'm talking to agree that the demand for freelance writers is rising, and one of the benefits of the most recent Google slap and their strong public argument for quality content is that a strong movement is forming away from Indian and Philippines outsourcers and towards native English speakers for writing articles. The movement is towards at least basic quality, and even if $5 for a 300 word article isn't much at all, a good Native English speaker shouldn't have any problem writing 3-5 of these an hour (assuming Internet standards of quality and not New York Times-Pulitzer Prize level). Even at the minimum there, $15 an hour isn't bad compared to you know, $0 from being unemployed or not being able to find any work.

Now, I don't have an issue with many Philippines outsourcers who are paid to write quality and can do so, but I am against making outsourcers write $1 articles at obscenely fast rates like 125 articles per 40 hour work week. You can't get quality from that. Those of you living overseas who can write quality articles are going to find yourselves in higher demand. It may take some time, but this is a good thing in the long run.

So generally speaking, especially with a changing perception from many Internet Marketers about wanting more original content and wanting more quality, the outlook for freelance writers and especially beginning freelance writers is excellent compared to recent years.

Individual Niche Sites & The Keyword Academy
Individual niche sites are still the way to go with Amazon and AdSense based sites, or you can go with the super site model. The point is, many people who wrote high quality content and invested in their own sites are still doing well. The old model of 5 pages with thin re-hashed content and tons of backlinks and nothing else isn't going to work anymore. However a rock solid niche site with twenty or more pages of original and high quality content can do quite well.

In other words, those of you frustrated seeing cheap crap rank ahead of you because you developed your own sites with original and high quality content that took some time to develop then don't worry and keep working because my niche sites are doing fine. In fact, they've done much better since the last update. If anything, the only thing this last update did was to confirm what many Internet Marketers have said all along: go ahead and use blogger, HubPages, Squidoo, and the like for links but INVEST in your business with your own websites which you can actually control and which can't arbitrarily just be taken away from you.

This also brings us to what I believe is the best tool out there for online freelance writers or marketers, especially novices or beginners or even those somewhere in the middle. I am a firm believer in The Keyword Academy (and yes, that is an affiliate link) and see the teaching, lessons, and resources they offer as more important than ever. If you want to work towards full time residual income, then in my opinion you'd be a fool not to join this program. It's the only monthly membership site I belong to, and I anticipate it's the only one I ever will.

First of all, there's an e-book and video tutorials for beginners that are extremely detailed and helps even the greenest newbie understand basic SEO, how to build niche sites, and how to get going with making money online. Add in support forums, a great community, and some unbelievable tools and it's not hard for people to see why the Keyword Academy is so well thought off by its members.

There are amazing tools that make keyword research a breeze, help to get a large number of good backlinks (the hardest part of SEO and ranking in the search engines), and to teach the technical aspects of setting up WordPress blogs. Those videos in particular have been huge for me, helping me to learn how to change the blog set ups as necessary to optimize my sites and get the most money out of them.

The way it currently works is the first month is free, then it's $33 a month for the premium membership after that (go with the premium as the webinar recordings and Forums are worth the extra $4 a month). Any one of their major tools alone would be worth the money, so the combination is outstanding. They're recent webinar push towards further quality content convinces me that they're dedicated to building amazing tools that will last.

If you are ready to really pursue the passive income options from working online, then you want to check out the Keyword Academy. They're the best teachers I've found with an amazing array of tools and a great support system. Worst case scenario, take the free month, learn all there is to know, and then cancel if you're not ready for the rest or simply aren't sure if it's right for you. Right now they're even sharing 4 "super sites" they're building from scratch so you can literally follow the process along the way.

The e-book
I'll be working to wrap this up shortly - was just about there when a huge series of changes made big sections of the e-book obsolete. So now working on the overall and I'll be bringing it out before too long. It's aimed primarily at beginners and people just getting started but there will be some solid advice in there for some people who are at that space of being more than a true beginner but not where they want to be yet making a full time living writing online.

My goal is to provide clear cut information on all the sites I've written for and how to get the most out of each one. This will not only give readers the ability to make a full time living writing online, but also get the most out of each and every site I go over. This way readers won't have to spend six years learning by trial and error like I did: they'll get all the benefits of my experience with one reading and be able to get to their goals much faster than I did.

I'll keep everyone posted on more as that project develops.

So finally at the end...
So this will probably go down as one of the longer freelance writing blog posts I've had here, but this brings us about up to date with all the changes that have gone on. I'd love to hear everyone's experience with what's going on and what your plans are to make the most of it. Hope everyone is doing well and keep at it - the reward at the endgame is worth the long online freelance writing journey.

How Are You Going to Bust Through?: A Freelance Writing Rant

2011-02-13T08:23:00.028-06:00

Freelance Writing isn't for Sissies. Do you know how you're going to make it?

And after a month away working feverishly on my passive writing income and setting up my business ventures for this year, we're back! This post might be a little different than some of the other recent ones, as the past couple months have also been a time of major reflection and some pretty painful and brutally honest self-evaluation. Classic 80/20, if you're familiar with the Pareto Principle that has been pushed into the spotlight by Tim Ferriss's The 4 Hour Work Week (which I highly recommend, btw), and while I have plenty of legitimate excuses about life getting in the way, have done an amazing amount of work, and have been pulled in eight directions, it was still a stark revelation to see where I really was versus where I thought I was. Unless you're really focusing on it, most people probably don't realize how much time falls between the cracks. To paraphrase something I've heard over and over: "I thought I was working really hard, but I really wasn't."

Even for those of us who do work a lot, is it really on the projects that are most important for our long term growth? Do we really accomplish what we should, or do you find after a year that somehow, some way, when you look at the numbers honestly that you haven't done anything remotely close to what you wanted? Did you really write 350 hubs at HubPages in one year at an incredibly modest 1 a day, or after a hard working year do you find yourself hovering around 70? Oops. I'm not bringing this up to preach or condemn - I'm finding myself in the same boat.

Have I done a great amount of useful work the past two years in particular? Absolutely. But what if my goals (especially for passive income) had met even some very modest goals? I'm nowhere close to 700 hubs on HubPages, which is where I'd be if I did 300 a year for every year since signing up - a modest less than one a day. How many niche sites have I actually set up? One a month? How many actual links have I built to every article, every hub, every niche site?

The funny thing is, despite all the work I've done, my actual numbers fall short of the extremely modest "one hub a day" or "one blog post a day" or "three backlink articles a day." I think most people reading this blog who are trying to balance freelance writing and passive income building with a real world job understand. Even balancing freelance writing to pay the monthly bills versus building passive income is a very difficult proposition, even if writing is your full time profession. I can look back and point out the many potential true reasons why I didn't write 700 hubs over two years and get plenty of backlinks to all of them, or I can accept that:

There is always enough time if you're willing to make it
It's all about prioritizing
Daily consistent work is important
There is ALWAYS time for one a day

When you look at your freelance writing goals or residual income goals over the past year, what do you see? Is 300 hubs in a year really too ambitious, or could you find the time for one a day (not even)? I think if most of us are honest, the problem isn't having too little time, it's not prioritizing and not staying consistent. After all, how can writing 300 hubs a year, less than one a day, be a deal breaker?

This is just one example. Did you want to set up 12 niche sets over a year and only set up 3 or 4? Ask yourself: if you sat down for one week and treated residual income as your only concern, could you knock out the basic articles and set up to 12 sites in one week? Of course you could. I absolutely suck at anything technical. I even consider using WordPress annoyingly technical. That tells you how not a techie I really am. All that "programming WordPress is easy" did not apply to me - it was hard. So if I can set up 12 niche sites in a week, including the About & Privacy pages, insert AdSense, and get 5-10 basic articles up on each and linking to one another, then what's the excuse for anyone else?

Breaking through means not doing the same-old, same-old. One of the easiest things to do is fall into habits of "studying" and "researching," or losing minutes and hours at a time sitting at the computer, making lists, making notes, or doing any and everything other than the actual work to advance your business. Breaking through means narrowing a big goal down to smaller ones, and then attacking those small daily goals over and over - even on days when you don't feel like it because you're far more likely to go on a 10 day skid than "make it up the next day."

Recently I've made a very conscious effort to only do the absolute minimum for freelance writing and spend a lot more time on passive income and my other growing business. This is a difficult decision because I have tons of student loan debt, a lot of medical bills, and several thousand dollars more in medical procedures I need to undergo. Then there are the weddings, reunions, and badly need travel vacations that I need for personal sanity and preventing the severe stress attacks that put me in terrible shape last fall. Nothing like a doctor telling you "Take a long vacation or you'll have a heart attack," to make you learn not to stress the small things.

This led to another revelation while I went on my seven weeks of travel and vacation (although I do always have to work at least 4 hours on Fridays). The revelation was that I really didn't fall behind on anything because when I looked at the bottom line numbers, I just didn't write nearly as much as I thought I was. In other words, it was easy for me to do more work in January than in October through December combined, and I take more time off for myself.

So these question are for ALL of us writers and Internet Marketers: How are we going to break through? How much more can you fit in each day if you commit only one or two solid hours to passive income? Is that hour of doing nothing really worth delaying the day when you have enough passive income to live off of?

Unfortunately, dreaming and planning don't pay. Work does. This is something I've harped on frequently in recent freelance writing blog posts, and I'll continue to do so. Look at the work you've done. Even if you don't set up your own sites at all and only did HubPages, did you do the equivalent of one hub a day? If not, how much would it change your income if you did write one hub a day for two to three years? Can you spare one more hour a day for backlink articles? This combination really is a tiny amount of work when you look at it, but most of us fail when we look back a year or two later to accomplish even that much.

So at the end of the day, it's time to man or woman up and make our large goals tangible, daily or weekly, and to dedicate ourselves to making them. If you're part of the Keyword Academy and have seen the forum reports, it's amazing how many people are hitting the $1,000 a month passive income mark and how they are taking many different strategies to get there. If you aren't a KWA member, I highly recommend it if and ONLY if you meet one or more of the following requirements:

You make over $50 a month passively and are prepared to reinvest to make that number take off.
If you know for a fact you are completely dedicated to earning passive income and won't quit.
If you are dedicated to spending enough time every month on your page or sites to make the $33 a month expense worth it.
You're already experienced and want to take the next step.

Some people recommend KWA for beginners, and I admit that I am torn on this. The issue is not with the program. The starting videos and core videos are absolutely exceptional, and if you know even the basics, you know how valuable the advanced tools are and how to properly use them. If a beginner is gung-ho and knows for a fact that they will stay with it (and the problem is everyone thinks this until they see the work that is involved), then starting with KWA will save them months, if not years, and make the process much faster. So yeah, for anyone who can afford the investment, it's worth it. The first month is free, but after that it is $33 a month.

So whether your goal is freelance writing, residual income, or a little bit of both - it's time to really be honest and look back over what you actually did versus what you thought you were doing. You might be surprised how little writing or marketing you actually did, and that might be all the motivation you need to really kick off your breakthrough for 2011.

Writing for Passive Income: Small Steps for Big Goals

2011-01-16T13:54:00.032-06:00

Small writing steps equal giant passive income results

Hard to believe we're already 16 days into the new year, but here we are! January 1st is a day when we all make goals and resolutions for our "new start" and then generally completely forget about them until months later when we get that "it's too late now" attitude. Freelance writing and writing for residual income are two areas that can make it very easy to fall into this trap since so much work is required before seeing any pay-off. Many writers become overwhelmed, and it's easy to try and convince yourself that reading 5 blog posts and doing some keyword research is a lot of work. It's not. I'm not preaching at you, I'm still often guilty of the same thing. So this is the first update, along with a very happy and special announcement at the end :)

In my last freelance writing blog post I talked about setting some of my own goals after realizing I needed to become much more efficient to reach my goals, and after getting some inspiration from re-listening to Timothy Ferriss's The 4 Hour Work Week (love it - and that is an affiliate link), getting re-charged from vacation, and also being inspired by Kidgas's effort to triple his online income. It's been a very effective trifecta for me and I put down my own goals and dreams, although in a more abbreviated form, and swore I was going to work my tail off to get them.

So how am I doing at this point? All in all, actually quite well. I'm especially impressed considering that I'm split working in multiple directions, no matter how much I wish it were otherwise. I have to drastically increase the amount of freelance work I'm doing to pay for a wide variety of medical bills, lawyer fees, those annoying student loans, and some other major one time (I hope) expenses that are all coming up this spring. In addition, ideally I'd like this to be the first year I'm going to buy a house and get out of the country for the first time in 12 years. So there's the freelancing....then there's the building the business my brother and I are starting, which is almost like three different business focuses in and of themselves, then there's my actual passive income I want to work on...which comes from multiple sources.

In other words, I'm ridiculously busy once again, even with 80/20 applied to my life. Still, I've made some very good progress and based on everything going on, my freelance and passive writing goals are going well so far. Just this weekend I published six new HubPages for myself, with some backlink work to each, finished $400 in freelance work and produced seven hubs for my brother and I's business, all also with backlinks. The outlines to a few e-books are just about complete and I have a very clear idea of what lies ahead for the next couple months. In the first two weeks of January, I've gotten about as much done as I did in any full month last year.

So why is this? Because I didn't let myself get overwhelmed with the sheer mass of things to do. Every single thing that needed to be done, I broke it down into the smallest, easiest steps possible and then I focused only on those small steps. Yeah, I'd love to write 100 new hubs in the next few months, and in my 100% dream scenario write 1,000 total hubs on HubPages this year (BTW - if you are completely new to the make money online or make passive income online, start by signing up with HubPages and making hubs there as you learn how to rank your pages and monetize them. HubPages is the best beginner's place to go by far, IMO).

Will I achieve that goal and many other equally as ambitious? I think so. 1,000 hubs is a huge number and if I try to think about it that way, it becomes overwhelming. What if I fall behind for a few days, how will I come up with 1,000 ideas, how will I find the time to check all those keywords, how will I have time to backlink them all, etc. It doesn't take more than a couple minutes looking at the big picture before it's sheer size is enough to crush you. So I don't worry at all about 1,000 because there's no point to doing so.

There are ALWAYS more markets and topics to write about, and one thing I do have now is a couple hundred good keywords. So I'm working on those one at a time, two to five a day depending on all other surrounding circumstances. Over the course of a year, this will add up to 1,000 hubs or mighty close enough and without the stress, worry, anxiety, and everything else that would come with trying to plan out every detail from the outset. I've also known from watching other people, as well as observing myself, that when you focus on the big picture and try to get a handle on huge goals or huge problems, you tend to not only NOT control the situation, but you get far LESS work done than if you just took the "I'll do 1-4 a day and not worry about the rest" approach to it.

I don't think about having to pay off those $10,000 or so in medical bills early this year, I just think about making an extra $30-50 a day above my average freelancing workload, and over the next half a year that will take care of itself.

Whether you are reading this as a freelance writer, or an internet marketer, or anywhere in between of those two broad terms, then maybe you'll agree with me when I say this is one of the most important lessons I've learned over these past few years: we are our own worst enemies because we overwhelm ourselves so much that we end up accomplishing so little.

The choosing to go for 1,000 hubs this year while doing the backlinking on my existing articles and websites is a decision I made very recently based on a stark observation I made on myself. Back in the winter of 2008 when my job in Austin, Texas, just disappeared, I tried to plan ahead, figured I had 4 months of expenses barring anything going wrong (which it actually did in spectacular fashion, but that's a story for another day), and I was trying to plan looking at the big picture without thought on how to get there or making goals that I couldn't actually directly affect (an example: make $3,500 by March - that's a terrible goal because it doesn't give any clue for as how to get there. A goal like "write for Demand Studios or Guru.com 8-10 hours a day" at least gives me a clear idea of what to do). Obviously even with the terrible economy and hugely changing markets I made my way back and then some, but then the thought hit me: what if I had just wrote 1 single HubPage, 1 single eHow article (until eHow was closed to writers), and 1 single Squidoo lens a day?

That's well under 8 hours of work a day, and on a good day is less than 3. The answer: I would have nearly 500 more HubPages, 500 more eHow articles, and 700 more Squidoo lenses than I have now. Based on the average of what each of those earns me, we're talking about over $2,200 in complete passive income more per month. That would have me in "semi-retirement" mode, living extremely comfortably and in position right now to only work on what I want to do and nothing else while traveling at will.

So how have I worked my butt off for three years to not be at the same place where 1 hub, 1 eHow, and 1 Squidoo lens a day would put me?

Because I made the same mistakes that many other people in this position have made, continue to make, and will continue to make. I didn't make room for that minimal daily effort like I should have, even when "life happened," and I was too easily overwhelmed and distracted by the large goals or big picture to get the daily work done. I'd recommend taking a good long look at your own efforts and see if the same is true.

This time around, I'm not going to make those same errors. This year, there is always time day to day to work on the hubs, to work on the supporting links, and to make sure that by the end of the year there aren't any more years doing work for others that I don't care for. Day by day I concentrate on the good and hit it out one step at a time, one page at a time, and don't worry about the big picture: because that will take care of itself just as long as I keep steady.

Now, the very happy and special announcement: most of you who know me personally or follow this blog know my overall feelings about graduate school and the years of my life wasted there. We'll keep it very understated and say that my overall experience was less than stellar. That being said, there were a few incredibly cool people I met during my time up there who have been very close friends of mine and like family. My life has been permanently blessed and made better simply from having known them. One of these people is Ashley Cowger, who consistently was one of my favorite writers in the program. She started her first year in the MFA program in Fairbanks Alaska when I was finishing my third and final year. Her brother, Justus Humphrey, is a good friend and actually put me up for a brief six week period when I would otherwise have been homeless during the winter in Alaska. Still very much obliged, bro.

Both are remarkably wonderful people, and both are great writers, as well. I'm happy to announce that Ashley's first novel came out this week: "Peter Never Came." I'm waiting for my copy to arrive in the mail, and the next 10 I'll order for friends and family who love good stories and good reading - and even without seeing an advance copy, I can tell you from seeing a dozen plus of her stories or more that I WHOLE HEARTEDLY and without reservation recommend her book. Ashley was an incredibly talented and hard working writer when I first met her, and she continued to get better and better. I can tell you right now when that book shows up, I won't by doing ANY work. I'll be kicking up my feet and enjoying some great fiction.

It's a small press publication and a collection of literary short stories. If you want to read great fiction, buy Peter Never Came. If you want to support an amazing collection of short stories, buy a copy of the book. If you want renewed faith in an amazing up and coming young writer, read Ashley's book. If you love supporting quality literature from a small press, buy this book. Here is a link, it is NOT an affiliate link: http://www.amazon.com/Peter-Never-Came-Ashley-Cowger/dp/1932870466/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1295243965&sr=8-1

I've tried to think what I could do to encourage people to buy a copy of Ashley's book, and I think I've come up with something. This is going by the honor system, but there's a good group following this blog so we'll do this on the honor code. Over the next month I'll be putting together a guide on freelance writing & earning residual income online. This isn't an A to Z complete guide, but it will include a lot of my "tricks and tips" for making passive income, how to set up a HubPage that converts (the set up is huge in determining whether they make money or not), how to maximize results from your online work, and basically sharing my tips and knowledge from six years online in about 20 pages. It's not an encyclopedia of knowledge, but if you're a beginner or just getting started, this will speed up the learning curve quite a bit.

Buy Ashley's book, e-mail me at masterdayton [@] gmail.com with the words "bought Ashley's awesome book" or "peter never came" or anything along those lines. When I'm done with my guide, anyone who buys Ashley's book and sends me an e-mail gets the guide for free. I'll e-mail it right to you.

I'm not going to give a BS sales pitch with a fake "valued at" number, but I will tell you that this is going to have far more value than most of the multi-hundred dollar e-books out there. Hopefully that deal will help move a few more copies of Ashley's book, and I really am ecstatic over her recent success. Sometimes good things do happen to good people.

Hope ya'll liked this post. Now I have a couple more hubs to hit before bedtime, but keep on keepin' on, devote some daily time to your business, and if you enjoy a good book, grab a copy of "Peter Never Came" to celebrate the emergence of a wonderful writer.

2011 Writing Goals: Looking Ahead

2010-12-29T17:25:00.033-06:00

Full Time Passive Income x 2 , No Freelancing, and a $15,000 December?

Hello everybody! I have to say, I think the Europeans have it right as far as the minimum of six weeks paid vacation per year. I'm back from 4 weeks and change of traveling, and another week of just being lazy and enjoying re-acclimating myself to winter weather once again :) While it is definitely very cliched and maybe even passe (that's an annoying fashionista word, isn't it?), this time of year it simply makes sense to not only look back on the past year, but also look forward to making your goals and New Year's resolutions for 2011.

I'm no different, as I've been spending the last week in the exhausting task of recording every top 10 page keyword ranking for every passive income article, website, URL, Hubpage, Squidoo lens, blog posts, or what have you that I have online. When combined, this is over 1,200 pieces at some level. While some are much more valuable and thus much more time-worthy of working on then others (Associated Content articles are pretty much ignored and Squidoo lenses are way down vs. HubPages, all of which are lower than my 100% own blogs), I like having numbers and I want a clear list of everything there is to work on.

This is part one of my 2011 goals: Taking away all excuses to delay or procrastinate because I don't know what to do next. The beauty of this long master list is that if I don't know what to do, I take a look at the next keyword on the list and just keep going. There's no chance now for me to waste time or get frustrated because I'm drawing a blank. Basically I'm preempting one of the major issues I've run across throughout my writing career, and one that because of that I'm sure to run into again.

I'm a firm believer that the reason most people don't achieve their goals isn't because it's not possible - not even the most overconfident of us knows what we're truly capable of - but because making the goal is only part one. The even more important part is planning out in specific and very detailed, easy to follow steps how you are going to do it.

One great example of this I've already seen online is Kidgas's hub on tripling his online income in just one year. What does he do right?

He sets a goal that is ambitious but realistic, one that is going to force him to work but isn't going to become an anchor because it's unrealistic.
He clearly identifies the best way to get from point A to point B (tripling traffic)
He clearly lays out his plan of how to get there, not with a general "write x number of hubs," but an even better weekly plan of one Saturday, one Sunday, and one during the week - as well as some specific steps on building backlinks, since this is a crucial part of ranking in the search engines and getting more traffic

If I was a betting man, and I am, I'd put my money on Kidgas not only making his goals, but even surpassing them by the end of 2011. That is a good plan. And yes, a few simple tweaks or additions will make his backlinking efforts much more powerful (more on that in a bit), but the point is that all the bases are covered. This is someone who is putting the clear planning and effort behind his goals to succeed.

So for this post I'm going to do two things:

I'm going to announce my own goals (public pressure and all to keep me on track) for the next year and how I intend to get to them, including some major potential pitfalls I can see.
I'm going to give some simple steps/advice to Kidgas (not picking on him or singling him out - but I know he reads this blog and I'm eager to help him hit his goals; I'm a firm believer in paying it forward) that can help improve his backlinking strategy to help him reach his goals.

In all fairness, it might be that Kidgas didn't mention everything he did with backlinking, so maybe I'll just be talking to myself and running a refresher course, but some well intentioned good advice certainly can't hurt.

But first, my writing and passive income goals for 2011. The subtitle of this post, while appearing somewhat sensational, is actually pretty accurate. My three main goals for 2010 when it comes to writing and passive income are:

To no longer have to freelance write for clients at all - and I mean NADA
To have two full-time incomes (in my mind app. $36K a year) from passive income by the end of the year: one from just my own efforts and one from my brother's and my business
To have a $15,000 month (minimum) in December solely from Amazon's Affiliate Program

So starting off with #1: it's not that I don't enjoy freelance writing, I love the lifestyle and there is little else I'd rather do, but the prospects of having full time passive income and being able to work on my passions and my own creative projects is FAR more appealing, not to mention that an end of the year Pareto Principle look at my life indicates that the majority of my work stress (all of it, actually) comes from freelancing for clients. Don't get me wrong - many of these clients are great and many of these jobs I enjoy, but at this point I have to do a pretty decent chunk of freelance work to make ends meet, pay student loans, and try to save up to improve my current lot in life. And with this comes stress. While I can weather the storm of any major recession, the sooner I don't have to freelance at all, the sooner I have total control over my financial life.

So how to get there? Obviously I need much more passive income to make up for the freelancing income. The first step for me is counter-intuitive. I want to take on more work the first three months of the year to save up an extra 3 to 4 months of expenses - something I've never had before. With that much saved up I can take the next 4 months off from freelancing, only take on the easy, high-paying, and fun jobs that come along (if I so choose) and use all that extra time to focus hard core on the passive income side of the equation.

I'm very confident that if I had 4 months where I didn't have to worry about making any income at all, and ALL of my attention was focused on the residual build up, then the progress on that front would be exponential compared to right now.

To do this I plan to spend 4 hours a day writing for Demand Studios, 3 hours a day writing for jobs I win from Guru.com, and 1 hour a day finding new work. I know intermittent work will come in from some former employers, but I choose not to count on it and anything I get is just bonus.

Now for #2: Getting not only one, but two full time passive incomes by the end of 2011. This definitely might be considered over-ambitious considering I haven't fully earned one yet, but I'm feeling good about this. Part of it is from the fact that the business my brother and I are partners in did very well in December - about $1,700 well and counting from only online sources. Yes, the Christmas season throws the numbers way off since a lot of that is Amazon, but it still shows what is possible, and we got started late and were not anywhere close to putting in 40 hour weeks...if only we had.

One of my first steps is making the SEO master list of all my sites and pages, and the company's sites and pages. There are more than enough good topics, keywords, and online real estate that I think I would already be making at least one, if not both, incomes if all these pages, sites, or articles ranked in the top 5 (preferably top 3) in the search engines. So getting there is step one, and with the voice software, I can do 10-12 articles a day for backlinks pretty easily now, in fact in three hours or less - so 300-400 backlink articles a month on the really low side won't hurt at all. If I spend 10 hours every Saturday doing nothing but backlink articles, I can do upwards of 40 to 50.

Next is to create a minimum of 200 new hubs for both my personal account as well as the business account based on continued keyword research, and using the optimal layout we found for selling Amazon products, in addition to still converting for AdSense. These will all get backlinks, including from revenue sharing sites like Xomba, InfoBarrel, and Squidoo. I also need to get my butt in gear and get some of those e-books and online reports done like I've had on the "To Do" list for over a year now and make sure all of my domain names have active and hosted websites - which means a lot more work to get up from the 25% or so where I'm sitting at right now.

This means going back to old pages to "properly" monetize them based on what I've learned the past two years and also being very selective about what I spend my time on. I'm very much naturally a "scatter-shot" sort of person as opposed to the "sniper focus" and my efforts the past few years have reflected that: very broad but rarely very deep. To complete this goal, I don't have any other option. I need to focus heavily on the pages that are showing the most return, the most potential I can actually turn into earnings in a reasonable time, and the projects with the highest upside.

I'm also going to "cheat" and count 2011's Amazon earnings as part of the "average" for the year.

Finally, I've had some really cool ideas for e-books and online courses that I've been working on just a little bit throughout the past year, and it's time to get those out. While not completely passive, they will definitely help with no longer having to freelance and over time some of them might become very profitable passive income streams. One of the appeal of e-books is if you can get an audience and provide information that really is worth $40 a pop versus 50 cents a click or $1 a commission.

Which brings us to #3: $15,000 December. This I actually think is very achievable. Basically I didn't heavily figure out Amazon until this year, and it's been mind-blowing for me. Using only HubPages (so think 60% of what we could have earned) and starting on the 15th of August, we made 67 HubPages, each with an average of 3-5 articles backlinking to each one. Considering there's 116 days between then and Christmas, this isn't that much work, especially for two people. In fact, we pretty much stopped doing anything the first week of November.

The end results? By changing which keywords we shot for slightly and testing to find the best layout for hubs to sell Amazon products, our company (which right now is the two of us just working together) earned $2,783 in commissions, well over half of which came in December. My personal account jumped from $10 a month to $70, and tallied nearly $200 for December, and mostly just from me revising and changing 5-10 hubs I already had to make them more Amazon friendly.

At the end of the day we could have done so much more - even doubled the work without feeling all that stressed out or rushed. So knowing that, and having figured out how to take advantage of Christmas sales and how to design HubPages and sites that actually convert for Amazon, with an entire year to go making $15,000 in December 2011 does not seem that far fetched at all...especially since it's not like this year's hubs disappear. They'll rank even higher by next year.

The goal here is 2 campaigns per month, and at least 2 backlink articles per hub or per website page per month aiming at Amazon, with a huge push in July through October 2011 when we'll have a much better idea of what's hot and what's not during the Christmas season, and what words will be achievable versus which won't be. This goal is actually the one I consider the easiest of the three based on experience and my confidence in what I know and how to do it.

So those are my goals and how I intend to achieve them. For anyone looking at making goals for the next year, I'm personally a fan of aiming for challenging goals that force you to "step up" to achieve them. Getting to new places and reaching new goals means pushing yourself to accomplish things you haven't done before.

Next, hopefully this helps pay it forward and helps Kidgas (who seems to be a cheerful and thoroughly outstanding individual - you can check out his "My Online Income" blog here) reach his goals with some advice, which is always my two cents and nothing more, that hopefully will help his backlinking efforts and in achieving his goals over the next year. And actually, these can be used by anyone, so anyone else go ahead and take notes and enjoy!

Well I guess we could just go back to my old blog post on backlinking for beginners, but since none of us are going to do that, let's move on to just a few basic steps that Kidgas could take to make his back linking more effective.

By all means, I agree with bookmarking at Xomba, Snipsly, and SheToldMe. This is a good start. I would also say, if you don't have an Ezinearticles account, get one! Regardless of what people have been saying for 5+ years, the demise of Ezinearticles is greatly exaggerated. Even 2-3 Ezinearticles (don't use the exact keyword you're shooting for in the title - use a related one) per hub can add 4-6 good solid backlinks. Learning the "a href" language to get backlinks in your author box is not difficult, and I get solid traffic directly from my Ezinearticles...and if they're willing to click once, they're willing to click again once they get to my page.

So I obviously encourage adding Ezinearticles to the mix. You can use the bookmarking sites on these to add extra "juice" to your links.

The next step would be to look at InfoBarrel if you haven't already done so. This is a very good AdSense and Amazon revenue sharing site that also allows you to have backlinks in your "signatures" of the article. InfoBarrel articles tend to rank fairly well, and you can make money off of them, as well.

Finally, in each new hub make sure to link to other recent hubs that you produce. This is a very smart move, as those "internal links" can actually be an enormous help in outranking other pages.

This is an extremely basic "how to get started," for Kidgas or whoever else needs it, but even by adding just a few Ezinearticle, InfoBarrel article, or other links you might be surprised how quickly your rankings in the search engines improve. HubPages is an incredibly strong site, and it often doesn't take very many backlinks to push the hubs up in the rankings for targeted keywords. Once you get the hang of this and start seeing the results, take a look at the backlinking for beginners post I made as it will give you a list of other places to get backlinks from (including sites who have an AdSense share program) and the default order in how I do things if that type of structure helps you out.

If you haven't tried it already, down the line consider looking at a Keyword Academy Membership (this is an affiliate link), which last I check offered a free trial month. The tools and teaching they offer is incredible and has shaved months off of my journey, if not more. The regular price is $33 a month, so it is a commitment, but it's not a bad idea to sign up when you have some time to watch the teaching videos, get a feel for their tools, do some research and get some backlinks, then if you can't afford $33 a month you can decide whether it's worth it for you to come back at a later time. Definitely hold on this until you know you have time to look at the videos and take notes: it's incredible information and even if now you can only do the free trial run, do it. What you learn will speed up the passive income process immensely.

So hopefully that will help you out to really get the most out of your backlinking efforts. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to leave a comment and ask. You were brave enough to mention your goals, so I want to be able to help you reach them and then some.

As to everyone reading, hope your holidays are great, feel free to share your goals or thoughts in the comments section, and I really encourage you to challenge yourself to really go after those big time goals in 2011. Cheers!

Freelance Passive Writing Income: And a Vacation Update

2010-11-30T13:40:00.056-06:00

Passive Writing Income Opens Up the World

Well this should be an enjoyable post. I've just finished my third week of travel/vacation out of four, and after a week enjoying North Carolina and then Tampa, Florida, this week is already up and kicking in Las Vegas. And we're not talking New Mexico here, people. While I've attempted to start this post several times in the past week, well vacation has been great and there is always a lot to see in the city, so the tenses of this post might not completely match, and I'm going to try and be a little bit less long winded than usual since I am on vacation and there's so much more to be out doing and seeing. But I figured it would be nice to get in one freelance writing blog post before Christmas.

This has been somewhat of a work vacation, as I've put in about four hours of work every Friday, but many days on vacation I haven't done any. And on some of the other days, I've only worked a couple hours a day, using free or rented Wi-Fi and a laptop to get online and type some articles, or use my Dragon Natural Speaking Software (this is an affiliate link, but I strongly recommend this software after a couple months of use and will be doing a more in depth review on it later) to really get some done quickly in a shorter time. So it might not be a 100% no work vacation, but I haven't worked more than 8 total hours any of the last four weeks, and the reason this is possible is not only because of a little bit of savings, but because of the way that passive income opens the door for this type of trip. In a limited way, so does freelance writing since it only takes a laptop and Wi-Fi, but then you have to work a lot more on each week of break than you otherwise would.

During these four weeks I've received over $300 from Google AdSense, $250 from Amazon's Affiliate program, $150 from my eHow articles, $90 from Yahoo! Contributors (formerly Associated Content), $13 from Suite101, $125 from Squidoo, $40 from eBay and $700 from other various sources of passive or semi-passive income. Taking a month long vacation is much easier when you're receiving $1,665 from work that you've already done while on vacation - and it definitely helps you to stretch out the savings. This is part of the reason I so adamantly believe that all freelancers should spend some time building up their passive income streams. The number of hours or days I "have to work" shrink dramatically when a flow of money is coming in from various resources. Even the number of days you can qualify as "I should work, but I don't really have to" also shrinks dramatically when enough money comes in to pay the bills.

This also makes traveling more enjoyable. What stopped me the most early on was that I spent way too much time reading and trying to learn everything there was to know instead of actually building blogs, writing articles, and building sites. And when I started Grizzly's famous make money online for beginners blog was available as an excellent resource, before Google and a few jerks (you know, the ones who try to ruin everything for everyone) hammered away until it was no more. Even if that blog was still available for all of you, it would be a bad idea to do too much research and not enough doing.

There are several reasons for this, not the least of which are:

Online marketing and passive income changes constantly. While the basic cornerstones remain the same, there are constant changes in how pages are ranked, what links are most effective, and other tweaks to the best ways to rank pages and make passive income. Because of this, you can NEVER learn 100% of what there is to know before getting started.
You can always learn while you are setting up money making pages. Not only is this smarter because you will learn the most by actually doing, but instead of sitting on the sidelines you will be beginning to make the articles, HubPages, and websites you need to build up your passive income.
Age matters. The older a website or article, the more authority it has in the search engines and the easier it is to rank on top. So the sooner you get started, the sooner your pages will age and the more they will make for you.
Did I mention that actually doing is the best way to learn this business and you can fill in the details while you're writing online?
Passive income is partially a numbers game. The higher the numbers, the more winners you are going to have, the more money you will make, and the more likely you are to have a large number of articles or pages that you can tweak to turn into good earners once you learn more about passive income.
Paralysis by Analysis is the most common thing that stops people from making it online
And finally, almost everyone I know making passive income states that their one big regret was not jumping in and getting started sooner or waiting too long before starting, or something else along those lines.

One of the great things about writing for passive income online is that you get to correct your mistakes and improve your sites down the line. You don't have to ever be perfect, and certainly not up front.

Use that information to encourage yourself to get moving. You can always revise your HubPages later, move ads around on your blogs and websites, and write more articles that are better focused. You're not going to get hurt earning online passive income because your articles or pages aren't perfect when you're starting out. At least by having pages out there you have the ability to earn - someone with all the knowledge in the world and 0 sites is worth $0.00. A person with a badly put up site with no good keywords at least has an outside chance at something.

So this is one of those basic "motto" posts which can be summarized easily: get started and work consistently. If that means something as simple as only one HubPage and one InfoBarrel article a week and one Ezinearticle to both, then so be it, but put in the work. It's worth it, and you'll be glad you did down the line. And if you're ready to really invest in your business, then read this Keyword Academy Review to get a true sense of where the next step is for the true beginner.

I Haven't Updated My Resume Since 2006

2010-11-20T08:57:00.013-06:00

Freelance Writing Benefit: No Resume Games

First off, let me add an important caveat to the title, that being that I'm not saying having a good resume isn't important or that freelance writers shouldn't have resumes. I'm just saying that I haven't updated mine since 2006 and honestly I'm not keeping a conventional resume any more because I don't have any intention of getting an "honest job" (whatever that means) again.

My personality made me clash with authority even before I worked for myself, so really, in many ways I'm probably pretty unemployable at this point unless my boss let's me do my own thing as long as the job gets done. But one of the advantages to a freelance writing career is that after a certain amount of time, depending on how well you set up your business, you don't need a resume anymore. I stopped updating mine in 2006, when it became clear that getting into academics was a nightmare I wanted nothing to do with, and that the boss of the job I was interviewing for had exactly 0 interest in my resume and was only interested in my writing skills and at how efficiently I could keep growing and adapting into producing the type of writing that was actually useful to him.

Now don't get me wrong, I do keep track of special accomplishments, list of clients I've worked for (or continue to work for), and places published and earned awards. But as for organizing everything into a writer's resume, I don't bother. There's no reason to. Between steady clients and my growing passive income, there just isn't any reason to. Aside from the fact that the way I was taught to write a resume in college is now "completely wrong and outdated" why do I need an updated resume? Maybe down the line if I want to spend some free time teaching as an adjunct because there are a couple classes I'd really enjoy designing (such as one on online freelance writing that college students could actually use and turn into paying work), I love working for myself and am not willing to give that up.

For beginning writers, a freelance writing resume is essential as you build up a client list, learn the ropes, and still have to sell yourself in query letters time and time again. If you're also someone who doesn't mind writing for a company or in the corporate world, then a resume in addition to copies of published articles (your "clips") are very important. However, one of the great advantages of being a freelance writer is that word of mouth is a powerful way to gain new work as one impressed client will suggest you to others looking for a good and RELIABLE writer. I still can't believe all the horror stories of flaky and terrible writers who don't respect their clients and make the rest of us look bad.

If you're a good and reliable freelance writer, just keep marketing yourself and over time between steady clients and word of mouth, you'll get to the point where you have all the clients you need and possibly a backlog to boot. Another key point here: passive writing income definitely helps out this process a great deal. The day you work for yourself only, with no other clients, I'm sure is also a great day - and one I'm rapidly working towards. Never ignore passive income even if 90% of your time has to be spent on freelancing - a situation I'm used to. However that 10% of time I've spent just over 3 years (because the first 2 years I did ignore the passive income) building passive income has me almost half way to a full time passive income. I'd probably be there by now had I started right away, but the point is that even small baby steps over time will add up to hundreds, then thousands, of dollars a month. You'll be very glad you did not neglect this point.

So what does not updating my resume since 2006 have to do with anything? Well to me it's symbolic of a lot of things that I love about the freelance writing life style. There's a definite independence. Not only do I not worry about finding a new job, I don't worry about getting fired from an old one. There's no being pissed off at being passed over for promotion over and over again or having someone else take credit for your work (unless you're a ghost writer getting paid very handsomely to do just that). There's no worry about whether or not I can compete with experienced veterans or eager newcomers willing to work for less - employers do not let go of excellent reliable writers. No worrying about "having to" beef up a resume or "what about that gap" or "how can I make this sound impressive?" None of that.

Not to say I haven't written resumes since 2006 - I have...but other people's for $50 a pop :) The point here is that a skilled writer willing to take the lumps, learn the business, and push through the frustrations and muck then you can become completely independent of all the worries that plague so many daily grind workers who deserve better. I haven't updated my resume since 2006, and you know what, that might be the last time I ever do.

So how long has it been since you had to update your resume? How hard would you work to make sure you never had to do so again? This might not be right for everyone, but these are questions that might give you that little bit of motivation you need to get moving with the online writing. Imagine never having to prepare a resume again because you were secure. What would that be worth to you?

Last Writing Post Before a Freelance Vacation

2010-11-11T00:58:00.019-06:00

Freedom to Write on the Road

If there is one giant benefit to freelance writing, especially when the majority of my work is done online (and nearly 40% of my income is passive) is that when it's time to take a vacation...or just wander off for a while, that's exactly what I can do. There is no office I have to be at, no location where I "must" be to do my job. Have Wi-Fi, get paid for working. So over the past year I've been back in Cedar Rapids, Iowa building my business, taking care of personal matters, and trying to clean house and figure out what's next for me.

Part one is part doctor's orders and part just long overdue. After a very stressful year and too much working in 2010, (not to mention serious wanderlust that hasn't been seriously fed in 2 years) there's no question that it's time for a good vacay, and there is little that relaxes me more than traveling. So I'm going on a vacation, also a "work vacation" for the rest of the year.

Next week I'll be taking the train east to visit one of my best friends in North Carolina, who is fulfilling his life dream of going to college at the age of 30 - a life dream that was delayed by a hard life. After hanging out for a week, it's a road trip to Tampa, Florida where he can visit his family for Thanksgiving, and I can visit my Dad for Thanksgiving. A week after that I'm flying for my return trip to Las Vegas, Nevada, where I'll be meeting some of my best friends from Alaska who I haven't seen in years.

After that, a week in Austin to see some of my old friends and scout out apartments for a return next year and a nice train ride home with a few days in St. Louis before getting back to Iowa in time for Christmas.

How can I do this? Because as a freelance writer all I need is Wi-Fi, whether it's Asheville North Carolina, Tampa Florida, Las Vegas Nevada, Austin Texas, St. Louis Missouri, or back to Cedar Rapids Iowa. I've worked my butt off the past six weeks to pay off the bills, set myself up to be able to coast out the year and take this vacation with minimal work.

Now I'm not 100% passive income, and that passive income level isn't where it needs to be so I can "not work," but I'll be enjoying life a lot more than most people stuck in a career. Every Friday for the next five to six weeks I need to work 4 hours a day in the morning. Otherwise, it looks like 6-8 hours a week will be more than enough to handle expenses, give me a decent bit of spending money and cover all the bills. For me, visiting some of my favorite cities and some new places altogether is going to recharge me in incredible ways, with or without work.

The freedom of a freelance writing lifestyle is what allows me to end a year like this, and while I'm on break no worrying about saving up for bills, no worrying about getting extra work, and no worrying about building passive income or writing my next e-book. I'm going to do the minimum work to finish out 2010 and recharge my batteries to be prepared to go full force in 2011.

This also serves the important function of reminding me not to pigeonhole myself, because being a freelance writer offers freedoms and an openness to planning life that gives me the opportunity to do amazing things and enjoy an amazing life - as long as I don't let old habits or practices get in the way and change my thinking to make a freelance lifestyle just another job.

Not everyone is going to have the same goals or desires that I do. I love travel. ALWAYS have. For other people that's not the goal, but simply having the ability to move around, to work in different places, and to have that control over your life is a huge relief and maybe the biggest benefit of being a freelance writer.

Being at my breaking point, having the ability now to travel, to spend a week at five different places (most I love, one I haven't ever visited) and to only have to work a grand total of 10-12 hours a week at the most to do it is huge for me. For those of you who are more motivated by the possibility of living out your dreams as opposed to written goals to achieve (i.e. earning enough to take a 6 week work vacation as opposed to a goal of 'write 100 articles' and then doing it), take the time to really look at what you love out of life and use that as motivation. I find it easier to have at least one or two reminders of things I have done and want to do again - this is easier for me to imagine as opposed to going somewhere I've never been or doing something I've never done.

This doesn't mean I don't have to work for a break - I've pushed myself pretty hard the past few weeks, but now I get to enjoy the pay out, and while this shouldn't be the last freelance writing blog post before 2011, I'm not sure if I'll be posting over my break. Basically if I feel like it I will, and if I don't then I won't. That's the beauty of a freelance writing vacation, as well - I get to choose my schedule.

So I hope everyone is doing well, keep up your writing goals, and if you're finding a hard time getting motivation then think of the things you want or the ideal lifestyle you could enjoy from making a full time living as a freelance writer. Spend some time reflecting on these goals or ideals, then map out the first steps you can take to get there.

So take care, and for now I'm outta' here!

Dragon Naturally Speaking Review: The 15 Minute Review

2010-10-29T19:34:00.005-05:00

Immediate Impressions of Dragon Naturally Speaking 11

After recommendations from several people about looking into this software, and getting the green light of approval from several online freelance writers whom I respect very much who claim to use Dragon Naturally Speaking Software full time (thanks to TW at Complete Writing Solutions for the encouragement and answering my questions), I decided to finally bring out the credit card and take a shot to see if all the hype was there and if this really could make me more productive - or at the very least take down the physical stress from Carpal Tunnel. I bought the Dragon Naturally Speaking 11 Home Edition, without any fancy bells or whistles. What I thought would be interesting is to try it right away and give my initial first impressions, do a second review in two weeks (right before my vacation) and then do one in January after I've had plenty of time to decide whether or not this is something I'd recommend to freelance writers.

So what's the result after literally only 15 minutes? I would probably recommend it to most people. Seriously, I'm blown away by the early results. This doesn't mean I don't have frustrations or concerns, but this software hasn't even had time to adapt and learn how I speak and it's by far and away superior to every other voice software I've ever tried.

In fact, I'm going to paste in my "practice run" using Dragon for the first time:

Dragon naturally speaking review.

Many people have recommended this software to me. After a long debate, I decided to finally give it a try. Early on it is hard to figure out it is a good piece of equipment or not. Early on I'm having a hard time with actual word showing up that I did not say. But I have been told that this is a problem that most people have with speaking software right out-of-the-box. I do have to admit, that so far I am fairly impressed with this software. The hardest part for most people, including myself, is having the patience to train the software to work for us. When the software is working fine you definitely pick up speed and versus typing.

This is my first test using Dragon NaturallySpeaking software. There is no question in my mind, that this is a much better piece of software than the cheap version that comes with some Windows. When I tried using other brand it was pretty much worthless. I can already see how the this particular piece of software could definitely help me out. One thing you will have to be aware of so, is that you will have to do a lot of visual checking and correcting to make sure the words are coming out right.

Another very important aspect of using the Dragon NaturallySpeaking software is that you have to make some corrections yourself. Making the corrections with your voice instead of typing them in, helps to train the software to recognize your own enunciation's and accents. I also think that while correcting text to seems difficult at first part of that is just not being familiar with the command first time.

I have made some minor corrections with this text, but have chosen to leave most of it as is so you have at least a reasonable idea of how the software is working as I'm talking to you first time. So far I have had to make approximately 6 corrections. The funny thing is, many of the hardest words on here the software recognized right away. Right now is having the hardest time figuring the word at versus it. In fact I just had it correct that in the last sentence.

If you're writing here does not seem up to par with what I usually do, don't worry that's more of me figuring out the software and learning to talk as opposed to write my ideas. Although obviously there are some early frustrations, unlike other voice software I have tried even with the first test run here I can see how this will be worth the purchase. I also appreciate that the DragonPad makes files in RTF format.

This makes it much easier to save the file straight to document and then be able to use it with anything I need on or off line. While I can't endorse the software yet due to the fact that I'm still using it on my very first day, the potential is definitely there and my hands are already happy with the rest that they are getting. Once I actually get used to the commands that you use with this program and more used to talking instead of typing, I think I could definitely improve our production using the software and help prevent carpal tunnel, or at the very least alleviates it.

So in some ways you can look at this is a test, and maybe I'll have a better idea what this can do after 10 days and even better idea after 30 days. It is too early to say for sure whether this was a good buy or not, but the early signs are looking like this is a very worthwhile in investment. Are you kidding me
End of Dragon test

Now the "are you kidding me" comes from me realizing that as opposed to talking out about 300 words in 13 minutes, which is where I thought I was, the total actually came out to be 633 words, which comes out to 49 words a minute completely ignoring the facts that:

I spent over 50% of the time correcting small details and trying to learn the correction commands
I had no outline and no idea what I wanted to say
This is my first attempt dictating an article as opposed to typing, so I felt very slow stringing my thoughts together
This review isn't a topic I'm used to, so I couldn't just pull stuff out from prior knowledge like I can with many of my niches
It was my first freaking time using the software - 50% of which was spent trying to learn simple commands.

Which means even going slow as an absolute beginner, I could still belt out over 2500 words per hour even before this software learns my speaking nuances, before I learn all the commands, without being familiar with the subject, without being familiar with the software, and before I get used to speaking and thinking as opposed to typing and thinking.

So what happens when I stop pausing every time I just remember to say "comma" or "period," when the software gets used to my pronunciations, and I get used to dictating instead of typing? My guess is my rate will double at a minimum, and it will save my hands. This is especially useful for late at night when I can think of things that need to be written or things I want to write, but my hands and eyes don't want to cooperate.

So my initial reaction is that this was an exceptional buy for me, and I have a feeling I will be strongly recommending it once I really used to using this software and become much more comfortable and efficient using it.

Backlinking for Dummies (or Just Beginners)

2010-10-27T17:14:00.029-05:00

Backlinking Basics for Beginners

Welcome to the freelance writing blog post featuring the most alliterate title to date. Recently I've been helping some friends get started not only with freelance writing, but specifically with the real basics of passive income. HubPages, keywords, and backlinks all come to the front of the discussion, and it's easy for me to overlook the basics because I have been working on passive income for some time now. I believe for a lot of us this could be the case. Even after a short time working for passive income online it can be easy to not think about things like keyword research or finding backlinks, because it's all become second nature after even a short time.

Also, after a certain amount of time you get used to being able to take short cuts. I've done so much keyword research I can take an educated guess at this point and with about 60 seconds of research decide if it's worth going after or not with a pretty decent rate of accuracy. But it took a lot of time to get to this point. And now more often than not I simply use the tools at The Keyword Academy to REALLY shorten up the process. Ditto with collecting backlinks (and if you're serious about your online business and have the time and money to invest, the $33 a month subscription for The Keyword Academy is ridiculously good resource. That is an affiliate link, but I believe the first month is only a $1 and if you don't like the affiliate link, then type "keyword academy" into Google).

So for someone who is a true beginner, who knows only the most basic information about making money online and SEO (Search Engine Optimization if you're really a noob...aka getting ranked high in Google), doesn't know where to get backlinks, and doesn't have the time or money to make a $33/month investment at this point, then this post will walk you through a nice simple template of actions I used early on to get backlinks to everyone of my money pages - and I still use this with new pages when I don't want to think too hard about it.

If you're a veteran at the passive income, you can probably skim or even ignore the rest of this. For anyone who feels lost as a beginner and wants a solid way to build several good backlinks to their money sites, read on or feel free to print this post out as a starter's guide.

Caveats: Many of the links further down are affiliate or referral links, but I only use these links when I get a cut of the website's %, not yours. This is also going under the assumption that you're building HubPages as opposed to websites when starting off. I'm doing this because HubPages is by far and away, in my opinion, the best way for true beginners to learn how SEO and Internet Marketing works and to see some early results to stay motivated.

If this isn't the case, I'll explain more about how that changes things (actually very little) later on in the post. Also, have a safe place to keep copies of all your log in information as you will need to open accounts in several places to build your backlinks.

First of all, you will need to open accounts at several article directories and websites. Some split income with you (InfoBarrel, Xomba) while others don't (Ezinearticles, Buzzle, Articlesbase). This doesn't make one better than the other: you need backlinks to get your money pages ranked, and the more good links, the better.

Open accounts at Ezinearticles, Buzzle, Articlesbase, InfoBarrel, Xomba, Olive Articles, Blogger.com (gmail account needed), Wordpress.com, RedGage.com, YouSayToo.com, SheToldMe.com, A1 Webmarks.com, & Theinfomine.com

After publishing a hub, the first step is to write a Xomba bookmark for your hub. Although there is a 50 word minimum, I strongly recommend 75 words as this almost guarantees your hub (or whatever you're bookmarking) will be indexed by Google within 24 hours.
Find a high PR blog that gets a lot of attention (like the 4 Hour Work Week Blog) and make a relevant comment, only linking your name to your site. This isn't for a keyword - this is to get Google's attention, index your site, and get a "natural crappy" link to make the link building look natural and honest.
Write 3-5 original articles for Ezinearticles and submit them.
Write 1 original article for Buzzle
Write 1 original article for InfoBarrel
Write 1 original article for Articlesbase
Write 1 original article for Olive Articles
Write 1 original article for Theinfomine.com
If the topic is something you're going to right a lot about, start a Blogger.com blog and a Wordpress.com blog. You'll eventually want a minimum of 5-10 posts each, but each post can have a link to a hub or article (not even including the blogroll for each blog).
Bookmark your hub at RedGage.com, YouSayToo.com, SheToldMe.com, & A1 Webmarks.com.
Create a Xomba bookmark to every single one of the articles on this list with a 75+ word description.
Use the 4 social bookmarking sites to bookmark every one of the articles on this list.
Write a Xomba article (not bookmark) that links to your hub or site. 400+ words is best but not mandatory - this will give you a "no follow" bookmark, which is always good to have a few.
If you want a few more links, Google "KeywordLuv" and spend 20-30 minutes gathering blog comment backlinks using a variety of keywords related to your hub.

That's it. Is it a lot of work? Yes - but everything online for making money is. Is it difficult or hard or confusing? No. This is very easy, and you can completely skip the Blogger.com and Wordpress.com steps if you feel like it. If you're a true beginner, I might even recommend that. When you're further along with Internet Marketing you'll understand how to use those better, anyway. If you have a website or blog as opposed to HubPages, then just follow these steps, except add a HubPage and then go through all these steps for the HubPage, too, to make that a much stronger page, which will make it a stronger link.

This outline is very basic, it uses basic social bookmarking, blog commenting, and article marketing to get a solid group of links. HubPages is a very strong website that tends to rank very well right off the bat and FAR better than an independent site or blog starting from scratch. If you follow this group of instructions, you already have 15-18 backlinks, even with no Blogger Blog, no WordPress blog, no Keyword Luv commenting. A decent amount of these directories even split any AdSense earnings that your articles might earn. Aside from Xomba and InfoBarrel this rarely happens, but every little bit extra helps.

Most of those are do follow, with just enough no follow to make your site look really good to Google. With a HubPage, this can often be enough to start ranking well, especially after some time passes. The steps are ordered by importance, so if one article directory is ranked in step #3 and the other is step #8, then the backlink you get from #3 will be stronger than the one you get from #8.

I'm not saying this is the best way to gather and build links, but it is a great backlink starter template for those of you who want to learn about Internet Marketing and SEO but don't have a lot of guidance. Now there's no excuse. Go make some hubs, and use this guide to get them all some backlinks. Remember that the sheer number of hubs and money pages you have does matter, and time is a very big factor when it comes to ranking a page at the top of Google, which is how your pages will make you the most money online.

By all means, keep learning and keep reading from the many incredible resources that are online, but there's no excuse now. Go to HubPages, start building hubs, and use this template to gather backlinks. No fear!

I'm not saying there won't be a learning curve, and as you learn more online you'll almost certainly go back and touch up your old sites and/or pages (I still do), but when you really know what you're doing and understand down the line from having more experience, you'll definitely be glad to already have a great base of backlinks. It makes everything much easier! Hopefully that helps out and if anyone has any questions, feel free to leave them in the comments section.

Good luck and enjoy the extra results this work will bring to your efforts!

Online Writing, Passive Income, & Blogs to Read

2010-10-20T21:48:00.021-05:00

Reading Break for Online Writers

One of the nice things that I've really enjoyed about becoming an online freelance writer is not only the freedom of time and place or the security that comes with being self-employed, but also the great community that exists online. You don't have to spend too much time looking around to find a huge number of writers, bloggers, and other normal people shooting for passive income who want to share what they've learned and help out others in their online community. I've felt extremely blessed for the number of positive comments and e-mails I've received from this blog, and from the number of people who I've helped to get part time or even full time income working on their own. Just as great has been the sheer number of online friends I've made, the communities I've discovered, and the support that really comes from normal people who have extraordinary dreams - because those are two of the common factors I've found from many people online.

So this post will hopefully give you a few great resources and blogs that are worth checking out. As always, make sure you're working towards your goals and not letting over analysis paralyze you - nothing any of us ever tell you is going to beat good old fashioned experience when it comes to learning the ropes of making money writing online and making money through passive income. But it's nice to have support, encouragement, and online mentors...and this list of blogs is one that I encourage anyone looking for great reads to take a look at.

It's important to understand that while earning passive income online most often involves a LOT of writing, that's not the only model for earning passive income. One thing I like about passive income online is that Jade Dragon's blog covers both the online and some offline methods to passive income. Two recent posts have really jumped out at me. This one on being happy with $3 a day, and then this informative article on a great link stacking tool that is extremely useful for improving your SEO online. Both of those posts are definitely worth checking out.

Along the same lines of there being more than one type of passive income, I strongly recommend the blog "My 4 Hour Work Week." There are several reasons why I love checking in on this blog. Aside from the author being about 10 times more consistent at posting than I am, he's willing to ponder unconventional questions like this post wondering if controlled chaos can equal success. It's a good read and good discussion down in the comments section. He also talks about non-Internet based sources of investment and passive income like this earnings update that also serves as a LendingClub Review.

I definitely feel akin to this next blog, as the author, Felicia, started as a writer and is moving into full time passive income. Obviously this is exactly along the lines of the same transition I'm making, one that started shortly after I originally created this freelance writing blog. So if somehow you haven't heard of the No Job for Mom Blog, you should go check it out. The comments section can be a wealth of information here.

If you haven't seen the Complete Writing Solutions blog, then you will want to check it out. This blog is a recent one that a reader actually recommended to me. T.W. covers some major parts to writing online full time, and goes into the great benefits of living as a writer such as living overseas, travel, and living a mobile lifestyle as a full time freelance writer.

And sometimes blogs are carried not just by great information, but also great personalities. This isn't saying that the other blog owners aren't likable (I find everyone listed here to be a jolly good group), but some blogs really shine almost personality first. Two examples of blogs that jump out immediately in this regards is Lissie's Passive Income Blog and Kidgas's Online Income Blog. Both of these blogs feature writers who are very open, very friendly, and know what it's like to be a true beginner still working towards their main goals. I always enjoy new blog posts from these writers and enjoy hearing about their on going successes, as well.

Finally, one freelance writer's blog that I strongly recommend is Bianca Raven's Freelance Writing from Home blog. The October 15th, 2010 post she has on the need for freelance writers to take their clients seriously is fantastic and I strongly recommend it. Far too many would be writers make this critical and completely inexcusable mistake.

So this should leave you plenty of reading material, including this blog. You never want to read so much that you stop working on your stuff, but this list of blogs gives you not only a wide array of perspectives and people willing to give good advice, but also a part of an online community that is actually worth being a part of. While these blogs all vary greatly, one thing you can see in common with those listed here is a genuine kindness and willingness to pass it on.

That's it for now, although there will be some more posts coming up soon going over my base link building strategies for passive income, current strategy for writing online, and a post making fun of the first outright "crazy person" e-mail I've received because of the advice I'm giving on this blog. So hope everyone has plenty of reading now, and keep up the good work!

Finding Private Freelance Writing Clients

2010-09-20T01:43:00.017-05:00

Freelance Writing Work: Finding Private Clients

One of the major parts of building a successful freelance writing career is building a list of private clients. This can be one of the hardest and scariest parts of building a freelance writing career, as well. But private clients often equate to steady work and much higher wages than any other form of writing. There are many, MANY people out there who are willing to pay much higher wages to find one very good and very RELIABLE freelance writer to deal with all of their work.

Many of my private clients pay me double or more what they originally did when I was first hired, because I set myself apart as being talented and completely reliable. The second part is even more important than the first. Average writers who are completely reliable are 10 TIMES more valuable than fantastic writers who may or may not hit deadline. If you can be above average and prove yourself as THE go-to guy (or gal), you can find some excellent pay. I don't have any private clients who pay less than $36 an hour, and on some jobs I get paid as high as $60 to $65 an hour. Even if you don't hit those levels (and early on it will be difficult, especially in this economy), having steady solid work from private clients makes a huge difference and is worth pursuing.

There are a few important rules you need to make sure you hold yourself to before you search for even your first private client.

Always get done before deadline. There is absolutely no exception to this rule. Almost any successful employer or business I worked for agreed that C+ work done on time is ALWAYS better than A+ work delivered even a few hours late. Missing deadlines kills businesses, and great writing won't resurrect them.
Come through in a pinch. Proving that you can deliver on short notice can move you to the top of the list. Two private clients I write for both originally used several freelance writers. Once it became clear I was willing to turn any reasonable project around in 24 hours, I took over ALL the work for both. Sometimes this means you'll get a job at 9 pm and be staying up all night so they have something in the inbox by 10 am the next morning...but this type of coming through not only lets you charge more, it means they'll send all the high paying quick turnaround work to you.
Defend your specialties. Everyone has their specific niches or specialties - those topics or subjects that they know more about than other people. As a writer, you need to know the areas where you can excel, because these niches are the first places you're going to look for new clients. If you're good at a niche, work to become great. Expertise shows.
Be confident. Many writers like the idea of working from home, and part of that can often come from preferring to be one one's own as opposed to having people looking over your shoulders. That being said, finding private clients means practicing some common exercises that many people find hard nowadays: cold calling and pitching. You need to appear confident because when cold calling you're already pitching yourself without any permission and no foot inside the door - which makes it all the more important to come across as confident, professional, and with true value to offer.
Be Prepared. Be prepared, because on cold calls I find my success rate is about 3% - and I have a really good radio-style voice that gives me a little bit of an edge in the "vocally charismatic" arena.

These five rules are critical before even starting the search. The next section, about places and techniques for finding private clients, are based on past experiences I've had. This isn't a step by step guide for a major reason: while I can give general advice and tactics that have worked for me, finding private clients is going to be different for individual people, and changing technology and economic times means that the best ways to find private clients (and the demand for reliable writers) is going to shift and change over time. Everything I'm writing here is true, as far as I know, in my experience from 2005 to 2010. Starting in 2011 and on, who knows?

But those five freelance writing rules for finding private clients still stand. You will get rejected much more than you get accepted, but even a few consistent private clients can make a huge difference. So here is my best advice for finding or increasing your number of private clients.

Use old connections. This is a great piece of advice, and the ideal way to actually get started into freelance writing, if possible. Did you just walk away from a company? Get downsized a few years back, but know they need an online presence? Do you have friends with companies that want to set up websites? Former employers, friends at other companies, or any type of old connection can often be used to find work. You might be surprised how often these connections can lead to work, but only when you ask point blank. My best private clients to date are actually my former employers in Austin, Texas. Just because there was no longer enough work to justify a full time writer on staff didn't mean there wasn't more writing work that had to be done. Those old connections (and their recommending me to friends) leads to thousands of dollars of work a year for me.

Forums. Don't spam online forums, but in many online forums you can offer services or find work even by casually mentioning that you are a writer, especially in niche forums (those forums about topics you are a specialist in) and online marketing forums, who are often ALWAYS looking for talented writers. With the latter you may have to start with a discounted rate to prove yourself, but if you prove your mettle you can pick up some very profitable long term clients.

Start out at auction site. This is how I found many of my earliest clients. Personally I have a lot of experience with Elance.com and Guru.com and can vouch for both, but many writers I know also like oDesk and Rentacoder as well. These sites may not seem like a natural place for finding private clients, but many employers come to these sites looking for quality writers not only for one project, but for several. It's not uncommon to have employers who use Elance or Guru for all their projects to come to you first for any new work, and they're willing to pay extra to have a writer who is consistent and provides quality work. Sometimes all future work is done on the auction sites, I've also had these employers contact me directly and start paying me directly to work for them. That way you save 6-10% on commission fees and you have more private clients who often recommend you to their friends, as well.

Surf websites in "expert niches" and find sites that may want more content. Sometimes I'll stumble on a website by accident while doing research. Sometimes they have a blog but no content, or a really nice site but no content, or a nice set with terrible content. I'm not shy - if the writing sucks I'll offer my superior services for a reasonable professional price. Look around niches you know a lot about and see if you can find a lot of sites that might want contact. You might only get 2-3 responses for every 10 or 20 e-mails you shoot, but even 5 test articles at $15 each is a nice little haul in for a couple hours of querying. Any long term contract you get is bonus. I broke into travel writing this way, and while no one contract was large, there were 4 sites I wrote for who each wanted 15 to 20 articles a month at $15 each - and they were simple, I could do two in an hour, and added up to good grocery money.

Set up your own online presence. If there's one area I should personally do better in, it's this one. You can set up a professional website or blog (or both) to set yourself up online. In addition, while building passive income by writing for sites like HubPages, Squidoo, and Xomba you can talk about yourself in your profile and even offer your services. If nothing else, leave a business e-mail to let clients get a hold of you. Just from HubPages and Squidoo I've been interviewed as an expert in writing, working from home, literature, and history on various radio shows and online radio shows, and was almost in a USA Today story. You will be amazed at the ways people will find you online as long as you have a presence there.

Cold call local companies. This is one of the most intimidating ones on the list, and many people find it hard to believe that calling is better than e-mail now - but cold calling is MORE effective than ever just because of this change. So many people shoot an e-mail when looking for work or asking a question that having the guts to call not only makes you stand out and look more professional, but gives you a better chance of success. You might be surprised how many companies want a freelance writer, or didn't think about it but are willing to give you a shot once you call. If you know anything about SEO to go with freelance writing, your chances of success sky rocket.

Advertise in local papers. And I don't mean online. While I believe in having an online presence and how important that is, I'm not a fan of online ads since people look for cheap work here, and many people look for people to rip off. Many people still swear by Craigslist, and I'm not saying it can't work, but a great way to find local private clients is through local papers. People still look at the want ads or ads offering services, so put yourself out there.

Advertise in trade magazines of your niche. Sometimes it's best to just pitch magazines, but depending on the niche, it might be worth advertising yourself as a professional online writer who specializes in that magazine's niche. Chances are that people who run popular websites in the niche still look through specialty magazines for ideas. An ad for a freelance writer custom made to their niche could easily be too much to resist.

Business cards at coffee houses. Remember all those billboards at Colleges full of fliers and business cards that no one paid attention to? Well there's one place I've found where those actually get read and picked up. Coffee houses. Post up some business cards, or a flier explaining your services, and you might be surprised how often this leads to some good work.

Read the best books on the topic. This is kind of a no-brainer, and don't worry I'll list the ones I feel are the best. If I miss one, feel free to add the information in the comments section.
First, I would strongly recommend Peter Bowerman's book, "The Well Fed Writer." This gives a ton of great information about finding clients, and the cold calling advice is invaluable. I know Bowerman also wrote a sequel to The Well Fed Writer, but I have not read it at this point so I can't personally vouch for it. Once again, if anyone reading this post can give a review good or bad, please include your opinion in the comments section. Robert Bly's two books: "Secrets of a Freelance Writer" and "Getting Started as a Freelance Writer" are both also extremely useful and should be extremely helpful to beginners. I also strongly recommend Jenna Glatzer's "How to Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer." The emphasis here is on magazines, but the chapters on research, marketing, and pitching should be read by everyone who wants to make it as a writer. The reason I recommend these books is because these writers have landed more private clients than I have by far - and the best way to get information is right from the expert's mouth!

Be persistent. It takes time to build a strong client list, but private clients seem to be the most profitable as well and taking the time to build that list will help you on your way to a strong full time income as a freelance writer. Push through the early rejections and over-deliver every time you get a chance to prove yourself.

That's it. That's all the advice I can give about tracking down private clients, and it's what has worked for me. Hopefully this helps all of you, and keep on fighting for that dream. It's worth the long struggle when the hard work pays off and you get paid handsomely to make a living writing.

Creative Writing, Brief Update

2010-09-15T21:41:00.004-05:00

3 Poems and a Brief Blog Update

Hey all. Appreciate the kind comments and e-mails. I'm always encouraged by stories of people finding work, taking their first steps, and finding success in the world of freelance writing. I'm currently working on a blog post on how to find private clients as a freelance writer, since that is a topic that is getting a lot of interest from readers. This is taking a little bit longer than I expected, thanks in part to several real world projects that popped up as well.

So until I get the next post wrapped up, I thought I'd answer the second request that comes up a lot, and share some of my creative writing.

For those of you who are new to the blog and have no interest whatsoever in creative writing, feel free to check out early and try the following posts:

50 Things Every Beginning Freelance Writer Should Know

Why I'm Not Ashamed to Be a Freelance Writer

The Truth About Freelance Writing

Demand Studios Review

Constant-Content Review

For the rest of you, the following are three poems I wrote while living in Alaska, one of which was published, one which won a contest/award, and one which would have been published had the journal not folded two weeks before publication. Such is life :) Hope ya'll like it, and be gentle. Poetry is my fourth creative writing skill behind fiction, creative non-fiction, and screenplays. Also if the formatting gets screwed up - blame Blogger and Microsoft Works for not playing nicely.

Graduated
Arctic chills in spring,
familiar fragrance, burning meth
lazing thru loose floor boards
and shoddy dry wall.
Sit on empty red milk crate
grading freshman papers
Gut-wrenchingly bad.
The poets are in hiding, and
future leaders have lost all sense of soul.
Muffled mattress squeaks,
inevitable result of meth perfume,
Harbinger of sad quiet sex
once distracting, now ignorable
like a drip, drip, dripping faucet.
Until one very early morning red and blue lights
cascaded thru open shades
and splashed our walls.
We laid awake and trembled
like deer who just missed the headlights.
They took them away,
one in a bag.

New neighbors came.
Summer brought back familiar smells
and not-so-quiet mating,
snorting like animals,
Summer papers were a little better.

Remembering when I was astray, the warthog,
burning spoons and shooting syringes,
Tap, Tap, Tapping the Mainline Florida,
and, oh God, how I loved to touch you . . .
until you rode off one Tuesday
on back a Harley to somewhere;
left me to finish the degree I started
and forgot about half way through.

I moved out of state, two thousand miles to teach,
but never enough for a better apartment
with a river view like we talked about;
but what would an adjunct do with money anyway—
and what’s the point of a river
with no one to share?

Communion

Cabin’s cold even in summer
Alaska's like that,
but the shiver indistinguishable from a shudder
and not due to forty degree nights.

Marshall bought bread at
Wal-Mart, evil empire of commerce,
but prayers sanctify
organic whole oats
or refined wheat flour
into the twisted flesh of
a broken Savior and
grape juice in blue plastic
Dixie cups transforms into royal
blood prepared for cannabilistic ingestion.

Prayers drip off heavy lips
like the tears bursting from
closed eye lids too light to hold back
the deluge behind the levy.

Bless us. Forgive us. Help us.
Word torrents rush out and
old tongues mix with new,
older than Aramaic,
harder to translate,
always ends with Abba.

You want a whole piece? I asked,
surprised when he didn’t tear it in halves.
I have a lot of sin to cover, he replies,
and knows I do, too.

Naked body cannibalized
piece by piece,
by greedy ravenous teeth,
thanks given,
spontaneous prayer bursts forth
from sanctified vessels;
the cabin walls can not
contain it.

We erupt and do not care
who hears.
Bullied into silence long enough,
but not in our temple.

The blood is sweet and
gushes down eager throats,
but some remains on the bottom,
speckled, you can never quite
get it all, and not all can ever
quite get it and therein lies the
problem and maybe the solution.

North of Noah's Flood

Technically Fairbanks, Alaska,
is a desert, my professor says,
and I’m not sure he is right,
but there is so little rain,
and they say come in, but this
isn't even drizzle, it's mist, and
even then it only comes twice
a summer.

Then there was 2006,
and it was different.
On Monday I spread my arms
and yelled joyfully at the sky as
it drenched me and
every other Midwesterner
dancing in the rain and even the
Alaskans thought we were crazy,
these people who didn't know to come in,
and danced like wild pagans
praising an indigenous Christ-like God
and the rain is home.

That was the only good rain in three years;
but then the skies poured again,
and Thursday twice more.
Lightning made buildings shake
and I wonder about cabins with tin roofs as the
skies won't stop dumping,
coming in sheets and flash flooding
in ways even Iowan farmers
would fret at,
wind blowing weighted trees sideways,
Trees gyrating wildly,
already bent near breaking
from many winters snow,
cabin's tin roof poor shield
from lightning and logs.

Wind howls and man,
I have never seen this here—
no one has—
and man oh man are those trees
making me squirm.

We've never seen a storm like this,
and some wonder aloud
if the world is ending.
Maybe it is.
Us crazy bastards,
not even we dance in this.
The desert becoming
an ocean,
and us without an ark.

The Truth About Freelance Writing

2010-09-06T14:54:00.020-05:00

The Truth About Freelance Writing: What a Writing Career is Really Like

There are many different important freelance writing topics I cover with this blog, and while they are all perfectly valid, I wonder how many beginners stop and think about why they want to be freelance writers. More to the point, I wonder if they understand what a freelance writing career is really like, or if they hold a romanticized notion of what a writing career is really like. It's not that being a freelance writer isn't great - there isn't another career out there I'd rather be doing (and I fold my passive income work into the general term "freelance writer career" as well), but that doesn't mean this doesn't come without its own set of costs or difficulties. Some of these difficulties are easy to overcome if you really don't care what other people think, and this is a job that I thoroughly believe is much easier if you are single as opposed to raising a family.

So I wanted to take some time in this post to explain the truth about starting your own freelance writing career, and explain both the positives and the negatives: and how sometimes they can be the exact same thing. This post isn't meant to force people to jump in and become writers, nor is it here to try to scare you away from pursuing a freelance career whether it is part time (which I think is probably right or better for most people, especially starting out) versus full time. This post will hopefully simply lay out the truth about what a freelance writing career is like, both good and bad, and give you a better idea if this is the right road for you - or indeed since there are many different ways and routes to becoming a full time writer, which specific road might be the one you're most comfortable with pursuing.

First of all, the disclaimer: there are ALWAYS exceptions to the basic "rules" of any given industry, and freelance writing is no exception. I've met a couple of people who just were in the right time, right place, starting out and were good enough to turn it into a full career very quickly. Over 99% of the time, this isn't going to happen. And the majority of the time someone leaves a snarky comment on a writing blog about how quickly they made $50k+ a year right out of school writing, notice the less than stellar writing and lack of a URL linked to the name. There are more trolls claiming to be successful freelance writers than there are really good freelance writers making a living. Most successful freelancers I know are more than friendly and go above and beyond in sharing their time and advice with newbies. In fact, there's only one I've run into who isn't. All the others are more than happy to help someone who is willing to do the work needed to prove they're really dedicated to making it.

Not everyone will experience all of these, but based on my 5+ years experience as a freelance writer, I'm going to go over my experiences as a freelance writing and mention not only the positives and drawbacks of being a professional writer, but also go into the things that I think others could have issues with as well.

Common freelance writing beliefs or questions

#1: Freelance writers can work anytime they want. This is one of those freelance writing beliefs that is both true and false. Yes, you do get to set your own hours. This means if you get up one morning in April and the water levels are finally down after a wet winter and the trout streams were stocked for the first time all year, you can choose not to write that morning or even the early afternoon. Pure freedom, right? Wrong. A more accurate description of this common belief is that: freelance writers can move their working hours around any way they want. You can go fishing when the fishing is good, but that means you won't be going to bed at nine at night. You'll be staying up until 1, 2, 3, or maybe even 4 a.m. making sure you get your needed writing in and get any assignments done on time. The work MUST be done, and it MUST be done on time and on deadline when applicable. So yes, you can move your schedule around and it helps to lead a richer and fuller life, IMO, but you WILL make up for it. Flexible Schedule? Absolutely. Work whenever you want with no consequences? Not bloody likely.

#2: The Respect Issue. There are generally two, and only two, reactions you get after telling someone you are a professional freelance writer. The first reaction is what most non-writers or beginning freelance writers imagine: surprise, interest, and a strong sense of respect, often out of interest in what you do and how you pull it off. The second reaction is a little (actually probably a lot - I'm fortunate in that I'm surrounded by family and friends who more or less gave up on me ever going the conventional route for a job or life by the time I was 17) more common and surprises many beginning writers: smirking, arrogance, or absolute disdain. Don't be surprised if many people look down at you, believe you can't get a "real" job, or will never believe you no matter how easily you can prove that you're successful. Don't be surprised if everyone who looks at you with disdain thinks they could do your job easily, even though most can't. And you will NEVER convince them otherwise. I'm making double per month what some people who know me are, and they still snicker and make fun of me for being "just a writer." If you crave or need the respect of others, sad truth is you just might not have the skin to be a freelance writer. That's a hard truth, but it is one you need to be aware of before making an unwise jump into the freelance writing business.

#3: You get to write what you want. No, you don't. This doesn't mean you can't start your own blogs or write specialty articles, but most people will never be able to make a living writing articles on only things they are interested in. Even if you are very capable like Celeste Stewart over at Constant-Content and can write excellent high quality articles on topics you choose and sell them: they still have to be in topics in demand. I might be able to write 20 great articles on the historical philosophical and political ties between the Kingdom of Morocco and the United States, but no one is going to buy them. You are allowed to turn down jobs you're not comfortable with, and I 100% suggest that you do just that, but getting clients means writing the way they need you to write for the jobs that they need you to do for them. Period. That's the only way you can make it as a full time freelance writer.

#4: Freelance writing is easy. This is a misnomer. Personally, I find the writing part easy and natural. I've literally been writing since I was 3 years old and have never wanted to be anything else other than a writer. But there are always jobs that are harder than others, and writing is only one part of being a freelance writer. Taxes, finding clients, pleasing clients, dealing with problem clients, finding more work, adjusting with ever-changing markets, writing online, writing offline, learning different writing styles, editing, budgeting, loneliness, self-motivation, discipline, providing own benefits, marketing, and balancing life and work are all important aspects of being a writer, and balancing all of those is NOT easy in any way, shape, or form. And if you're stuck doing technical writing, you're making a lot of money but the writing itself won't be easy either.

#5: Freelance writing is lucrative. This is one where it's hard to nail it exactly, because freelance writing can be lucrative. It can be extremely lucrative, especially on a per hour basis. However getting to that point can be very difficult and take a long time. I started out at about $4 an hour while learning the ropes. If you've followed this blog and some of the other excellent resources online that were not around back in 2004 or 2005, then you should be able to start at quite a bit more than that. But even then, getting to $20 an hour or $30 an hour or more can take a ton of work, a lot of time, and working for countless 50, 60, or 80 hour weeks or more building up your portfolio, looking for better long term clients, and constantly working not only to keep up with the rent, but to keep pushing your freelance writing business towards more growth and more movement.

A Writer's Market article from several years ago mentioned that a stunning number of freelance writers would never make enough in a year to pull them above the poverty line. Somewhere in the 75%+ mark. Making above 30k as a freelance writer puts you in the top 10%. While the top writers make six figures - there's no question they are in the top 1% of all earners. Passive income can muddle this up a bit, but even in that field there are far more trying to make good money at writing and blogging than are actually making it.

As a part time job, second income, or hobby that's used just to fill an IRA or save up for a vacation once a year, freelance writing is a great gig that is very lucrative and attractive for limited goals such as these. As a long term freelancing career, it's hard.

Other points of interest to beginning freelance writers:
There are several other points I want to make from personal experience, because there is so much that can be covered on this topic, but it's hard to dive into everything fully for people who haven't been through the same, and as with all things, different people react differently. Loneliness is a major problem for many people, while it's just not that big a thing to me. Additionally, I'm willing to do more with less because I don't have a family, which makes many things simple for me that are harder for others (like insurance, day care, extra expenses, working at home while trying to balance family life, etc).

Going in a bullet point format, here is a final list of tips. If there's any point or number of points that you want to know more about, or if there's even something else I haven't covered completely, feel free to ask a question in the comments section. I'll do my best to answer based on my own experiences.

More truth on the freelance writing experience:

Develop a thick skin. Even if you are one of the best, you'll get rejected a LOT. If you take it personally, you'll burn out too early to ever see success. Develop a thick skin and go from there.
Recognize you could get lonely. Freelance writing is a long lonely job. Take a break and spend an hour at a book store, take a walk in the park, or go out for a cheap meal. Just being around people often helps, and you need this to keep your sanity over the long run.
The money will be hard early on. Very hard.
Private clients will pay the most, and will be the hardest to find.
Some types of writing, like technical and sales copy writing, will pay far better than others (like content writing). The more expensive the writing, the harder it is to break into that market.
You pay self-employment tax. This varies greatly based on circumstances, but a basic rule of thumb is that you will pay 12-15% more than you are used to.
You must have self-confidence, because many people who think they are helping you will inadvertently (or maybe even intentionally) put you down during the hard times when you need support the most. At these times only your own self confidence and determination will see you through.
Get a community. A supportive online community can be very helpful during the rough times - but don't go there so often that you spend more there than actually writing.
Be open to learning multiple styles of writing. This makes cobbling together clients and a solid writing resume, as well as a working income, much simpler.
Specialize in a popular niche to really get some private client attention.
If you don't know what cold calling is, learn it. This remains one of the best ways to find private clients who can become your biggest paychecks.
Never undersell yourself. If in doubt, charge 20-30% more than you think you're worth. I was stunned when I did this and saw my workload double, then did it again and saw the demand stay exactly the same. Don't work for less when clients have already decided you're worth more. I've been told by clients who pay me $36 an hour that I don't charge nearly enough. Good to know.
You have to learn to concentrate on the very short term, in a one-step-at-a-time method to keep your work running smoothly and keep yourself sane but if you want to succeed long term you have to be able to keep an eye on the long term picture without getting overwhelmed. It can be a tough balancing act.
Learn what passive income is right away and devote a MINIMUM of 10% of all your working time towards building this passive income. Start with HubPages, InfoBarrel, Suite101, and Xomba and go from there. It may take two years to see big results, but you'll kick yourself in the butt for not doing more while being thankful you started at all.
If you have the choice, start at part time and go from there. If you're a college student and money's not an issue, jump right in.

That's it for this new post on learning some truth about freelance writing. I hope you found this useful, and feel free to leave any comments or questions you have.

Freelance Writing Updates, Advice, and Important Miscellania

2010-08-19T23:24:00.016-05:00

More Freelance Writing Advice, Corrections, and Updates

Hey all. I appreciate all the kind words from the last blog post of mine, about celebrating freelance writing milestones. Every single comment I receive that tell me I've helped to inspire people to get started, or helped people take the next step in freelance writing really fires me up and I count each one as a huge blessing. Thanks for the great comments, and thank you all even more for pushing yourselves to meet your goals in life. Even a quick e-mail note telling me you're a college student who writes only $100 a week just to travel during the summers - that's exciting and awesome from my point of view and I appreciate all the stories you've all shared with me.

For this post, there are going to be a lot of odds and ends that I cover as it seems like that time of year where there's one little note of interest here and one other note of interest there. I'm not sure how comprehensive this will be for complete newbies, but hopefully between all the little things I want to cover there will be some gems of information that are worth knowing, and I'll mention all the resources that I personally know are worth paying for. Yes, those will be affiliate links, but anyone who has followed this blog for any amount of time knows that's not why I'm in this one. Look at it from my point of view: I absolutely am defensive of my name and reputation because it's one of the few things I can generally control. If I don't feel completely comfortable with a product, I won't recommend it and if I'm willing to take an affiliate commission, then I know I'm putting my reputation on the line with each recommendation, so I'm very careful about what I endorse.

And as with many past websites, I reserve the right to pull that endorsement at any time as I see fit based on changes or actions of the site or resource in question. The past couple weeks have also taught me some things I wasn't aware of before, and I found some high quality blogs that are also worth a mention, particularly for those of you just becoming familiar with concepts like "Lifestyle Design" or "Automated Residual Income."

So while there are plenty of reviews and more advice coming up in later posts, right now this one is going to be a hodge-podge. Based on the sheer number of e-mails I get, I will include in this freelance writing blog post:

All the paid resources I can personally vouch for and have bought or used myself.
Some blog posts worth following (any blog I've linked to in post in the past is most likely still on my heavily recommended list).
Updates on various online writing websites and what I think of them as of the date of this blog post (08/20/2010).
Some announcements on future projects I'm working on and will be releasing by the end of the year.
More comments throughout badgering new readers to get started NOW, because getting started is the most important piece of advice anyone can get for freelance writing or building passive income.

So first and foremost:
If you haven't already started, get started NOW! (See, told ya' I'd be badgering over this one). If you learn everything there is to know over 8 months, in 8 months you have knowledge and you have nothing to show for your learning. The guy who throws up 10 hubs a day, even at random without keyword research, he's not getting enough for his work, but he'll have hundreds of hubs and therefore he will be making money.

So people have asked for my recommendations on paid resources. I'll give the list here, but I want to make sure this is perfectly clear: not every person has the same needs as I do, which is especially true since I'm working to switch from a mostly freelance model to a mostly passive income model. These have worked for me and I recommend them to other people. I'm also NOT saying that I don't trust anything that is not on this list. The best programs in the world might be out there and I don't even know about them. But these are the ones I can personally vouch for:

The Keyword Academy - This is an amazing program that Court and Mark oversee, and newbies get their first month for $1, then it's $33 a month after that. If you're looking to learn how to earn passive income, how to find back links, and want to learn to make a full time residual income, this is the place. As of this writing they have a goal of helping 1,000 students reach their goal of $1,000 a month passive income within 12 months. Strongly recommend if you can afford it and put in the time to work a little bit every day.

Celeste's E-Book on Constant-Content - Nobody rocks Constant-Content like Celeste. If you want to know how to make it at CC, this is the one and only guide.

Writer Gig's E-Book on eHow - I used to have this one on the sidebar, then I took it down. NOT because of quality - Writer Gig's book is the real deal, but after the eHow and Demand Studios mess, I wanted to wait and see what happened before putting this back up again. While it's not 100% up to date because of the new format, if you're approved to write for Demand Studios and want to make the most out of their residual income articles, this is still your best resource.

Justin's Great E-Book: Life After the Cubicle - Justin as a great blog, and he worked a year on what is obviously a passion. Comes with MP3 Coaching and deals with a wide variety of topics that people have to deal with when looking to work for themselves or get away from the cubicle life they hate so much. Highly recommend.

The 4 Hour Work Week (Audio Book) Revised and Expanded by Timothy Ferriss - Not every part of this book is right for everyone, and it's not meant to be. Some of the exercises are great for individuals, others I think are a touch corny. But in the end, the expanded version of this book is incredible, and if you are willing to give it a shot, there is something here for everyone who can learn to make a side income, chase their dreams, become a more efficient worker, and find a much better path that what most people are following right now. I listen to this all the time for encouraging and motivational background. In fact, this is what I'm listening to right now as I type this blog post.

How to Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer (Print Book) - Best book I've found for magazine writing, freelance writing print markets, and how querying and research is best done for maximum effect.

These are the paid resources I would recommend at this point. You know, as long as you immediately started working on your writing career even as you were reading them. Without getting started, they're just more information overload. If you want passive income and don't know where to start, start with HubPages. It's where I started seeing major results, and I know it's one of the first places Lissie started seeing success online. It's perfect for beginners.

Secondly, there have been some very good blog posts recently that are worth having a look at. Some of my favorites from the past month or so:

JadeDragon's post on Constant-Content Success and why most new writers fail there (and why they have no excuse to). His observations on CC and how writers should be able to sell a lot here and why most don't are dead on with what I've seen. Yes, he links to one of my posts from the blog, but this truly is a great blog post and comes back to the all important point: you have to get started.

Okay, this one is older, but if you're new and haven't seen Allyn Hane's: Everything You Need to Know About Backlinks, you're missing out. Go watch, read, then come back and get started.

Take a look at this blog: "My 4 Hour Work Week." I've only discovered this one recently, and obviously he is also a fan of Ferriss' work, but it is great to see another perspective on learning to make passive income online, on the hard work to get there, and on how progress does happen.

Change Your Life, Are You Living or Surviving? Not about freelance writing at all, but this is a question every single one of us should be asking constantly. If you don't get the question, then it's REALLY time for you to stop and start thinking about what it might mean and what direction your life is going.

Check out Lissie's Passive Income Online article on The Secret to Online Success. Lissie is great, friendly, and and hits the nail on the head on this fantastic post!

Felicia is an absolute inspiration and does a FAR better job updating her blog consistently than I am here. She had a couple of great posts worth reading, one reflective on Choosing the Write Way (nice), and another on Dreaming Big But Thinking Long Term. They're both worth the read, and might be that last little push to get you moving.

And last but not least, thank you to TW for Another Look on Content Mills. Before anyone comments on whether or not the math was right, wrong, or otherwise, read the article, read the comments, and realize that whether or not he understood the math for the specific example, the concept is absolutely correct and Demand Studios gets mentioned a lot in the comments because of it.

Finally, as for the questions about whether some future business projects I've alluded to have anything to do with e-books or creating my own writing e-book, the answer is yes and kind of. Before the end of this year I do intend to create a few e-books that aren't just aimed at beginners, but go into things like running an actual business, finding clients, carving out a niche, improving query letters, and working efficiently to build freelance and passive income at the same time. I also have a very big project I'm proud to co-author aimed at college aged kids, or kids wondering if college really is a good idea anymore or not, and what the real options are versus what they're being told.

So yeah, there's a lot coming out in the future, and since there seems to be plenty of interest, I'll make sure to keep things posted here. A creative writing project I was hoping to have up this fall is running behind schedule a little bit, but we'll see what everything's looking at by Christmas.

So that's it for this update. Plenty of reading, plenty of resources, now get out there and don't you dare settle for anything less than your wildest dreams!

Celebrating Writing Milestones!

2010-08-06T18:52:00.002-05:00

I Am One Happy Freelance Writer

Sometimes you toil for months or even years (years especially if you tend to be stop-and-go like I am - always the sprinter, always had trouble with marathon running) wondering why you can't hit that huge freelance writing or passive income breakthrough that so many people have hit before you. Sometimes you see only slow snail-paced movements and you start wondering if you'll possibly have the energy to finish the race to your goals before becoming too exhausted to do anything but quit.

And then sometimes....and then sometimes...

Sometimes you hit that week that not only changes your perspective or your business, but it also changes your life. Based on the title, you want to take a guess on what the last few days in August have been like for me? :)

Well to copy I quote I came up with earlier this week: "The ceiling that marks the limits of what I can accomplish seems to be flying further and further away with every passing week." Wednesday I landed the largest writing contract I've ever had, and it's a beauty. In fact, it's probably going to push me into the next tax bracket. I call that a nice problem to have. The next day on Thursday I broke through a barrier I've been chasing since March 1st, over a full 5 months ago when I made $19.83 in one day with AdSense. I finally broke through that $20 in one day barrier, and so far in August my total passive income is destroying the 15% a month growth I've been aiming for (and almost averaging) this year.

Back on May 30th, so beginning of June for all intensive purposes, I wrote this blog post about passive income, encouraging people just starting out to keep with it, even though it's hard to see the work. One of my biggest points was that in the beginning it took 6 months for me to get to $40 in one month, but after two years my AdSense had single months where it grew that fast, or close to that much. I also stated that I expected to make the $100 jump from $200 a month to $300 month in about 4 to 5 months, less than half the time it took me to get from one hundred a month to two hundred. Well I hate to make an early call, with Murphy's Law and all, but barring Google dying or an atomic bomb disaster of a month, I can already call it: I'm going to blast past $300 this month, only 3 months from the time I was celebrating the $200 mark.

That's a snowball effect, and it's a beautiful thing when it's working for you instead of against you. Hopefully you'll all not only enjoy this day and these accomplishments with me, but take encouragement, as well. I'm not the most tech-savvy person, and in fact that's one area where my smarts don't help me a lot. It takes me a long time to figure out basic SEO stuff that came easy to other people. I'm not a natural at all at marketing myself or pitching to clients to get huge writing jobs. But I know my craft, and I'm stubborn as the most bull headed mule you'll ever meet. So I'll learn. Very slowly, and with many nights banging my head against the wall, but I will keep going to learn what I have to and accomplish my goals through sheer work if nothing else.

I'm sure there are many ways to get to where I am faster and with less pain than it took me...but the point is by being good at what I do, by working on my craft, and by hammering away I managed to get here. I'm going to make more this year than I ever have in a year despite a really ugly first few months, and next year might take me right out of the middle class bracket...which is pretty freaking cool. The passive income is growing and snowballing and giving me more freedom than ever, and getting me close to the point where I can start doing some serious outsourcing to ramp up the passive income projects even more.

If I can get here by pure force of will and stubbornness, what's stopping you?

It wasn't that long ago that I was unemployed with no prospects and no emergency funds, and it wasn't that many years ago when I was homeless for a while. If you really want the dream of a freelance writing or passive income, just keep fighting for it.

I can tell you from first hand experience these breakthrough moments are absolute bliss, and even better than you imagine.

Thanks for sharing this moment with me, now go and make one of your own!

How I Turn Demand Studios Rejections Into Passive Cash

2010-07-28T14:46:00.009-05:00

Rejected Demand Studios Articles Can Make a Mint if You Know What You're Doing

One of the most important aspects of creating a successful freelance writing career is knowing how to get the most out of your articles, and knowing how to ride through the rough spots. I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a fan of writing for Demand Studios as a way of supplementing a writing income, especially for beginners, part-timers, or college students. Even if you're not particularly skilled at typing or researching, you should be able to write at least one article an hour, which translates to $15 an hour at a minimum. If you're very good at quick research, typing, and writing to format, there's no reason you can't make a lot more. When I'm really distracted I make about $22.50 an hour. When I'm not distracted, I make $30-$40 an hour. If you're other option is unemployment, or if you're a college student saving up an emergency fund, that's not bad scratch.

But I'm not a sunshine pumper, either. I try to be as honest as I can about what a freelance writing career is like, and to give the pros and cons of various freelance writing resources that are available online. Because of that, I'll also fully admit that Demand Studios can be a complete and total pain in the ass. And by "can be" I mean "eventually will be." You can count on that just like death and taxes.

Normally revision requests from the copy editors are reasonable, and early on it's a little bit more of a headache as you learn the guidelines and nuances of each form. But sometimes there are just completely off the wall or unreasonable requests from the CE that make it abundantly clear that the article is no longer worth your time. For me, this falls into the 8%-11% range, depending on the month. That includes articles rejected after revision (>1% in my case) or articles where I abandon the rewrite because it's either impossible or not worth my time (7% all time, about 12% in recent months).

To give you an idea of what my overall stats for Demand Studios are:

Approved No Rewrites: 74%
Approved Rewrites: 18%
Abandoned Rewrites: 7%
Rejected Articles: 1%

And that's from over 700, almost 800, articles so it's a pretty solid base of comparison. So the question comes up, what do I do with the abandoned rewrites? I hate wasting time and research, and 65 articles adds up to quite a bit of writing and research that I'm not getting paid for. Rejected articles the text stays there for you to copy, but abandoned rewrites disappear, so make sure to copy and paste your text into a notepad or word file so you don't lose it. There are a few strategies you can use when dealing with an abandoned rewrite or rejected article:

Throw a hissy fit, refuse to work anymore, and not make any money (not recommended).
Just move on with life and forget about it (fully acceptable, but still wastes that time and effort you made on those articles)
Use Demand Studios' keyword research on the article and take your information to your own blog, InfoBarel, Xomba, Squidoo lens, or HubPage. (CHA-CHING!)

The ONLY obligation you have as a writer based on the Demand Studios contract is to NOT use the EXACT title of the article. That's it. All that information and research belongs to you, so if you want the most out of your article rejections at Demand Studios, look at it as a chance to build up your passive income.

We can sit here and argue about how effective Demand Studios really is in finding profitable markets and doing keyword research and all that jazz, but the point is that DS is willing to pay $15 or more for these articles because they believe there is money to be made. So if they're not willing to pay you for your work, then you mine as well profit from it yourself!

Some recent examples for me:

Speargun Regulations becomes Speargun Fishing Regulations
Russian Restaurants Near Worchester, MA becomes Worchester MA Russian Restaurants
Flathead Catfish Fishing Tips becomes Flathead Catfish Tips or Tips for Flathead Catfish Fishing or Fishing Tips for Flathead Catfish

See the difference? This is all legal based on the agreement - just change the title of your article or HubPage to use the same keyword but a different order. Then you can expand on your article without having to worry about all the really annoying restrictions that DS puts on the articles and how sources have to be cited, and you can use that blog of the guy who has been a professional fill-in-the-blank for 20+ years as a source that you couldn't use for DS because it's a blog, and therefore unreliable as a source.

So write for Demand Studios, and make a lot of money doing it, but when a rejection comes along or you think a rewrite request just (for whatever reason, and there are many) just doesn't work, go over to HubPages, open an account if you don't already have one, and put your articles up there. Throw on some Amazon and eBay modules that can earn you affiliate commissions, add your AdSense code, and enjoy the extra passive income you can earn from all of these sources. If you don't want to put up a whole HubPage around a subject, consider editing the text to make a good InfoBarrel or Xomba article. Each of these still gives you the opportunity to make some AdSense income from your work, which is far better than just throwing that time away.

Personally, I make a HubPage out of most of these articles, as I find the topics are ones that a HubPage can rank well for, especially when I double the text, add some links, and set up a good hub around the topic. In fact, it's almost a guarantee that you will outrank whatever article they eventually approve on the topic, even if you do an absolute minimum of backlink and SEO work. This is why I don't let unreasonable rewrite requests from Demand Studios get me down anymore. If I receive one (especially when it's obvious I know 100x more on the topic than the CE calling me out), I simply go to HubPages, create a new hub, and then gather some basic backlinks later on when I'm working on building my passive income.

Some of those hubs have made a little bit of income for me, several have made nothing. And one or two have done very well and consistently bring in per month about the same amount that DS offered me upfront for those articles. Just like with any online venture, some work really well while others bomb completely. But at least this way my words don't disappear into oblivion and all that work goes unpaid. It's making the most out of a given situation, and even better in my case it means that 10% of my freelance writing time ends up becoming passive income work that will keep working for me long after the initial pages are up.

So for those of you writing for Demand Studios because you need the money, and who are frustrated by the rejections or the rewrite requests that are too ludicrous or time consuming to even consider, then build up your passive income. If you haven't been building any passive income before now (bad writer - hit yourself on the head with a newspaper), this is the perfect time to open an account on HubPages, get approved for Amazon affiliate, eBay affiliate, and Google AdSense, and start building passive income. Even if this wasn't your original intention, if you write 50 DS articles a week and abandon even 5% of the articles (way less than I abandon, btw, and I make what amounts to a full time living from DS) then after 50 weeks of writing over the year you would have 150 HubPages earning passive income for you. It doesn't take long for just a little bit of backlink work to turn that into an avalanche of passive income.

So that's my advice for you guys today. It's a great way to write for Demand Studios for freelance writing income now, for building passive income for the future, and to set yourself up in a way that the occasional rejection or really unreasonable rewrite request won't get you down - but can actually end up exciting you as it gives you yet another 300+ word head start on your next passive income page.

So keep writing, guys, and as always I look forward to hearing from you! Keep following the dream.

The Residual Writing Income Journey: Reflecting on Two Years

2010-07-15T21:13:00.011-05:00

Two Years of Passive Income Writing Online

I've been trying to think of something to write my next freelance writing blog post about, and while hemming and hawing over which direction I should go next or what idea on a list of blog post ideas, it completely escaped me that the end of June marked my second year of writing for passive income. My writing for residual income started back in June of 2008, with a very inauspicious beginning as I wrote six blogger blog posts, put on some AdSense, and started link building. I looked around at websites like Squidoo, HubPages, and eHow, and started focusing on the pay per view aspect of Associated Content. But I have to be honest, it didn't start out strong at all!

The main reason was I had a great full time job in Austin, Texas, and at the time I made the most money I ever made, was in a great living situation, and really dug the town. I was spending most of my free time starting to think about where I really wanted to go in the future, if maybe in Austin I finally found a place to settle down (my apartment in Austin was the first address I had stayed at more than 12 months since I was 17 - a total of 10 years at the time), and working hard core on my fiction and some creative projects.

Because of all these things, my efforts towards passive income probably amounted to about two Squidoo lenses, a single HubPage, one how-to article, and I made 33 cents on AdSense. That's it. As the months went by I tried to put in 15 hours a week on passive income of some kind because even though it wasn't necessary, the thought of earning extra travel money seemed nice. The thought of trying to earn full time passive income didn't even occur to me at the time. Looking back, it was very safe to say I was too comfortable, and in retrospect (and granted, that's a big one since my job was eliminated mid November of that year) I wish the full potential of what passive income could be had hit me back then.

Thankfully, at least I ordered an audio book that had a huge impact on my life. Ironically I ordered the audio by accident, but I'm glad I did because the audio version of Timothy Ferriss's The 4 Hour Work Week became my constant background noise around September, and my efforts towards passive income grew.

That 33 cent month in June with AdSense became $40.77 by the month I was laid off, and I was already making that much on eHow, as well. Obviously a lot has changed in two years. I try to spend at least a quarter of my time on passive income work. After two hard years of work, and even seeing a six month span where freelance writers couldn't find work (and I had never even heard of a market like that) or struggled to get by, I know that working on articles, websites, and blogs that keep working for me even when I log off is the way to go and the way towards financial security. If it wasn't for the ridiculous amount of student loans I have to pay off (fat lot of good college did me), I would spend 75% of my time on passive income. Yes, it's that important.

So where am I after two years? I'm a heck of a lot closer to a full time income than 33 cents a month, that's for sure. There have been very few times over the last two years when I've been able to give the attention to passive income that I wanted, and because of a ton of bills to educational loans, medical bills, and credit cards (look at #2 to explain how this happened) the actual freelance writing has to come first. I'm not making enough in passive income yet to be to the point where I can work on what I want, but here are some numbers from June that have me very optimistic that things will work out:

Some passive income from June:
eBay: $29.62
Amazon: $40.75
AdSense: $237.52
eHow: $162.16
Squidoo: $75.14
ejunkie: $25.00
Constant-Content (referrels): $83.60
Associated Content (PPV): $36.92

This all adds up to $690.71, which is still a long way from full time, but living in the Midwest that's an awful lot of money for no work. And by no work, I mean that's a lot of money to get paid for not having to do any new work, because writing for passive income is very labor intensive. There are also some other affiliate programs building towards pay out that aren't included on that list.

What's most encouraging to me is that this year I've seen a huge jump in passive income, and I'm fairly easily seeing 10% growth a month right now. I also know that I've done more work in May, June, and July then in the past 12 months before that combined. This means that in 6 months when all this work starts paying off, things are really going to start getting pretty freaking cool. In fact, with the way the passive income is growing, it's going to free up more of my time from full time freelancing to do more residual income work, which will make more money, which will free me up even more, and the writing momentum and compounding continues!

This month has been an absolute bear as far as work goes, and the end of summer isn't going to be getting any better for me. I guess I want to finish this freelance writing blog post about passive writing income online with just some tips I'd give to anyone else who is looking at the same options, or just beginning to realize what earning 2, 3, 5, or even $10,000 a month in passive income would mean as far as security and a complete lifestyle change.

Be ready for the long haul. Building passive income is very labor intensive, and you often hear that you don't see the full impact of your work until 6 months after it's done.
Be persistent. Writing 300 words every single day and making it a habit is much better than a stop and go, stop and go approach.
Always make AdSense a major part of your passive income plans (and make sure you understand all of their terms and conditions).
Diversify, but not so much that you end up feeling slogged down.
When in doubt, put most of your effort into making your strengths even stronger, not into fixing weaknesses.
Don't underestimate what being an Amazon affiliate can mean in December.
If you feel lost, spend six months making one HubPage a day, then spend the next six building links to all of them.
Always keep learning.
Find the goal that will keep you running through obstacles during all the hard times.
Expect that most people won't understand what you're doing.
Celebrate the small victories. This is critical to making it full time.

So that's some degree of reflection on where I've been and where I'm going. The coolest thing about passive income is that once you finally get stuff moving, it tends to avalanche in your favor after a certain point. So I'm going to post this, get back to work, and take a little bit of time to enjoy the ride. Keep at it, and don't give up! It's worth the work.

Xomba Freelance Writing Review: How I Use Xomba

2010-06-15T11:52:00.010-05:00

How I Use Xomba

There are several things to like about the freelance writing site Xomba.com, but as with many online writing sites there are definitely strategies and methods that are going to be more effective than others. Xomba offers a 50/50 AdSense split with their writers. On any article you write that gets a click, you are entitled to 50% of the profit. In addition, as of this writing Xomba does allow you to include affiliate links in your articles, from which they don't take a cut - you get the full affiliate amount the program offers you. Xomba is also unique in that not only can you write articles of 150 words or more (although longer articles tend to rank better in the Search Engine Rankings), but you can also link to websites, blogs, videos, or articles with a social bookmark, which only needs a description of 50 words or more.

Using an overall writing strategy that takes advantage of all of these unique aspects of Xomba, you're going to increase your chances of making some decent online income writing for them. So while this might not be your conventional Xomba writing website review, I'm going to go through what I think the major advantages of writing articles for Xomba can be and how I personally use their site in my overall online freelance writing plan. This doesn't mean it's the best way to do it, or the most profitable, but this is how I personally use Xomba in my own overall freelance writing efforts.

Using Amazon with Xomba Articles
One of my favorite methods of using Xomba is using text links from my Amazon Affiliate account to relevant products. This is especially effective with articles on topics that don't have a lot of traffic but don't make a lot of money from AdSense. There's about a million keywords about cooking or recipes that fall under this category. Those articles might not make a lot during most of the year, but when Christmas comes around and everyone is shopping, having a couple hundred visitors go to Amazon is a huge income boost. When someone uses your affiliate link to Amazon, you get credit for any sales that come from that computer for 24 hours.

The benefit of this is that if you have 1,000 people a day finding your article on Christmas crock pot recipes, they may be interested in buying a crock pot or cookbook, but even if they're not, if they go to Amazon and simply decide to do their online Christmas shopping since they're already there, you get your affiliate cut from those sales. Having high traffic articles with links to Amazon early on can result in a huge jump in income from affiliate sales from Christmas shoppers on hundreds of items you don't even have to promote.

This is an especially good hedge if you make a lot of income from AdSense, since those numbers generally plummet in December. Only one caveat: if you include a picture, do NOT link pictures. This is also against Xomba's TOS.

The Xomba Bookmarks
The social bookmarking that Xomba allows can really be used effectively to help Internet Marketing efforts if you know how to use it correctly. One of the hardest parts about building your sites up in the search engine rankings is that you may write 100 articles and blog posts to give your main site backlinks, but only 50-60 get indexed. That's part of the game: it is about numbers because not every backlink you create is always going to be found, but I've used Xomba bookmarks to drastically increase how quickly and how many of my articles get indexed.

For whatever reason, Xomba bookmarks seems to have a pretty strong push with Google. So by making a Xomba bookmark to every GoArticle, every Post Runner article from the Keyword Academy, every InfoBarrel article I write - basically a Xomba bookmark to every support article has resulted in me seeing a giant increase in the number of my support articles indexed, how quickly they are indexed with Google, and how quickly that affects my rankings in the search engines.

While it's fairly rare for me to get any AdSense clicks from the social bookmarks, it has happened on occasion and the huge boost in getting support articles (and their backlinks) indexed I believe has been a major part of my freelance writing income momentum, and in the huge and steady gains in AdSense income that have resulted from shooting up the search engines.

This is probably the single most powerful tool Xomba offers, in my opinion. When you have the power to get 70-90% of your support articles indexed quickly instead of 30-50%, it makes a HUGE difference.

Using in Combination
It is against the TOS of Xomba to bookmark your own Xomba articles, so don't do that. But you can write support articles that link to your Xomba article, and then use the social bookmarks on Xomba to link to each of those support articles. By steadily writing articles on high traffic topics and including Amazon links, and by using the social bookmarks to stack links to all of your support articles, you have the ability to make what might otherwise be just another run of the mill AdSense sharing site into something very powerful and very impressive.

So that's it. There's nothing fancy or huge or secret about any of this, although I'm sure I could have made a $10 or $20 "Secret Report to Getting Up To 90% of Your Support Articles Indexed" report, but I'm just not that kind of guy. This is a basic tip, so if it helps everyone out, great. I'm not charging for a one page tip sheet.

I hope some of you find that helpful. If you have any questions, or have any of your suggestions to share about how to use Xomba, feel free to share them in the comments section. Until then, keep on writing.

The Freelance Writing Business: Let's Talk About Momentum

2010-06-11T21:03:00.045-05:00

Building a Freelance Writing Career: How Momentum & Compounding Matter

This week's freelance writing blog post is a topic that has always intrigued me, and with relatively recent developments in my freelance writing business and its explosive growth, this is a subject that is also very intriguing to me. There's a lot to be said for both momentum and for compounding, and while this post might seem a little more theoretical and abstract than most of my other blog posts about freelance writing, I think if you want a successful freelance writing career, and if you want to get from Point A of being a complete novice to writing online to Point B of making a comfortable full time living, and if you want to do it quickly, then these are two concepts that you will definitely want to study and pay attention to.

Oh, and this post is going to be LONG...so if you need to stretch, order pizza, grab some coffee, chase off some monkeys or secure your house from a zombie breakout, go ahead and take care of those first. Especially if the last one is in play.

Albert Einstein is often quoted as referring to compounding, or the concept of compound interest, as one of the most important mathematical concepts of all time and as the "Ninth Wonder of the World." Why is it such a big deal? You most often hear about compounding in the form of investment, especially in the many lectures that occur about opening an IRA earlier rather than later (and btw the numbers are staggering - whether you're 16, 18, 20, or whatever, go out of your way to budget and save to open one ASAP). In fact, this investopedia blog post describes the basic process in math terms fairly well.

But compounding isn't limited to just math or money or numbers. In fact, compounding can go hand in hand with momentum to build a business that grows faster seemingly by its own accord. While you will want to do planning and take action to keep working on your writing career, changing the way you go about can make a huge difference. I've learned this from first hand experience.

The importance of momentum.
The importance of momentum cannot be understated. This works on multiple levels, as well. At the most basic level of day to day work, don't multi-task, and don't open four different articles or web pages to work on at once. Why is this? Science has actually shown that there are physiological changes that take place in the body when concentration is needed on a task. The body only has so much fuel - meaning jumping from one project to another or trying to multi-task, even if you're relatively good at it, tires you out more quickly and makes you less effective as you work.

So rule #1 is if you want to build momentum focus on one task at a time and go crazy on that one task or project until you're done with it for the day. I've always been a good multi-tasker, but I will admit that after taking this advice, a lot more work was done by the end of the day. In the end, it's all about the word count.

Momentum is also important on a broad scale because there are times where getting a lot done and seeing tangible results is going to result in a huge adrenaline rush and confidence boost. When you're in this state, you simply can do twice as much work as when you're not. I don't know why, and I describe it as seeming like time slows down - you nail a 600 word article, look down, and can't believe that only 12 minutes have gone by instead of 30. There is something about using the power of momentum that can help you really launch off a freelance writing career - and I suspect that this is actually true of most careers outside the scope of writing, as well.

Most people in every day use don't normally discuss momentum in its original scientific definition - but it's worth taking some time to study that definition more closely. The way most of us use it is still related to the same concept, but it leaves out one CRUCIAL part. When we talk about momentum in every day life, or even often with our growing businesses, we talk about any type of forward movement. "Well I finally got another job, so I'm building some momentum now."

Are you?

When talking about "building momentum," think of an avalanche, or a runaway miner's cart. Are these things scary at the very beginning? No, they're not. It's that constant gaining of speed, of force, that makes these two things dangerous. Getting more freelance writing work doesn't necessarily mean you're building momentum. In fact, sometimes getting more work means you're going in the wrong direction, insofar as building momentum goes.

If you're really building momentum, then at some point the work, the pay, the overall situation of your business should be built to the point where it is gaining from its own accord. When the weight and push of your efforts are done right, your freelance writing business will get to the point where momentum takes over and your income and the business seems to keep producing its own opportunities.

Now I'm not saying this eliminates the need to work. You stop working, that's like introducing inertia and everything slows down and eventually stops, but creating and riding out momentum, which eventually leads to the next part about compounding, is the single smartest way to set up a business. Which brings up the question of: how do you do this?

Well that's the problem with talking about a subject that is somewhat theoretical. There isn't exactly a "One Size Fits All" blueprint. However, based on the fact that the majority of humans on this Earth fall into similar patterns and habits, there are some suggestions I can make that I think will work for most people. Some of this seem pretty basic, others might seem counter-intuitive to everything you learned (but that's often a sign you're on the right track), and some of these seem simple, but you really need to dig behind the words to really decide if you're truly getting the full meaning of the tip, or just the surface.

Some Tips for Building Freelance Writing Business Momentum:
Focus Tips:

Concentrate on one or two major projects at a time and no more. Make sure you get these done before jumping to anything else. No matter how much it SEEMS like you're getting done, often times multi-tasking kills results.
Be result oriented. This is a HUGE one. Who gives a crap if you work 14 hours, but only get 3,000 words online. The person who only worked 4 hours, but got 3,500 words online had a FAR better day. You can't magically make $500 in AdSense in one month from scratch because you want to - but you can write 3,000 words a day working towards that goal. Focus on the actual production and results.
Be brutally honest reviewing yourself. I review my work daily at 8 pm, because it gives me time to get work done, but I'm a late night person, so if I screwed off during the day, I still have time to get back in gear and get real freelance writing work done before the day is completely wasted.
Use the 80/20 principal of Pareto's Principle that was popular even before Timothy Ferriss's The 4 Hour Work Week. Take some time to figure out what is giving you the majority of your best results. It's usually a small amount of work, efforts, or clients that is getting you the majority of your results. Restructure your business to spend MOST of your time in the highly productive areas.
Have an extremely specific freelance writing goal to work towards. Making $5,000 a month is not specific enough. "Doubling my business" is not specific enough. You need extremely detailed goals that you make NOT for the purpose of having a goal to break, but because you've identified those goals as being specific ways to build momentum. For example, if you wanted to increase AdSense by 20% in a month, a good goal to build momentum might be: write 100 Xomba articles in one month, write 2-3 Ezinearticles to backlink to each Xomba article, and 30 HubPages to the articles that show the most promise.
Act like a happy idiot when the momentum starts building. Seriously, there are huge advantages to this, and it will actually help your business grow and momentum keep going. There are huge arguments over why this is or if this is (I'll deal with those after compounding) but the point is, if you take HUGE joy in little victories, and intentionally get your body fired up, you'll be surprised to find out how often your production sky rockets and keeps feeding the momentum.
Focus on building momentum. A focus on building momentum and being result-oriented will do wonders for you.

Why is momentum so important? Because a business that is being built with results and momentum as part of the plan will be more efficient, more profitable, and far more likely to succeed than competitors who aren't.

This isn't an exact science. What worked for my particular situation might not work for your situation or skills. That said, perhaps the single biggest piece of advice I can give to someone who wants to build a momentum based business but doesn't know how is to always take immediate supporting action any time you have a client, account, website, or project that is showing a jump in returns (and it doesn't matter how large or small). These are basically signs that momentum can take place, and if you pour your energy into the projects that want to become winners, you'll be surprised how quickly your success rate goes up and how much more viable your business seems long term.

Once momentum is built and you understand how to keep feeding momentum in your freelance writing or online marketing business (and as a very important side note here: you don't have to understand every detail of how momentum works and works in your business - in fact I'm fairly sure that's impossible - by understanding I mean you've learned to focus on results, focus on where your work is showing possible breakout potential, and on working with a momentum based focus as opposed to hourly fee or flat fee type of focus), that's when compounding can come into play.

A Little on Compounding

Compounding tends to come into play more with residual income rather than active income online, which makes sense considering the nature of the two businesses. Part of the reason for this is that AdSense, affiliate sales, pay per views, and all the other forms of passive online income are based around math principles that hold steady over time. If I get 1,000 visitors to HubPages, I know roughly how much I'm going to make from AdSense. The exact numbers may vary on different days or even weeks, but in the long run the average holds steady. I know what gets 3% click through, 5% click through, or 25% click through. The math will always work out in the long haul in this business, which makes the potential of compounding that much more powerful.

Here is a brief video from Tony Robbins using a real life example on what compounding has the power to do, and I'm not saying I agree 100% with his arguments or how easy it sounds (although everyone calling the video a scam because of the 15% number have completely missed the overall point - that this works and has been done by thousands), but the way he talks about it is important because changing your mind set is a huge part of succeeding with an online writing business. Or you can skip it and keep reading, but it's a good resource for what I'm talking about in very general terms.

The point isn't exact numbers, it's what happens with compounding, which an inherent requirement is reinvesting the profits from the immediate benefit. It is theoretical math to most people, because most people are lazy. They want a 20% interest savings account or it's impossible, despite millions of people who started from $0 and got to over a million. They don't think beyond basic, easy, and simple, so compounding is out of reach. How about the story that was mentioned of Ted Johnson? Or invest in dividend stocks that pay 6-7% a year even if the stock price never goes up - doubling money in a decade or less.

So what if after building momentum, you learned to focus your work efforts on the actions that helped to build a compound effect?

Now I'm not getting metaphysical or hyping a soon to be released rip-off e-book or any crap like that. And I'll even admit that I'm NOT using a 100% accurate definition of compounding, but I am using an understanding of the concept and how it works to go about building my business in a very different way than I ever have in the now going on 6 years I've been freelance writing.

But this is a very legitimate question, and the combination of momentum and compounding has literally changed my business and is very rapidly changing my life. Right now I'm experiencing compound growth of my passive income that's roughly matching pace with my AdSense growth (meaning although I'll use just the AdSense numbers, the percentages are happening across the board with my other passive income endeavors, as well). So for the first 6 months of this year (June numbers are obviously estimated - and I even rounded those down so they're lower than what I'm actually going to do this month), the numbers look like this:

Jan. $132.24, $4.27 a day
Feb. $136.60, $4.88 a day, improvement of 14.28%
Mar. $184.47, $5.95 a day, improvement of 21.93%
Apr. $192.59, $6.42 a day, improvement of 7.89%
May $221.28, $7.14 a day, improvement of 11.21%
June $257.93, $8.60 a day, improvement of 20.45%

Overall per month average growth of 15.15% so far this year. If you want to know why compounding is so strong, consider this: if you ADD all the percentage growth together, it comes out to 75.76% on the year so far . . . which would lead to monthly earnings of $232.42 - a full $25.50 LESS a month than I'm actually looking at already. And I really underestimated the June numbers (this post was written on the 12th, I divided the total income by 12 for the per day avg and included $0 income from today). This discrepancy only gets bigger in my favor as the numbers get bigger.

Those numbers aren't even completely accurate. I changed my approach to my online residual income writing business and my freelance writing business about one week into March, and you can see the immediate jump. Because of really difficult and tragic family circumstances, there was one month I did virtually no work at all, and the first two weeks of the next month suffered, as well. Obviously by the numbers you can see that was April and May. But if anything, that only makes me more excited about the way my new focus is working.

So even though this isn't exactly the scientific definition of compounding, using the ideas and principals behind that mathematical theory, I readjusted my goal back in March, which was to grow the passive income part of my business 15% every single month. That was my entire focus, and I didn't mean 15% flat from January's number, I meant a compounded 15% every single month, which on the year I'm on pace...and if there are no more disastrous months, maybe even quite a bit ahead?

So let's say that hypothetically this works. What would that mean for my AdSense growth? If my business grew exactly 15.15% a month, every month, as it's averaged so far, the rest of the year would look like this:

July $9.90 a day for $306.90
Aug $11.40 a day for $353.40
Sept $13.13 a day for $393.90
Oct $15.12 a day for $468.72
Nov $17.41 a day for $522.30
Dec $20.05 a day for $621.55

Now I know these numbers won't be exact - for example December is BRUTAL on AdSense earnings (although a gold rush for Amazon affiliates), so I know my earnings for AdSense will go way down that month...but that will also mean an incredible rebound in January. But are you seeing how the compounding would work? 15.15 added 6 times is 90.9%, but $20.05 a day is 102.5% higher than July's average. If you compare January earnings to December, the difference is easy to see.

So what if I could just keep this up through May of next year before taking an entire summer off (maybe)? I won't bore you with the month by month numbers, but for May I would be making $40.59 a day for $1,258 month, or almost $15,000 a year of completely passive income. Well before December I would never have to work again.

But is this sustainable?
Now whether or not I can keep up 15%, I don't know. The practical side of reality says no chance in hell. But I don't do well when I listen to "reality." Something in the area of 90%+ people never reach their dreams, and even many people who are happy are that way because they've sold out for less than what they really wanted. And if that leads to happiness, I will NEVER condemn or come down on someone for doing that. Happiness is a hard thing to hold onto, but don't tell me realism has anything to do with anything, and don't say you're happy if you're not.

So some interesting tidbits that I want you to chew on if you're still with me at this point - and bravo to those of you with the pain tolerance to do so :) - because I think even if what I'm going to say about my freelance writing career and residual income business doesn't give an immediate and clear blue print of what you should do, I think maybe it will help open your mind and thinking process to looking at things in a different light and questioning how you write and how you progress and maybe lead to the same type of breakthrough I'm really enjoying right now.

So beyond the fact of not doing any work in April and not much in the first ten days of May, think about a few things:

Anywhere from 62% to 90% of all businesses fail depending on whose numbers you use. Logical conclusion: thinking, working, and acting the way other people do is almost a 100% sure fire way to FAIL UTTERLY AND COMPLETELY. Why is my business exploding? Because I've completely rearranged the way I do everything. Naysayers can tell me I'm an idiot all they want, but I'm the one on pace to retirement at the age of 30.
You can't get the right answers without asking the right questions. By changing my perspective of how I was going to focus on growing my business back in March, I had to re-question how I was going to do EVERYTHING. The end result of this? I found out that I had to ask completely new questions, get completely new answers, and I figured out that some of my biggest "successes" were holding me back. I didn't understand what my true obstacles really were until I changed course. So don't be afraid to re-evaluate everything you've been doing.
Don't take advice from people who haven't done something. Plenty of people who have run businesses (some successful and some failed) are telling me I can't run a business based on pursuing an "abstract idea" like compounding. But none of them ever tried it, did they? My numbers are telling me otherwise, so be wary of who you take advice from, even if at first glance they seem like an expert (like business owners).
Take the time to build and infrastructure or strategy that can help generate its own momentum (and by doing so, help keep up compounding).

Actually that last point, even though we're approaching 4,000 words (good-bye previous record holder of longest freelance writing blog post in history), I'll go more into that part right now. While I'm looking at simply putting together a free report in PDF format to give away in the future on my "Link Wheel" I use with every blog post, or as a general linking strategy for HubPages and other money making websites, this is a good example of how to build a structure that encourages momentum.

For this blog post not only will I write 2 Ezinearticles and a few other linkbuilding articles pointing back to here, but I'm also going to write a Squidoo lens, two or three HubPages (usually I'd do one, but this is a mega blog post), two or three InfoBarrel articles, a couple Xomba articles, and a Xomba bookmark. Why? Because not only do all of those give links, but the Squidoo lens, HubPages, InfoBarrel articles, and Xomba articles ALL allow me to also make money from them through sharing AdSense, making affiliate sales, or revenue share programs.

Then to make those links stronger, I'll interlink the HubPages, the Squidoo lens, and the articles. I'm also going to write InfoBarrel and Xomba articles just for the HubPages and the Squidoo lens. I'm going to bookmark all of the support articles with Xomba, as well. Then I'll re-write a bunch of articles to get links for all my money making articles. The end result is you have three layers of links eventually all pointing back to this blog - which is great SEO and link building. But even more importantly, I'm using platforms that allow me to make money while I'm building my backlinks. This is what I mean by setting yourself up to build momentum.

You can only use guest blog posts and Ezinearticles - but then you'll never get any additional money from HubPages, Xomba, Squidoo, or InfoBarrel. By setting up a wheel the way I do, all of those have a chance to make you more income when you rank - meaning your link building work and your make money work don't have to be separate. If any of these end up ranking, they're only going to make everything else in the network stronger, as well, because of their linking to one another. This is a prime example of building momentum in your business, and critical if you want to take advantage of compounding.

So back to more freelance writing thoughts on momentum and compounding:

Concentrate on strengths over weaknesses. Most people go nuts trying to fix weaknesses, and I'm no exception. That being said, it is inefficient, ineffective, and often completely unnecessary. Concentrating on your strongest pages not only builds momentum and makes you stronger, but there's less stress because you can see results and feel confident.
Only if there isn't an obvious strength or potential to breakthrough should you work on weak pages and low to no earners - and even then scatter gun it. Do 3-5 articles on each with a Xomba bookmark, any other social media bookmarks you have, and then let it be. If the pages show signs of life, then work on them. Otherwise, let them sit and go on to more productive areas.

Don't question your ability and don't question yourself, but don't be afraid to ask questions. Some of my favorites:

Okay, am I working hard right now, or just goofing off and wasting time?
What are my newest pages showing potential? What can I do RIGHT NOW to strengthen them even more?
What are my strongest projects that still have room to grow? What can I do RIGHT NOW to make them even stronger.
What projects can I work on that can make me money even while building a support structure? What projects build their own momentum?
Do I have any potential "Jackpot!" projects that are long term that I can give an hour a day to? What actions can I take that have the most impact right now AND down the road to get those projects going?

The key is to keep focusing on action. Questions can make all the difference - especially when you start finding answers that you were not expecting.

Some Real Life Examples
To get to compounding, you have to start with momentum, and I was no exception. Part of the reason a lot of this has all opened up for me is because of the momentum I gained in the spring from re-examining everything I was doing. One of my first steps was to stop writing for three websites I had previously wrote for, because the return wasn't worth it anymore, and the time was more valuable to me than the income they were barely producing.

The second was shifting the way I thought about work. Previously writing for Demand Studios, I thought of articles in terms of $7.50 or $15 or $20, and while I kept in mind that smaller pay articles could be better if I did more in an hour, I didn't bother to examine much beyond the basics of what each type of article wanted. Originally there were the Golflink articles, which were $20 for about an hour worth of work on average. When there were a lot of Answerbag requests, I could do 3 an hour with time to spare, for $22.50 an hour, which was a momentum boost for me, because I could earn more in less time.

When those dried up, I realized I was no longer content with trudging along at $15 an hour at a relaxed pace. I didn't want to lose the momentum that earning over $20 an hour had given me. Since I was thinking differently, I re-examined DS and realized there was a way for me to make even more. List articles were very easy to write in 30 minutes as long as you choose titles that do not require contact information. Suddenly I was up to $30 an hour, which meant in three hours and change I could do an entire day's freelancing work and turn my attention elsewhere.

Some people will call this luck, some will call it a fluke, some will argue for the power of positive thinking, but I noticed after I focused on keeping momentum going, "coincidences" happened all the time. Every time one income source dried up, a better one took its place. Once I was result and end game focused, amazingly I could ALWAYS find a way to get to a point I never reached before. To put that simply: once the end result was $30 an hour, somehow I keep getting there even though a year ago that rate seemed impossible for me.

Freelance jobs from past clients came in, and once my focus was the per hour earnings, my body responded as if I had trained it, and I could write faster, do research more quickly, and knock out the same quality in less time...always enough to get right around that $30 an hour mark that momentum had helped to bring me to.

A friend of mine who has basically traveled a parallel road, albeit a little later than mine started, shared how her freelance earnings have changed as she's made the same type of adjustment in how she choose to think and focus. She's much more into the spiritual interpretation of quantum or meta physics, along the lines of What the Bleep Do We Know?, so our exact interpretations are somewhat different, but we've both changed and modeled our business around the same fashion.
She's agreed to share her earnings since I'm not sharing any name or personal information, but here's how the last five months have gone:

5 months ago: $1,561.87
4 months ago: $2216.51
3 months ago: $2468.50
2 months ago: $3,592.30
1 months ago: $4,271.73

She's looking at breaking $5,000 a month for the first time this month. I'll be doing the same next month. People with the ability and willingness to try, fail, and think outside the box get rewarded. Like the earlier business stats showed: most people and businesses fail. Doing what most people do, by that definition, doesn't make any sense.

So kind of tying it together (yeah right)
So although this has been about freelance writing in some degree, in many other ways it has been more theoretical and gray matter. I've tried adding in some concrete steps for people who are interested, but in the end, although there is a lot of science to this, there's plenty of art, too, and this one isn't exact.

So how do you "compound" your efforts on residual income? I focus more and more time on what works, and worry less and less about underperformers - to the point of more or less not worrying at all. The pages that make me money or show some potential get love. The others aren't getting my time and effort.

I also outsource on a very limited basis. I'll take my earnings from passive income and hire freelance writers when I have a list of very specific, very targeted keywords that I know have the potential to make me money and strengthen pages that have potential, but which I might not get to on my own. If I don't have a clear list, I don't spend all my earnings. I NEVER outsource for the sake of outsourcing. However, if a page on "Rare Iberian Hybrid Muskie Bass" starts making me some serious money when I'm barely ranking for anything, and I have a keyword list of 50 keywords, I will outsource 40 and then write 10 myself.

The key here: I'm not taking time off. While other freelance writers are working on those 40 articles, they're saving me 20-30 hours of time that I'm spending writing articles for other successful websites, setting up link wheels, writing HubPages, or even setting up new URLs for large specialty sites. As I make more money, I can turn that to more momentum by having more people writing more articles or doing more research. I'm never going to be able to write 1,000 articles in one month. But if I hired outsourcers to write 800 of them, I could get 1,000 total done and posted in one month. That momentum definitely makes compounding a lot freaking easier to achieve. Especially as the full effects of what you do online are generally not seen for weeks, months, or even a year down the line.

We've already talked about changing focus and thinking patterns and taking action, but even beyond all of those important things, I can summarize what one of the most important actions for me has been. You know that old saying, "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results," (another Einstein quote by the way)? I do the opposite. I find whatever works and I repeat it.

And that's not just conventional "work stuff" when it comes to online freelance writing.

When I'm happier and excited and loud and not using my inside voice, that emotional swell and improved mood usually means I also get a lot more done in a short time. I become very proficient. And I don't care about the why. I don't care if it's because of physiological changes in the body that flood me with positive hormones, if it's because the Universe reacts positively to happy people, or if it's simply because the happiness comes from success with naturally makes it easier to be motivated. I don't care as long as it consistently works.

And that's part of what it comes down to with the whole power of compounding, with an nontraditional approach to a freelance writing career by thinking differently and approaching work differently, and why I don't care how "positive thinking power" works or doesn't. If something works in my life to make me more effective, productive, or capable of growing my business at a ridiculous rate ((even forgot to mention almost have my time is NOT spent on passive income or freelance writing right now since I'm pursuing other ventures)) I don't need to know how or why it works - only that it does.

And for right now that's more than enough for me. So there's a new record for what might be the new longest freelance writing blog post ever at 4,998 words. Future posts will be more hands on with practical steps, and if I ever figure out a way to make something somewhat abstract like compounding and momentum ((which I know I didn't explain well, as my understanding of how to use both far exceeds my ability to explain how to do so)) easy to harness in a step by step fashion, you'll all be the first to find out.

I know I didn't explain everything well, so if you have any questions, comments, thoughts, philosophical contemplations, scientific insight into a more accurate way to label my bastardized version of compounding, or anything else, feel free. Critical is fine, as long as it's respectful and clean in language use.

Hope everyone is doing well, and don't be afraid to take chances to run your business in a way that allows you to receive all the blessings that are out there for people willing to break away from the herd mentality and try something different.

Residual Income Freelance Writing: Made A New AdSense Mark!

2010-05-30T17:52:00.014-05:00

Hit the $200 AdSense Mark

This has been a pretty good day for me, as this Sunday marks the first time I have reached the $200/month using AdSense. I'm all about celebrating the small achievements and enjoying the little victories, although in honesty this doesn't feel very small at all! I have been using AdSense for just under 2 years, although the first 3 months I did next to nothing, and I've never been able to work a full time schedule on my residual income - which definitely has hindered progress.

That being said, this freelance writer is thrilled with hitting that mark, and still having time to pass it by even more before the end of the year. While because of the TOS I can't give information like CTR, average CPC or things like that, I can say that without giving any numbers I am allowed to tell you what my personal income percentages have been this year. Breaking down the amount for average per day, my worst month this year saw an 8% increase in average monthly income from AdSense alone, and I'm averaging 14% growth in income from AdSense every month, and this month is already looking to match that average, unless tomorrow is the worst AdSense day I've had since 2009. I'm betting I'll be fine.

Part of the freelance writing and Internet Marketing process is learning how to enjoy the small victories, and being able to get fired up about them. After all, $200 as a number isn't a big deal at all. I can easily make that in a single day, on any day I have an Internet connection and choose to do so. But $200 for a month in AdSense is a pretty good mark, and I've done the most work by far on my passive income the past three months and change. This is doubly exciting, because as people who have been in the residual or passive income for very long know, you reap the benefits of your work months or even years down the line. If I'm seeing 14% average jump for 5 straight months and counting, just how much better is my AdSense income going to look by the end of this year? Or the end of 2011?

This doesn't mean I've just hit $200 in passive income. I've been over that number for quite some time, but AdSense is by far and away one of the best models for getting serious residual income - the type that leads to a 4 Hour Workweek lifestyle and serious full time online passive income. So while have a diversified income stream is always a good idea, the quicker AdSense gets to a full time income for me, the more quickly I can diversify my income and spend all of my time on projects and work that I'm most passionate about.

To give a screenshot of what just a few of my passive income sources look like for this month, and these are approximates since it's not the end of the month yet:

Associated Content PPV Bonus: $37.00
Constant Content Referrals: $30.00
eHow earnings for May: $118.00
eBay affiliate earnings: $32.00
Amazon affiliate earnings: $38.00
Squidoo $75.00
Google AdSense (app.) $214.00
Other $485.00

I'm not putting this up to brag (okay, maybe a little), but hopefully to encourage people to see that there are a lot of options out there, and if you start out knowing absolutely nothing but stubbornly work on while very slowly (because some of us are better workers than learners, myself included) and you try to learn, no matter how long it takes for it to make sense, then even on a part time basis of only a couple or three hours a day, you can get to this point.

In fact, there's more here not listed. I occasionally get a check from Commission Junction, just not every month. Ditto with Clickbank, ejunkie, Elance, and a couple of other programs I have an affiliate account with.

The beauty of this? I know enough now to speed up how quickly I earn passive income with new articles, new sites, and new pages. This means it takes less work to get from zero to wherever I want to get to. In addition, the more passive writing income I make, the more bills I can pay with that money and the more of my time that gets freed up in order to work even more on my residual income projects. That speeds up how quickly I can earn more passive income, which then lets me outsource. Outsourcing increases the amount of work I can get done in a short period of time, more work = more money, and we're off to the races again.

In the first few months I used AdSense, getting a $2 day was amazing and rare, and it took me over half a year to go from $3 to $45 in AdSense. But I kept at it, I kept learning, and the few free moments I had from freelance writing and fighting my debt load was used to build the base for future earnings.

If there's any piece of advice I can give newbies, or the frustrated, it's keep at it. It took me 14 months to go from $0 to $100 in one month. It only took me 9 months to go from $100 to $215 (approximate). I bet in 4 months, 5 at most, I'll get past $300. In fact, this would happen much quicker if I didn't have so many other projects on my plate, but that is life. Still, reaching the $200 AdSense is a great accomplishment, and one that is definitely lifting my spirits and firing me up to sprint to the next obvious marker: $300.

So I wanted to take one post to demonstrate how important it is, in both freelance writing and in Internet Marketing, to celebrate the small victories. This is a good one for me, and I'll spend about 20 minutes enjoying a soda and smoking half of a congratulatory cigar.

After that, it's back to work again. Fame, fortune, and retirement won't make themselves happen :) If anyone you have a recent success, no matter how small it seems, share your victory. Creative writing or freelance. I know a lot of you are doing some very impressive things right now, so feel free to share, brag, and encourage!

Freelance Writing Struggles: Motivation & Encouragement

2010-05-19T02:31:00.008-05:00

Freelance Writing Struggles

The last few weeks have been a constant reminder of how mentally draining a freelance writing career can be, and how sometimes the biggest struggles in making it as a freelance writer, or an Internet marketer for that matter, aren't lack of knowledge or difficulty learning the technical aspects of a job but the emotional and motivational struggles that take place. No matter how gung-ho you are about writing as a career, there are simply going to be times where it is hard to get motivated, hard to feel on top of things, and you're going to have times where you really need encouragement and there may not be anyone around to give it to you.

This is a natural ebb and flow of any job, I think, even one that has the many advantages that freelance writing can provide. There are also pressures that come with any freelancing type of employment that can make these ebbs and flows even more pronounced and harder to deal with. One of the major problems that comes up is that life doesn't stop, and you don't have a boss to force you back into work after a long struggle. Recently I've undergone some huge personal tragedies in my family, and we all have the difficulty of getting back into work, getting back into a groove and taking care of what needs to be done. This can be very hard freelancing because of the obvious: there's no clock to punch in, and because of that it's very easy to let becoming despondent or depressed take down your entire business if you let it.

So what do you do in these situations?

I think this is a hard question because individual people vary so much. Believe it or not, and I've had problem employers in the past who seem to not believe this, freelancers are people, too, and each person reacts differently. What motivates me to get back to something as "trite" as work when I'm asking questions about faith, hope, or am firmly in the depressing "what's the point of anything?" mode - what motivates me to keep hammering away and what will motivate me to keep me from stopping and giving up might be completely different from what someone else will use to keep fighting the good fight.

For example, I don't give a crap about money. Now to clarify that: money as a motivator does absolutely nothing for me. That's why goals like "Make $5,000 in a month" don't do me much good because honestly, $5,000 doesn't motivate me more than $3,000, and even $8,000 just looks like another number. But certain things money can buy DO motivate me - such as travel or vacation, or oddly enough - the good feeling I get from my Debt Spreadsheet as I watch the numbers plummet.

But to some people, the money number barriers are very important and might be the biggest motivator. Money doesn't motivate me, but the thought of being able to live comfortably in Tampa, Florida, or Austin, Texas, really does. Others probably couldn't care less about living in either of those cities, but having 10k in the bank account can drive them through brick walls.

And I think this is a good time to talk about anger, because depending on your make up and what your situation is, you might be more inclined towards destructive anger than towards depression. I know based on the situation with my family, we're all hurting badly, but we're all furious at injustice. I want to make one thing clear: anger is not a bad thing in and of itself, and if it motivates you - USE IT!!!

It can be hard to come to terms with this idea because it's against what so many of us are taught since before grade school, but anger can be righteous and it can be used to do good. Do you think Martin Luther King, Jr. wasn't angry about racism? Has there ever been a fight against slavery or inequality that did not involve harnessing anger for a greater good? Those are extreme examples, but if you find yourself angry, PLEASE don't let it become depression and destroy you. Don't let it just flow out without control, scorching everyone around you, either. Hone it. Rage is like fire: it can burn wild and out of control, or it can be concentrated and focused - made even hot enough to bend and work metal like iron or steel.

If you're angry - hone it. Use that energy and motivation to focus in on your work and goals and drastically improve your life and your position, and put you in a place in the future where you will be more capable of helping others, as well.

Sometimes that's the best we can do.

And sometimes all we can do is pull up to the computer, find some motivational videos that give us just enough to start typing, and hammer through the fog, the fear, and the emotional baggage one keystroke, one letter, one article, one assignment, and one blog post at a time. The following couple videos have helped me get back on track and cope day to day. I hope they help anyone else who needs a little extra push, as well.

If you've never listened to Tony Robbins, don't judge like I used to, this is worth hearing:

And some great wisdom from Will Smith. BTW, the book he mentions: The Alchemist, is a fantastic book that I also recommend.

Thank you for the many kind words and comments. More website reviews will be coming up soon, and I hope you are all doing well. Until next time, take care, and keep on fighting for your dreams, no matter what obstacles are getting in the way.

EHow & Demand Studios: How Do I Like Them Now?

2010-04-16T22:18:00.009-05:00

Demand Studios & eHow: What Does It All Mean?

A few weeks ago eHow made the sudden announcement that they were ending the Writer's Compensation Program, and would only accept new articles now through their parent company, Demand Studios. You can read the post that announced it here at Jade Dragon's Writing Blog, but the gist of it is that eHow has basically frozen out its current writers and any new ones. It was a heck of a spin job, but in the end Demand Studios decided to make more money by funneling articles through a system that's more profitable for them and most likely less so for the writers. In theory, any old eHow articles will continue to earn passive income for the writers, but there is a general consensus that with how poorly (and outright shady) all this was handled that eventually all those articles will be removed or they'll stop paying. There's no solid evidence of this yet, but the fact that so many writers feel this way tells you how badly the entire situation was handled. This was also done shortly after my Demand Studios review, and I've yet to address it from that side of the fence, as well.

Obviously with eHow only accepting articles through Demand Studios, it's hard to recommend eHow to anyone since they can't sign up directly - which is a shame because when it appeared they were trying to work with the writers, it was a really good place to write and make some passive income. Further making things complicated is that I think Demand Studios definitely has a place in the online freelance writer's overall freelancing strategy, but this is the same group that also created the entire eHow fiasco, so now it definitely complicates what I think of them.

First of all, before I get any pro-capitalism comments, I am the first to openly say that as much as I hated the move, Demand Studios has the right to do whatever the hell they want. They are a company, they own eHow, and as such if they want to treat all the writers who built up that site like total garbage and kick them to the curb, they have every right. Would I have done the same? Absolutely no way in hell. But Demand Studios can do with their sites whatever they want...and observant writers noticed months in advance that a strong shift towards Demand Studios and some very questionable practices were already being implemented. It was only a matter of time before something like this happened.

That said, they should have come out and said so. Up until days before the announcement the overwhelming response from eHow editors was that absolutely nothing was changing, the WCP would stay around, and there were no major changes in the works so writers shouldn't worry. They should have come straight out and told everyone exactly what was going to happen instead of blatantly lying and then more or less closing down angry forum discussion.

Maybe it's because I was raised in a really old school family, so I grew up in a home where the word "honor" wasn't some nebulous word, it was the distinct understanding that there was a right way to do things, and a wrong way. And even if it sucked and made your life miserable, you did things the right way. And since I'm an Iowa State (I-State) Cyclones fan, I'll link to this video where Head Coach Paul Rhoads does a fantastic job explaining doing things the right way. You have to go to 2:19 to see the speech, but this will make you wish every high school and college coach believed this and taught our kids this way.

But I digress. Demand Studios had a passive income article set up before the eHow mess, and I assume that this is the same thing that former eHow writers are being encouraged to use in order to submit passive income articles now. I've never tried it, and so I'm going to be very straight forward and open at this place in saying I have NO idea at this point how it works - but there are many great discussions going on at Jade Dragon's Passive Income blog through the comments sections about the formula for passive income being slightly lower for Demand Studios than it was for eHow.

So what do I think? I don't know. My overwhelming feeling is that even if the passive income articles from Demand Studios to eHow work and provide some income, I'm not sure after seeing how this company handles itself whether or not I would actually want to take the chance of investing a lot of my time into passive income writing for Demand Studios when their track record for treating writers is spotty, to say the least. For true beginners, maybe this is still a viable option, but I think for people who are really serious about building a major passive income while they're freelancing, there are better ways to spend your time.

So that brings us back to talking about Demand Studios. Do I still like them as part of a freelance writing portfolio? The answer is yes, I do, but for flat fee articles and not for writing eHow articles. At some point in June I will likely throw up 20 or 30 keyword researched articles, with backlinks from article directory articles (so I can always edit and switch the links to non DS and non eHow sites I own if I'm not happy with the result, or if the article gets swept but they try to keep the URL) and give it a couple of months to see what the results are. I've done enough writing for eHow with keyword research that I have a pretty good idea of what the articles I'm looking at posting should have as far as potential. Once I get to that point, I'll let everyone know what I think.

But for now, especially for writers who want to make cash now, Demand Studios with their flat rate articles still needs to be considered as a viable option, just be wary of the passive income options.

How I Became A Freelance Writer

2010-04-05T01:11:00.007-05:00

How I Became A Freelance Writer

Update: I'll be addressing the eHow/Demand Studios situation shortly, but since I already started this post, this is the one I want to finish out while gathering more information on the new eHow situation before making a post or updating my review pages.

The only major regret I have with starting this freelance writing blog post is that I don't have a picture of the maladjusted Frankenstein of a computer I started my online writing career with. Because no matter how I describe that thing, it would never compare to a photo of it, and that single picture might encourage more people reading this blog to get writing than anything I could ever say. Because if Master Dayton could get started on that piece-mail p.o.s. with a dial up connection, everyone who saw that picture would suddenly believe (and rightly so) that they could do it, too.

But alas, that horror remains a memory with no photographic evidence, so we'll just have to move on and deal with the mental description later. For a while now I've hinted here and there that eventually I would get around to telling my story of how I became a freelance writer, including the embarrassingly low amounts I used to write for, the "lucky" breaks that pushed me to the next level, the "so close but not quite" moments, and all the ebb and flow that led me to this point.

This story starts out around late 2004 heading into 2005. At this point I was attending my second year of graduate school at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska (UAF) ((several of my friends up there who saw my situation joked that it should have been FUA for F**k U, A-hole based on "truth in advertising")). Even before the spring semester it was becoming pretty apparent that not only were my efforts to graduate early going to be blocked, but that a series of odd situations and "slightly" imbalanced individuals were not only going to keep me from having any chance of getting my degree, but were escalating things to the point where I feared for my physical safety, and after flunking the spring comps exams by a 3-2 vote and not having my space renewed in the program, I was done.

No degree, no job, no place to live, and no major prospects. At this point I knew nothing about freelance writing, and didn't even know where to look. Keep in mind that this was in 2004, and the Internet as a widespread thing was still kind of "new" to most people. Many of the writing sites I use today either didn't exist back then, or have their roots in those days.

I left Alaska and went to Iowa, deciding ahead of time to do the only thing that made sense in my position was to take the money I had saved from working, and to go Kerouac. At that point I was a creative writer, and although a couple of independent work study writing jobs at the University gave me the beginnings of a pretty impressive freelance writer and editor's resume, at that point I had no idea how to convert those experiences and skills into something better.

Besides, I was 24 going on 25, had some money, and some buddies who were willing to road trip with me that fall. Turning down an offer of a job doing maintenance at a camp outside of New Orleans that no longer exists (and if you did your math, yes, that would have been the year Katrina ripped through) in 2005 we went to the Northeast living from campsite to campsite and failing to find any work to allow us to stay more than a month and change. I did get a lot of creative writing done on the road, but came back and within a couple months was broke with student bills coming due, and sleeping on my friend's living room floor while living out of a suitcase.

On December 7, 2005, on my 25th birthday, Gabe and I lost control of the car on an icy road and flipped over a bridge, the undercarriage of the car catching, and flipping us so we hit roof first.

That entire night and the miracle of getting out with "as little" damage as we did could take up pages by itself, but the long story short: I had severe deep bone bruises from my ankles all the way up to my hips. The way the doctor explained it to me was to clasp your hands together with fingers intertwined. That's your bone with the marrow inside. Now move your hands an inch and a half apart while untwining your fingers. That's in simple terms what a severe bone bruise is - dozens or hundreds of "micro fractures" that take a long time to heal. In fact, it was over 3 years before the purple and black bruises on my legs disappeared completely.

So now I was broke, injured, and couldn't work anywhere. We had a computer that had a dial up connection, and there were only two skills I had that could make money online: playing poker and freelance writing. So that's what I did. On a dial up connection on a computer that looked like this: both sides were completely open, as the tower system was a 2000 PC that had been specially built to only function properly when running Windows Millennium (remember that piece of crap?) and that was attached to a partially burned out motherboards (as in at one point the old computer started smoking and there was black soot all over it) from a Gateway computer working as the brain. A CD disc drive was held in place with bubble wrap, folded cardboard, and duck tape and several of the wires from the original motherboard that ran Windows ME were literally cut and spliced to work with the gateway. The monitor's cord had to be run in through a hole in the side because there were no plug-in spaces in the back where they were supposed to be.

It was that ridiculous of an abomination a computer, and yet it started my freelance writing career. To this day I have no idea how Tim managed to get it to work.

So I started looking around and found Constant-Content, a website I still happily write for to this day and can still whole heartedly recommend to beginning online writers. I wrote a few articles, and within a week had two accepted for $40. In retrospect, I should have made $100 of of those two, but I was just getting started and two Andrew Jacksons are a lot of money when you're broke, injured, sleeping on a living room floor, and in need of food. The other site I found was Guru.com. I had enough left on one credit card for a one year subscription, and about $10 of room after that, so I did my research and decided jump jump in. I bought the 1 year subscription to Guru, knowing I had to make it work.

One long term positive that came from working with Guru was that with 100 bids a month, I had to write a lot of query letters. While you could save templates, learning to form a good query letter and how to adjust every template towards each bid is a skill that has paid off huge and is necessary for the success of any writer. The first month was hard, as I was accepted for only one job and received $200 as a kill fee - only to have the job fold in the first week. The second month on Guru I only managed one job, $45 to re-design and re-write a brochure that required 3 revisions - but this did lead to my first positive feedback.

I kept working on my query letters, and I could tell they were getting better as I was getting more and more communication with questions from potential employers, but the lack of feedback made it hard to get more work. But what happens to most really good writers who work hard happened to me as well: I worked hard enough to "get" my "lucky" break.

In March I was offered a job to work on some overflow work that a couple of writers were doing for a friend before they were overflowed. Unfortunately, since I was the second overflow, the 30 page e-book on poker was going to pay a measly $60. Still, I needed the work and took the job, especially because my gut told me I liked the tone of the guys. Thomas, from Journey Beyond Travel, was actually the one who gave me a lot of this work and more that followed, way back before they got such a nice website and really took off. After that poker book I wrote a koi pond e-book for the same price, and received a lot of apologies from them for having so little to pay.

But after they caught up, they liked my writing enough to hire me to provide Morocco travel articles and content, at $12-$15 per 400 words in batches of 10 and 20. That boost got the snow ball rolling, and after a few more jobs adding positive feedback, it snowballed. By the end of March I had over $700 of work not including CC sales, and in April I broke $1,300, not including CC. In May I was just short of two grand - and I still hadn't figured out how much I was worth and that I was under charging for my services.

Life happened in an odd way that summer, and as my friends who had put me up were both moving across the country, I received word that several of the professors and administration who had made my life a living hell up in Fairbanks were gone, and some of the very few professors who had supported me were in more powerful positions to help me not get screwed over. With a little encouragement, I did go back and finish, and by May of 2007, barely a year after starting my freelance career from virtually scratch, I accepted a job offer in Austin, Texas, for solid salary and amazing work at home benefits because of my skills as a poker and e-book writer.

Obviously anyone who knows my story knows that job disappeared a year and a half later, but I still get some of my best freelancing work from them, and I continued to develop my skills as a writer, learned about the opportunities available online, and began my quest for passive income.

There are some major points I want any beginning freelance writers to get out of this post:

I didn't start of with any experience freelance writing
I didn't start out with a strong support structure to support me as a writer
I could not write a good query letter when I started freelancing online
I didn't have any connections at all when I started my freelance career
I had terrible equipment when I started writing
I started off in a huge financial and life "hole" that worked against me at every turn.

Despite all these, in a year and a half I had an office job that would pay $38,000 a year and still allow me to work at home instead of the office while freelancing on the side. In retrospect, I did not take advantage of this nearly as much as I should have, but you live and you learn.

The main point I want to make is: Basic writing talent and a RIDICULOUS work ethic is MORE than enough to create a freelance writing career from scratch.

I want everyone to realize this. Basic writing talent, work ethic, and stubbornness is enough to get you from nothing to a full fledged career. I think that's really important for people to understand because too many people are being held back wanting to be perfect or not being sure if they can do it at all. Work. Then work some more. Then work even more. If you do that, you will succeed. There is always more space for a good hard working freelance writer.

I hope this was encouraging. This wasn't meant to be bragging or bravado or a "look at me and how great I am" blog post, but it underlines the fact that good solid writers who have an incredible work ethic and are willing to be stubborn and pursue that goal of a freelance writing career against all odds and hardships, will make it to the Promised Land.

March Freelance Writing Goals: Calling It In

2010-03-30T01:23:00.007-05:00

Calling It 2 Days Early

So this month definitely wasn't what I was hoping for - and it seemed that a ridiculous amount of things went horribly wrong as if there was some universal conspiracy to make my life and freelance writing career stressful and frustrating. But these things happen, and all we can do is keep going. The one time for me when goals can become a huge albatross instead of an enabler is when I'm closing in on the end of the goal time and know the goals are no longer achievable, but because of an OCD habit to put up a large sheet of paper with a circle representing every article in my goal I begin to get frustrated when not every one is crossed out. So I'm calling it early because I think considering the surrounding circumstances, it was a very good month and besides, I prefer doing helpful articles for my readers, like the recent Demand Studios review.

So, this month which I was hoping would be a month of quiet before the storm, turned out to have plenty of rough moments on its own. For starters, our "amazing" cable and Internet provider's Internet went down four times this month, for blocks of no less than 8 hours. This isn't including frequent 2 am to 5 am outages, which are my best work hours during the day. That didn't help, and would be a killer to my freelance writing career even in the quietest of months.

Then there were personal issues that had to be resolved, an editing job that looked easy but became a disaster, and the delay of a major contract that would have allowed me to hit the $5,000 goal I set for myself. Not all was bad, as some of the delays were due to me not working for an entire day on two separate occasions because of opportunities that came up that were both business and/or creative related and I'm a firm believer in not letting potential once in a life time opportunities slip by. Whether they work out or not, who knows? But freelance writers can't be afraid to take chances, and occasionally a Hail Mary pass wins the football game.

Anyhow, back to the writing goals. I'll talk a little bit more about this at the end, but as for 30 days in March there were multiple Internet problems, including major outages for 4 days and minor ones for another 10 (believe me, I'd switch companies if we could, but where we live we have one choice and that's it, so I'll deal with it). In addition to all that, I can say there were 7 days where I did virtually nothing. I'm not trying to use that as a justification for the mythical "what I could have done," but take it as a guide that if I can do this much in 23 days with a lot of interference and Internet problems, think what can be done with your writing goals and career when you simply focus and decide to obsess for one month to improve your lot.

So let's go over the goals and see how I did. Original goals will be in bold.

Freelance Writing Goals

Over $5,000 in freelance writing income. This does NOT include passive income or increases in passive income sources like AdSense or eHow. I fell $1,500 short of this goal, which I won't say was easily achievable if everything went right, but in a calm month I would be able to do it without any problem, something I wasn't sure of when I started this month. Add in the passive income, editing work, and what I'm likely to do in the next two days, and I got within $600.

Double my AdSense income in one month. I did not honestly expect this one to be doable, and I understand that the majority of HubPages hubs and InfoBarrel articles aren't going to start getting decent traffic and producing until later down the line as they climb the SERPs. In fact, it's safe to say that all the new articles and hubs I made will make several times what they make now in just a few months...which was part of the point of this exercise, to get the work done. Obviously since I'm calling it quit before the end of the month, I'm going to guess by making the last two days of the month equal to my worst day in March. Based on that, my AdSense did go up 37% in one month and just based on the work I've done, it wouldn't surprise me if this month's number doubled or more by the end of June. So I'm very happy with those results.

Double my eHow income in one month. Done. Even with 2 days to go I can say I already hit this one, and I'm obviously extremely happy with those results.

Get the AdSense income to over $100/month for me and my brother's business. Didn't even come close, but we did double the AdSense income, even though this part of the business pretty much fell completely by the wayside after the first week of March.

Creative Writing Goals
Finish 3 more zombie short stories. Technically I haven't finished one, but I'm ridiculously close to having all 3 finished (in fact it might be done by the end of the month). And even though I agree with Ernest Hemingway's quote: "The first draft of anything is shit." I'm really pleasantly surprised by the potential these stories are already showing.

Finish 2 more chapters of the novel "Broken" I'm helping to co-write. One chapter will be done by the end of the month. The other won't be.

Finish 4 chapters of the novel I'm writing for my sister. This one I wish I had found more time for and is the one I regret not getting further on the most. One chapter is done. A second will be done soon.

First 20 pages of my novella "Pawprints to Saskatoon." 5 pages are completed, and there is a much more complete outline. The last 3 pages are also written.

First 10 pages of "Men with Beards" screenplay I'm helping to write on spec. Still developing the ideas on this one, but on the actual writing this one is a goose egg.

Write, complete, revise, and send out 2 additional short stories. I am about three quarters of the way through 1 additional short story, but no hint of a 2nd.

Passive Income Writing Goals.

Write 100 InfoBarrel articles. Wrote 50. Built 50 backlinks to various published InfoBarrel articles through writing more articles.

Write 100 new HubPages. Will have 45 by the end of the month. Did some huge backlinking work on some hubs that were starting to rank really well for a couple really good money making keywords.

Write 15 new Squidoo lenses. Will have 5 finished by the end of the month, although 10 half filled outlines are waiting "in progress."

Write 30 new Xomba articles. All 30 will be written by the end of the month. If bookmarks counted I'd be about 100+ over on this one.

Other Writing Goals

Minimum 8 blog posts on this blog this month.
This blog post makes #6. I could sneak two more in, but that would just feel like cheating. Still, 6 in a month isn't bad for me, and definitely would have had 8 if the Internet was up for any amount of time.

Minimum 12 blog posts over at my "Fixing My Life" blog. Only managed 5, probably be 7 or 8 by the end of the month. But still going swimmingly despite this past month, so hey, having it happen is a whole heck of a lot more important to this freelance writer than blogging about hoping it does.

Rough scripts out for YouTube parodies (pet project). Yes and no. I have 5 scripts. Somehow they're all newer ideas that weren't at all the ones I was talking about. Well, we'll chalk that up to being a great problem to have.

100 articles for backlinks via the KWA directories. By the end of the month I'll have over 80 posted.

30 articles for UAW (which is really 90+ since you have to have 3 versions of each plus hand put in all those annoying boxes at the end). Well this one didn't go nearly as well as I hoped. I'll have 6 done by the end of the month. I'm not counting the 8 I had outsourced.

Revise my poetry portfolio. This didn't happen. I'll arbitrarily blame spring fever for this one.

10 personal hand written letters through the month of March. Five down and five being written over the next two days, so this will be a check.

And other stuff never mentioned in the goals: I've written over 100 articles this month for article marketing purposes, not to mention work gathering backlinks, some guest blog posts, setting up new niche sites, all the work I did for my brother's and I's business, and about 120 pages towards e-books I'm writing for the future. There's probably more here I'm forgetting. It's been a busy month, despite some burn out days, some days without the web, and some days where personal matters had to trump everything else.

So even though I didn't hit a lot of the goals, I feel pretty great. Based on the numbers here, I think had this month gone smoothly, I actually would have accomplished most of the goals I set out, which seems outright insanely awesome to me.

Besides, when I look at how much is done, how can I be upset? Most of this work, I'll see the full benefits in the weeks, months, and even years to follow. When summarized:

I've built over 500 backlinks to my sites (not even including UAW) and web properties
50 new InfoBarrel articles
45 new hubs
5 new Squidoo lenses
30 new Xomba articles (not even counting the 100+ bookmarks that tend to rank really well with Google for some reason)
6 good long Master Dayton blog posts
eHow income doubled with AdSense up 70%
More creative writing in one month than I've done in nearly two years

And this was a BAD month where everything seemed to be going wrong. One of the greatest benefits of this experiment is that it's shattered a lot of glass ceilings. If this is what I can do in a bad month, then how much more could I do in a good month? For decades people believed that a 4 minute mile was impossible. Once that barrier was broken once, it opened a floodgate and that barrier has been broken hundreds, if not thousands, of times since.

I think the same thing applies to writing goals, whether creative or freelance. With a lot of my ideas of "realistic" shattered, it wouldn't surprise me to match these numbers next month and not be nearly as tired or stressed doing it. Once it's been done before, suddenly it's a lot easier to get there again.

And good thing, too, since taxes are going to eat up virtually all of my freelance income from March and early April. Ugh - well welcome to the freelance life :) Hope everyone is doing well, and pursuing their writing goals with gusto. Cheers!

Demand Studios Review

2010-03-27T12:46:00.007-05:00

Demand Studios Review

A lot of people have asked me my opinion about Demand Studios and whether it's worth it or not. There are a lot of things to like about Demand Studios, and there are things that annoy the living piss out of me when it comes to writing for DS, but I will say this much right off the bat with my Demand Studios Review: this website is definitely worth writing for. I'll go through the rest in my normal long rambling posts trying to cover every little detail, but for right now don't let any of the details or mini-rants coming up deter you from expanding to writing for DS in at least a part time basis. But I believe in telling the good and the bad, so let's jump in.

The bad news right off the bat is that Demand Studios is yet another site that is not open to international freelance writers. They are mainly U.S. based, and although there were plans to expand to Canada, Great Britain, and Australia, I have no idea if this has actually occurred yet or is still in the drawing board.

For those of you who are looking to break into freelance writing as beginners, Demand Studios is a really good place to go, and it's a very solid place for established writers to defeat the entire idea of "feast or famine." In fact, if you wanted to make a full time living writing solely for Demand Studios, depending on where you live that goal could very well be possible.

Getting accepted into Demand Studios writing program
You will be required to apply to the program and prove your writing is up the standards desired in order to write for DS. If you're even an average writer, this shouldn't be a problem at all. Just be sure to proof and double proof your writing samples because this would be the wrong time to have a stupid typo sink your chance to write for Demand Studios. If you've already written several articles for eHow, you have an even better chance of getting accepted and should mention that in the application since Demand Studios is the parent company to eHow.

The application process can take anywhere from a few days to a couple of weeks. In my case, I was approved in two days, but I also believe it helped that I had over 150 approved articles at eHow at the time I applied. That's about as good evidence as you can get to prove you can write up to their standards.

What it pays
Freelance writers at Demand Studios are paid on a per article basis, although writers also have the option of writing "residual income" articles that don't pay anything up front, but can be a source of passive income over time - kind of the way eHow works. Pay can range from $3 for a tip article that is only 100 words and one source (read less than 5 minutes of work), and there are other articles at $5, $7.50, $15, $20 or even more.

I find most articles are either $15 or $7.50, and even when I'm not pushing myself at all it's easy to write a $15 article in 40-45 minutes or 3 $7.50 articles in an hour. Sometimes more depending on the article style. When I'm on the ball and really trying to hammer away, it can be much higher. In fact, two days ago I wrote $210 worth of Demand Studios articles in just under 9 hours.

You won't be able to get those results until you're familiar with DS and the style guides, but it is a place you can eventually reach. So if anyone asks if Demand Studios is a scam, it most definitely is not because you can get paid very well, especially once you break it down on a per hour basis. Most people I know would be very happy with a $15+ an hour job, especially if they got to choose their own hours or work extra whenever they felt like it.

Most articles will be either $7.50 or $15, although occasionally you might see a surge of $20 articles - I made a lot of money through Golflink requests at the end of 2009 when that happened. How much you can make an hour will depend on:

How fast you can research
How quickly you can type
How well you can write to template
How quickly you can proof read

That's it. Different styles of articles on Demand Studios have different time requirements, so I'll only briefly cover that, seeing as how each writer is different and figuring out what you excel at or what you prefer to write about can make a huge difference.

Article Styles
There are many different types of article styles, and individual freelance writers are going to excel at different styles. That's one of the most important pieces of writing advice I can give to in this Demand Studios review. Look around, try out different styles, and figure out what works best.

You can read about the different style types and requirements for each one on the Demand Studios articles on the sites, but many of my favorite styles are: fact sheets, decision, list, & about articles.

The fact sheets and decision articles will normally be $7.50 each, while the list and about articles will be $15 a piece, with an occasional $20. My personal favorites at this point are the decision articles, because I can pop those out in around 15 minutes, and the about articles, which take 35-40 depending on how much research I need to do. I made a lot of money off the list articles and they're a simple template, but finding and recording all the address information meant that those articles took 45-50 minutes, so I'm moving away from them to more "about" articles.

However many people might be good at the "how to" articles and can knock them out with little effort. I am not organized enough to be good at these, but there are always thousands available for writers who are really good at that format.

How much can I write?
One of the biggest benefits of writing for Demand Studios isn't the pay levels themselves, but it's the time and work ability. You can only check out 10 titles at a time to work on, but once they are under copy editor review that space can open up and you can pick up another title. This means you can write far more than 10 articles a day. The most I've written in one day was 22. A lot of those were the $7.50 articles, but that still resulted in a $265 day, which is an entire week's take home pay if you're living where I am (where minimum wage jobs are about all you can find right now, if you're lucky).

So you can write, and write some more, and write some more. You can do a few a day as a side income to save up for retirement, vacation, or an emergency fund, or you can make this a pretty full time gig. It's a great supplement even for professional freelance writers because if you're in a 3-6 week "drought" as far as writing assignments go, there's nothing like being able to jump online and knock out $15-30 an hour whenever there's nothing lined up. It definitely makes it easier to budget and make it through a year.

How Demand Studios pays
Demand Studios pays its freelance writers through PayPal twice a week, on Tuesdays and Fridays. It's a pretty convenient system for budgeting. Articles finished by Sunday night are paid on Tuesday, then articles finished by Wednesday night are paid on Friday. Any articles that aren't paid on one day get rolled over to the next, so as long as you write consistently you'll get paid twice a week.

Is Demand Studios a Scam?
Demand Studios is not a scam, contrary to what many self-righteous freelance writing blogs out there say. I personally don't believe that Demand Studios is a rip-off, either. How many millions of people work for less than $15 an hour? That's $32,000 equivalent in salary, but even many of my college grad friends who make $30-40k a year, they DON'T work 40 hours. They work 60. Or 70, or more. And if you're a dedicated writer, you can easily make $22-$30 an hour on DS and choose to work more than 40 hours a week.

If you consider anything less than 6 figures a rip-off, then fine. But plenty of part time workers, unemployed workers, college students, and struggling people right now will be more than happy to hammer away for $15 an hour and a lot of us didn't start with any back up plan. Why don't I spend more time "improving my value" as one fairly arrogant writer put it? Because I made the mistake of going to college and grad school. If don't start off at zero, I start off with a ridiculous amount of bills each month and if I don't pay them, I go homeless. Again. For the 3rd time.

So $15 an article is fine with me because it's a lot better than what I started with working my way back, and that much money can be a major blessing for a lot of people.

I also don't fully buy the most common counter arguments of "professional writers" because:

Printed mediums are dying. There are less and less markets for more and more competition.
Already established writers will get the majority of work.
There is very limited work that pays really well, and
There is limited high end talent.

Some people just aren't going to be good enough to "work their way up," and others have to work 40-60 hours a week to break even for past mistakes (hell0), and keep the rent paid and food coming in while I work on building passive income and working on the business I'm starting with my brother. I don't have 40 hours a month to keep sending out query letters or samples that get nice hand written or typed comments about having writing talent, but not being right at this time. And I don't have the built in connections to force my way in.

The big advantage of Demand Studios is when I want to make $20+ an hour, I can jump online and do it for as long as I want. I love making $72.50-$100 an hour working on the weekly Forex reports I prepare for a couple of clients, but that was, is, and always will be only 1.5-2 hours of work a week. Something has to fill the spare.

Demand Studios Complaints
Now that I've talked them up, let's get toe the common Demand Studios complaints, and some reasons why even previous writers left some very negative Demand Studios reviews. There are some things that be incredibly annoying if not outright aggravating about writing for DS. So lets start with the copy editors.

Straight out, a lot of them either don't know what they're doing, act like they're editing for the New York Times, or you'll receive contradictory information from two different editors. In fairness, I shouldn't have said "a lot," I'm sure it's a minority of editors there, BUT it seems like a lot when a lot of articles get sent back for revision. This isn't always a bad thing - many of the revisions are stupid little things that take all of 2-3 minutes to fix. Spending another 2 minutes on something for $15 shouldn't piss off anyone.

That said, those other reasons can be a hassle. If the comments for revision are paragraphs long and involve a condescending lecturing tone, I simply walk away and let the assignment expire. At that point it's not worth my time. Editors not knowing what they're doing can be really annoying, especially when they ask for revisions that make the articles just sound terrible. But it happens and you have to decide how to deal with that on a case by case basis. For the contradictory info, just make the editor who is going to pay you for that article happy, and try not to let the annoying things bother you.

These things can really throw off your day, but part of being a freelance writer is learning how to develop a really thick skin. You can't survive without it. Also: don't worry about the graphs that tell you what % of articles were accepted, accepted with rewrites, rejected, etc. Most of the writers I've talked to who use DS full time have about 30% of their articles that have to be revised. I usually have 20-25%, and 3-4% where the requests are unreasonable and I simply walk away from them.

As long as the majority of your articles are accepted, you're fine. Any articles I "walk away from" or in the rare 1% times it's rejected, I copy the text and sell it elsewhere. You're not supposed to take the title, but if they don't pay me for the writing I sell it online to someone who will. That's making the best out of an unfortunate situation.

The main Demand Studios complaints are almost certainly going to revolve around the editors. While there is some legitimacy to these complaints, you can either move on and make some money, or don't. I do my best to not let it bother me, and keep hammering away to pay off the bills.

And that's pretty much it, folks. That's my review of Demand Studios. Especially for beginning part time freelance writers, college students looking to save up for spring break, or for the unemployed who need some income, any income, DS is a very good option - especially if you're trying to build up passive income but you need more money now. The editors can be a pain in the butt, but buy a punching bag and put it in your office every time one gets to you and the problem is solved.

I hope that helps. If you have any more questions about writing for Demand Studios or why I'm a firm believer that DS is NOT a scam, and while it's not the end all, be all, to freelance writing it beats the hell out of being homeless, working for minimum wage, or adjuncting as academic slave labor (sorry guys). It's a great stepping stone, and if you're from a background where a long life of poverty is reality, it's one heck of a step towards getting to the right place, please feel free to leave me any questions in the comment section and I'll do my best to respond.

Demand Studios & eHow Update: Okay all, there has been a huge change at eHow and this change is going to drastically effect the parent company, Demand Studios, as well, IMO. As of April 5th, 2010, eHow has shut its doors to its writers and will only accept articles from parent company Demand Studios. Not only do I strongly disagree with and dislike this move, but I think it's going to eventually make writing on DS much more difficult, as well. I'm going to take a little bit of time to find out what I can before coming back and talking more about what I think this all means for freelance writers.

March Writing Goals Update #2

2010-03-20T01:26:00.005-05:00

Freelance Writing Goals #2

This is the second update on the blog since I displayed my ambitious writing goals at the very beginning of March. I was going to write one around the 15th, but that was my brother's birthday, some jobs came up I couldn't ignore, and it was my 50th blog post on this blog, so it seemed like a good time to throw in a "clip show" of a blog post looking back over where this freelance writing blog started and where it's going. But now the month is almost 2/3 of the way through, and I thought I'd add another brief update on my writing goals. By the way, if you're new here, feel free to look through older posts for freelance writing website reviews, tips for beginners, or any of the other information that this blog provides for people interested in advice for freelance writing for beginners.

So I'm not going to go point by point this time, but as the days are going by, I'm definitely beginning to feel the squeeze. My chances of finishing all the goals? Pretty much none, but I think that's what we all assumed at the beginning of the month when I made them. Still, overall I am encouraged by the amount of work I've done and the progress I'm already seeing. This month I fell just short of having my first $20 AdSense day, which was really cool since my previous best was $14 that happened one day in early November of 2009. Overall, traffic to my AdSense sites are up 28% and within the next 3 days I'll surpass my previously best month. Will I hit the 100% in one month goal? I'm guessing not because traditionally AdSense tails off quite a bit at the end of the month - but it's going to be a close one, and the fact that's even true is encouraging - not to mention that passive income is only going to grow as the new articles and pages get stronger, meaning the end of the month payments are going to continue to get bigger and bigger. With passive income, that is always a plus.

The $5,000 in one month freelance writing goal discounting all passive income, editing, and consulting work actually appears to still be in play. If I had to wager a guess, I'd say I'll end up a few hundred short (especially since the Internet around here has been going out for hours at a time) but it's a number I could very easily hit if I added the consulting fees, passive income, and payments for editing work in.

The doubling my eHow income is actually on track to hit. I don't even want to go into how many articles I had to churn out to make that happen. With even just a little SEO work those could end up paying off big time in a couple of months.

I've done daily creative writing. I'll have at least a couple of zombie short stories finished, and many pages of fiction spread out through the other projects. Getting back to writing creatively daily has been nice, and I've done a lot of revision work on my novel, preparing it for another round of send offs. Easily I've done more creative writing and revising of my creative work this month than January and February combined.

With the creating passive income properties, the numbers are mixed. If you go by a what I have to average per day, I'm behind on both InfoBarrel and HubPages, but I've written more of both this month than the first two months combined, and the 100 each goal are both within striking distance, so we'll see how those finish up.

I'm ahead of pace for the Squidoo lenses, and very excited about them once again for two reasons. One is that because of the "info links" that are added, my lenses are about 70%+ more profitable than they were before. The second reason is that based on how some of my lenses are performing way beyond expectation, I may have found an untapped niche that could end up making a HUGE difference in my monthly and yearly passive income numbers.

I've already done something in the range of 60+ Xomba bookmarks, and am within striking distance of hitting my goal of 30 for the month.

I'm a little behind on the blog posts, UAW articles, and script writing, but really making progress on everything else.

At this point in the month, I can say those 2 days where the Internet when down for 10+ hours killed me. It wasn't just the lost hours, but those were days I was really fired up and just ready to absolutely kill it. The emotional impact of being hyped up and focused, and then having the legs cut out from under me, that just really crushed my work ethic for about a 5 day span, and in all honesty, there wasn't a lot of work done (comparatively) in that time period. In fact, I was really sluffing. Which really opens up the possibilities of what a single person can do when they can stay focused and on task the whole time...and have a reliable service provider.

So this last stretch of 11 days will definitely be really interesting. I'm focusing better for the home stretch and am prepared to really hammer everything out during this time to see what happens. The one other thing that is probably worth mentioning for the goals: I do article marketing for backlinks, and those articles were not included in my monthly goals - even though I've written over 120 of them so far this month.

So yeah, I'm feeling pretty darn good about where things are going. Even if you're not the insane goals type, if you're looking to get into freelance writing (or even if you're established), figure out one or two concrete goals for next month that can help you take a really definitive step towards your overall freelance writing career goals. It's absolutely stunning what can be done when you focus in specifically on a couple of solid concrete targets.

So that's it for now. I'm going to try and finish my Demand Studios review by Monday, and an updated Associated Content review by Wednesday. Beyond that, we'll just see how things roll. Thanks for reading, and feel free to leave a comment!

Master Dayton Freelance Writing Blog: 50th Post

2010-03-12T14:25:00.013-06:00

Celebrating the 50th Freelance Writing Blog Post

For some blogs, maybe the 50th post isn't a big deal, and doesn't seem like much at all. But when I started this writing blog, it was a side project, something I enjoyed, and had nothing to do with me personally making any income or building my online businesses, so this was never meant to be a post daily or weekly blog, and 50 posts is pretty good for me. I tried to think of something special to do, but being in the midst of a crazy month shooting for crazy writing goals, my brain isn't firing on all cylinders when it comes to putting together a blow your socks off post. So instead of something new and absolutely brilliant, I'm putting together a clips show.

I've actually been amazed at how many interesting and really cool things have happened in my life due to this blog, and also to writing online in general. I've met some really cool people, learned a ton about making money online, passive income, and how the possibilities of what you can do online can change your life. Jobs that resulted from my online writing have seen me move across continent from Alaska to Texas and back to Iowa right in between, and I've managed some pretty good stories and across the world invites whenever I finally get that darned passport.

So some of this freelance writing blog post will be rambling, some will be freelance writing advice, and a lot of it will be looking back at links, posts, people, or events that have made a particular impact on me over these past 5 years of writing online, and the past 2 years with this blog. So kick back and smile if you enjoy rambles, because none of this post is thought out ahead of time and it's going to be a happy scatter shot from here on out :)

So before I go into making lists, there's one blog post I did that stands above and beyond all of them. At the time it was one of my longest blog posts, and it is my personal favorite, in addition to being the "favorite" of my readers based on comments. Even despite the hugely increased following I received after that post, it remains the single most read and commented on post I've ever done on this blog, and it doubled the number of followers I have (that show on the feed or contact me by e-mail), received a lot of link love, and I noticed a huge jump in traffic that has stayed ever since. "Master Dayton" is also now searched for on Google monthly in the double digits, which I just think is cool. So hands down, the "BEST" blog post I ever wrote was this:

Why I'm Not Ashamed to Be a Freelance Writer

That one would have otherwise been on every single other list had I not set it apart, and that one post really did put this blog on an entirely new level by virtually every measurement I make and keep track of. So with that post getting its due, from there I thought the common sense way to start off would be to mention my 5 favorite blog posts, which were:

While these are my personal favorites, if I'm basing the most popular posts on number of comments, then the 5 most popular posts of my blog are:

Setting Ridiculously Ambitious Writing Goals (we all seem to like this one)
50 Things Beginning Writers Should Know
Constant Content Review
Entry Level Freelance Writers: Don't Get Discouraged
Freelance Writing & Blogging

It's kind of funny to me how that one post strikes a major chord, but otherwise there's a pretty good divergence between the posts I liked most and the ones most popular with readers. Then again, some of them make sense. Writing about the 50 things beginning writers should know might not interest me because I've been there, done that, and have long since moved beyond many of those lessons. On the other hand, what a great post for writers who are literally just getting started in freelancing.

The success stories I've been e-mailed by some of my readers just encourage me beyond belief and make me really happy that I'm doing this. Because time wise versus monetary return, this blog should have been abandoned long ago. But I really enjoy helping others, I like being able to talk about freelance writing, and although there are the occasional trolls, it really is a small price to pay for the people I've met, the online friendships developed, and for the other places I think this blog (and my writing in general) are going to end up taking me. I want others who are on the fence or afraid to be encouraged and to work for more, and to dream of more, than they otherwise would.

I also want to take time to mention resources I would encourage beginners and intermediates in the freelance writing and passive income business to check out. These are good informational sources, each one I personally approve of and would have no problem recommending someone to.

Jade Dragon @ Innovative Passive Income
Allyn Hane @ Blogger Illustrated Video Blog
Grizz @ Make Money Online - first of the honest blogs about making money online that I've found, and this guy has influenced so many people he's like the "Godfather" of the honest make money online bunch.
Courtney Tuttle @ The Keyword Academy
Lissie @ Passive Income Ideas Online
Felicia Williams @ No Job for Mom

These blogs cover the gamut from freelance writing to affiliate programs, SEO, AdSense, passive income, and everything in between. If you want to learn how to become an online freelance writer, or make passive income online, it doesn't get any better than those sources. After that, it's just a matter of taking some type of action each and every day towards accomplishing your freelance writing goals, because even a small step is still one that gets you a little big closer to your freelance writing dreams than before.

There are two other sites I'd like to share. I haven't had correspondence with these individuals, or comment back-and-forths or anything like that, but I enjoy their blogs and think some people will enjoy them, as well.

There's Justin at Life of Justin, I think formerly it was "Digital Nomad," but I'm not 100% sure on that one. Enjoyable blog that also tracks how he went from corporate job to being self employed and being able to "go mobile" to enjoy life a lot more and still get the income to live well.

Then you have Ben over at Making Money Online with SEO. I have absolutely nothing but mad respect for this guy. You know how sometimes you think "If I just write 10,000 articles I'll have enough to make x a month?" but then you never follow through because that number is so ridiculously high? Well Ben learned SEO, keywords, finding good niches, and then he put in 18+ hour work days for months on end to prove that sheer volume, when done right, is enough to get to a full time online income pretty darn quick. If you feel yourself slacking off, reading the work he does acts like one heck of a kick in the pants to get you going again. And once again - rock solid information, and just like Grizz's blog, read all the comments.

There's the shout out to my friends. Sharing some of my favorite pages or "surprises," does come up with some issues. I'm not going to share my best money making pages, because giving away your niches is the best way to lose them. But I do have pages I wrote for fun which led to other opportunities, and those I'll be glad to share.

Some pleasant freelance writing surprises:

My Coen Brothers Biography on Squidoo. My first venture into passive income came when I was starting a new job in Austin, Texas, and my boss wanted me to become familiar with Squidoo. This was the first page I wrote, and it's made me $215 and makes about $20 a month. Strangest thing, for the longest time I couldn't figure out how the heck it was getting 300 visitors a month from search engines. Now I've figured it out and am going to be doing some experimenting. I'm not going to give away that secret, but I will say it's one of those "that's so stupid I can't believe it's working," things. Gotta' love when things bounce the right way. Another plus of this Squidoo lens: it led to a print publication as a Coen Brothers expert in the .Cent international arts magazine. Freaking cool.

Along the same lines, other Squidoo lenses that have done well for me include: Sinclair Lewis Novels, It Can't Happen Here as a Prophetic Warning, and Best Dystopian Novels. All of these have led to a wide variety of opportunities including being a specialty guest on radio and Internet radio shows on multiple occasions, and guest speaking at a high school and college on these topics. Once again, all really cool stuff, and it makes my "Academic Resume" look really good. Never mind that I'll probably never apply for a professor's job again, but eh, still cool. Strengthens a safety net, as well, and I like my options :)

My original page helping freelance writers is also on Squidoo, and doing well and helping people, but I'm not linking back to that one, because that's one of my best links to this blog and I don't want it to be reciprocal.

Writing on HubPages has led to a lot of hubs that haven't made me money (although there are plenty that are) but several I've made have led to some amazing conversations about philosophy, Alaska (love the state), pros/cons of legalizing marijuana, and a wide variety of other topics. Writing there and seeing detailed but civil arguments or discussions in the comments section has been a real cool thing. Writing for HubPages also almost got me in a story for USA Today. Granted, this story would have been cooler if I actually ended up there, but hey, it shows the possibility is at least there.

Probably my best story is how a little read article (only a few hundred people) resulted in me getting a thank you note from a king. An article I wrote for Associated Content about an new charity resulted in the King of the Isle of Man (and yes, I realize there are arguments over this, but the title has been granted to him) reading it and sending me a thank you note. So I'm one of the few people on this Earth who can say I've received a thank you note from a King.

Among other pleasant surprises, my article on the 10 best post apocalypse movies is probably my favorite. I know from testing that articles like that don't end up converting in AdSense and they don't get people to buy the movies, so it looks like "worthless traffic," so I like getting paid on a per view basis for that type of traffic. And this article makes me $12-20 a month in page views, and has made me well over $200 for what was about 70 minutes of work.

Which brings me up to a bit of advice, if you're writing for Associated Content and you want to get anywhere remotely close to a decent passive income stream from it, then you want to write list articles. Out of my top 20 monthly earners, 17 are list articles. So are #21, #23, and #25, for that matter.

On this blog, I'm seeing more and more attention, more and more search engine visitors, and more consistent lurkers and registered followers. I'm beginning to see more natural backlinks to the blog, which means bit by bit I'm ranking for more terms for Google, "Master Dayton" is becoming a more recognized moniker, and more people are finding me every day. This is all really cool, and as my passive income from freelance writing continues to grow, I think the many amazing stories and opportunities from writing online are only going to continue.

So that's it for now. Read some of my friends' blogs, get some writing done, and if the idea of a "new lifestyle" from writing seems odd, I do recommend The 4 Hour Work Week. I use the stories as more of motivation and tips for staying productive than a set business plan, but it's a pretty cool work, and one that gets you thinking.

March Writing Goals Update #1

2010-03-07T03:43:00.005-06:00

Update for March Freelance Writing Goals

Well this post is definitely going to be brief, or at least semi-brief by my standards. This is the first update all about the ridiculously difficult writing goals I set for myself a couple blog posts ago. Although it hasn't even been a week yet (it's 4:08 a.m. Sunday morning on the 7th, so until I go to sleep and wake up it's still 6 days by my count), but already I've seen some really interesting results, patterns, developments, whatever you want to call it, and some transparency is never a bad thing.

If you haven't read the original post, that would probably be a good idea. You can click on "writing goals" up above to go right to it. Because those weren't any ordinary goals I set. Not by a long shot. In fact, some of the individual writing goals would have made great one month goals for me in and of themselves. I've never come close to writing 100 HubPages or 100 InfoBarrel articles in one month, for example. But they're both there.

And I just kept adding on and adding on and adding on some more. As I stated in my other blog post, I wanted to shoot for the moon, so even if I fell woefully short I would still land on Everest.

So how am I doing so far? Here's a breakdown of the first 6 days, with minimal commentary:

Freelance Writing Goals

$5,000 in one month: right on target. Might even be slightly ahead right now, and I'm going by the $162/day accounting. That's right what I'm averaging...and I get paid big time once a month for reports I do on the 15th so I have a LOT more breathing room than it looks.
Double my eHow income: a little behind, but wrote more articles for them already this month than I had in any of the last 4.
AdSense: I'm not checking the #'s, so I don't know. I'm too easily addicted by number checking to trust myself not to whittle away precious hours doing just that. But traffic is up 29% already this month, so that's a good sign.

Creative Writing Goals

I'm half way through 1 zombie story, and have a new outline for another. The one I'm half way through will be the longest, so page wise I'm ahead in my goal of 3 zombie short stories. This amazes me considering all the freelance work I've been doing.
2 new pages on the novel "Broken."
1 page on book for my sister - so behind on this goal.
Haven't touched the novella yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if that's one I knock out 20 pages in one day towards the end of the month.
2 pages on the screen play, so just about right on target.
Additional short stories: I have 2 pages of outlines. So progress, but probably behind.

Passive Income Writing Goals

100 InfoBarrel Articles: I should have 19-20 done to be on pace, I have 6, so I'm behind on this one.
100 HubPages: I have 7 of this done, so I'm a little behind. But Sundays tend to be my passive income days this month, so I'm looking at my first one tomorrow.
15 Squidoo Lenses: I have 8 in development. Now I just need to flesh them out and I'll be way ahead of schedule.
30 Xomba Articles: I have 6, so right in line.

Other Writing Goals

8 Master Dayton blog posts this month. Well this is #3, so I'm ahead.
12 blog posts at my "Fixing my Life" blog. I have 4 typed out, I just need to go post them.
100 KWA articles for backlinks. I have 12 so far, so I am behind, but in fairness, I didn't even list Ezinearticles or article directory articles for backlinks, and I've shot out about 50 of those this month already.
30 UAW articles. 4 so far, so 2 behind.
Haven't touched the poetry yet, but did start a couple new ones based on lines I thought of the past few days.
10 Hand written letters - 3 ready to go Monday. So ahead.

So I don't know what the perception is at this point, but it might be important to note that for $162 a day in online freelance articles, I'm writing most of those for Demand Studios, which means 11-17 a day just for that one goal.

So what's this all mean?

Well I've already noticed a habit change in my writing. It used to be very difficult and mind numbing for me to sit down and do even $60 in Demand Studios freelancing. Now, I feel lazy if I haven't knocked out $100 by early afternoon. The habit of getting up and just going all out working has already paid huge dividends after one week. $60 a day used to be hard for me to concentrate on, now $100 a day is easily twice as easy for me to do as $60 was, and I am POSITIVE that this is because my goal was to shoot way ABOVE $100 a day.

It's like some forms of athletic training. If you want to consistently work out at a rate of 7, but you can't bust through 6, spend a few days training for less time at 8 or 9. Then go back to 7. Suddenly it seems easier and you can do it.

This is the same thing that I find happening to me right now. Your economic situation definitely changes when $60 a day turns into $100 and you have even more time free afterwords.

Another major thing I've noticed already is that by forcing myself into an insane month's worth of goals (because honestly, I'm not even sure it's possible to do everything I've set out to do in one month by myself, and starting out I didn't even expect to hit half of them by month's end) I've cut out all the little time consumers like checking e-mail 30 times a day or checking AdSense every 50 minutes. Those little things really add up to consume FAR MORE time than you think. Seeing what I'm able to do when on focus makes me kick myself for taking two years to try an experiment like this :)

The 3rd thing I've noticed is my excitement at freelance writing. It's beginning to match my excitement of creative writing for the first time, because having these incredible goals really is acting like a shot of adrenaline right into my system. It's the kind of month where if I get even remotely close to the goals, the impact could very well change my life.

This freelance writing blog has covered a lot of themes and issues over the past couple years, but in many ways these past few posts have been exciting for me. I'm not only hitting a new level on being able to concentrate, work, and make good money freelancing while still building passive income and working on creative projects - but I am absolutely SHATTERING every glass ceiling that was in place before I tried this.

So that's the update for now. I don't know how close I'll make it to all my final goals, but I can say this much: I'm a whole lot more confident that I'll blow that "realistic" 50% mark completely out of the water by month's end. Keep at it, and there will be some website reviews coming up in the near future.

Writing Skills: Tunnel Vision & Walking Away

2010-03-03T20:05:00.010-06:00

Freelance Writers Need to Have Both Traits

This freelance writing blog post should be a little bit shorter than many of the others, as anyone who has read my last blog post on Insane Freelance Writing Goals will know that "full" doesn't even begin to describe my plate right now. And if you haven't read that post, go ahead and do so. It's a good one . . . might even make my Hall of Fame post list for this blog, but we'll wait and see on this one. Even though I can't really afford to spend two hours rambling, I like this blog and I like you guys so who knows? :)

While I kind of wish I had my full Demand Studios Review finished, this post should be fine without that one - which will be one of the next posts because I believe it's very relevant to writers looking to make a living freelance writing online. But we'll move on to the two freelance writing traits I think successful writers need to have (and know how to balance) and see what happens from there.

The first trait I definitely think good writers need to have is tunnel vision. I've heard that when a predator like a big cat (cheetah, panther, etc) sees some prey and begins to charge, that the cats literally lose their peripheral vision and literally only see what they're focused in on. This is well documented in police or soldiers stuck in a close quarters gun fight. Tunnel vision is something that can be very effective for writers, and sometimes I think is just outright necessary.

The last blog post I made about my ridiculous freelance writing goals for March is a prime example. There is NO possible way to come even remotely close to those goals unless I'm spending virtually every day in March 100% focused, tuned in, and spending every spare waking moment pursuing my goals. Believe me, after this blog post is done I'll be doing the absolute minimal of promoting, and then I'm immediately going back to Demand Studios to knock 3 more articles out before midnight, at which point I'll be writing some articles for back links to both my new Hubs and InfoBarrels, but also to the pages my brother and I's business.

And since I've figured out I'm at my best staying up to 5 am and then sleeping to 10:45 a.m. I'm sure there will be another Xomba article, Squidoo lens, or something going up. If it's one of those nights I get exhausted early, I'll work on my creative writing since that always fires me up and rejuvenates me. One way or another, there's not going to be any watching TV, no surfing the web mindlessly looking at NFL draft news, and the XBox 360 is staying turned off. Because I have a whole lot of work to do.

Tunnel vision is the only possible way I'm going to get anywhere close to nailing my March freelance writing goals. And so far in the first 3 days, I had a little bump this morning, as it was just one of those days where I REALLY, REALLY didn't feel like doing any writing. But I started grinding through, I reminded myself of why these goals were so important to me, and by late afternoon I was back on track again. And it happened by just focusing on the next job. And then the next. And then the next.

Basically I tunnel-visioned it one article at a time until my freelance writing was back full speed ahead. One problem with ridiculous ambitions is they can crush you, but one article should never be intimidating. Thank you freelance writer tunnel vision!

The second thing I wanted to touch on really briefly is being able to just walk away from a job when the situation isn't worth it. Now this is one of those bits of advice I have to add an asterisk to or add a note of caution with. Many beginning freelance writers (and I certainly am no exception to this) start out working under value as they learn the ropes and improve their skills. But there are going to be times where a job goes bad. There can be several reasons for this. The most common for me are:

A ridiculous amount of work being asked done for not nearly enough compensation.
A severe lack of professionalism, rudeness, or disrespect.
Any worried feeling that throws up red flags.

The 3rd one I trust the most, but that's something that may take time to develop. If my gut makes me suspect that there's even an outside chance of things going really bad, I simply won't take the work. The middle one should be pretty self-explanatory, and the first one is the one I run into the most often.

Now here is the reason I wish I had done the Demand Studios Review before this section, because all in all I like writing for them, and believe there is a lot there for beginning writers, as well as even for intermediate and experienced writers as a side source of online freelance writing income. There's a lot of good with that site, especially when you figure out the right styles that match your writing style as well as the right mentality to have dealing with editors (because that's where most of the complaints come from and where most of my issues crop up). So I'll have to cover that later. Just understand that overall I DO like Demand Studios as part of a freelance writing income, so don't let the following scare you off, just take it as an honest review.

Most of the Demand Studios editors I deal with are reasonable or respectful. A couple are either jacka**es or totally insane. Or don't know their own guidelines they are supposed to be enforcing.

Most of the time this isn't an issue. This is when the decision has to be made. For a $7.50 article I'll gladly spend 15 minutes writing. I'll even check one that's been flagged for revision to see what's amiss. If the editor's comments for what I have to fix are four paragraphs long, I hit the "save draft" button and let the assignment expire. It's not worth the time.

This is hard for some people. But if you've already committed work, how can you just throw away that time? Better 15 minutes than 1 hour or more...especially if after an hour the article is a complete re-write, meaning that it may or may not get accepted anyway. It's smarter to write a new $15 or $20 article during that time.

If the editor goes on a long rant about how to write an article correctly, demanding a lot of changes that actually go AGAINST the DS guidelines for writing for specific companies, I also simply let the assignment expire. It's not worth my time or the headache.

Now most of the time this isn't an issue, and any revisions that take 10 minutes or less I'm more than happy to do the work, because at that point it's 1, 2, 5, or 10 minutes for $7.50, $15, or $20 in pay. If the editor wants a ridiculous amount of work, it's just not worth it and I let the assignment expire.

The first few months, this was REALLY hard for me to do. But I realized a few things:

An abandoned rewrite looks a lot better than a rejected article, and causes less stress and frustration for me personally.
As long as this is a tiny % of my total articles, it doesn't really matter in the big picture.
I'm more efficient just ignoring the jobs that have become albatrosses.
I'm probably putting jerk or incompetent editors on the hot seat by allowing the articles to go unedited.

Number 4 is a little of a conjecture, but think about it, if one editor has a lot of writers refusing to do any rewrites, that person is probably a lot more likely to get reviewed than an editor whose rewrites are actually done by the writers.

In the end, part of creating the best possible freelance writing career is knowing when to do the work and when to simply walk away. So if you ever experience a combination of #1 and #2, walk away from that article and move on to another. I generally have about 20% of my articles sent back for a re-write at Demand Studios, but the far majority of those are little details that are legitimate, or even if it's an opinion difference, it's work that takes all of 1-10 minutes to fix and get paid, so that's fine.

So there you have it. Tunnel vision and walking away. They seem contradictory, but these are two skills that advanced and successful writers need to have.

Ridiculously Ambitious Writing Goals: They Can Help You, Too

2010-03-01T01:10:00.008-06:00

Making Ambitious Writing Goals A Boost & Not an Anchor

There are two ways that ambitious writing goals can generally go, and I think sometimes for both beginning and seasoned freelance writers (and maybe even creative writers, too - Justus and Ashley feel free to fill to chip your two cents in the comments about if you think this applies across the board or not for creative writers, as well) the way we handle and deal with ambitious writing goals is maybe just as important, if not more so, than the goals themselves. This is really an important point, because while setting hard to reach goals and accomplishing them can really propel you as a writer (or in any other endeavor for that matter), I know plenty of beginning freelance writers who felt crushed by the weight of their own goals, especially after falling behind and failing to achieve them.

In this post I'm going to share some of the freelance writing goals that I've set for myself for the month of March, and I'll be the first to admit that not only are they overly ambitious - but ridiculously so. That said, I know where I am in life both as a writer and as a person striving for daily betterment of my life and myself, and setting very ambitious goals is a very good idea for the situation I'm in...but where can this sometimes go wrong for writers?

One of my strong points is not organization. Anyone who reads this freelance writing blog with any frequency at all probably understands that. So I'll make a list of questions that you should ask yourself before deciding what kind of goals to set for yourself, and whether to shoot for the realistic or the ambitious.

Am I going to become frustrated, disappointed, or depressed if I don't reach my goals or don't come close?
Do I take written goals seriously, or do I ignore them completely the more obvious it becomes that I'm going to miss them?
Are my writing goals based around what I should do, what I want to do, or both? Or neither? Why?
If I have trouble accomplishing my freelance writing goals, is it because money is not enough motivation as a goal? (I know for me it's not)
Will ambitious goals make me rise to the occasion, or intimidate me into frustration or depression for not making the mark.
What are the reasons behind my goal setting? ((this might be the most important question of all, and one you need to take time to study as a writer if you don't understand the meaning)).

I might not have drawn it out completely clearly, but I think you guys probably get the gist of what I'm saying at this point. If written goals aren't heavily motivating to you, but you still get depressed from not hitting them when the month's end comes around, then you need to a) find a better way to motivate yourself, and b) work on changing your mindset.

Angry can be good. My now "famous" angry blog post about not being ashamed to be an online writer is one classic example of channeling anger into something really productive. That blog post in a way launched this blog to a new level. Followers doubled, e-mail "lurker-followers" doubled, my comments have gone up exponentially, and the links I received from people who liked the post probably got me another point of PR and ranking well enough to draw in about another 50 visitors a week. Thanks to you all.

That was anger turned into production. I can't do the same from frustration or depression. I don't think I've ever met anyone who can. Even worse, being down about not making some ambitious goals can cause you to drag your feet or become despondent about your writing progress so it gets even worse, and suddenly you're in a vicious cycle.

I like ambitious goals for the same reason Timothy Ferriss does. I find in my life that average goals mean mediocre work and effort, and no major adrenaline rush when I hit them...but maybe a little of the "what's wrong how could you not even get that done in a month?" when I don't hit those same goals. If I shoot for the top of a tree and miss, I might land on the first branch. If I shoot for the moon and miss, I still might land on Everest. That's the big difference, and that's the motivation you have to be able to give yourself as a freelance writer in order to really make huge strides forward in your writing career: whether it's online, offline, passive income, or some combination of all three.

So why am I making absolutely ludicrous freelance writing goals (and creative writing goals as well - when you consider them tied in with everything else I'm doing this month) for the month of May when I'm almost certainly destined to fall at least a little short?

Because:

The larger the goal, the more work I'll get done even if I fall short.
Having huge goals is an adrenaline rush that keeps me on track and on task.
IF, and it's a big if, but IF I somehow nail the goal and make it, accomplishing that level of work (or even coming close) will be the type of victory and confidence builder that will give me the drive and the ability to run through brick walls for months to close in on my much larger goals for this year.

Those are the reasons that I personally love setting ambitious freelance writing goals, and why I'm going to do so for this month. If this strategy works for you, copy it. If not, find what does work for you. Writing is a skill that can ALWAYS improve, no matter who you are. So get at it.

So here's my favorite time: put up or shut up. So here are the goals I'm sharing:

Freelance Writing Goals

Over $5,000 in freelance writing income. This does NOT include passive income or increases in passive income sources like AdSense or eHow. Does not include editing jobs, either. Writing job means writing job. This alone will require a ridiculous amount of writing for me.
Double my AdSense income in one month. I've been on a plateau for about 4 months now. It's time to get the work out and get my passive income to some actual serious numbers that can make a dent in the monthly budget.
Double my eHow income in one month.
Get the AdSense income to over $100/month for me and my brother's business. We hit $20 starting for scratch (and AdSense isn't anywhere close to being the main income stream of this business, but we're all about passive and diversify), and now I'd like to see that make a huge jump in month 2.

Creative Writing Goals

Finish 3 more zombie short stories, including an outline for the one I'm really excited about. I'd share the title, but I'm jealously guarding the plot and the title would give it away.
Finish 2 more chapters of the novel "Broken" I'm helping to co-write.
Finish 4 chapters of the novel I'm writing for my sister.
First 20 pages of my novella "Pawprints to Saskatoon," which currently as 15 pages of random scenes and an outline.
First 10 pages of "Men with Beards" screenplay I'm helping to write on spec.
Write, complete, revise, and send out 2 additional short stories.

Passive Income Writing Goals.
(Yes, I realize AdSense earnings could technically fall here)

Write 100 InfoBarrel articles
Write 100 new HubPages
Write 15 new Squidoo lenses
Write 30 new Xomba articles

Other Writing Goals

Minimum 8 blog posts on this blog this month
Minimum 12 blog posts over at my "Fixing my life" blog (going swimmingly, by the way, thanks for asking)
Rough scripts out for YouTube parodies (pet project)
100 articles for backlinks via the KWA directories
30 articles for UAW (which is really 90+ since you have to have 3 versions of each plus hand put in all those annoying boxes at the end)
Revise my poetry portfolio (I know, creative, but I told you I wasn't any good at organizing anything)
10 personal hand written letters through the month of March.

So hey guys, those are my goals for this month. It's a ridiculous number of overly ambitious writing goals, but if I do even half of this, it's going to be one of the best months I've had in two years, and it's going to see me in a much better place than where I started. You know what else? The results from that work will be more than enough to give me a boost to keep going.

You know how much of a "writing god" I'm going to feel like if I pull ALL these goals off...or even come close? No blasphemy intended at all (note the lower case 'g'), but the point I'm making is that by putting this out there, this is how I'm going to absolutely kick ass in March of 2010, and get some much needed momentum and strength heading into what's going to be a difficult personal time no matter what happens of the situations coming to bear.

So how are you going to take your writing career to the next level? How are you going to challenge yourself to see what you REALLY are capable of? Leave a comment and let me know. And oh, yeah. 1st blog post of March is down. Feels like I'm already have way there :)

Entry Level Writers: Don't Get Discouraged

2010-02-16T20:44:00.012-06:00

Entry Level Writers: Think of Writer Reporters

One of the hardest things for beginning freelance writers to learn is stubbornness. Fortunately for me this has never been an issue with my family, which admittedly has led to many problems in my life but has made me perfectly thick skinned for quick success in a freelance writing career. But not everyone else is like me in that respect, and I think there are tons of talented entry level writers who could be so much more, but get beat down early and never make it back up the mountain to the success that they should be having. While being a full time freelance writer definitely has it's benefits, the freelance writing market is not as easy a place to scrape a living from as many people would have you believe. Still, there are more ways to break into the market than ever before, and if you are completely focused in on your goals of becoming a freelance writer, then you shouldn't let early troubles get you off course. The following is a list of the most common things that deter beginning freelance writers from their goals and some advice or suggestions for preventing the same from happening to you.

#1: Stopping Before Getting Started
This is actually one of the most common problems that shoot down the budding career of an entry level writer. There are many ways this can happen.

Writing only a few articles, promoting them, and not seeing enough income back.
Information overload that causes writers to lose heart.
Not seeing the results on popular writing websites other writers brag about having.
Getting so bogged down in 20 different writing styles that the entry level writer never gains traction

There are several ways to combat this common stumbling block. The first and most important part is something I've preached on from the 4 Year College Writing Plan to my post on 50 Things Every Freelance Writer Should Know: which is to get started writing NOW and to write something each and every day. "Research" DOES NOT COUNT. This isn't accusatory - this is something that I still struggle with even after several successful years in the business. Make sure each and every day you do some actual writing that you get paid for. This is especially important for beginning online writers who are aiming for passive income. Think about writer reporters, and how they have to keep hunting down leads for a story. There's no quit there, and there can't be any quit for any entry level freelance writer who wants to make it in the online writing world.

Even if it's only a few bucks a day, that will motivate you more than nothing. Every article you actually write gets you a little closer to your writing goals, while all the research you do doesn't get you any closer than the so called "writer" who sits around thinking all day about how nice it would be to make a living writing and does nothing to get there.

#2: Getting Overwhelmed
There are many different ways this can happen, and part of the freelance writing life is that once in a while things do seem to just avalanche all at once. Especially if you're not used to setting your own hours, or haven't found your main source of income, this can be a very common problem that happens relatively often early on.

One of the best things you can do is to concentrate on one or two main sources of income while doing your research to learn more. You're going to learn more as an entry level writer becoming efficient at one or two sources than trying to dip your toe into 10 different websites.

Early on I was rather lucky. I found Constant-Content, and I stumbled onto Guru.com, and I had no money, no job options, and two busted legs from a car accident so with enough room on a credit card for a year long subscription to Guru, I only had these 2 sites to work with and HAD TO make them work.

Demand Studios, Constant-Content, Elance, and Guru.com are examples of some freelance writing sites where entry level freelance writers can learn the ropes of writing career and can actually work their way up to a full time income. Associated Content would be an example of a site that's easy for entry level writers to break into, but one that you would want to move on from eventually. But early on it's a decent confidence builder, and the potential for passive income makes it a decent place to have some articles once you learn how to efficiently search keywords.

Other sites like eHow, Xomba, InfoBarrel, and HubPages are great places to use writing skills to get into the passive income writing market and to figure out what the difference between the two are. Because while great writing skills can help you earn passive income online, they're not enough.

Choose 2 or 3 at the most to get started with, and get to work. Getting some income in from your efforts while being able to learn online writing skills through experience and trial and error will be the best way to speed up the learning process and keep you moving in the right direction while also keeping you from getting overwhelmed as a beginning freelance writer.

#3: Not Willing to Take Risks
Now as any freelance writer reporter can tell you, there are good risks to take and bad risks to take. You don't want to take shady sounding jobs from Craigslist that sound like a rip off waiting to happen. But I know many people who want to write online who decide they're going to write for one website and only one website or write one type of writing and only one type of writing, and that's it. There are even other writing blogs that recommend this path and all I can say is that in my opinion, this is some of the worst possible advice out there.

A content writer can write content, and that's it. Whatever the price content is going for is the best you can possibly hope for. But press release writers can make very good money for what is usually an easily written and templated one page PR. Ghost writers have more options, as do technical writers, editors, copy editors, copy writers, specialty content providers, writer reporters, and other types of freelance writers.

One of the reasons I survived the early lean months and eventually excelled was because I was willing to learn new types of writing. I had never wrote a press release the first time a client asked me if I could, but I knew that for $50 I was willing to learn. Press release writing turned out to be a fairly lucrative bit of writing for me, as I often could knock one out in an hour with no problem at all and charge $50+ for it. Ghost writing landed me some major projects, as did e-book writing. As my sales letter writing continues to improve, that could knock the income door off its hinges and to an entirely different level.

But none of that would have been possible if I was only willing to write what I was comfortable with. As an entry level freelance writer you will have your strengths and weaknesses, and the same is true once you are an experienced and full time online writer. But that being said, you shouldn't limit yourself to only one type of writing. Unless you're one of the top 10% sales letter writers in the world, that's a good recipe for going broke.

Take some risks beyond your comfort zone and expand yourself as a writer.

#4: Giving Up Too Soon
This is very common. Become a successful writer doesn't happen overnight. Not even close. You need to commit time and hard work to building a full time writing career. If you can put yourself in a situation where you have a full time job and just do writing on the side, I strongly recommend that as the way to go. Can you work even when you don't feel like it? Are you learning how to pitch yourself better with each and every query letter? Is your income slowly (or quickly) climbing with every month?

Many people have the energy for 6 week, 2 months, or maybe even half a year, but the hard core writers are separated from the pretenders at that point as many people don't have the drive to go on, or feel like they're being suffocated or overwhelmed by the sheer amount of work they didn't even imagine was there for writers to do.

Many decent writers give up literally a month or two short of beginning to hit the full time income level, when every experience based lesson is learned and the "A-HA" moments all directly lead to higher pay. If you really want to make a living writing, keep at it and don't quit. Enough work will get you to where you want to be.

That's it for now. This is a little shorter than the usual monster sized freelance writing blog posts, but it'll have to do. Hope ya'll are doing well, and as always feel free to leave a comment and I'll try my best to respond in short time.

Freelance Writing College: The 4 Year Writing Plan

2010-02-06T01:25:00.014-06:00

Write Online in College

For some reason, a good chunk of the people who find this freelance writing blog are college students interested in freelance writing. Actually, this is great. I started shortly out of college, and in fact put myself through graduate school and lifted myself out of homelessness through freelance writing. While I was planning on this post being a relatively short update, especially since it's 1:39 a.m. (I know, I know, that should be early for a writer - but I'm a creative writer, too, so 29 years old has seen a lot of mileage on the wheels, LOL), but this is one freelance writer who believes in caffeine, loves to help other people, and is tired of working on everything that actually makes me money from my writing, so the size of this blog post will be a race between how tired I am versus how long I can ramble. For anyone who has followed this freelance writing blog closely, you know how long a post that could mean :)

But I digress. If you're a beginning freelance writer, or thinking about becoming a freelance writer, or are starting college and this is the first time the idea has even hit you, great. This post is going to lay out a general 4 year plan for becoming a full time online freelance writer, while building up a solid passive or residual writing income that can help set you up and take care of you for life. One reason I'm passionate about helping college students become writers is that many of these online opportunities didn't exist when I went to college. Heck, when I started college Yahoo! and Netscape were your two main choices for search engines, and AOL was relevant - that tells you how much things have changed online in general, much less in the Internet freelance writing world. But if I was starting out now, there is no reason I couldn't use the free Internet access and the technology available, and most importantly: 4 years of relative security and plenty of "free time" to set up a freelance writing career and enough passive income to make the rest of my life much easier . . . if not get to a point where I could outright semi-retire.

So instead of making 20 more posts that touch on bits and pieces of why I think any University student looking to freelance write part time for money would be an idiot not to use the time and resources to their advantages, I'm going to make a monster post outlining the very basics of a four year plan (and even if you're a sophomore, junior, or senior this plan can at least work as a blue print to get you started on your writing career) to help young adults earn the security that an established passive income and online writing career can offer them. Hopefully this post will also be a call to action to anyone reading it for why they should get started freelance writing right now!

And before I get started, one last warning to people on a schedule right now: I can tell already in just warming up that this freelance writing blog post is going to be LONG...in fact I'm feeling that this one is probably going to blow away my reader favorite and classic rant on why I'm not ashamed to be a freelance writer, at least in terms of words, and that blog post was over 2,450 words long not including comments. Although, in risking being a disappointment, this blog post probably won't come up with nearly as good a subtitle as that lengthy entertaining blog rant did. "With all due respect, my critics can bite me." Wrote it, forgot about it, and now it's cracking me up, so don't say that writers don't have a sense of humor. Back to the point of long freelance writing blog posts: if you need to bookmark this or e-mail yourself a copy of the URL, do it and get back when you have plenty of time to mull it all over.

Otherwise, this 4 year college student freelance writing plan is going to start with a few assumptions that are based on a lot of my fears, trip ups, and hesitations when I first got started:

1) I'm assuming you're a true beginner who has no clue at all about how to break into freelance writing.

2) I'm assuming as a college student that you can find a couple hours a day minimum on average (and let's be real - I got through college on about 4 hours of sleep a night for 3.5 years while working full time, so there are always options to find more time) to do some work, but understand that some weeks will be better than others.

3) I'm assuming that your need for money now isn't so great as to demand a full time job. If that is the case, then this will be a much harder time line to implement, but it's still worth fighting for.

4) I'm assuming you're willing to work. If dreaming about earning money or spending 4 years in information overload learning to make money writing is your idea of working, then this plan won't work. In the end, you have to put in the elbow grease.

5) I'm assuming your interest is in writing and you don't really understand the difference between freelance writing, AdSense writing, and Internet marketing.

6) I'm assuming that skill levels vary, and you may or may not be good enough to be an upper tier freelance writer and thus grow past all of this very quickly, or that you may or may not be good enough marketer of your skills to get paid what you're worth. Or you may not even know if you're good enough. That's fine, that's why I'm going with the assumption that most of the people reading this can be okay to average writer, without marketing skills. Because I can relate heavily to that.

Start Writing in Year 1

The first year of my freelance writing plan (and this is the same way I would tell my freshman self to get started is somehow I was young again) is one that can overwhelm many people because of information overload. There is a lot of freelance writing and make money online information out there. A lot of it is good. Even more of it is donkey manure. Even if you stick to the good freelance writing online information, the problem is that you could easily find so many bogs to read that you never get any work done. This was the biggest mistake I made in starting a writing career. Don't wait!

Yes, there is plenty to learn about writing for a living and making money online, especially if you're aiming for writing online for residual income. But no worries, because I've read the good stuff and the crap, and I'll tell you who to follow in a moment. There is a ton to learn about writing online, but you can't win a game you're not even in. If you don't have any writing online, you can't make any money. That's all there is to it.

So for year one, you're going to sign up for Constant-Content, eHow, Associated Content, Squidoo, HubPages, Xomba, and InfoBarrel. I know, you're already intimidated, but there's no reason to be. Some of these you only use sometimes, or only for a specific purpose. A couple of these sites you'll use to learn how to write online, and then all but leave them later for the sites that will really pay you in the long run. Don't worry about it. I'll explain how to use each. Along the way you will also eventually want to start setting up some free blogger blogs. Nobody should be intimidated by that step,

HubPages is especially a big one, because that is the easiest way I've found to quickly get approved for the Google AdSense program, as well as for becoming an affiliate for Amazon.com. Both of these are crucial to any future passive income plans you have online. Once you're approved for these programs, you can use AdSense based income sites like Xomba and InfoBarrel.

Early on, getting work out there is more important than doing things perfectly, so write. Make writing and working a habit that you refuse to break. HubPages and Squidoo lenses can always be edited later. Blogs can always be altered. New articles can be written that easily outrank or replace the old. But you can't make a single penny or learn a single thing from experience if you don't start freelance writing right off the bat. A professor once told me "Writers write. If you don't write, you're not a writer." The same idea applies to anyone who wants to be a freelance online writer. You have to write online. It sounds simple, but many would be freelancers get stuck here before they ever even get started.

Try to make a goal of writing 20 decent quality HubPages of 500+ words as quickly as possible. There's no reason this can't easily be done within a month even assuming you're only working an hour a day, or even less. If your hub is 1,000+ words, then all the better. But first and foremost, get some stuff out there.

In addition to these hubs, write one how to article a day and publish at eHow. Coming up with one article a day shouldn't be hard at all, and if you have an eHow article that relates to a hub, or vice-versa, link them together.

In that first month I would also say write one InfoBarrel article for every hub, and have those articles link to your HubPages hub. This "linking" might be basic, but you will have to learn about the basics of SEO and when all is said and done, if you want people to find your stuff online you have to rank at the top of Google. To rank at the top of Google, you need good backlinks. Do this over time, and you'll speed up the process of earning a full time passive writing income online.

When you have an idea for an article you would like to write, and not a one page web page, then take a look at submitting your original freelance written article to Constant-Content. Only send your best articles to this website as the editors are very strict. If you can consistently write articles that pass editorial judgment here, then you don't need to have any doubts about your ability to make money freelance writing online. This site will also force you to learn how to value your work and set prices that make it worth your time to write the articles.

Associated Content is a site I like for absolute novice online writers for three main reasons:

It's fairly easy to get up front payment for original articles, and while the pay is very low, breaking the psychological barrier of your first online sale can be huge.
You get paid per view. Once again, while the pay is low, this at least begins to set you up to see some basic passive income each and every month.
Once you learn about Internet Marketing, SEO, and article marketing, AC works well to post "display only" articles that you're using elsewhere. These might only get minor traffic, but you're still getting paid for the views, and I have been surprised in the past about how much direct traffic I get for my AC articles.

As a side note, if you are interested in making money sports writing online, it's hard to do without a sponsor, but AC is a good place to post non evergreen sports articles. This is a decent way to get some up front payments and some residuals, especially for online sports writers who just do it as a hobby and see the writing as just a side thing.

Once you get even remotely decent as an online content writer, you'll outgrow most of AC other than maybe #3 or the very occasional sports related article (articles during the bowl season of college football can be very profitable if you do them right), but it's not a bad place to break the early psychological barriers to "becoming an online college writer."

Xomba is a site that allows social bookmarking of any article or site, and it also allows you to write original articles. All AdSense on these pages are split 50/50, and I recommend using Xomba to bookmark all of your hubs, blogs, eHow articles, AC articles, and InfoBarrel articles. Try to include a summary of 100 words, using your keywords to make sure the Google ads match. You can earn AdSense from these bookmarks, while also increasing your online presence with backlinks.

Squidoo gives you more options in creating a web page, getting traffic, and getting links to your other pages or articles. This is a tool that is better for Internet Marketing than pure online freelance writing, but the tiered system does offer another source of revenue, and Squidoo allows you to make pages more bent towards products and affiliate programs, which is something that comes in very useful over the 4 year plan.

For the first semester of getting your online writing career started, and for some maybe even the entire first year, those are all the sites that you will need to begin to get going. This doesn't mean that there aren't more options, more sites, other steps, etc, but as far as getting started in the beginning, and especially with laying a foundation for passive income, this combination of sites is more than enough, because in the first year you will also need to learn about Search Engine Optimization (SEO), using AdSense to build passive income, and the many many skills that it takes to make it as a writer. This education is going to take time early on, and so different people might want to take this plan at different speeds.

If you are really interested in the freelance writing to the point where you want to make a part time income right now during the college years, then during the second semester I'll add two things:

Sign up for Guru.com and shell out the money for a year long subscription. Elance is a similar site, but I've found it easier to get started on Guru. Expect the first three months to be very slow until you get a reputation built up and sales from previous jobs on the site. But once you get going, the income and jobs you get can snowball. Guru will force you to learn how to send a good query letter and how to pitch yourself. You can't make it as a true freelance writer without these critical marketing skills.
Apply for Demand Studios. If you have a large collection of eHow articles, this becomes very easy since DS is eHow's parent company. You don't get passive income or royalties from DS articles, but there are tons of articles for $7.50, $15, or even $20 an article, which means you can write online for a decent amount of weekly income as long as you put the hours in.

If the residual writing income has you intrigued and earning actual part time income right away from writing isn't a necessity, then you can skip these steps and aim yourself more at Internet Marketing as you continue to hone your online writing skill set.

So in summary: 1 eHow article a day, 20+ hubs a month, 20+ InfoBarrel articles a month, a few CC articles in your spare time, and a lot of Xomba bookmarks. Some occasional AC articles and Squidoo lenses are good, but not as important since the long term returns are more likely going to be lower. This sounds like a lot of work, but really two hours a day would be more than enough to take care of all of this, especially once you get comfortable. Yes, you will want to learn about backlinks and you will definitely help yourself out by spending more time working to get your articles and hubs (and blogs, if you were really ambitious) ranked higher in Google, but the point I want to make is that getting a sheer solid bulk of work out is not hard at all.

If you followed these averages, in one year you would have 365 eHow articles, 240 hubs, 240+ InfoBarrel articles, not to mention over 800 pages on Xomba w/ your AdSense on them. Even if you were absolutely terrible at keyword research (or did none at all), had tons of misses, and didn't hit a single "home run," even if you did nothing extra to help yourself out, in the ridiculously worst case scenario ((in other words I'm skewing the results to be the ultimate pessimist)) you would still be looking at over $400 a month in passive income, in my opinion. Now maybe you would have less, I think the majority of you would make more. If you were serious about this as a career, perhaps a lot more. But that would be $400 a month, every month, that you know you're going to make even if you don't work. See where the time is on your side argument comes in?

And that's not including actual money for content work you might be doing for Demand Studios, Elance, Constant-Content, Associated Content, or Guru.com. It's also assuming you haven't set up a single AdSense blog for yourself.

But I can't stress enough to learn true SEO and Internet Marketing because this is the key to making permanent residual income online.

So what else should you do year one? Well you're in college, so study. Here are various resources I am more than happy to recommend, as I know these are all completely legit. That said, don't spend so much time with this information that you don't get your writing done. If you find yourself procrastinating, help yourself out this way: make the blog reading your homework assignment, but one you're not allowed to do until your articles are done for the day.

Approved Online Freelance Writing & Marketing Resources:

Free Passive Income & Internet Marketing:
Lissie's Passive Income Online
Allyn Hane's Everything You Need to Know About Backlinks
Ben K Make Money with SEO (read what this guy does for work and you will have NO excuses for not getting started)
Make Money on HubPages best and most detailed hub I've seen on this subject.

Freelance Writing Blogs Worth Following:
Poe War Writing Guide is a fantastic novice online writer's resource
Bianca Raven's Writing Blog
Monika Mundell-Freelance Writer
Master Dayton Freelance Writer (you didn't think I'd leave myself of the list, did you?)

Other Resources
The Keyword Academy - this is not for true beginners, because it is a paid membership. $1 for a trial month, then $33 a month after that. Is it worth it? Absolutely - but only if you have the basics down and know that you are in the Internet Marketing and passive income business for the long haul. Until you know this for sure, you're better off staying with free resources for as far as those will take you.

Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer - by far and away the best book I've ever read on how to break into the magazine writing market.

So after the first year, now what?
Now this is the part where some of you beginning freelance writers might get mad at me. What's the plan for years 2, 3, and 4? A lot of the same for year one, with adjustments made BY YOU, based on what your freelance writing or Internet writing goals are. One part of writing over a year is that it will become very clear:

What type of writing you enjoy most
Which sites are producing the most results
What your strengths are
What your weaknesses are
What your smartest plan of attack will be

Different writers are going to have different strengths and weaknesses. If you only wrote 50 eHow articles, but they make you $200 a month, that's obviously better than 200 hubs that make $30 a month. Part of being a successful online freelance writer is growing in confidence, skills, and ability. And this starts with simply getting started.

If you need more income now, like a job, then Demand Studios will become a bigger part of your arsenal, or maybe Guru.com and Elance. Once you learn to write queries, go ahead and pitch to magazines, trade journals, or other print publications. Your skill level, work ethic, and ability to learn will determine which direction you need to go.

But always remember time is on your side, and if you don't know what to do, repeat the first year, focusing on InfoBarrel, eHow, and HubPages. If you graduate with 1,200 eHow articles, 1,000 InfoBarrel articles, and 1,000 HubPages, there is no way you won't be making an extremely solid (if not full time) passive income. You would have to refuse to learn anything and go out of your way to suck to pull that off.

There are many ways to get there as a full time freelance writer, and I strongly advise all beginning online writers to learn SEO, learn about backlinks, and to use that information to boost all your online pages and articles. That said, in the end writers write.

That's really all there is. If you're just starting out as a college student and you want to make money writing online, follow this guide, learn your craft, and keep working. If you steadily grind away at it, you'll find yourself out of college with one hell of a safety net, and with the ability to say you are a full time freelance writer.

That's it for perhaps the longest freelance writing blog post in history.