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

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.

2011 Writing Goals: Looking Ahead

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:

1. 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.
2. 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:

1. To no longer have to freelance write for clients at all - and I mean NADA
2. 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
3. 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!

March Freelance Writing Goals: Calling It In

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!

March Writing Goals Update #2

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!

March Writing Goals Update #1

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

1. $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.
   
2. 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.
3. 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

1. 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. 2 new pages on the novel "Broken."
3. 1 page on book for my sister - so behind on this goal.
4. 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.
5. 2 pages on the screen play, so just about right on target.
6. Additional short stories: I have 2 pages of outlines. So progress, but probably behind.

Passive Income Writing Goals

1. 100 InfoBarrel Articles: I should have 19-20 done to be on pace, I have 6, so I'm behind on this one.
   
2. 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.
3. 15 Squidoo Lenses: I have 8 in development. Now I just need to flesh them out and I'll be way ahead of schedule.
4. 30 Xomba Articles: I have 6, so right in line.

Other Writing Goals

1. 8 Master Dayton blog posts this month. Well this is #3, so I'm ahead.
2. 12 blog posts at my "Fixing my Life" blog. I have 4 typed out, I just need to go post them.
3. 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.
4. 30 UAW articles. 4 so far, so 2 behind.
5. Haven't touched the poetry yet, but did start a couple new ones based on lines I thought of the past few days.
6. 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

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:

1. An abandoned rewrite looks a lot better than a rejected article, and causes less stress and frustration for me personally.
2. As long as this is a tiny % of my total articles, it doesn't really matter in the big picture.
3. I'm more efficient just ignoring the jobs that have become albatrosses.
4. 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

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:

1. The larger the goal, the more work I'll get done even if I fall short.
2. Having huge goals is an adrenaline rush that keeps me on track and on task.
3. 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 :)

Summer Writing Update | Brief eHow Review

Summer Writing & Brief eHow Review

Update 04/05/2010: Due to a hugely unpopular move by eHow and parent company Demand Studios, there no longer is an eHow writing program open to writers. If you're looking for other ways to break into writing online, I suggest having a look at my Constant-Content Review or Demand Studios Review (which may also need updating depending how this all goes down). Avoid Helium.com, and keep hacking away at the dream. It may have gotten a little bit harder as yet another employer chose not to respect their writers, but keep at it.

Original freelance writing blog post & original eHow review
First of all, thanks to everyone who has left comments or sent encouraging e-mails. It always feels great to know people are reading your writing, that you're getting some great positive support, and that you're making a difference and helping out. I also want to congratulate those of you who have been doing very well on Constant-Content - an extra few hundred a month is nothing to sneeze at and one of you just cleared $500 in about 4 weeks. Very impressive.

For those of you who haven't read the last post, or caught wind of it elsewhere, I'm in the middle of a major writing marathon. I'm trying to really push for a shift from conventional freelance writing to more of a passive income/residual income mode of making a living writing. I have AdSense blogs, affiliate sales, etc. helping in this pursuit, but I'm naturally a writer first, and so a lot of my focus is trying to really build my online writing in places where it can earn me a good residual income.

So far in 9 days (not counting today because I'm still working) I've wrote 36 articles on eHow, which is right on schedule for my 3.5/day average to make my summer goals, 10 hubs for HubPages for the challenge (putting me behind my ideal schedule), as well as several miscellaneous articles and about a grand in freelance work that's above and beyond my normal weekly projects. Between trying to prepare for a move and everything else going on in the personal life, it's not a bad effort.

Which brings me to a brief review of the eHow website, which I haven't given a thorough look at yet on this blog. After spending long enough writing on this site to give it a fair shake, I have to say this: I'm a Big fan.

One of the things I immediately like about eHow is that it allows you to build a passive or residual income, something that is much more difficult to do with many other online writing websites. In other words, if you write a good article that continues to get traffic, then that article is going to continue earning money for you long after you've finished writing it. It has taken me a few months, sped up by buying and studying (the then available WriterGig's ebook on improving eHow freelance writing earnings) I strongly recommend buying a copy for anyone interested in making a serious passive income with eHow. It's worth the buy - especially since the advice in there had me recoup my investment in one month, so there's not a lot of risk.

Another thing I love about freelance writing for eHow: it's a very easy format. Since the "how to" set up of the website sets up the template for every article, it's very easy to whip up an article in 15-20 minutes if you know what you're talking about. For writers like me, this format helps organize my thoughts, which is not always my strength. For writers who really like step by step formats, they're just going to thrive.

Another plus for eHow is that it can be considered its own income stream for individuals who are also working towards the full time residual income online. What's this mean? The income you get from your articles is from splitting any advertising revenue your articles generate. But you don't use your own AdSense account. This means that your AdSense earnings and eHow earnings are completely separate streams of income. Just as with anything else, diversifying is the key, so having eHow as an income stream is very helpful in the overall writing goals.

Another giant plus is that eHow has a really active and good online community. There are a lot of helpful people here, and you find out pretty quickly that making a lot of money on eHow isn't a random thing: there are several hard working writers on this site who make a very good monthly pay out, and also are often more than willing to share advice with newer less established writers.

Finally, I really enjoy eHow because I've seen solid gains in earnings every single month I have wrote articles for them, and eHow is an authority site. What does this mean? It means Google sees eHow as a trustworthy site, so articles you write for them are more likely to show up high in the search rankings, which brings more traffic, more exposure, and more income. When you're learning about Internet Marketing, AdSense, or how search engines work, you'll learn why this is such a huge deal.

Anyway, this is a semi-brief update because things are still crazy here. Thanks again to everyone reading, and I can't recommend eHow enough. It's a fantastic place to write for a long term passive income. Best of luck to everyone, and keep writing through the recession. Freelance writing is a long term endeavor, but it's worth it.

A Busy Writing Summer Kicks Off

Insane Summer Writing Goals?

Regardless of what calendars say, to me June 1st has always been the "official" start of summer. As a new season begins, I'm also taking some time to wonder where I should go as far as my own specific writing goals. This isn't just about how much freelance writing work I want to get done this summer or how much I make, but also how I make it. While freelance writing and residual income are not necessarily mutually exclusive, they're not always the same thing, either. One website that is an example of where the two meet is eHow. You write all the articles and content, the website splits the advertising revenue with you. That continues even after you stop writing, making writing for eHow one way that ordinary online writing can be turned into passive month after month income.

I've been freelance writing in some form for about five years now, and I've managed to make a full time living at it since year one. It's not always the most financially comfortable living, but I've done all right and even had some quite good years in there, as well. I've been able to travel, enjoy freedom of schedule, explore the Northeast (especially Vermont), Alaska, and Austin Texas, and I'm on my way to the West Coast and Oregon in a few weeks here, once all the final ducks are set up in a row. But one thing about conventional freelance writing is you're always looking for repeat work, always looking for a new job, and after five years the "boom and bust" way that freelancing works can really wear on you when you're trying to create some form of order or semblance of stability in your life for the first time.

And this is where passive income comes into the picture. I've read Grizz's make money online blog and really appreciate his knowledge and honesty. I've followed a few Internet Marketers like Josh Spaulding and Jeff Herring, signed up for Court and Mark's Keyword Academy, and bought Marisa Wright's e-book on maximizing profits on eHow. I've been extremely happy with all the information this has gained me, and have been struggling between some health issues, personal issues, and family issues to put all of this information into action. I'm just hitting the point where enough has cleared up that this looks possible - although that move to Bend, Oregon, coming up in a few weeks is definitely consuming some major time.

So what's all this mean? It means that while I'm going to keep writing website reviews and giving advice on how to make a living freelance writing, I'm also going to be spending the next several months shifting most of my efforts to making passive and residual income: income that is going to keep paying me for my writing long after the actual blog posts, websites, articles, etc have been written.

Most of my writing the past year and a half was for an employer in Austin, Texas, who is an Internet Marketer. I'm withholding the name simply out of respect because I'm not sure what's considered "appropriate" or not. I was hired for 14 months and change, and then let go. There's no ill will: I was treated fantastic the entire time, had a great face to face talk about the situation and decision, received glowing endorsements of my work, and I still gladly freelance for them on a monthly basis. But that time in Austin was my dream job: get the writing done wherever and whenever you want, just get it done. Remote location working - and Austin is a great city to have that perk!

Then, it was over. So with passive income and residual income, imagine the security you would have if you knew you were making enough off of past work to make a full time living even if you didn't write anything new all year. Imagine if you had two or three different income sources that were providing you with a full time yearly income online. Aside from the obvious complete freedom of movement and freedom of time, there's also the security factor of not ever having to rely on someone else for your own livelihood.

So that's what I'm working towards now. When I first move into Bend, I'm going to have no TV, I'm not going to know anybody in the area, and no video games or other distractions. This makes it a great time to really buckle down on the work and see what I'm capable of producing in a short time period like a summer. My student loans are in deferment (I can rant again about the politics and waste of money grad school often is - but I digress), and I really don't require that much to live if I trim the budget down to true necessities.

So I've done a lot of really hard thinking about what I want to do as a freelance writer, what kind of writing really excites me the most, and what my writing goals for the summer should be to get me from another freelance writer struggling with this gawd-awful recession, to someone making a full time income off of passive online sources. Right now I can look at a couple hundred and change in completely passive income per month. I'd like to push that to three grand or more.

I work best with a clear plan that still gives me freedom to improv my way there. In other words, I do best with general goals, but don't do as well when I break that down all the way to strict day by day guides.

So for the next three months, here's what I'm shooting for to try and make that transition from freelance writer to writing for passive income online:

1. 22 niche websites monetized with AdSense or Affiliate links
   
2. 10 micro niche blogs monetized
3. 150 new hubs on HubPages
4. 300 new eHow articles
5. 10 Clickbank campaigns by using PotPieGirl's Squidoo lens strategys (50-70 lenses)
6. Get this blog up to 100 visitors a day and look at monetizing it
   

These are the main goals, and not even listed will be the normal freelance writing work, more articles to add to Constant-Content, and the heavy amount of article marketing and link building to get these articles, hubs, lenses, blogs, and websites onto the first page of Google for their respective niche keywords. The link building and article marketing in theory should take even more time to get these all to first page Google than even the actual writing.

This is also in addition to moving across the country and picking up some extra freelance work from Guru.com in order to help pay for the expenses, as well as improving what I already have set up and earning for me. I'm not naive: getting all this done without outsourcing means I'm looking at 12-16 hours a day, almost every day of the summer. And you know what, to take a shot at the life that a full time passive income could offer me, I'm willing to do that. I can rest in September when 90%+ of my work will be analyzing results and building backlinks.

I posted those goals because that's a great encouragement to me. Now it's out there, published, where anyone can see it (and ask about it) later. I'll update my own progress over the summer while still adding posts that hopefully all the rest of you will find helpful.

I guess this post also points out something else I believe about freelance writing. This advice also works for probably any process that helps you earn money online. If you're going to go, go all out. If you're going to work for something, shoot incredibly high. If you shoot for the moon and miss, you might still make it up to space. If you shoot for the mountains and miss, you're still stuck in the hills.

Freelance writing isn't easy, but it has benefits I wouldn't trade for the world. That said, even the most happy traditional freelance writer, in my opinion, would be a fool not to also invest in passive income for now and the future.

That's all for now. I hope all of you are doing well, and keep on writing. As always, my one bit of advice is get started writing online right now!