However, today I returned to one of my old haunts – HubPages – and began posting a series that should be of use to all the newbie onliners out there: Getting Started As A Freelance Writer.

The content’s pretty huge and long, which is why I’ve held off posting it here. Part one went up today and covers some of the preparations new freelancers should do even before they start looking for advice on setting up!

Hope you enjoy it. (And don’t forget to do the ‘follow’ thing so you get updated when each step’s published!)

The ideal start to 2012

It’s finally here. After months of work, weeks of waiting and days of reformatting for the Kindle (yikes, that was painful), my book is available to the public!

It’s incredibly cheap, too – $7.50 for the paperback or around $5 for the Kindle edition (depending on taxes and other fun stuff Amazon does with the so-called “list price”). Over 100 pages of essential info for less than the price of a couple of pounds of pork sausages. Awesome!

You can find out more from the Half Hog Home Page, which is soon to become the new hub for everything to do with half-hogging - tips, advice, resources and anything else I can come up with to help you get your part-time freelance career off the ground.

Right now, there’s just a static page but the Half Hog Forum is open and just waiting for you to drop in and ask questions, offer your own tips and special tricks or even just chat for a while.

Keep your eyes on the new site URL: I’m working on some fun freebies to go with the launch!

It’s stupid.

Allow me to impart a wonderful little nugget of wisdom that I picked up from a certain Mr. Coker.

Picture, if you will, a 15-year-old Spike and the said Mr. Coker, a schoolmate who was later to achieve legendary status among his peers by placing a satsuma in the path of a bus and singing the “Small ones are more juicy” song from an Outspan advertisement as it was obliterated.

We were on the same work experience posting for school and had to sign a document limiting liability for the employer. Coker said:

I’ll bring it with me tomorrow. I never sign anything without reading it first.

An amazingly responsible thing to say at only 15 years old but I felt stupid for not having thought of it myself. I was ready to sign immediately, to trust the adults who’d handed me the document. It was all above board, of course, but the advice stuck with me. Years (a lot of them) later, I still follow Coker’s advice.

This all came back to me today when I read a comment on a myLot discussion about earning from writing on revenue share sites. It read as follows:

I’m a member there but I have only submitted one article with them. It was approved but it was based on hits, I think. To be honest I really don’t know how it works there.

My first thought was “too much trust”. They had signed up for the site and submitted content, expecting to be paid, but had never read the terms and conditions. They didn’t even know how the site’s revenue share model works.

Every employer – whether they’re a site, a magazine, an individual or anything else – makes a contract with you when they employ you. When you click the “I agree” button at the end of the registration process on a rev share site, you’re agreeing to a collection of legal statements that define the payment terms: how, when and if you’ll earn money.

Not reading those terms is stupid. You could be giving away your work for nothing. You could be giving up your rights as copyright owner. You could be submitting content for free. Unless you read the terms, you don’t know.

99 times out of 100, a contract will be clear and contain nothing to worry about. However, that one time it doesn’t might cost you a lot. So remember what I learned from a schoolboy friend and follow his excellent advice.

Never sign anything unless you’ve read it first.

¹ The presence of a photo of Ms. Kardashian (who has taken the step of showing her boobies in W magazine, no doubt to further the cult of zero talent) in no way implies any connection to this phrase. Nope. Absolutely not. No way.

I don’t know who said that (or something like it) but they were right. Editing should ensure clarity as well as factual accuracy, style and everything else.

This is particularly difficult when you’re editing your own work. After all, you wrote every word so they’re all there for a reason, right? Not necessarily. We’re all excessively wordy sometimes, especially if we’re writing in a conversational style.

You want examples? Alrighty, here’s a couple.

A few weeks ago I was editing a short article about property. This sentence leapt off the page as a great example of unnecessary wordiness (or a freelancer trying to fluff out their word count):

“The demand and supply forces in the current market have ruled a mandate that has dictated that…”

How many unnecessary words are there in that single phrase? Almost half the sentence is useless. The author could have written “Demand and supply in the current market dictate that…” and used nine words instead of seventeen. The meaning is the same and it’s a lot clearer.

More recently, I ran into the problem in my own writing. As you’re probably aware, Jill has finished her first edit of Going The Half-Hog, my book on freelance writing without marketing. Apart from the 143 corrections, changes and comments she made (aaargh!), she wrote almost an entire page of commentary about my distaste for advertising and marketing. According to her, the tone of one particular section was excessively venomous.

I’m the first to admit that I don’t often get nasty about subjects but when I do, I really let loose. The frequency of the expression “marketing whore” on this blog is testament to that! However, in her opinion – and mine once I’d read her well-considered argument – was that I sounded like a crazy man or someone with an axe to grind. That could alienate a large number of readers or make them wonder whether they can trust the opinion of someone so obviously deranged.¹

I sat and rewrote the section for over three hours. It was only a page long but every time I tried to express myself better, I fell into the same trap of sounding like Mr. Straightjacket, complete with foaming mouth and gnashing teeth. Not good.

In the end it was my lady who came to the rescue. She’s such an inspiration! I explained the problem and she solved it with a single phrase: “You need another solution.” Somewhere in my brain, synapses fired, a light-bulb lit and I knew what to do.

I deleted the entire section.

In four words, she gave me the insight to step back and realise that the page-long diatribe I had vomited onto virtual paper was completely useless. It didn’t add anything to the book and, in fact, detracted from the subject. It made me look like a ranting idiot rather than conveying useful information.

Lesson to learn: if something you’ve written doesn’t add value to your work, press the delete key. You’ll feel better, believe me.

¹ This is a superb example of why you need an editor for your work!

A much, much better resource for serious SEO

If you think it’s odd that I’m posting about SEO, don’t blame me: it’s ircurt‘s fault. He told me to do it. I’m taking the Nuremberg defence: I was just following orders.

SEO is, of course “Search Engine Optimisation”. It’s a complex set of skills that, when applied to your writing and your site, make your work look much more attractive to Google (specifically, although the same goes for most search engines).

The ultimate goal of SEO depends on how you look at it. If you’re a writer, the goal is to make your work more visible to the search engines and thus rank higher, so that visitors who are looking for the subjects you write about can find your work easily.

If you’re a marketing whore, the goal is to reach the top spot on Page 1 of Google’s results for absolutely anything anyone might type to find your product or service.

Before we start, I want to say two things:

Disclaimer: my regular visitors know that I don’t do SEO or marketing if I can avoid them. Consequently, I know about as much about SEO as I do about the Second World War. That means “enough to hold a reasonably intelligent conversation but not a great deal more”.

This entry covers the real basics and nothing beyond: if you’re considering a career as an SEO writer or want to use it on your own site to improve traffic, go read Peter Hoggan instead. He’s very good. Seriously.

Caveat: I’m assuming you don’t own the site you’re writing for so you’re only concerned about SEO in your articles – the page content, not site structure, semantics, meta, image alt tags and other such fun things.

Page relevancy

That phrase isn’t mine: I’d have used “relevance”, of course. This is the expression search engines use for how relevant the content of your work is to the person searching. It’s a primary factor in determining where you rank on search results.

To understand this, imagine you’re looking to sell your unwanted DVDs. You’re not going to go to Google and type in “buy a dog”; you’ll type something like “sell old used second-hand films DVDs”. This is called a keyphrase (again, a search engine term – it’s two words in proper English).

The keyphrase is used to search Google’s index of web pages and figure out which are most likely to provide the thing you want.

In the DVD search example, a good page is likely to contain sentences like “If you’d like to sell your old DVDs…” and “You can use this site to sell of your used films and earn extra money from unwanted DVDs“.

I’ve highlighted the bits of the keyphrase to show you why Google considers it a good choice: it contains words that you entered in your search.

Note that most search engines will rank an exact match higher than a partial match. So, for example, if your site included the expression “sell old used second-hand films DVDs” (which it shouldn’t, since it’s not normal English), it would rank higher for the above search than the ones with sentences that match individual words in the search phrase.

Also, bear in mind that graphic text (i.e. replacing a typed title with a pretty image that says the same thing) is not scanned by the standard web crawler: using graphic text reduces your SEO efficiency and therefore the page’s popularity.

Link popularity carries great weight in determining page popularity and relevance but that’s not an issue when you’re writing for a client’s site.

Keyword research

Unless you’re working for someone who decides what keywords (another term for keyphrases) they want included in your content, you’ll have to do some research to figure out the best phrases to use.

Generally, individual keywords aren’t used: a single word like “DVDs” returns hundreds of millions of pages and, to be honest, no one goes to Google and types a single word in the search box. Or if they do, they soon correct the mistake and type more.

Consequently, you should consider phrases of 3-5 words that the people you want to attract are likely to type to find your article, in the same way as the example above.

Google provides a keyword research tool for free, as do many other sites. You’ll need to take a logical approach to working out what keyphrases you want to use.

1. Think about how you would search for your own content.
2. Note down phrases you’d use.
3. Try them on Google – you’ll probably think of more phrases.
4. Go back to step 1 with different ways to search.

Keyword research isn’t difficult but it can be long. There are factors like local spelling to consider (the American use of ‘z’ as opposed to the British ‘s’ in words like ‘optimise’, for example) as well as how competitive certain phrases are. You’re much less likely to rank highly for terms with very competitive (i.e. popular) keywords than you are on the less-common ones.

One vital part of keyphrase research is synonyms: in the DVD example, “used”, “second-hand” and “old” are all synonyms – the words mean almost the same thing for the people looking for this content. You can use this to your advantage in creating content by varying your sentences to include each one instead of repeating the same thing over and over.

Keyword density

The number of times you use a keyphrase in your content determines your keyword density. Using 3 keywords in 100 words of text is a density of 3%. Actually it’s a bit more complicated than that with multi-word phrases, exact matches and so on, but I won’t go into the complexities here.

There’s still some argument about the ideal keyword density for SEO but most people agree it falls somewhere between 2% and 20%. Yes, that’s a big difference. In most cases, people aim for between 3% and 7%.

SEO copy

Adding Kim Kardashian to your page gets more hits than SEO

This is the crunch. Assuming you have your keyphrases sorted out and have decided the density you want, you now need to write the content.

There are some critical factors that affect SEO writing, especially after Google’s Panda update:

1. Make sure the copy is readable. Repeating gibberish sentences just to include keywords does not sit well with Google. Don’t spam keywords.
2.  Make sure the copy is informative.
3. Make sure the copy is the first thing on the page after the title: including tables, images or <div> tags can negate your hard SEO work.
4. Keep the paragraphs short and easy to scan – they’re more inviting that way and, once the visitor is hooked, they’ll take the time to read properly.
5. Use plain English unless the content is literary or requires technical terms. Here’s a wonderful phrase from Mr. Hoggan’s course: “Grandiloquence, digression and circumlocution are superfluities that epitomise impenetrable online prose!”
6. Use keywords for on-site links wherever possible: search engines love this.

A little SEO trick

As you know, I don’t really do SEO. I have, however, dabbled occasionally (on demand) for individual clients and picked up a neat trick along the way that I’d like to share.

Don’t think of the keyphrase as a single block of text.

Huh? Is that it? Yes – but allow me to show you how this simple idea can turn shoddy SEO writing into normal, quality writing.

For this example, I’ll use the phrase “cash buyers property”. This is something a person might type into Google to find a company that’ll buy their property for cash but it’s horrible English¹. The site owner will include the phrase in meta tags and stuff but they might ask you to include it in your writing as an exact phrase.

How on earth can you do that without typing something awful? Treat it as two parts: “cash buyers” and “property”. How about “[...] looking for cash buyers. Property owners who need [...]“?

Now here’s the thing: including the full stop and breaking the phrase across two sentences doesn’t matter to SEO. I’m going to say this in italics so you remember it because it’s quite simply the best thing I’ve learned about SEO writing:

Unlike me, search engines do not care about punctuation or capitalisation.

The web crawlers see “cash buyers property” in the same way as “cash buyers. Property”. Isn’t that awesome?

Note: there are, as far as I can tell, only three punctuation marks that web spiders care about: the at sign (@) which frequently denotes an email address, the hyphen (-) and the apostrophe (‘). Use those with care.

Is that it?

Oh, my goodness, no. Absolutely not. SEO is a complicated subject and, as I mentioned at the start, this is only the most basic of basic information.

Hopefully it’ll help you produce content that attracts more traffic.

Do you have any neat SEO tips and tricks to share? Leave me a comment!

¹ Incidentally, isn’t it awful how so many people think that’s acceptable English? They’ve read SEO phrases like that so many times, their brain just filters out the enormity of it.

Three of the five major food groups. Essential resources.

For the final post in this Back to Basics series, I’m presenting a list of useful resources for the budding freelance writer. As usual with third-party sites, I’m not endorsing any of them (even those which have referral links) – always, always do your own research before joining any site!

I’ve separated the list into rough categories, though some sites – especially the revenue share ones – have elements of more than one type of earning.

All figures for PR and traffic (visitors) are from mid-2011.

Bidding Sites

Let’s start off with the Big Four bidding sites, which are the most common way of finding work for freelancers. All four are very similar in style and offering – the differences are minimal (though important to some people), so your choice of forum is mostly down to personal preference.

Elance - 250-300,000 visitors per month. PR6.

Guru – less than 100,000 visitors per month. PR6.

oDesk – around 200,000 visitors per month. PR6.

Freelancer - 200-250,000 visitors per month. PR6

Job Listings

These are just personal favourites or common suggestions – there are millions of job listing sites and aggregators around.

FreelanceSwitch’s Monster List - an absolutely massive list of resources of all sorts. It’ll take you a while to go through this lot, let alone keep tabs on the job offerings!

Deb Ng’s blog – Deb posts pretty much every day and hates low-paying work, so you should find some good stuff here.

Anne Wayman’s blog – Anne posts jobs three times a week and has a lot of very helpful content the rest of the time.

Marketplaces

Although someone I know is planning on creating a new one in a similar style – more news on that if and when it comes to fruition – there’s only one reliable marketplace at the moment.

Constant Content - editorial guidelines are a little tougher than most freelance sites but they’ll help you improve your work (and the editors are really friendly and helpful).

Revenue Share

The rev share market is absolutely enormous – everyone and his granny has their own budding site. I’m only listing ones that I’m certain are reliable and well-established here, either from personal experience or from sources I trust. That’s no reason not to do your research first, though!

Note that unique visitors and PR are critical on basic revenue share (i.e. no up-front payments or marketplace work) as they govern your content’s potential earnings. These are all post-Panda figures.¹

Helium - the toughest site which demands appropriately high-quality work to earn well and also requires all writers to rate articles to keep getting paid. Pay increases as you gain more “stars”.

Between 1 and 1.5 million visitors per month. PR6.

Associated Content – only pays US residents unless you were already a member before the Yahoo! buyout (I still get paid, for example) or get into their Featured Contributor Program. Pay increases as you gain more “clout”.

Between 5.5 and 6 million visitors per month. PR7.

Triond – been having trouble this year but will hopefully recover. A favourite for non-native English writers.

Around 250,000 visitors per month. PR5.

Bukisa – another favourite of the non-native English writers, this one seems to have the most flexible editorial guidelines (or lowest quality, depending on how you look at it).

Around 300-350,000 visitors per month. PR5.

HubPages – rev share, per-view payments, affiliate links and an active community. A very good way to build up content.

Around 8 million visitors per month. PR6.

Squidoo – rev share and even more affiliate options than HubPages. Seen as the “cool” rev share site.

Around 8 million visitors per month. PR7.

Factoidz and Wikinut come from contacts – I’ve never used them, so I can’t say much about them apart from, uh, they’re rev shares.

Factoidz gets around 300,000 visitors per month (PR4) and Wikinut about 70,000 (PR3).

Revenue Share Blogging

A slightly different category, there are still a couple of blogging sites around that offer a share of their revenue when you blog with them. In exchange for forgoing 100% of your ad income, you get better traffic and a community.

Traffic and PR for these sites is extremely hard to ascertain as they offer domain names they own to their bloggers (or even register one for you).

Orble - has an absolutely brilliant network setup that shows other blogs on yours (and vice versa) for extra traffic. Very friendly and a good way to blog if you don’t want to manage it yourself.

Worldblogosphere – not so good on the setup but offers a slightly higher share of revenue.

Tools and Utilities

Some extra tools for writers, all of which have their uses and save you forking out for paper copies of references you only use rarely.

Dictionary and Thesaurus

Purdue OWL - a collection of helpful stuff for writers, including APA, MLA and other style guides for your stricter clients and academic work. Invaluable!

Copyscape - the best way to check if your work is a copy of someone else’s… or if someone’s been stealing your content! (See also Dealing With Plagiarism in the Free Stuff here on ScrawlBug.)

Special Mention

A special mention goes to the PTP (paid to participate) forum over at myLot. It won’t earn you much for contributing – probably only $10 a month at most – but the amount of knowledge shared there is phenomenal. Some of the ideas in this Back to Basics series came from the friendly folks there!

myLot - sucks for money but is one of the best sources of opinion and information I’ve found: not snobby, not too focussed but a good, old-fashioned discussion site. Just remember to read the rules before you post.

Call For Resources

If you’ve found an excellent resource for freelance writers, tell me about it in the comments. No, I’m not asking you to spam, plug your blog or promote your latest crappy marketing ebook – I’m asking for informed, useful opinion!

¹ Google Panda changed the search engine’s algorithm to favour proper writing instead of the demented-robot SEO link-stuffing practised by most online marketing whores. This is good news for actual writers but has seriously hit the article directories’ traffic stats.

Got wood? Build your own online home to earn extra income!

For the penultimate post of this Back to Basics series, we’ll be taking a look at the advantages and disadvantages of working for yourself.

Remember: I’m not talking about freelancing in general, here. I’m talking about freelance writing with no direct client: marketplace sales, sponsored blog posts and advertising programs (but not affiliate marketing).

Given that this kind of work is often a mix of direct sales and revenue share, many of the advantages and disadvantages are similar. Let’s have a look:

Marketplace Articles

We’ll start by looking at marketplace writing, since sponsored blogging and monetising sites are quite similar.

Marketplace Advantages

1. You can get paid more from marketplace work

Much like direct work, marketplace pay per article is generally a lot better than many forms of content writing, especially revenue share.

2. You can set your own prices

If you’re a real expert in a particular field, you can set prices that reflect your knowledge. Alternatively, you can price your work to sell and earn less (but hopefully more frequently).

3. You’re not tied to a schedule

In the same way as rev share, you can write whenever you want. That’s a real bonus, especially if your work availability is erratic.

4. You can write whatever you want

Again just like rev share, marketplace writing can be about almost any subject. This means that you can write about anything (unless you want to respond to buyer requests) and still generate income, though lower-interest subjects are harder to sell.

5. You don’t have to market (as much)

Buyers know where the marketplace is and they know what they’re looking for. You’ll need to choose your article keywords (for the site search, not the content) carefully to make sure potential buyers can find your work but you don’t have to publicise yourself or generate traffic.

6. You’re automatically advertising for clients

By selling articles in a marketplace, you’re showing potential clients (who are willing to pay well) the quality of your work. Although it may seem odd, an article marketplace can be a great way to pick up one-off or even regular jobs.

Marketplace Disadvantages

1. Your income is erratic

Probably the biggest negative of marketplace writing is the uncertainty: there are no guarantees that your work will sell, even if you’re responding to buyer requests. Articles can sit on display for months (or even years) without success.

2. You can’t avoid “usage” rights

This is specifically a Constant Content issue: all articles posted on the site must have “usage” (i.e. non-exclusive) rights for sale. While this means any article can earn from repeated sales, the pay is lower and, unless you’re producing very popular, general content, it can put a serious dent in your exclusive-rights sales. Once the “usage” rights are sold, the higher-price exclusive sale is lost.

3. You need a sizeable collection and regular output

Since you can’t guarantee sales, the only way to generate a steady income is to ensure you maintain your work output. By constantly adding to your marketplace portfolio – either by spreading your subjects wider or producing more work in a particular niche – you increase the chances of selling something.

4. Your choice of subjects is important

More popular subjects sell quicker whereas evergreen content tends to command higher prices. Your choice of subjects can affect your earnings enormously. On top of that, you’ll have to come up with the subjects yourself which can be a strain for the less creative.

5. Your risk increases the more you focus your output

Writers who produce content for very specific niches have to be careful: if demand for their is negiligible, they won’t sell anything. Keep an eye on the current popular topics and what’s selling.

6. You need to be self-motivated

In the same way as revenue share, there’s no client setting deadlines and no one pushing you to produce content, so you’ll need to push yourself to keep working.

7. You’re expected to be a professional

Marketplace buyers pay well for articles and they expect commensurate levels of professionalism and quality. Producing rubbish is not acceptable and won’t get past the on-site editors. They want high-quality work from a serious, professional writer: make sure they get it.

Monetising Sites and Sponsored Posts

Monetising your blog (or web site) through advertising programs or looking for sponsors for posts both have similar advantages and disadvantages, so I’ll treat them together. For more on sponsored blog posts, read this post.

Advantages

1. You earn 100% of the income

Whatever earnings you gather through monetising or sponsored posts, the money’s all yours. There’s no cut to pay to a middle-man or a site (barring cashout fees). All your work generates income for you and you alone.

2. You’re building residual income

Unless you decide to delete your entire site one day, the content will remain on the web for ever. The more posts you write, the more content you produce and the more work you put in, the more earning potential you have. Write once, earn for ever – especially true for evergreen content.

3. You don’t have to specialise

If you have a lot of interests, it’s entirely feasible to run several blogs or even dozens. Note that you should always try to keep each subject to a separate blog, so people know what to expect when they arrive. As your earnings increase and your popularity grows, you may even end up paying people to write for you instead of maintaining them all yourself.

4. You decide your own schedule

In the same way as rev share, you can write whenever you want. Although it’s always best to keep up a regular posting schedule for a blog, you can decide what “regular” means for yourself. No bosses, no clients, no pressure.

5. You can write whatever you want

Again just like rev share or marketplace writing, your blog or site can be about anything you want. Obviously popular subjects attract more readers (and more sponsored posts) but the choice is yours, especially if you’re just monetising through ad programs.

6. You don’t have to follow the rules

Since it’s your site, you can do whatever you want. You can let your personality flood out and spread like a disease across the Internet. There are no clients to tell you what style to use, how many words to write, what phrases to use or anything else. It’s all yours.

7. You’re automatically advertising for clients

Your blog or site is a central online presence where clients can find and contact you. As it grows in popularity and your fame extends beyond the walls of your own home, your site becomes the focus, the thing that defines who you are and what you do. You can use that as a form of marketing to find new customers.

8. You can earn nice bonuses

Sponsored blog posts are a nice little kick in the backside for your earnings, especially if you have a high-PR site. Sure, they don’t pay as much as regular freelance work but an extra $10 here and there for a little bit of work can’t be bad.

Disadvantages

1. Your short-term earnings will suck

When your site is still young and unknown, you’ll earn virtually nothing. No one will want to give you posting sponsorship and no one will visit to click your ads. The first six months are like that (nine months if you don’t market much) until your traffic starts to pick up.

2. You have to market yourself

Not only will you have to produce all the site content but you’ll also have to do all your own marketing. That means a lot of extra work getting listed in directories, posting to bookmarking sites, building a presence on social networks, visiting forums and everything else that modern marketing requires.

3. Your earnings depend on your popularity

You don’t have to market yourself but your earnings depend on your popularity. You need to generate traffic – and a LOT of it. Ad click rates are frequently less than 1%, so you need hundreds of visitors to bring in a few cents. To make enough money that you’ll consider it “income” takes tens of thousands of site hits. (Check out the series on driving traffic here on ScrawlBug.)

4. Your subject choice affects your earnings

Choosing the wrong niche can ruin any chances you have of earning before you even start. Make sure you research your choice carefully: fighting your way into the online earning marketplace (or the freelance one for that matter) will take a lot of effort and endurance – there are so many blogs about it already that the Internet’s probably due to reach saturation very soon. And no one’s going to sponsor you to write about it, either – if you want sponsorship, create a review blog.

5. You have to write about sponsored subjects

Obviously, sponsored blog posts require you to write to a given subject. This isn’t a big problem for most people but it’s something to bear in mind if you hate doing work on demand.

6. You have to be self-motivated

There’s no one to convince you to keep going. You’re on your own. You probably won’t even get a comment for the first few months of blogging. Do you have the patience to keep working at it until the traffic starts trickling in?

In the next episode…

In the next (and last) Back to Basics post, I’ll give you a list of resources: trusted sites that you can use to get your freelance writing career started. Keep your eyes open or – even better – subscribe and make sure you don’t miss it!

Edit: since the series is now complete, how about a next entry link? Sorted.