It’s toot your own horn time!

It’s Friday again! And it’s time to toot your own horn. I did this a few months ago and it was so fun and inspiring, I decided to pull it out again. I know we creative types have trouble taking credit for our success. So no matter how big or small, it’s time to toot your own horn!

Here’s my horn tooting:

The reason I haven’t been blogging as much in the last few days is because I just put the final touches on the first draft of my very own ebook. It’s called The Content Chef and as soon as I have some other eyes take a look at it, it will be available for sale. This has been a major goal for me all year long, and I’m glad that I finally got it accomplished.

Now it’s your turn!

Have you kicked butt on a project lately?

 

Did a client give you an awesome referral?

 

Were you able to reach a personal goal of setting up your website or learning something new about web writing?

 

Post your success stories below!

 

November 30, 2007 | Filed Under Fun Stuff, Making Money, Motivation | 5 Comments 

Anyone know a good Wordpress tweaker?

I need help! I’m not looking for a custom template, I just want to tweak this one….but my attempts to do so have obviously screwed things up, as you can see from my header.

Can anyone help me out or know someone who can?

November 29, 2007 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 7 Comments 

Are you building your house on a pile of sand?

There’s something to be said for offline writing. It’s generally more coherent, more engaging and better researched. I contend that this has less to do with the online medium, and more to do with the propensity for quick, sloppy content creation online.

It all started with back links. Your page shows up higher in the search engine results for certain terms when there are links out there in the Web ether back to your site. After link exchanges and other first generation back link techniques faded away, article marketing came to the forefront. Articles (well written articles, mind you) are great ways to build traffic. But it takes a lot of articles to create a big influx of traffic. So it takes lots of content to build up a large volume of traffic back to a site. Unfortunately, some people have taken this to mean that they need to write all of this content in a few days.

Whenever I start a project, I check out what others have done at Ezine Articles. I’m often shocked by the poor quality of the content. Many articles have run on sentences, bad grammar and pointless paragraphs. I imagine these are the type of articles people pay $1 for or write in a hurry. Don’t get me wrong, if the topic is right and I’ve had my caffeine I can whip up 400 words in 15 minutes. But that’s a first draft. I edit, perfect and then submit.

Writing bad articles because you need lots of back links is like building your foundation on a pile of sand. Over time, you’ll just have to produce higher volumes of bad content, because your first batches of bad content will fall in the search engine rankings. Worse yet, people won’t respect you if you represent yourself that way online. If you didn’t spend the time to proofread your work, why should I listen to what you have to say?

If you’re on the marketing side of the fence, purchasing poorly written content and using it in your marketing is doing your business more harm than good. Take the time to learn to write a good article, or pay for quality writing. I know it’s hard to swallow .04 a word, especially when there’s a $1 an article writer right around the corner, but isn’t your business worth spending the money on being represented professionally? Well written content isn’t going to take the rankings nose dive that bad content will. You won’t have to reinvent the wheel each and every month.

Well written content works for you. It informs your visitors, inspires them to take action and persuades them to purchase from you. It speaks for you when you’re not there.

I see a lot of frustrated marketers who throw in the towel because their once vibrant affiliate business is crashing to the ground. I often wonder what their content looked like and if that was a factor in the decline of their business.

It looks like great minds think alike! Hope Wilbanks started a three part series on quality content writing. Make sure to stop by her terrific blog and take a look.

November 28, 2007 | Filed Under Making Money, Web Writing Basics | 18 Comments 

Plagiarism or just sloppy RSS usage? What’s your take?

I just received an e-mail from Melissa at Writing Forward about my blog, her blog and dozens of other writing related blogs being copied and posted on the brand new procopywriters.com blog that was started yesterday.

This isn’t your run of the mill content scraping. The articles are reprinted in their entirety and credited to me and the other writers. Sounds okay so far.

But there are two problems that I see:

-The owner doesn’t have permission to use the “borrowed” content.

-There aren’t any backlinks back to the sites, which means there’s no value for the other writers and myself.

The owner of Procopywriters posted his reasoning at Writer’s Resource Center

It included:

“First…ProCopywriters is almost three years old, however, we started the blog YESTERDAY!!! It is true that the content comes from other web sites around the Internet. NO content is stolen from a web site - it is collected through the sites RSS feed.

We do NOT edit the content or change ANY of the embedded links. We do use a contextual advertising technology that adds advertising links where none existed (Kontera, for those interested).”

I do know that from what I saw, the embedded links were kept intact but there were no links back to my blog. If there had been, I would have seen them in my incoming links instead of being notified by Melissa.

What are your thoughts? Do you use RSS syndication? Has your content ever shown up in this manner somewhere else?

November 28, 2007 | Filed Under News | 25 Comments 

Cool Beans! Top Ten Writer’s Blogs 2007/2008

I’m so honored to be among the esteemed company in the running for the Top Ten Writer’s Blogs of 2007/2008. Out of these 19 blogs, 10 will be picked as the year’s best. The contest is being held at Michael Stelzner’s Writing White Papers.

Thanks to those of you who nominated me!

Be sure to visit the other nominated blogs below and see the best of what the web has to offer:

November 28, 2007 | Filed Under News, Web Writing Basics | 5 Comments 

Free Accounting Software - I Heart Quicken

Good news for freelancers! Thanks to the guys at Web Content Writer Tips I just downloaded a free copy of Intuit’s QuickBooks - Simple Start 2008.

Go pick up your copy now so you can get organized for next year!

And speaking of organization, Deb Ng of Freelance Writing Gigs had a great post last week on things freelancers should do before the end of the year. It definitely inspired me to get my books in order and plan for 2008 a whole lot better than I did for 2007.

November 26, 2007 | Filed Under Making Money, Resources, Organization | 5 Comments 

If you build it, they WON’T come

Unlike Kevin Costner, we bloggers don’t have the luxury of building a blog and having it filled with dead baseball players, I mean, visitors automatically. At first, we all blog to no one. But eventually, visitors start to trickle in. Before you know it, you have a community of followers.

My promotion for this blog has been on the back burner for a while. I know there are those of you out there who are regular readers, but how did you get here?

I’ve mainly used signature links in forum posts to “advertise” my blog. I’ve commented on other blogs, too, and also joined My Blog Log. Other than that, I’ve been a lazy blog promoter.

How have you promoted your blog and what has worked best for you?

November 26, 2007 | Filed Under Uncategorized | 4 Comments 

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