New Look at ArcticLlama Freelance Writing Blog
Sometimes, you do things fast. Sometimes doing something takes so long that you forget some of the parameters you had when starting. The previous layout of this freelance writing blog was one of the latter. I set up this blog long ago when I first started out as a full-time freelance writer. As you may know, this blog runs on WordPress, the popular, open-source blogging platform. The design and layout of WordPress blogs is controlled by a “theme”. There are numerous good, free WordPress themes out there. I have spent some time (too much time) looking through lots of different [...]
Zemanta Plugin for Online Writers
I make my living as a professional freelance writer. For the most part, that means that I go out, find clients, get them to hire me, do some freelance writing for them, and then repeat the process. This is a great way to make a living as a writer without starving to death while you write the next great American novel. What is even better is writing for your own websites, building your own traffic and making money off of what YOU want to write, when you want to write it. It’s better than just working from home. Unfortunately, this [...]
Mini Panda Recovery
I wrote recently about how this freelance writing blog and other websites of mine had been hit by Google Panda on the October 13 update. For those of you new to the concept, Google initiated a new algorithm early in 2011 to help improve its search results, primarily by reducing the amount of results from the so-called content mills that ranked high in searches. The result has been the virtual shut down of Demand Studios and severe cutbacks at BrightHub. Ironically, the all-comers publishing web platform HubPages has recovered from Panda quiet nicely. The Panda algorithm has been updated and [...]
One Month to NaNoWriMo
One Month until National Novel Writing Month. Although the concept of NaNoWriMo involves writing a novel “from scratch” beginning on the first of November, there is nothing wrong with considering what I will be writing about. I’m sure many other writers may take to the winds and follow their muse, but I do have a lot of ideas stacked up in my head. Every time I find an old notebook, it seems to have a half-dozen ideas lurking in the pages. Of course, some of my ideas are better than others. More to the point, some of my ideas have [...]
Writing and Hubris
The mere act of writing involves a certain amount of hubris.Writing something, and particularly publishing something, assumes that what you have written is worthy of being preserved and subsequently read. In other words, your thoughts are valuable enough for others to read about them. It is not arrogance or folly, per se. After all, writing invokes no more requirement that others take in your thoughts than speaking them aloud does. However, there is something to be said for how one assumes it is worth taking both the additional time and effort to commit ones thoughts to a more permanent form. [...]
Write Every Day
In a recent exchange with a budding freelance writer, I said something to the effect of if you aren’t writing every day then you aren’t maximizing your potential as a professional freelance writer. We were discussing the lack of updates on his writing website and my point was that by posting something every single day, you get a lot of advantages. First, writing every day builds your writing portfolio faster. Just do the math. If you post an article on your blog every day for a month, you will have 30 articles published. If you post every other day, you’ll [...]
Apologies for Multiple Posting
Sorry about the multiple postings of today’s article. I wrote the post in Windows Live Writer and it gave me an error when I tried to publish it. I assumed that meant it hadn’t worked, and I kept trying to “fix” it. Hence the five or six repeats that went out. Now that I know what happened, I’ll be sure that it doesn’t happen again. Sorry.
Do Frequent Updates Doom Writings to Obsolescence?
Today’s post comes courtesy of the guy/gal/folks who run PoeWar.com. If you do enough online reading about writing and freelancing you will eventually come across the PoeWar site. I remember it from my early days, and sure enough, it’s bookmark resides within my oldest links. Yet, I never really seem to end up at PoeWar on a regular basis, and it doesn’t have a spot in my recently reconfigured Speed Dial under "Business", "Writing", or "Freelance". That seemed odd, because it is a great resource with a lot of useful information. However, as I was getting ready to leave a [...]
Automatic Tweets For New Posts
Testing out a WordPress plug-in I came across called TweetSuite. I does lots of different things (that list of Twitter tweets in the sidebar is one) but the main thing I am testing out is that it automatically posts a Tweet whenever I publish a post here on ArcticLlama. On one hand, this is great because it saves me creating a Tweet manually. On the other hand, I’m not so sure, because I don’t normally Tweet every post and when I do, I craft a manual one that has a solid description so people know whether or not to click [...]
Twitter Surprises Lurking In Google Webmaster Tools
I actually have a pretty active freelance writing business, and while that is good for many reasons — most of them having to do with paying the mortgage and not having to go back to a cubicle — it also means that I often neglect my own sites in order to make up time on paying projects. However, I was looking around in the various Google Webmaster Tools for some of my sites when I stumbled upon an External Link that made me stop in my tracks. It appears that a site called Twitterholic displays other Twitter users who are [...]
