Freelance Writer Needs Coffee, Twitter Optional
This morning started off kind of slow. I woke up with a headache. It was not one of those headaches you get in a general region like the front or back of your head, but one of those headaches you get in a specific spot. It’s the kind of headache that makes you think that maybe there is a problem right there, like you are having an aneurism or something. (Nice job on aneurism, SpellCheck. – It can be spelled with an ‘i’ or a ‘y’.) From there, everything was normal, but the coffee wasn’t kicking in even though I [...]
Online Marketing Guide for Freelance Writers
Actually, this is an online marketing guide for everyone, but it should be used extensively by freelance writers as well. If you know anything about online marketing, SEO, or social networking (social marketing, to some) you know that there are tons of sites out there and even more ways to use those websites, services, and the like to market your freelance writing business online. In fact, there are so many different things that you could do that to learn about all of them would take so long that you would never have any time to actually earn money writing. On [...]
Social Networking For Writers
Can Writers Benefit From Social Networking? It seems like the bandwagon only bangs the drum louder with each passing day. You MUST be fully immersed in the world of social networking, and/or social marketing, immediately or else your business will fail and you will have only your stone age understanding of computers, the Internet, the cloud, and the 21st century to blame. You don’t have a Facebook page? Oh, no! That is a slight exaggeration, but not much. Do any reading online or elsewhere and you are sure to find numerous recommendations that your business start using social networking immediately [...]
Get More Search Engine Traffic By Changing Your Writing … for the Worse!
To get more search engine traffic there are a lot of things you can do. You can read all about search engine optimization until you go blind. You could even hire an SEO consultant if you have money to burn. You could comment on a thousand blogs a day with a link back to your website. You could research keywords with Google’s keyword tool, the AdSense keyword tool, and the AdWords keyword tool. And, don’t forget about the Google keyword research tool. What the–? Has Arctic Llama lost his mind? Aren’t all of those tools listed up there the same [...]
Controlling Your Freelancing Brand Name Versus Additional Exposure
Over the past couple of years I have flirted with writing for various online publishing systems. I never really go the hang of Squidoo (or I did and just didn’t like it), but I have writer accounts on several other online publishing websites. Some of those accounts have gotten a lot of attention at one time or another, and some of them have had little done with them except for their original creation. My latest foray into this realm is publishing articles on HubPages as "Hub Llama." I use HubPages as a way to test out ideas or keywords or [...]
Automatic Tweets Update
Another, maybe better, way to automatically tweet everytime you post an article on your blog.
Build a Custom WordPress Site Using Free Theme
One of the things that make WordPress the dominant blogging platform on the Internet is that it is free and customizable. It is so customizable that there are thousands of themes available. A theme is a set of files and functions that produce a unique look and design for any WordPress website. There are free themes and “premium” themes and themes that are free to download, but you have to pay for support, and so on. Most of them are not good. It seems that coloring and graphics is what makes a theme “good” to most of the Top Whatever [...]
Building Websites and Blogs to Achieve Total Writing Freedom
This blog, and all of my other “serious” websites, are built on WordPress. I’ve tried Blogger, but just can’t seem to get into it, and frankly, if you are going to build up an empire of websites, the blogging ones should pretty much be built on WordPress or Blogger. As you know, I am a professional writer, not a web designer or webmaster, or whatever people are calling themselves these days. So, why am I building any websites at all, and why am I telling you about it on a freelance writing site? The answer is total freedom and independence. [...]
Should You Use WWW In Your Domain Name Or Not?
Do some reading on domain names and what good ones are, as well as a little bit on search engine optimization and eventually you will come across the very sound advice to only use www.domain.com or domain.com, but not both. The idea is two-fold. First, you don’t want to lose out on your search engine rankings by having people (and yourself) point to both www.arcticllama.com AND arcticllama.com, because the search engines consider these to be different pages. Second, you don’t want to confuse visitors who might wonder what the “real” address is, even though it doesn’t really matter. What you [...]
Twitter Won’t Make You Rich, Famous or Drive Tons of Traffic To Your Website
The other day I got an email from another freelancer. He’s not a writer, but our respective freelancing professions have a lot in common. Recently, he started up a website with a blog. What he couldn’t quite iron out what that he has thousands of friends on Twitter but he still doesn’t get much traffic to his website. He said he must be doing something wrong because everywhere he reads about how powerful social media is, and how he should be using Twitter to drive traffic to his website. Twitter Has No Power There is a disconnect between what is [...]
