Making Money with HubPages
Not too long ago, there was a gold rush of sorts at HubPages. About a year ago, web marketers got the idea that HubPages, with its PageRank 6, was a good place to do something called article marketing. I don’t think there is any hype around it anymore. With article marketing, you publish articles on websites, generally for free and without any editorial approval, and then use those articles to link to your own webpages. The idea is that since Google is basically a glorified link counter, making more links point to your online writing content is a good way [...]
Taking Down Bright Hub Links
I’ve been slowly but surely deleting the links to my content ever since Bright Hub shut down for all intents and purposes. Unlike writing for Demand Studios, one of the things that made Bright Hub worth writing for after awhile was the revenue sharing. Now, as most of my readers know, I’m not a big fan of revenue sharing. The main reason is that there are just too many factors out of my control. No matter how great my freelance writing is, for instance, there will never be any traffic to speak of if the site it is published on [...]
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 [...]
Bright Hub Cutting Back Too
Recently, I have noted that Seed.com has shutdown. Then, it seems that Demand Studios has shut down for all intents and purposes. Now, Bright Hub, one of the first online publishing sites I ever wrote for, is cutting so far back that many writers are no longer able to claim any article writing opportunities and those that can have few choices to pick from. Bright Hub is the latest of the online content publishers to essentially admit defeat in the wake of the Google Panda update. I mentioned earlier this year when I wrote about whether writing for Bright Hub [...]
Making Money With Blogs
Update: I have no idea if the two are related, but the day after I installed Skimlinks, my traffic dropped and my AdSense was cut in half. I have disabled / deleted all Skimlinks code at this time. The information below was written before this happened. — I’ll update with a new post if traffic comes back. It may be coincidence. I won’t know until Monday. Sunday’s are typically pretty light around here. Making money with blogs isn’t as easy as it sounds. On the surface, all you have to do is write some [...]
Demand Studios Over?
Recently, I wrote about how Seed.com is gone as far as freelance writers are concerned because it no longer offers paying writing assignments. Shortly thereafter, I wrote about the lack of titles at Demand Studios available for freelancers to write and concluded that it may be either natural ebb and flow, or an attempt to reduce expenses before reporting quarterly earnings. Turns out that Demand Studios might be following Seed.com’s footsteps. A recent email and forum posting regarding the dearth of Demand Studios articles available to be claimed by freelancers (see here for how Demand Studios works) suggests that Demand [...]
AOL Seed Still In Business?
The guys over at Business Insider have posted an article speculating on the current status of AOL’s Seed freelance writing platform. The article notes a “commenter” on another article has said that there are no articles to claim and that he thinks that Seed is defunct, to use BI’s words. There is even a note in the article about how the writer has reached out to the AOL spokesperson to get some comment. Of course, they could save themselves some work and innuendo by just checking the home page of Seed.com, which states under “Current Assignments” that: We are in [...]
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. [...]
Dealing with Rejection in Freelance Writing
One of the toughest things to deal with in any business is rejection. By definition, running your own freelance writing business means that there will be times your work is rejected, or even worse, when you are rejected before ever getting to show what you can do. The former happens when you submit freelance articles, the latter when you submit resumes or query letters. As a professional freelance writer, you get used to the rejection, especially when it comes from lofty places. There is no shame in having an article for Time Magazine, for example, returned for edits or even [...]
Is Writing for Bright Hub Worth It?
I have a bit of a soft spot for Bright Hub, so much so that until today I have never mentioned or written about them for fear of sending too much competition that way. When I was first starting out as a freelance writer a few years ago, Bright Hub was one of my first recurring paying gigs. Running a successful freelance writing business requires having at least some source of income that is dependable and recurring. Without such freelance writing clients, it can be difficult to smooth out the variations in income that make freelancing so difficult. With a [...]
