WordPress.com Blog Suspended
Like many freelance writers, I write on a variety of blogs around the web. Some of them I own, some are owned by clients, and others are free publishing services like HubPages or Squidoo. Sometimes, when I want to try something out, or I am writing on a topic that I’m not sure I will continue to have enough passion to write about, I will start a free blog on WordPress.com to see how it goes. Often, that free blog satisfies my needs when it comes to that topic, and other times, I will end up transferring most of the [...]
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 [...]
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 Shuts Down
Today, I received and email from the folks at Bright Hub. Sadly, Bright Hub is shutting down. Officially, Bright Hub and brighthub.com remain in business and the website will stay up along with all of the content they commissioned from writers over the years. However, revenue sharing payments will cease on December 15th and any new articles will be written internally or by a small group of writers who are contracted with on an “ad-hoc basis.” In other words, Bright Hub, as it pertains to freelance writers, is closed. The writer forums were also unlinked or deleted. I was able [...]
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 [...]
Finally Tagged by Panda
For those of you who are professional writers that don’t run your own websites online, you may not have heard of the Google Panda update. Essentially, Panda is an algorithm run by Google against its search index that it uses in the wake of stinging criticism about its search result being cluttered with low quality content, especially that associated with content farms like Demand Studios and Seed.com. There have been several versions released in the months since the original version embarrassingly missed eHow.com, the biggest content mill of all. With each version, website owners, online writers, and others have complained [...]
Demand Studios Title Drought
The number of articles available to claim at Demand Studios has dropped drastically. On the heels of the Seed.com shutdown, writers are asking what this might mean for Demand Studios a.k.a. Demand Media. Low Number of Articles at Demand Studios The official explanation from Demand Studios is always the same, that different clients have different needs that fluctuate over time. The party line makes sense when the company is talking about third-party websites, but much of the content generated by writers for Demand Studios ends up on Demand Media’s own websites such as eHow.com. Even if the demand from the company for [...]
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 [...]
