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 [...]
How Do Content Mills Work?
After much Internet angst regarding Google’s most recent search engine algorithm update called Panda (or in some places, the Farmer update) there seems to be some discussion around what exactly is a content mill and how content mills work. What Do Content Mills Do? Content mills, like many forms of new media, are not specifically defined. For example, no executive, owner, or publisher thinks that their website or organization is a content mill, no matter how many people disagree. Furthermore, some content mills are much more spammy than others. And, there are arguments to be made that some content mills [...]
Google Keyword Variants on Webmaster Tools
Deciphering how Google ranks websites and determines its Search Engine Results Pages (SERP) is the focus of Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Numerous SEO professionals and SEO consultants offer ongoing advice to website publishers about how to get webpages to rank higher in Google search rankings, with the goal being to attain the coveted #1 ranking on Google for a specific keyword. To that end, there are numerous SEO advice blogs, and plenty of Google search engine analysis tracking websites published around the Internet. To help them out, or to correct misconceptions in the SEO community, Google relies on various [...]
Freelance Writer Blog Posts
If you are going to earn money writing online, you are going to need a website. If you are going to have a website that attracts enough attention from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Altavista, and others to actually drive any traffic to your website, you are going to need a blog or other section of your small business website that gets updated on a regular basis. If you are going to have enough time to dedicate to being an entrepreneur and running your small business successfully, you will occassionally find it difficult to update your blog as often as you would [...]
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 [...]
Yahoo Style Guide AP Style For The Web
As we mentioned earlier, Yahoo has taken on the task of producing a “style guide” for the Internet. Those of you who are already in the professional writing business know about the different writing styles out there. There is AP Style, which is based upon a book by AP called The Associated Press Stylebook. Then there is the MLA stylebook and a couple of others as well. For those of you not in the freelance writing business, the point of all these style guides is to fill in some of the language gaps that exist between the grammar manuals, like [...]
Freelance Writing Gigs Website Sold
I’m not going to get all emotional or anything, but something a little bit sad happened today that happens to hit home on a personal level for me as a successful freelance writer. When I first started my freelance writing business a few years ago, I did not really know how to go about finding freelance writing gigs without cold-calling businesses or waiting for someone who knew I was a good writer to ask me to write something for them. Obviously, this is a good way to both starve to death (waiting) and to crush your soul (cold-calling). For months [...]
Is Examiner.com Worth It For Writers?
Although it was not my intention when I started writing a blog for freelance writers and businesses who hire freelance writers, a lot of the new readers here at the ArcticLlama freelance writing business blog come from people searching for advice on where to write online for money. In particular, people search to find out whether or not it is worth it to write for Demand Studios and if Guru.com is worth it, and lately, whether or not writing gigs on Elance.com are worth it. (I have a review of a how to make money on Elance ebook coming up [...]
Webhosting Service Unbiased Comparison
Finding useful webhosting information is next to impossible. Most of the big, brand-name webhost companies out there offer very sizable pay to affiliates who refer people to their service. That means that almost every single comment on the entire Internet about which web hosting services are good and which web hosts are bad is tainted by a giant conflict of interest. I’ll try and spare you the details of how I know this, or why my freelance writing business and I are innocent (but, really I am.) If you happen to see any webhosting advertisements while you are reading this [...]
Demand Studios Increases Pay For Writers
As long time readers of this blog know, I’m a big fan of writing for Demand Studios for certain things. While I don’t think that it is worth it to write for Demand Studios as your sole source of income, or for even a big part of your freelance writing business revenue, Demand Studios assignments offer a unique combination of flexible scheduling, fast pay, and ease of projects that is tough to find elsewhere. That makes Demand Studios good to write for when you get those 2:00 am can’t sleep nights. If you can’t sleep, you might as well make [...]
