Site Smart

John Chow brings out a good point in his latest post. Now he talks about a bit of pondering that’s going about how high an income his blog could actually make. Through all this talk he tosses out a little gem for us to think about.

A blog can only have so many ad slots and when they are full the only other option to increase income is to raise prices. However, if you are at the highest price your blog can sustain then think about another possibility. Affiliate programs offer residual income meaning you will get a cut of the profits mad by other affiliates you refer, so in this avenue there are no limits to the amount of money you can make and it also continues as long as your referrers keep making money.

John Cow has a nice article explaining the benefits of guest blogging and how it can make you more money. Some bloggers are wary of or feel it is not worth the effort to guest blog. If you stop and think about it, yes, you are improving their site but you are getting traffic, exposure, and hopefully conversions like rss subscriptions, etc.

So there is plenty of benefits for you when you guest blog. Here are some good points from the article. Be sure to read the original for all the details.

1. Give More (Much More) Than You Take
2. Be BOLD
3. Tailor the Post to the Blog’s Audience
4. Look For Spaces to be Filled
5. Check Your Work for Spelling and Grammar

Michael Kwan has written a great post on what you should consider before diving in as a freelance writer.

I am not going to go into to much detail, you can read his full post if you want that, but I will write a summary of his points.

1. Do you have enough savings to endure your growing pains?
The reality is that you will not be making a full-time income right from the get-go unless you happen to be both really talented and really lucky

2. Are you organized, motivated, and self-driven?
Because you won’t really have a set working schedule or a boss breathing down your neck, motivation becomes a huge factor in your success.

3. Are you comfortable with all the other roles you’ll have?
You may be an exceptional writer, but how are you with accounting? Customer service? Sales? When you run your own freelance writing business, you’ll be wearing a lot of different hats.

4. Can you find a healthy life-work balance?
As mentioned above, motivation can become an issue, but so can finding a healthy life-work balance. Because you can make money at any hour of the day, you could feel like you should be making money every hour of the day.

5. Do you really love writing?
This sounds obvious enough, but you’d be surprised how many potential freelancers realize that they don’t like writing as much as they thought they would. When you’re blogging for fun, writing comes easy. When you’re producing countless articles on a daily basis, the task can get pretty exhausting.

John Chow has a helpful article on improving your blogging skills/lifestyle and ideas on how to find inspiration.

1 - Write as far in advance as you feel inspired to

This is the best piece of advice I can give to ANY blogger - when you’re in the mood and writing good content - don’t stop. If you feel like you’ve got more to say just keep going because you’ll be thankful of it later. I have an “unpublished” section of Seopher.com where I can throw pieces of content for a rainy day (like drafts on Wordpress) which is really useful because we all hit low days where you really don’t want to blog. On those days I cherry pick a piece of content and publish it - meaning the site doesn’t seem inactive but I’ve not really had to do anything.

2 - Schedule posts to go live in the future when you’re busy

If you know you’re going to be busy (or on Holiday, otherwise engaged etc) then I recommend combining the point I made in number one with the ability to schedule posts to go live in the future. This means that if I’m going away for the weekend I can take 1-2 posts out of my drafts and schedule them to go live later. I don’t use Wordpress but it’s really easy to do (when writing a post click “post timestamp” on the right hand side and edit the timestamp to be some point in the future). This is a great way to give yourself “time off” from the blog without handing it over to someone else.

3 - Hand it over to someone else with guest posts

Sometimes you don’t have the time or inspiration to maintain a sizable catalogue of draft posts for future use, so what happens if you actually need some? Fortunately it’s not too hard to find people who will write a couple of guest posts for you (taking the strain off yourself). Clearly there are pitfalls with this because people came to your site to read your content but ultimately it’s a great way of keeping blogging enjoyable.

4 - Write a series of articles

This is one I love to use because it can be hard to find inspiration on cold, dark January evenings, so picking a suitably wide topic and turning it into a series of articles can really help things move in the right direction. This means that you already know what your next [however-many] posts are going to be about and you can think about them in advance. This in turn results in higher quality content (due to the extra thought gone into the post) and offers a valuable resource to readers. Eventually you could use the series as the basis for an (e)book.

5 - Post a summary / blast from the past

This may seem like scraping the barrel somewhat but there’s actually a good reason for doing this. How many of your readers have been reading your blog since it first started? Probably not many. Therefore if you have some gems in your back catalogue it can be worthwhile bringing them back to life for your new readers to look over. This is also helpful because content can be re-submitted to Digg when it’s over 365 days old, so older content can be thrown back into the social-news arena for more coverage. This is great because it can result in masses of exposure for seemingly little effort.

6 - Review something

They don’t even have to be paid reviews (shock, horror). Sometimes you can just review something for the sake of something interesting to talk about. If you stumble across something your readers would enjoy and you’ve been struggling to find inspiration, then go beyond just posting a link. There are a few advantages to reviewing stuff randomly: it can prompt people into asking for paid reviews and it can also open communications with the people who are involved with whatever you reviewed… It can be a nice opening to a lot of good things.

John Cow has a great article on how to become a great freelance writer. If writing is something you like to do and want to make some cash doing something you love, whether part-time or full-time, this is good read with some great advice.

1. If you want to become a freelance writer, you have many markets in which you can dabble. For most, online markets are the easiest to break into. As a writer specializing in online works, you will be creating articles for webmasters, sales pages for affiliate marketers, and web copy for corporations. Just remember, you do not have to necessarily make all of your money online. You can branch out to other markets such as magazines, local newspapers, newsletters, etc.

2. To become a successful freelance writer, you need to bone up on your marketing and networking skills. If you want to have success sooner rather than later, surround yourself with people who can help you achieve your goals. In many cases, you will be able to turn one freelance writing client into another, and so on. As long as you are always networking, your business will always grow.

3. You want to be a freelance writing stud – produce high quality work. Just as Johncow.com produces high quality content, you need to do the same if you want your career to take off. Remember, your clients are not paying for trash. They want your best, and when you give it to them, you will find plenty more work waiting for you around the bend.