I love blogs. Why? Because I feel like I am always on the edge of what is new and exciting.
I used to bookmark lots of websites. I have a whole stack of freelance writing links, but I never return to them. It is just too time consuming. And then you do not even know how to find the new things.
With blogs, it is so different, I just add them to my feed reader and get the latest news right to my desktop, in real time (or close to it).
The only negative is that it is very easy to add a feed and much more difficult to take a feed out. Not technically, but just knowing which ones to kick out. You tend to know the good ones that keep coming up with great content, but the boring ones stay under the radar and clutter the feed reader.
I have not used it yet, but Google Feed Reader (which I am using) has a star system. I guess I need to star great posts and at the end of each month, I’ll just delete the feeds from the reader that do not have any starred item.
I know that bidding sites are not for everyone. However, if you decide to give it a go, you need to be aware of some things:
Get the First Rating
It will be much easier to gain further work, once you have received some ratings from clients. That is why it is not useful to worry too much about what you earn in your first few projects when you bid. Completing them and getting a rating (which are positive in most cases anyway) is far more important.
That is why our freelance writing job feed includes all bidding sites. Bid on every jobs that comes up, bid low so that you get some ratings.
Concentrate Your Ratings
Once you have a few ratings on one or two bidding sites, it might be best to concentrate on that one site (or maybe two). That way, you concentrate you ratings.
Many sites show the providers with more rating higher up in the results for the client.
Carve Out a Niche
Once you have completed a few projects, concentrate on specific topics. Why?
Clients will trust your expertise when they see that you have done similar things before.
You will be able to write a lot quicker with less research. That increases your hourly rate.
Marshall wrote a post that outlines why niching reduces your writing opportunities. However, there are two main approaches to making a living through writing: quantity and quality.
Think about who earns more money, the factory worker who produces widgets (quantity) or the highly specialized professor who researches atomic physics (quality).
Being a specialist will draw quality clients to you. Being a generalist makes you have to compete with low wage countries. That competition cannot be won.
I do not know about you, but listening to brilliant minds always inspires me. You’ve probably heard about the Be the Next Bestselling Author Competition (still 3 days to enter), you might also have read the Rise of the Author and now all this culminates in a teleseminar on February 26.
Mark Joyner, Dr Joe Vitale and Frank Rumbauskas talk about how they achieved their bestseller status.
All of it is in preparation for the launch of a new training that Mark puts out, but I find that there is so much information in the pre-launch material that it is worth reading and listening to that just for that information alone. (And sometimes I can resist the temptation to buy at the end).
So if you want to listen to some of the best, register your seat for the Best-seller Prep School.
What is one of the worst enemies of effective writing?
For me it is distraction and doing things that are not productive, such as wading through emails to get rid of the spam, or surfing the Internet without clear purpose.
The only strategy for the Internet I have to offer is to set a goal and a timeframe for any Internet research. It helps me sometimes…
However, with the Spam, I am using a tool called SpamArrest.
The statistics on the right show what Spam Arrest has achieved for me in the last 4.5 months. Over 80% spam!
Let’s just say that you need 3 seconds for each spam email to identify it as such and delete it.
That comes to a total of 15 hours that I have saved through this tool.
What does it do?
All emails are checked against a database to see whether you know the sender. If you do, you get the email.
Any sender that is not in your database, receives an email by Spam Arrest, requesting confirmation that they are a real human. Once they do that, any future emails are delivered instantly. The others never even reach you.
Another great feature is that you can set it up in such a way that when you send out an email, the person you send it to is automatically added to the database. That way, they do not have to authenticate themselves.
The Drawbacks
There are two:
It takes a bit of time to set up. You have to import your existing emails into the online tool, you have to change some of your email settings to integrate it all. Takes between 30 and 60 minutes all up. But once that is done, you are free from Spam.
If you are subscribed to any lists where you receive automated emails, you need to authenticate the sending email addresses manually. Usually the list owners will not receive replies to what they send out, so they will not authenticate themselves.
That takes a bit of checking in the beginning. You always have access to the last 7 days of spam messages. I went through them daily for a few weeks, just to make sure that nothing was in there that I wanted.
What to do
They have a free 30 day trial, but if you do not think this is for you, it is probably not worth spending the time to set it all up. If you do go ahead, here are the steps:
Write your personal message that will be sent out to request the authentication
Import your current addresses into the Spam Arrest database
Add any domains that you always want to receive emails from (e.g. facebook)
If you are using Outlook, at your new Spam Arrest email account
Change the smtp server for your existing email to smtp.spamarrest.com to allow automatic authentication for people you send emails to.
Optionally, you can customize the challenge page, but I think that costs extra.
In the beginning checking the spam messages takes a bit of time (but not more than it does currently), but then comes the day when this writing tool frees you of that.
One last point, they have an hourly limit of how many emails you can receive, but when you ask support, they can lift this limit. They have a great support team, really quick to help out.
Have you ever lost work you have written? Here are a few ways to possible get it back.
1) Google Desktop
Google Desktop works very much like Google itself - except it does so on your computer. It searched (very fast) through all your documents, emails, websites that you have visited.
If you have ever used the Windows search function you know how slow that is. Google Desktop works at the speed you know from Google and it looks at all the text, not just names of files.
You can choose whether to show emails, web history or files (and what type of files). You can sort by date or relevance. And there is a thumbnail preview.
So if you ever need to search for something, Google Desktop is for you.
The concern: Google Desktop prepares an index of all your documents and files. Naturally they promise privacy, but I am not sure whether the index is kept on your computer or at Google’s servers.
2) Google Desktop Cache
It gets even better.
You know how you sometimes delete a file and then you notice that you still need it? Naturally the recycle bin is a good place to look, but if it is gone from there…
Google Desktop includes a caching function. That means that there are at least two versions of all your documents. The current one on your computer and the cached one (most probably on Google’s servers).
So even if your current document is deleted, Google Desktop will still find the cached version and you can access it. (This is also really useful, if you have deleted text out of a document and not saved it as a new version.) If you want the deleted text back, chances are you will find it in one of the Google Desktop Cached versions.
3) Cache on the Internet
That same tool also exists for Google on the Internet. But you might know that already. If I need to get the content of websites from even earlier, I use one of my favorite writing tools: The Wayback Machine
It takes snapshots of all the Internet sites at intervals. I think the frequency depends on how often the site changes.
Great tool for research.
4) Backup
As we are on the topic of old versions and backup: Do you backup? How often?
I always hated it. If I was really onto it, I would do it monthly, but usually I did not get to it until much later.
Now I use an online backup system. Each day, my new and changed files are uploaded and kept safe.
Just the feeling of doing the right thing is fantastic.
They have a free version for home users, the business version starts from $4.95.
The drawback: When you delete something from your computer, those files also get deleted in the backup system. But as I’ve shown you above, there are ways around that.
5) No More Spam
You know what, I am going to leave that for tomorrow.
So even though these are not direct writing tools, they are certainly helping me to make my life easier.
If you are after writing tools that help the style of your writing, you might want to check these 50 writing tools.
Mark Joyner has now released a paper called the Rise of the Author in which he outlines how the face of publishing is changing dramatically. And why there is no better window of opportunity for authors to become bestsellers right now.
With his background in Internet marketing it is naturally using the Internet to achieve that, but the goal is for authors to publish their books with a traditional publisher and push them up through a concerted marketing effort (not any tricks or buying books themselves).
Naturally Mark does not reveal the full extend of what is necessary for this marketing effort (that is what he wants to sell at the end of this week).
The Rise of the Author is quite long with lots of history and examples of why he thinks the way he thinks. For people like me who are more into action, the summary at the end of the document probably suffices.
Just in case you are wondering what benefit a freelancer would gain from having a bestseller:
First and foremost the new status of being a recognized expert
More client requests so that you can choose who to work with
I came home late last night and did not get to bed until 11pm. At midnight, our 6 month old daughter woke up and I with her. Could not get back to sleep until 3 hours later. Why?
Because I kept thinking about this competition. I am not sure it is suitable for everyone to jumpstart your writing career.
But what was so intriguing to me, was the task: A story about your most life changing moment in life. I thought of my own birth, then the birth of our daughter, meeting my wife, making love to the first woman.
And somehow I realized that all these changes were not single moments in time, but rather developments over a few months. But then I remembered one moment.
So here is my entry to the bestselling author competition:
I just took action, wrote my thoughts down, taped it and uploaded it. If you decide to enter, too, please share the link to your video in a comment. I’d love to see it.
You can also see some other entries that have been posted in the comments on the simpleology blog.
Who has not dreamed of being a bestselling author? It somehow seems to tie back to this instinct of leaving a legacy, of leaving something behind that we will be remembered for.
Or maybe even having something now that we are recognized for.
I have to admit that I would love to see myself as a bestselling author. But I am also a numbers person. There are 950,000 books published each year. That is what Wikipedia has to offer on the subject. So being number one is almost like winning the lotto.
Except, that there is a way to influence the outcome, rather than just relying on luck, according to Mark Joyner. He has achieved bestseller status 3 times already. He says that there is an exact blueprint that will lead to anyone to be the next bestselling author.
How does this relate to a freelance writing career? Well, if you’ve got bestseller status on your profile, it should help with convincing clients to pay what you are worth.
This site used to be a website. I was pretty happy with it, until I started interacting with other writers online (mainly bloggers).
They were frustrated with our site. Here is the greatest criticism. So I made the decision to move over from an ordinary site to a blog.
I am not talking about starting a new blog. No, this is the content of the old site with the links of the old site. We just moved it over to a different platform for better future performance.
Today I checked the old sitemap to make sure that we had all the right links in place. There are a few missing, but overall, we’ve done pretty well.
Index
Index.html is one of these links that was essential on the old site. Now it has change to index.php.
So what to do? I just decided to title this post Index. That way, I am hoping that we have index.html available again.
Virtual moving
So if you ever need any support in moving a site from one platform to another, let me know and I’ll help out.
However, with the Spam, I am using a tool called SpamArrest.
That same tool also exists for Google on the Internet. But you might know that already. If I need to get the content of websites from even earlier, I use one of my favorite writing tools: 
