Freelance Writing Jobs: Evolution of a Blog
November 4, 2008 by admin
Filed under Freelance Writing Tips
by Deborah Ng
Welcome to the new Freelance Writing Jobs network of blogs. This is a major step and a major gamble, but I believe it’s a natural progression for this blog. With so many bloggers, and jobs and tips, it was getting a little confusing and convoluted.
And in case you haven’t been with us since the beginning, we’ve come a long way, baby!
Check it out!
June 2005
Originally Freelance Writing Jobs was part of Writer’s Row, an awesome group of content writers who found ourselves out of work and banded together to form a content site. I started FWJ as a way to share jobs with other Moms. This was in 2005 and I can’t find a screenshot of the original web page, but here’s a look at the first blog design – when FWJ was a blogspot blog.
January 2006
Several months later, a fellow work at home Mom named Wendy took pity on my design and created a new look for FWJ. I was still with Writer’s Row and this was still a .blogspot blog:
December 06
Why look who it is! It’s the pajama lady! Diane Penna re-designed FWJ to target Work at Home Moms. It wasn’t long before I started to realize, FWJ was more than just a mommy blog.
October 2007
FWJ made two great big leaps for the better. We moved from Blogger to WordPress and moved from a Writer’s Row subdomain to the Freelance Writing Gigs domain. Many people ask why I didn’t choose http://freelancewritingjobs.com – that domain was taken and I couldn’t afford to buy it. The summer of 2007 also welcomed Jodee aboard part time to help out with the leads.
May 2008
Three years later, my little work at home mom blog was a huge success. Many of my readers were male, however, and some weren’t even parents. My “regulars” became a mix men, women, work at homes, full timers and part time freelancers and college students looking to make ends meet. Harry from Men with Pens and his team of techies created the professional, coffee shop look you see today.
November 2009 – FWJ is now a network
Our FWJ Idol contest brought us two new writers, Terreece Clark and James Chartrand. The blog started getting crowded. It became hard to mange and visitors had a hard time finding leads through all the other good stuff. It was time to go network! In addition to a separate blog for leads, and blogs by Jodee, James and Terreece, we also moved over Network Blogging Tips, welcoming Jennifer Chait and David Peralty. And yes, we’re considering a forum.
Hope the investment was worth it and you like what we’re doing here. Tell us your thoughts in the comments.
Not to be too nitpicky, but it’s November 2008 right now
Congrats on making such a big move. I like the idea of a network and separate blogs will help reduce some of the clutter. I have a question about the feed…will there be a master feed that’s an aggregation of the new posts from all the blogs (please say yes) or will each blog have it’s own dedicated feed?
Hi Lorie – Can you tell I’m tired? This experience has been draining!
Hi LaToya – At the moment there’s no master feed, but we’re working on it. I do hope you’ll subscribe to individual feeds until then!
Thanks! I’ll tune in to the individual feeds until there’s a master one. Maybe I can tweak it so they come into one Outlook folder.