Some Early November Weekend Link Love
November 8, 2008 by Deborah Ng
Filed under Freelance Writing Tips
Happy weekend. The mail is coming in fast and furious. Some of you hate the new FWJ, some of you are on the fence, and many are happy with the new direction. I hope those of you who aren’t so sure are willing to give it some time. I remember this past summer when we changed from the “Pajama Lady” logo and format to the current coffee shop feel we have now, we got loads of complaints. Hopefully once the shock wears off, you’ll love what I did as much as I do. I do realize the front page navigation needs a little work, so if you can bear with me for another little while until I can afford to make more changes, I’d be grateful.
I had a big list of link love written last night, with paragraphs describing each. It only needed tweaking before being presented to you this morning. Instead of an easy morning with my link love post already complete, I woke to find the white screen of death. After a bit of futzing around and a system restore, I got my laptop back but everything in draft was lost. So, you may not get all the wonderfully descriptive paragraphs I offered yesterday. I just don’t have it in me this morning.
Here’s what I’m reading this morning:
- How Much Time Should You Spend Working Each Day at Freelance Switch
- The Freelance Parents are so in a fight with the Men with Pens – which I would link to but they’re in maintenance mode this weekend. Copycats.
- Top 10 Gift Ideas for Writers at All Freelance Writing
- Article Writing Strategies Anyone Can Use at Fab Freelance Writing
- 50 Ways to Screw Up Content at Big Red Notebook
- Using Google Tools to Rank Your Blog in Search Engines at Blog Herald
- Ridding Yourself of Writers Block at Blogging Tips
- Bad Times Ahead for Freelance Writers? At Bob Bly
- How to Change the World Using Social Media at Copy Blogger
- Big Mistake: Hosting Your Business Blog on a Hosted Service at Branding David
- Feeling Overwhelmed? Maybe You Should Think About Outsourcing at Freelance Folder
- The Downside of Huge Traffic at JohnChow.com
- Business and Aversion to New Media at Performancing
- How to Improve Your Blog When You Don’t Have Computer Access at ProBlogger
- When is Broadcasting OK on Twitter at TwiTip
- How I Broke the Chains of Corporate Slavery, Gave Myself a Raise and Cut My Stress at Rock Your Day.
- How to Achieve Your Writing Goals Everyday at Writer’s Technology Companion
Finally, don’t miss The Writing Journey’s series on starting a freelance business.
Rock on,
Deb
I’m a relatively new reader here, it’s been a few weeks since I first visited the site. I have to admit, I am not a fan of the new setup at all. To make following the articles a bit easier, I added the feeds for each of the blogs into my reader, which provided a bit more clutter than one resource needs, and there haven’t been enough posts from all the various blogs for me to understand why a “network of blogs” is even needed. It seems that there is enough content to maintain one blog with multiple authors, than multiple blogs with limited posting. Besides, the subject matter of each of these blogs are so similar, that giving them their own category or tags seems the better road to take.
Perhaps with some cleanup of navigation, drastically increased participation from your bloggers, and more separation of subject matter between the blogs will improve things. And I know (from reading your posts) that you would love to run a blog network, but as things stand now, I think you are apt to lose readership (and even pagerank) as a result of these changes. Take a look at the Google PageRank for each of your blogs, and the PageRank for your domain:
http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com/ – PageRank: 5
http://freelancewritinggigs.com/goodstuff/ – PageRank: UNRANKED
http://freelancewritinggigs.com/webandprint/ – PageRank: UNRANKED
http://freelancewritinggigs.com/articlewriting/ – PageRank: UNRANKED
http://freelancewritinggigs.com/businesstips/ – PageRank: UNRANKED
http://freelancewritinggigs.com/networkblogging/ – PageRank: UNRANKED
http://freelancewritinggigs.com/jobtips/ – PageRank: UNRANKED
The majority of the content people come here to visit is split between 6 different blogs, and buried deeper in the site than it should be. Most of the content on your site right now has almost no relevance assigned to it by Google, and it’s buried a couple of links into the site. In moving the content Google uses to assign relevance to your site further away from the “front page”, I wouldn’t be surprised if you begin to see that PR5 slide.
I will stick around for now to see how things progress, but you definitely need to rethink these changes, and soon.
Thanks Deb, just what I needed before my glass of wine and DVD =)
@The Burnman – The funny thing is I used to have lots of complaints the blog was too cluttered with all of us posting to the same blog each day. My take? I’m not going to please everyone.
In a perfect world I would have liked to move each author’s blog posts with him or her, but there was no way to easily move different posts to different blogs.
I lost my PR5 several times in the past – when I changed to my own domain, when Google dropped me off the face of the earth for some reason or another and one other time. I learned it’s more important to write for the loyal members of my community than for page rank.
We’re working out the tweaks.
Thank you for your comments
I don’t understand why people keep complaining about the navigation. Links to all the blogs are plain as day on the main FWJ page, in the side bar and under every single post. Not to mention a link back to the main page up top and a link to the FWJ network of blogs. Perhps people expect Deb to stand over them and click for them?
@ Deborah – You certainly aren’t going to please everyone, and if you do, be sure to share the secret as to how.
Of course it is important to write for loyal members of the community, but to disregard page rank can prevent that community… and your ad revenue… from growing. Communities are similar to clients. You can offer the best product in the world, but if it’s hard to find, even your loyal customers will eventually move on.
@ Kelly – The side bar? Oh, you mean all the content located below the 3 skyscraper ad banners? Ever heard of the phrase, “out of sight, out of mind?”
If people keep complaining about something, that might be an indicative of a problem, wouldn’t you say? When the site is about freelance writing, it’s pretty safe to assume people are going to expect the site to follow best practices in content presentation.
Thanks for link love, Deb!
It’s appreciated!
Carson
“The side bar? Oh, you mean all the content located below the 3 skyscraper ad banners? Ever heard of the phrase, “out of sight, out of mind?”
Wow Burnman.
You know what I think? I think if I were Deb and I sunk a lot of time, money and energy into this blog I’d be feeling kinda sh*tty at all the negativity directed towards what I’m trying to do.
We know she’s working on positive changes. We see new stuff every day. Everyone still comes by to tell her how much they dislike what she’s doing. Nice guys. Real nice.
@ Kelly – The whole reason why I posted my comment in the first place, was to point out potential long term issues that many not have been considered before the changes were made, in the hopes that SEO would be taken into consideration to maintain traffic and search engine relevance.
And the skyscraper ads in the sidebar do indeed push relevant content way below the line of interest, unless long comments like this push people’s eyes that far down the page, which is far less common than if that relevant content was further up the page where the meat of the article is.
As for sinking time, money, and energy into a blog or website… I would much rather hear from my readers any issues which may turn them off from what I am doing so that I can possibly correct a problem BEFORE I see it hit my revenue stream.
It’s a safe bet that for every person who expresses a concern or posts a criticism, a couple have already moved on to greener pastures. If I didn’t think FWJ was worth worrying about, I would have just moved on with them.
Kelly, people are going to post criticism, some helpful and some hurtful. That is the nature of social interaction, especially on the Internet. You can try to silence it by jumping in defensively, you can ignore it, or you can look at why it’s coming up in the first place.
Ok – Let’s see. Now that I have my very own blog again, it’s so much easier to respond to all the comments directed my way. So let’s have at it, shall we?
@Burnman – I’m still working on making it work. Thank you for your insight. And though I do expect criticism, Kelly is right. It’s very much a downer to be so excited about a project and receive so much negativity in response.
@Kelly – Thanks for having my back. Would you like to respond to my email?
@Carson – You were always worthy of the link love. Good to see you back where you belong.
@Andy – That’s how I spend my weekend nights too.
Um. People! I like the idea. I think it’s much more organized this way. I think it would be really cool in a “tag” format across the top, so I could just click from one blog to another. I love this site, and will keep visiting, regardless of the design. Unless, of course, Deb starts putting up porn banners…
@April – I draw the line at porn banners.
I totally agree on the loyal members/readers over page rank.
I could care less about page rank. I get my readers from MyBlogLog, Twitter, people who see my blog listed on other blogs, etc.
Do printed books have page rank or do they rely on page rank?
Def. not.
Great content/info. pics, take-aways, something to be remembered, etc. is where it’s at.
And just a thought. Maybe somewhere there should be a rant page for people/the community to rant, criticize, suggest without swearing and put-downs and things about the format or whatever.
And now off to hunt down those awesome job leads.
Printed books don’t have PageRank, no. There are all sorts of Best Seller’s lists though, and much like websites, their success can be greatly helped by the publicity those lists provide.
For websites which require ad revenue to operate, PageRank is absolutely an important consideration. If you do this as a hobby, than it probably doesn’t mean as much to you as someone who uses their website as a source of serious income.
It amazes me that SEO is lost on many of the people posting here, especially the network blogging crowd, as how well your content ranks will directly effect your income level.
@ Michelle – Community rant page? As long as comments are enabled, people are going to use them to express their thoughts related to the content provided, and those thoughts just might contain things you don’t agree with or want to hear. And like it or not, when there is a high level of negative community response, a problem exists that needs to be addressed.
Again, my initial comment was intended to bring attention to what I believe to be an issue with the new structure of the site. If people don’t care how well the site does in the long term, that’s fine. But I was just trying to help. It isn’t like there aren’t many, many, many, many other freelance writing resources on the Internet.
They’re easy to find too… they maintain PageRank.
Thank you for the link. A fair number of people are liking my little post on not using hosted services for their business blogs which is great!
Hope all is well. Expect more from me on NBT soon.
We WERE so in a fight with MwP. Now we all love each other again. Thanks for the link love!