Archives for May 2008

Freelance Writing Jobs for Friday, May 30, 2008

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Good morning FWJ Friends! It’s Friday, and the end of the month already. I’ve got some blogging jobs this morning, along with internships, a gig for a reporter, and some proofreading and editing stuff too.  I hope everyone has a good weekend and that you find something you are interested in applying for on today’s list.

Leads…

Good Luck!

Jodee

Tips for Pitching a Blog to a Network

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Many network bloggers, or aspiring network bloggers, have great ideas for blogs. If this is the case, they might want to pitch it to their networks. The worst they can do is say "no", right? If you have an untouched niche or a fun idea running around in your head, do suggest it to your editors. Here are a few tips to help you out:

Take Your Time

Instead of rushing off a hurried email to your editor, take your time to craft a well-written, well thought out proposal. Describe exactly what you had in mind with the blog and why you feel it will be successful. Include:

  • Possible name and available domain names
  • A detailed description
  • Statistics regarding the niche
  • Links to other similar blogs
  • How you plan on making it different from others in the niche.
  • Who do you feel will read this blog?
  • How do you plan on promoting your blog?

Don’t Bug

Don’t bug your editor or contact at the network. If you don’t hear back in a day or two remember editors and people in charge are busy and get email inquiries from hundreds each day. After a decent amount of time, say 30 days, write back and inquire. If you still don’t receive an answer you have several recourses:

  • Continue to wait
  • Shop your idea elsewhere
  • Start up your own blog

If the network turns down your idea

If the network turns down your idea, hopefully they will give you a reason. For instance, they don’t see it as a profitable idea or they already have a similar blog. You can continue to shop your idea around or you can start the blog on your own. It’s good to remember being turned down is nothing personal. There’s a business decision behind it, but that should deter you as a blogger.

You also not let one rejection discourage you from coming up with other ideas in the future. Bloggers are creative people and rejection is only a momentary setback. If you think positive, you’re sure to find an outlet for your ideas.

Freelance Writing Jobs for Thursday, May 28, 2008

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Good morning FWJ Friends! It’s a beautiful spring morning here, sunny and warm. I have some internships this morning, along with a research gig and some translation jobs. I’ve got some blogger opps, and web content and copywriting jobs as well. The employer with the sizzlin’ hot company is willing to train, so that might be a good one for those of you who are new to the freelance writing game. I hope that wherever you are the weather is beautiful and that you have a great day.

Leads…

Good Luck!

Jodee

Some Cool Niche Blogs

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Yesterday Jennifer talked about how she likes to read blogs not in her niche or about blogging. I like to call them recreational blogs. I read them as recreation rather than work or research. What I love so much about niche blogging is seeing all the different types of blogs – and different types of passions. What I’d like to do today, if you don’t mind, is highlight some of the more interesting niche blogs I’ve come across. Some of this is to show you different ideas and another is because I like to give props to people who do cool things. Some of these blogs aren’t on my daily or weekly read list, but I did want to highlight them because they’re unique niches.

Behold, some great niche blogs:

As you can see, people will blog about anything, and most of these blogs do well. What are some of the more unusual niches you’ve come across?

Freelance Writing Jobs for Wednesday, May 28, 2008

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Good morning FWJ Friends! Not many blogging opps today, but I do have some magazine leads thrown into the mix. I’ve got some copy writing and editing gigs, along with an employer looking for web site reviews and  a few proofreading jobs. I hope you find something interesting on today’s list.

Leads…

Good Luck!

Jodee

No Link Love For Blogging Bloggers Today

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I was going to link to some good blogging posts today, but decided not to. Deb did on Sunday anyhow, and we read a lot of the same stuff.

I like blogs in the niches I blog best; probably because I (thankfully) get to blog what I enjoy. I love architect bloggers, and also really like blogging and green bloggers. These are the topics I write about most, and likewise the blogs I visit most.

However, breaking out of your niche is cool. I think bloggers should have a good handful of blogs, that don’t relate to their own topic, that they visit on a regular basis. There are payoffs for visiting outside of niche blogs. The biggest is you have no idea what other people read. If folks see you around, making comments, they might click your name and like what they see. Sometimes you get the oddest, most seemingly out of character readers.

Example: For the longest time, at Offbeat Homes, I got a ton of page views from one guy. I went to investigate. Turns out he didn’t even have a blog, he was on one of the social network sites – MySpace or something like it, where we had one friend in common. All this kid (he was young) talked about was beer. How to get it, drink it, and beer based shenanigans; typical kid just found beer behavior. He did however, like my blog. He’d link to it, and this kid had oodles of pals, who also only talked about beer, but they liked beer guy, so they’d click on his links. End result, me with lots of page views (and some odd comments – but I can live with that). You never know who might like you.

Another benefit is it keeps you from wearing out. Maybe five of my blogs are green, or have a heavy eco slant. I love green, really, but sometimes I’m just so tired of thinking about it all the time. Reading outside of my niche probably saves me from complete and total saturation; my brain gets a rest. You can also get some quirky ideas. You’ll find stuff you don’t normally blog about, that you can perhaps slant to your topic. All in all it keeps things fresh.

So today, forget reading all the blogging blogs, forget blogs in your niche, go find something new. If you have no clue where to start, here are five random ‘out of my niche’ blogs I visit.

Now tell me five out of your niche blogs you like. I need some nice new reading.

Freelance Writing Jobs for Tuesday, May 27, 2008

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Good morning FWJ Friends! It’s Tuesday and we’ve got jobs for you this morning. There are some internships, blogging gigs, and stuff for content writers. I’ve got a couple of translating jobs, too. I hope you find something you are interested in on today’s list and please do let us know if you get hired for one of the jobs posted here. We love success stories!

Leads…

Good Luck!

Jodee

How To Look Like A Smack Amateur

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Don’t note your sources.

For crying out loud – this is blogging 101. This weekend I did my weekend prowl for cool news and other items, and must have seen at least 40 blogs with items, pictures, and quotes, yet not a source among them.

If you didn’t build it, make it, think it, create it, let me know who did. Nothing is more obnoxious than a blogger showing a house or cool art creation and not sourcing it. None of the blogs I saw tricks like this at were network based, but some were client owned blogs, or blogs for profit. Some of the blog were bigger names in their niche too. Shame on them. I’d list them, but don’t want to give them any link love.

If you are posting images or statistics or quotes with no source it’s not on the up and up where legalities are concerned, and worse, it makes you look lame and uninformed – read this: Blogs and Images.

Ok, rant over; I guess it’s just that few things make me as mad as finding a cool house I can’t mention or link to at Offbeat, simply because the blogger didn’t source it. Back to our regularly scheduled nice friendly tips.

PicApp: Benefits for Bloggers

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Guest Post by David Peralty

Deb’s note: I asked my friend and brand new community manager for PicApp to offer a guest post letting you know more about this great free, legal resource for images. I’ve been using PicApp for several months, and while there are still bugs to work out, I also see improvements being made and a way for me to use news and celebrity images legally. The image you see here is from PicApp.

Most of the blog networks that I have ever been involved with don’t spend the money to have access to images. Either they haven’t considered this, or they assumed we could find the images we need from the variety of free sources out there in the market.

Unfortunately, these free sources aren’t always filled with the images we need or want, and as such many bloggers jump over to Google’s Image Search and use copyright images without permission. This is illegal, but for the most part, it has been considered harmless. The harmless factor goes out the window when you are using images for a network blog. Networks are businesses and as such they have to be treated in a certain way. They can’t violate copyright laws or they will eventually have to deal with legal issues that could cost money, and eventually ruin a network.
Some blog networks have already started creating content guidelines to protect themselves, while still not offering money to get the high quality images they require for their content.

PicScout, the parent company of PicApp saw this issue, and while tracking how much copyright violation there is with their Image Tracker service, they realized that there was a void in the marketplace. Bloggers wanted high quality images, but they didn’t have the financial resources to back it up. PicApp contacted Getty, Corbis and other high quality image providers to come up with a solution.

The solution is PicApp, and its service. PicApp provides Getty and Corbis images through a flash embed system. This protects Getty and Corbis from having their images stolen, and through an ad interface on the embedded image, Getty, Corbis and other image providers will make some money back on the use of their images.

This provides bloggers with high quality images from the top stock photography sources in a way that continues to keep the providers happy.

PicApp has now gone beyond just providing those images though, and has added features that make it even easier for bloggers to get what they need. PicApp has added RSS for search, allowing you to subscribe to your searches so that you are notified of new images being added to PicApp.

This is great for those tracking events, or constantly talking about the same subject, so that you don’t have to come back and search on PicApp; instead, we will send the updates right to you.

We have also arranged to have constant updates from our image providers, meaning that bloggers can find images of sporting events before they have even concluded. This gives a competitive edge to the bloggers using PicApp. They will have images of celebrities, amazing sporting events, or even political events before they finish allowing their posts to be even more relevant and interesting.

It has been proven time and time again that adding relevant images to a post attracts more attention than posts without any images.

PicApp is still in beta and as such we are still looking for feedback, so if you have any questions, concerns, or comments, please let me know either here on this post, or at [email protected]

Try Adding A Current Event Link To Your Posts

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Over at Tree Hugging Family, co-blogger Peggy and I have been trying some different blog traffic building techniques out. If they work out, I may be sharing some here so that you can give them a shot at your blog. The first new trick we tried in May was a current event link.

A major issue at THF is that we post a lot, always have some sort of feature and poll going on, and we often have contests too. Who can keep up? We were trying to keep readers up to date with links before, but it got super annoying to end each post like this:

“Don’t forget to enter our contest, oh and this contest, and check in at the poll. We’re also running some special features this month like blah feature and blah feature, AND hey, are you signed up for our current green challenge?”

That’s like six links and it’s obnoxious. Plus, although we have a contact us page, it seems that people can’t find it, because we’d get comments like, “How do I contact you?”

We decided to try a current event link. Here’s what we did:

At the start of May we wrote one post and titled it current events. We made one basic link back that says, “Click here to learn about all the current contests, themes, and green challenges going on at Tree Hugging Family in May 2008” Now, if you click on it, you’ll see that we have all our contests, features, and events, posted in link form in this post, plus we included easy to find contact information.

We’ve been updating this one current event post all month, and then we’ve been simply inserting this link at the end of each and every post we write.

Has it worked?:

So far on our end, it’s been much simpler than a massive reminder link at the end of posts. This also fits our main goal of having THF be a reader friendly experience. We want folks to find what they need without much work. Also, both page views and links to our blog have increased this month. It’s tough to tell if the master link is helping there, but it seems like it. We’ll know better after doing this a few months in a row.

Why not give a master current event link a try at your blog, and see how it works for you? If you do try it out let me know if your traffic goes up, or tell me what sort of response you get to it.

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