From my experience, when you’re starting out as a freelance writer, you don’t have a big budget to take out full page ads to proclaim your arrival. That’s why I’ll be concentrating on the free promotional methods that worked for me when I started freelancing. I won’t stop there, though, because there are a few new outlets that I think any writer starting today would do well to consider.

I’m going to keep these posts short, concentrating on saying what the promotion method is, how to do it successfully and any pros and cons. By the end of the series I hope you will have a few methods that will help you to make the next leap in your freelance writing career. If there’s anything you particularly want me to cover, feel free to let me know in the comments. And for those of you who already know all this, feel free to chip in with your stories on which methods have worked for you. Look out for the first post tomorrow.

Writing Rates In Canada

If you want an easy ready reckoner, then check out Writers.Ca, which has a rundown on professional rates for different types of writing. Writers.ca admits that there are large discrepancies between the rates offered depending on location and experience but it is a good starting point. It’s also close enough to US rates to be useful to American writers (or those who write for American clients, like me )

Writing Rates In The US

The National Writer’s Union provides detailed information on rates actually paid for writing through an online database. The catch is that you have to be a member to get the latest information. However, you can see what writers were being paid in 1999, and the NWU even tells you how to work out what that should equate to today. Writer’s Market also gives guidelines, but this information is now available only to members.

Writing Rates In The UK

For UK writers, the National Union of Journalists provides two great resources. The freelance fees guide gives the NUJ’s suggested minimums for several types of journalistic work. However, it’s also worth checking out the rate for the job database, which shows what freelancers are actually earning for the writing they do. That database is updated regularly.

Finally, if none of these resources helps you, use your research skills and see what other writers are charging for particular types of writing. Take their rates as a guide, look at their samples and see whether your experience and skills will allow you to charge more, less or the same. Take an average across a couple of sites for best results.

Finally, as a follow up to my recent post on writing income, there are two more posts to read. One is from the Web Content Copywriting blog on Setting Writer Rates. See also Rachel Kaufman’s post on negotiating writing rates.

Got more freelance writing questions? Ask them here.

Technorati Tags: freelance writing,get paid to write,writing. writing rates

Everything on the site is clear and accessible. You would be amazed at the quality of free information that’s available on that site from several freelance writers who are getting paid and getting published.

So, what has changed? The first thing you notice is the new design. The orange is still there, but it’s funky, and the text is now on a blue-grey notebook style page that is very fitting for a writing site.

The second thing is that this site integrates a lot of the old IA functions. Every topic editor has articles, a blog as well as space to link to other resources such as books and stories. There are links to the chat room and a space for archived chats.

If you haven’t been attending the IA Friday night chats then you should. They are your chance for free information about writing, publishing, promoting and much more. It’s writers talking to other writers and it’s a fun, supportive community.

This is one writing site that you should definitely bookmark. Even though I write for the site, I always enjoy visiting to see what the other topic editors have written. I find there’s always a new perspective that’s worth reading about.

Then Blogitive started to change. First, you had to write your post based on a web release - less creativity. Then you had to write two short posts in between each sponsored one, which was still worth the same $5. In my opinion, that was the bad, because with the number of blogs I had, having to write four posts to earn from two Blogitive posts was hard work. That’s only my view, though; lots of my friends still use Blogitive and are very happy.

And now for the ugly. Once they had a few more bloggers on board, they got choosy about which blogs they would accept. That I don’t mind (up to a point). What annoyed me is the way they did it. One day I logged in to find that four of my blogs had been booted. They were only accepting self hosted blogs and no blogs on blogging communities. They actually booted one of my self hosted blogs by mistake. I added it again, they booted it again, and I have decided just to let it go.

They have also set up a number of new services, such as directory listings for your blog. Apparently my Writing Lab blog doesn’t make the cut, but no one has told me why. I still have a Blogitive account, but with one blog there, it’s just not worth it anymore.

Blogitive was a great place to get started with paid posting, but there are many others who now do it better. If you have self hosted blogs and don’t mind cutting and pasting to meet the two posts between each post rule, then it might be right for you. The money can add up pretty quickly. However, watch this space. I’ll be telling you about some of the other sources that I use - and many of them are much more blogger friendly.

Now, wordcount is the most useful tool in Word, IMHO, because writers, editors and publishers always need to know how long a piece of writing is. What I normally do to avoid the problems caused by Word is compose in Notepad or Wordpad, paste into Word to spellcheck and count the words, and paste back into Wordpad or Notepad. As I found out today, that doesn’t work quite as well as I thought it did.

Instead of tearing my hair out, I got on the net and found two tools that appear to solve the problem. A free online spellcheck is available from spellcheck.net and a free online word counter can be found at allworldphone.com.

I can’t make any grand claims about these two services, as I’ve used them only once each, but they did what I needed at the time. And I’m sure there won’t be any strange characters in my next batch of articles.

And by the way, if you want a program that saves in rich text format automatically (no funny characters), and has a built in spellcheck and word count, you could do worse than Jarte. And it’s free, too!

My Squidoo Lens On Website Promotion

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a way of making it easy for Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines to find and index your pages. The easier it is for search engines to find your pages, the more likely it is that someone will come to your website and offer you work or buy a product you’ve offered for sale. SEO increases traffic to your site or blog and, in the case of WritingUp, makes it more likely that someone will click on your ads and rack up those Adsense earnings.

How do I optimize my website?

If you’re launching a site from scratch, you start with keyword research. If you’re updating an old site, start with keyword research. If you want to bring traffic to your blog (and can write about anything), start with … (you get the idea). You need to think about what keywords best describe your website, business or blog and what similar keywords people are looking for on Google, Yahoo, MSN and others.

What will keyword research cost me?

Zilch. Zip. Nada. Bupkes. You can pay if you want to, but there are a few free tools you can use that will work well if you’re on a tight budget. They are:

Overture
Wordtracker/Overture
Adwords analyzer

These tools are simple to use. You type the keywords you want into the form, enter and you get back a list of related keywords or the number of times those keywords have been searched in the past month. Once you’ve identified the keywords that are best for you, you need to put them into your page content. This is covered in Part 2 of the series.
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The wireless internet anywhere concept becomes feasible due to very rapid and high development in wireless communication. Due to this development people are launching websites and selection of web design is becoming critical issue fro them. After selecting the design they move towards domain name registration for their websites. After this, there is a need of web site hosting to launch the website. But, the web owners of image based sites are trying to get best image hosting for their website along with high efficient backup services. But, then there is a need of promotion of websites with which hosting companies are also providing search engine optimization services.
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As a minimum, you should know how to structure a news story or feature article. With news writing, you’ll need to include the who, what, where, why, when and how of the story. If you’re writing a feature, you’ll need to flesh the story out a bit and tell it in an interesting way - and in the way that’s most appropriate for the readers you’re trying to reach. After all, you’d write very different stories for the New York Times and the Surfing Times, wouldn’t you?
Make sure you have the right equipment: telephone and mobile phone; PC or laptop; a dictaphone or other recorder for recording interviews; a printer and a scanner. A digital camera is also useful, as you’ll be able to take pictures to go along with your article.