Freelance Writing and Research

Do you ever wonder about your relationship to your freelance writing business? Are you happy with the way things are going or would you rather have less work or more?

I find that my realtionship with my writing goes through highs and lows, one day I am on top of the world that I am able to make money with my writing and other times I wonder why I do it.

Of course I know why I do it - I think that sometimes the writing for money interferes with my writing for the sheer pleasure of putting fingers to keys or pen to paper. Having said that there are some projects that fire me with enthusiasm and the money I earn is an added bonus.

What is your relationship to your freelance writing - Do you go through periods of doubt? 

Freelance Writing Business

In the title above I have empasised the last word of freelance writing business because it is all too easy to forget that if you are writing for money, then technically you have a business.

Most writers dream of the day when they can say goodbye to the morning rush and the difficult boss and spend their time writing from home. Sounds good doesn't it? The problem with this idealised view of the freelancing life is that the business side of things gets lost somwehere.

Help at Hand

There is help at hand for writers who are not keen on the business side of things or for those who simply have no idea how to track projects, time, invoicing and payments - this help can be found at http://www.creativeprooffice.com/.

Creativeprooffice is a completely free web based application that you can sign up for (if you have a firefox browser) and get started in less than 5 minutes. This software keeps track of clients, projects, time worked on that project on any particular day, invoicing and payments. You can keep track of how much time you actually spend on work for each client and this gives you a fair idea of what your hourly rate actually is.

Creativeprooffice is so simple to use, it took me less than five minutes to get signed up, add a client and a project along with what stage the work was at, I was also able to generate an invoice that will be ready to email out when I finish the project tomorrow. If you haven't tried this great software then you really ought to take a look - it takes a lot of the time out of the organization process. If you've already tried it then let me know what you think. 

SEO content creation in case you're not sure is content creation that is search engine optimised i.e. it is designed to get your content and therefore your website noticed by the search engines.

Google is hot on fresh content and when that content is properly optimised Google is quite happy to crawl your site and maybe even give it a page ranking. There are a lot of writers out there offering content creation but offering seo content is rather different.

A writer dealing with seo content creation may undertake keyword research to identify which terms are the most searched on a particular day - they may then try to work those primary, secondary and long tail keywords into the artciles or content they are creating.

SEO content creation is better paid than most other content writing gigs because it requires more skill on the part of the writer. It is all too easy to stuff an article with content to the point where it is just a fluffy background for certain words.

Google Isn't Fooled

Google isn't fooled by keyword stuffed content, if you do it too often in fact you could get your site banned by the search engine. What Google likes is original, quality content that is sensibly optimised so that both the search engines and the web surfers can find it. 

I am quite a fan of good blogging sites because it was on such a site that I actually got started in the Freelance Writing Business. One of the forums that I belonged to was raving about Xoomba, apparently the site gets a lot of traffic and having searched it out that seems to be the case. Because the site gets a lot of traffic there are some high adsense earners there. The sites splits on a 50/50 basis with writers.

There are two ways to boost your earnings and your website or writing at Xoomba and this is through blurbs and bites. A bite is usually a blog article of at least a hundred words and the blurbs are similar to the things you see on Twitter, a short introduction and a link to content. If you want to check it out then perhaps you would use my referral link, which is here