Nerd Writer Mom Blog

Google Algorithm Update 2011 - Downdate?

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 03:34:00 +0000

On February 23, 2011, the first major Google Search algorithm update since Mayday in 2010 started to show itself. Today, February 24, Webmasterworld is bursting at the seams with talk of a "content farm" update mentioned recentl by Google's Matt Cutts - and here is the announcement by Google. Judging by the panicky topics of forum threads today, general-interest "magazine style" sites like HubPages and Suite101 may have taken a hit in the search engine results.

What does this mean for content writers? At best, it may mean some instability in the ranking of our articles; at worst, it could mean serious ranking drops, with perhaps more tweaking by Google as the new SERPs settle into place. The sites on which we write may suffer the stigma of bad-quality content farms and be penalized by this algorithm update. Writers, in short, may do better publishing on our own rather than on the big sites. Writing on your own site, short-term earnings might decrease, but long-term earnings could match or even exceed the old.

Although my articles on HubPages and Suite101 have taken a pretty noticeable hit, on a tiny site I have that is not monetized by Google AdSense, views have increased, while on a slightly larger but still small site that IS monetized by AdSense, visits have stayed the same.

We'll see how this pans out. As I've said before, the Web is always changing. This is about as rough as it gets. But it's not the end of opportunity for the little guy - just the beginning, in fact.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Content Farms Are Not Evil, Just Upstarts

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 21:35:00 +0000

If you've heard the term "content farms," then you've heard people rail against websites widely considered to be content farms: Demand Media's eHow, About.com, WiseGeek, BrightHub, Suite101, HubPages, InfoBarrel, even Wikipedia...and hundreds more. As content farms, these websites either get their content from crowdsourcing (that is, they get their content from everyday people as opposed to those employed on a contract or permanent basis) or from contract writers with not necessarily journalistic qualifications.

Google has recently declared war of sorts on content farms. It's not clear at all to me whether their definition of content farms is the same as yours or mine, or even whether Google considers properties like Demand Media to be farms.

But regular folks do use the term "content farm" for the websites above. They complain that:

They are not "authority" websites.
They are spam.
They have copied, spun or scraped content.
They produce volumes of content just to make money.
They don't offer value to the user.

I'm here to disagree, or rather to defend content farms, and in a big way. Yes, I write for some of those websites. I'm also a user of some of those websites. And I see a different perspective.

Do these websites exist to make money? Yes. So do newspapers. So do massage therapists. So do call centers. So do doctors. So do the big banks. So do food producers. So does any profit based business. They all produce a product or a service, sometimes out of love for that product or service, sometimes not, but at least out of the desire to make money. Content farms are doing nothing that the businesses they are competing against are not also doing. Is it moral? That's for you to decide. But the question at hand is, is their product or service useful? I'd say that we can spare the big banks, but not so much the content farms. We need those, for reasons I'll explain soon.
Are content farms spam, existing only to be "monetized" by Google AdSense? I don't know, and furthermore, only Google does, and they haven't been saying much about it.
Do content farms have copied, spun, or scraped content? From my perspective, I see far more content copied, spun and scraped from content farms than by them. But I'll admit this is anecdotal evidence and that yes, some content creators do copy or spin content on some of these content farms, despite each sites' attempts at quality controls. (Incidentally, the websites on which I've published do not want recycled or rewritten content, which is considered plagiarism). However, the problem of intellectual property violation is by no means limited to content farms. Rather, content farms are a front-stage but relatively small part of a much bigger show. The huge problem assaulting the web is the inevitable challenge posed by digital technology to existing intellectual property laws designed in an infrastructure of print and controlled media. What does that mumbo-jumbo mean? Basically, that it was hard to copy things before, and now it's easy, and the old intellectual property laws were designed to protect property that was already well-protected by physical constraints. For example, in the world of magazines, people used to read only the few magazines sold in the physical bookstores or by subscription or in the library, and you had to physically copy them, transport them, covertly resell them, etc. Now to copy and publish material, all you have to do is search for one of the billions of bits of published material freely available, copy, paste, post, and earn...it takes less than twenty minutes and chances are you won't even get caught. The laws and the technology have to catch up with what people can now do in their new environment without stifling necessary free expansion. This is hard, and not a problem caused by content farms, but by the Internet itself.
I'll deal with #1 and #5 together, since they're related. Does the content in question have authority? Value? Yes, a goodly portion of it does. Content farms are not always sourced by authorities in the traditional sense, but that does not mean the content does not offer value for the users as good as, and even better than (since many are more concisely and clearly written), that of so-called authority sites (so-called because our criteria for calling a website an authority are controversial). They're valuable because these "farms" utilize the skills of the unproven but talented (read: youth), the authority of the freelance little guy rather than that of the hired drudge (what's the difference, again?), the garage expert rather than the certified and accredited expert. But wait, now...they utilize the certified and accredited experts, too, because the opportunities for jobs in the traditional job market are fading. Sure, those experts could have their own websites, but content farms make publishing easy for the non-techie. In fact, that's what the "content farms" that aren't editorially controlled are, like HubPages: they're massively popular self-publishing platforms. Even Suite101, though editorially controlled, doesn't dictate titles or topics. Those that use established professional editors like About.com and Demand Media actually seek experts to write for them, and get them, too, because the experts are out of traditional work. So yes, the expertise IS there on these websites; and where it's not, we have homegrown expertise, creativity, and talent coming from out of the woodwork, just as it did at another time of a critical economic shift - the Golden Age in the early 20th century.

Everyone who reads this blog knows that I tend to proselytize about the "new economic model" of the Internet. Though I'm not really a preachy person, I'll probably keep doing so on this subject until I'm done. Think of the World Wide Web as a big, new territory opening up from what was a shrinking, overpopulated, and highly competitive territory. Online, there's lots of space and resources and people are moving here for economic and social reasons: it's cheaper, faster, more equitable, and more bountiful than the economy built on the technology of the train, car, telephone, airplane, and TV.
Content farms provide something akin to a ramshackle mall structure in this new land: they provide a framework for people to enter the land and get down to business. Writers publish not just the stereotypical "made for AdSense" or "MFA" pages, but marketing pages for struggling businesses (the much-maligned affiliate model), creative works, and the "how to" tricks of human enterprise that allow people engaged in all trades, from cooking to boat building, to set down their knowledge when there is no apprenticeship model or family inheritance model any longer for transmitting this knowledge. Content farms offer publishing platforms for what will soon be a new Golden Age of creativity and information, the first truly bright spot in progress since the World War II era.
The people publishing on content farms now are not mostly scammers or spammers. They're disreputable, but only as the pioneers of the past were: they're the immigrants, the newcomers, the non-established, non-certified new blood, and in a dying economy, what we need is this new blood.
Yes, there's a lot of dreck produced on content farms. I don't like that, but I consider it not much different from the dreck produced and sanctioned by corporations calling themselves newspapers. (Why do we need the Associated Press again? AP was invented alongside the telegraph, so that regional papers could get non-regional news. Well, the Internet takes care of that now; with a click of the mouse, I can read about the earthquake in the newspaper of the city in which it's happening. So shouldn't newspapers let go of all recycled content?)

To get good content, we have to open ourselves up to all non-harmful content. That's what content farms are good at doing. Sure, it's a search engine's challenge to lead people to content that isn't harmful. But that doesn't mean getting rid of those upstart content farms, despite the speculation running rampant all over the Web, including a recent discussion on Webmasterworld.com. Hey, somebody come up with a real content management system that your grandmother could use, and then maybe we can get rid of content farms.
What do you think?Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Is CPC Overrated When Deciding on Keywords?

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:52:00 +0000

When writing revenue sharing articles and researching keywords, CPC - the metric that stands for "cost per click" and, when using the Google AdWords keyword tool, represents the estimated bid amounts advertisers can expect to pay for keywords - may not be as important as SEO experts will tell you. In my experience, CPC never jives with actual Google AdSense earnings, even after taking into account the 68% publishers get after the split, and I don't give it more than a fleeting glance when I do keyword research.

In fact, I'll go farther and say I think so much focus on statistics can hurt a writer's income, because we then learn that mysterious, meaningless stats are the key to earning, and our intuition is worthless. And that's not true.

You can't ignore stats, but the key is to think in terms of marketing. When you understand that writers who are earning by revenue sharing are not just writers, but marketers, as well, you have made an important step toward earning online by writing articles for revenue share.

Why is a marketing mindset important? Well, the Internet started as an academic thing, but around 1996-ish, the web changed. It became commercial. The growing need for paid content on the Internet is at the moment directly related to the need to provide content for advertisers.

There are other ways to earn money online writing - for instance, by selling your content on commission through Constant-Content. But to earn money with revenue sharing articles at HubPages, Suite101, InfoBarrel, or other sites, a writer writes an article that is, at his or her conscious or unconscious instigation, whether directly or indirectly, advertising copy.

I belabor that point because I've learned it's not necessarily the mindset of beginning revenue share writers, especially those previously published in print.

Knowing you're a marketer, not just a writer, doesn't mean you have to sell your soul to the devil and write about products you don't approve of or lie about them. It just means you need a marketing related mindset when you write about things. This doesn't mean being a salesman. A marketing mindset is simply one that involves persuasion. Some writers do this instinctively just by offering their opinions; other writers craft their words consciously.

Writers tend to be really good at marketing, because it's what we do anyway when we write fiction or present an argument - we persuade people something is true. When you write revenue sharing articles, that's what you also do - persuade them something is true. And the dandy thing is, because you work for yourself, you can make sure you only write what you think is the truth and promote products you do like. No great moral stress here.

The thing about a marketing mindset is that it gets you thinking about what advertisers are thinking about - specifically, products. In each article, there's a product - either implied or directly mentioned.

If you don't have experience or training in marketing, to figure out articles that are potential earners in the real world, without using the CPC metric, but rather by flexing your marketing muscle, try this:

Look at yourself, your parents, your relatives, your coworkers, your teachers, and your friends. Ask yourself - what would they buy on the Internet to solve a pressing problem?   What have they bought in the past?

With a global online community, each person you know, no matter how unusual or quirky, represents a microcosm of a much larger group of people spread out all over the world.

It could be anything from a girdle to an accessory for a musical instrument, from software to a vitamin supplement to a DVD they've been wanting but that isn't locally available.

Then ask yourself what sort of article would they be reading when they're in the frame of mind to buy that product. Then check to see if there are already articles out there that are like that, that are already accessible by a wide variety of keywords. If so, writing the article will probably only get you short term earnings, if at all.   Don't bother, I'd say.

But if not...write the article. Do pay attention to keywords and competition, but don't pay too much attention to CPC. If you don't believe me, try it the other way first. Then report back here whether you think knowing the CPC really made a difference to your success.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

50 Reasons Writing Online Pays Better Than Regular Jobs or Print

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 01:46:00 +0000

There is no shortage of people who will tell you that writing for money on the Internet is a scam, sweatshop labor, unprincipled, selling out to The Man, and undervaluing yourself. That's one way to look at it, I guess. But I look at it differently. Before I tell you the fifty reasons I think writing online is the greatest opportunity for people to earn money in a century, I have to qualify it: It's not all perfect.

The potential for earning money by writing online is nearly limitless, but the reality is dampening. "You mean I'm not going to get paid the mega big bucks?" "That's all an Internet writer who works for himself makes?" You can earn a lot writing online, but as it happens, most don't. I'd hazard that even most of those who are succeeding at it don't earn wages comparable to a teacher's salary. The pay tends to be either slow and steady if you're earning by revenue sharing, or fast and furious if you're writing for hire and need lots of money. There aren't as many big gigs available as there are micro-gigs - gigs that you do in quantity and that add up. It's not a get rich quick scheme. (Though I do think over the years you can do very well.)

Furthermore, you have to pay self-employment taxes. You may not have any health insurance. And no matter what anyone will tell you, it's not passive income; it takes far more maintenance than income from book royalties. Working for yourself presents a number of challenges, there's no doubt about it. It can take a year or two or three to get to the stage where you're earning enough to get by on and you can quit your regular job or reduce your hours.

But that's not the whole story. Nowhere near. That's the voice of a vanishing old economic model raising a cry of protest and unreadiness in the face of a strange and unfamiliar new economic model. Those cautions only sound reasonable because we've all gotten used to the idea that the odds of succeeding in writing are fifty thousand to one, and that the rewards have to be correspondingly astronomical. But the times, they're a'changing.

To read more about why I believe they're changing, see my article on why making money by writing online isn't going away.

So I think writing online is worth it, and I'll tell you 50 reasons why. And I'm only stopping at 50 because it's a nice, round number. If you want the short version, most of the reasons add up to two things:

You have fewer expenses.
Your quality of life improves.

50 Reasons That Writing Online Rocks

There are at least as many ways to earn money online as in the print world. On the Internet, you can choose the ones that suit you, for the most part. In the print world, you take whatever you can get.
You don't have to suck up to a boss under fear of being squashed like a bug 'cause a boss can make your work life hell or give you a bad reference - if she doesn't decide to fire your tush. This means less stress. Less stress means less compulsive spending on de-stressing things like junk food, books on how to find your inner child, and pedicures.
You don't have to play work politics every day and smile if you're feeling crappy or pretend you don't hear them maligning your religion. Less stress. (Let's just call it LS from now on, okay?)
You don't have to work with coworkers you don't like. LS.
You don't have to buy noise reducing earbuds to block out the chatty coworker in the next cubicle just so you can focus. Or, if you are that chatty coworker, you can make all the noise you want, blast music, whatever you need in order to work. You control the noise level of your work environment.
You don't have a daily quota to meet. Yes, you need to make enough money. But how much you work on any given day is up to you. LS.
You don't have to go to work when there's nothing to do and sit there frustrated, twiddling your thumbs and wishing you could take comp time now because you know you'll have to work overtime during the busy season. If there's no work, you don't work. Way more efficient.
You don't have to buy coworkers presents or make casseroles for birthday luncheons.
You don't have to feel guilty for taking long breaks.
There's no need to keep a tally of how much time you need to make up because you were five minutes late twice this week.
No traffic. LS.
You sleep better. No leaping out of bed and dressing in five minutes to make the bus or beat the traffic when your alarm clock doesn't go off.
You don't have to work when you're sick, so you get well faster and have less to catch up on. And because you stay home, you don't spread the germs to everyone at work and cause the office to be shorthanded and ultimately have to work harder to play catch-up, and deal with the "too many sick days" comments on job evaluations, and feel horribly guilty for not being at work every hour you're scheduled.
You can work at night if you're a night owl. Your schedule accommodates your personal peak energy times and your down times.
You can work in the home office, the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedroom, the Starbucks, at your mother-in-law's house, or on the lawn if you want to.
You can pop off to go running, walking, swimming, or whatever exercise takes your fancy at any time.
You don't have to spend hours commuting every day. (If you factor in commuting time to the hours you work in traditional jobs, you'll find your pay per hour is a lot lower than you thought.)
You don't usually have to do bookkeeping. It's done for you automatically, online.
Reporting taxes as a self-employed online writer is somewhat easier than as a self-employed published-in-print writer. There's no scrambling to find those writer's conference receipts you shoved in a drawer somewhere, exhausted, and forgot.
You don't have to pay for daycare for your kids.
You don't have to pay for pet sitters.
You don't have to pay for an exotic alarm system for your home, because you're always there, defending it mightily.
You don't have to buy McBreakfasts on the way to work, shell out money for $oup, $alad and $andwiches for lunch, or buy boxes of Oreo cookies to eat for dinner while you work overtime.
On the other hand, if you want to eat boxes of Oreo cookies at your desk, there's no nosy busybody coworker to tell you you're eating too many fat grams and refined sugar.
If you work overtime, you get rewarded. Unlike salaries, more work equals more pay.
Schmoozing is much cheaper, with almost no out of pocket expense. You don't have to pay for writer's conference registration fees, hotel fees, restaurant meals, and transportation fees, because you don't go to them. You pay instead with your time when you do social networking. Seriously, you can never go in debt with that kind of outlay.
You don't have to pay for the three "p's" of writing submissions to traditional markets: postage, paper and printer.
You don't have to pay for an expensive wardrobe. A robe is fine; no "ward" necessary.
You don't have to pay for expensive haircuts and other beauty treatments. Your cat doesn't care.
You don't have to shower every day. So your soap, deodorant, shampoo, and lotion expenses diminish greatly (and the people you live with give you a nice, comfortable wide berth.)
You don't have to pay for gas or bus or train fare. (At least, not on work's behalf.)
You don't have to pay for car insurance. (Again, you might use your car, but it's not work that's making you do it, anymore.)
You don't have to live in an expensive city. You can live in a less expensive, and roomier, home in an outlying area.
You don't have to get a higher degree to certify you.
You can start over with a clean slate if there are blots on your career. A bad reference, a bad former job experience, a long period of disability...these won't cripple your new career. You can reinvent yourself.
You can write on subjects that interest you - at least, to some degree. You'll still have to do some writing that's not the great American novel, but you don't have to write a boring technical manual if you don't want to.
You can go big or small. You can do small projects that take only a few minutes or a couple of hours or take on long term projects that go on for months. It's your call.
If you're earning by revenue share, you effectively get paid vacations and days off.
You get rewards throughout the day: you see your small successes and your earnings, and they motivate you.
If your working arrangement needs changing - say your desk needs to be moved - you can fix it without going through official approval channels, multiple committee meetings, and heated office politics. LS.
You eat healthier at home than at work. (Though this one depends on a lot of things. But in principle, if you have more control over what you eat and where you buy it, then you can eat more healthfully.)
You don't have to go on interviews to get jobs or gigs. (Well, not if you don't want to. Jobs through oDesk and eLance and Guru and the rest may involve interviews with potential clients, but they're usually in the comfort of your own home, and at your convenience, and not half as stressful.)
You don't have to spend time writing query letters or keeping track of submissions.
You don't have to wait on your manuscript for months or even a year until you hear from the editor you submitted it to, only to find out you were using outdated submission guidelines ("Yes, the latest market listing said we were accepting unsolicited submissions, but that was then - now we're only accepting agented material.")
If your work gets rejected, or you're not making enough money, or you're running into problems, you can complain about it to, and get support from, others who are in the same boat. In fact, no writer's conference or work lounge can compare to the 24/7 support network available to online writers.
Your success is based on how good you are and how hard you work, with a dollop of luck, and virtually no cash investment. For the last several decades, for a writer wanting to be published in traditional print, success was based on how much money was available for networking, how good the writer was at schmoozing, her intuition but also her luck in entering a market just when they were looking for exactly what she was offering, her stubborn persistence in submitting again and again and again and again and again...and a dollop of how talented she was and how hard she worked.
You're nicer to your family because you're less stressed.
You feel more in control of your own destiny.
You feel that there's hope, instead of the frustration of banging your head against a wall.
And best of all: "Work" is no longer an ugly word. "I'm working" means everything from "Shh, I'm writing an article" to "I'll be with you in a sec, I'm just doing a little research'" to "I'm trying to learn about keywords, this is really interesting" to "That's hilarious! What? Oh, it's the writer's forum" to "I'm chatting with an editor, she's actually from my hometown" to "I'm not doing much, sleepy now, just browsing jobs" to "I'm not shopping, I'm doing research - ooh, that's pretty" to "What's another word for 'infiltrate' - what's that, sweetheart? You've got a booger? Here, wipe your nose with a tissue." Work doesn't take over life. It is living.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Is Rewriting a Copyright Violation?

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 19:30:00 +0000

My last post covered rewriting and plagiarism, but I wanted to do a quick post on copyright infringement as regards to rewriting articles, too. Why? I recently had to file a DMCA notice with Google AdSense regarding a copyright infringement of an article I wrote. My article wasn't copied word for word, however - it was rewritten.

That doesn't make it less of a copyright infringement, at least in the United States. According to the U.S. Department of State's Focus on Intellectual Property Rights, republished in part in this glossary, there's a chance that the concept of "substantial similarity" would apply and protect my work from being rewritten.

What is substantial similarity? The glossary defines it as how similar an original copyrighted work is to the work accused of copyright violation, and notes:

Exact word-for-word or line-for-line identity does not define the limits of copyright infringement. U.S. courts have chosen the flexible phrase "substantial similarity" to define that level of similarity that will, together with proof of validity and copying, constitute copyright infringement.

So if you rewrite a work or more than one works, even if you don't use the exact phrasing, even if you never copy a single sentence, it's not only considered plagiarism, but also may constitute copyright infringement.

And if that's not enough to convince you, according to Copyright.gov, you've got a violation of copyright if you reproduce, distribute, perform, publicly display, or make the original work "into a derivative work without the permission of the copyright owner."

What is a derivative work? Back to the glossary: It's a work that's "based on a preexisting work that is changed, condensed, recast, or embellished in some way."

As with everything legal, the words are open to interpretation. But if you've had your original work copied, but not with the exact words, it still may be protected by copyright law. And if you're thinking of rewriting an existing article or articles, the safest bet would be to not do that, but produce your own original creative work instead.

And one more note. This doesn't mean you can't use other peoples' articles as sources when writing your own. There's a subtle, but very real, difference between rewriting as copyright infringement and writing your own article using another article as a source. I go into more detail about sourcing in Is Rewriting the Same as Plagiarism.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Is Rewriting the Same as Plagiarism? The Answer May Surprise You.

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:20:00 +0000

Many content writers wonder whether it's OK to rewrite articles by other people when they write for article sites like Suite101 or Demand Studios. Is it allowed? Is it plagiarism? Is it worth it?

A common complaint about people who write for "content farms," as they're called - Demand Media being one of the largest - is that they simply rewrite articles that already exist elsewhere on the web. Most websites make it explicit to writers that they are not to do this; they want original content. Really original. Not just rewritten. Many do anyway, though, whether writing for their own web pages or for clients. It's a temptation that's hard to resist.

Rewriting articles is, however, plagiarism. Usually. Sometimes it's even considered copyright violation. Sometimes it's plagiarism even when you're rewriting your own work. Yet this is not common knowledge amongst web content writers. People are often confused about the difference between original writing and rewriting. Before I talk about why rewriting an article actually is a form of plagiarism, I want to take a moment to question the value of rewriting at all.

Rewriting Offers Short Term Rewards - Very Short Term
The reason people rewrite articles is that they want to make money off of them. They think that given the nature of the way search engines work, it's a harmless way to enter a niche without producing original creative work. The reasoning goes like this:

If an existing article is optimized for keyword ABC, then people searching for keyword DEF (which is really the same as ABC in meaning) will sadly not be able to find the ABC article. So why not help readers and myself at the same time by rewriting the ABC article with the DEF keywords? Readers will have access to this information, I will make money, and I'm not actually encroaching on the writer's intellectual property or copyright or profits, right?

Well...sort of. The problem is that Google Search is getting better and better at being intelligent enough to know that keywords DEF are associated with ABC. In some keyword combinations, it already does. So your efforts might be wasted; it's doubtful you'd be able to compete with the earlier article without offering something new of real value.

But even if you're wily and manage to rank well for the rewritten article, there's the little matter of copyright violation. You've effectively stolen traffic from the author - not competed, not provided a better product, but infringed on copyright, at least in some jurisdictions. Copyright infringement, which is mostly about money, is not the same as plagiarism, which is mostly about ethics, but they're closely related.

Did you know that if you write an article about a book and you publish a summary of the key items of value of the book - the items that makes the book worth buying - and this results in significantly fewer sales for the book, then you leave yourself open to legal action?

There is an interesting dilemma here for the writer who wants to rewrite. You see a niche that needs filling. Do you leave it to the original author to find keyword DEF and optimize their article for it? No, of course not - nobody "owns" a niche. But it really would help visitors to be able to find the information they seek. So what do you do?

Not rewriting. You write your own answer. If you're not an expert, you research or think of something to say about it that would help the reader. Or you consider the existing article, think about it critically, and write a new one that responds to it, but doesn't simply parrot it back in your own words. You do the work. Some work. Any work that involves thinking critically. (Did I mention thinking critically?)

I'm not being a moralist here. Or if I am, I'm being a practical one. There are many cliches to apply here, but the simplest one is "What goes around, comes around." If you write something original (and I believe you can - if you're capable of rewriting, and you're capable of thinking creatively enough to come up with the idea of rewriting, then you're fully capable of original work) then you'd want others not to rewrite it, yes? A widespread respect for every single person's intellectual property is going to become extremely important in the near future. We're entering a new era, the era of Internet City.

Intellectual property as we know it is not going to be the same in the coming decades. What it means to "own" our work is going to change. Because of the way digital technology has changed the nature of media - in particular, making mashups easy and distribution massive and lightning-fast - intellectual property laws are going to have to reflect a new attitude to creation that isn't so proprietary, but involves more sharing and collaboration, reflective of values of the younger generations that will "come into power."

But we're nowhere there yet, and to get there, there needs to be a common understanding of what it means to respect the creative work of others.

Rewriting is a Form of Plagiarism
Rewriting is not usually allowed, because it is a form of plagiarism. Article sites that require original content do not want content that is rewritten, whether it's your own or someone else's. You can write a new article on the same topic, or you can write a better article inspired by the original, but both of those are quite different from rewriting. Rewriting can cross over into plagiarism, even if not a single phrase is copied. And rewriting can be a copyright violation even if you don't copy a single word.

See this example of plagiarism in rewriting.

In the example I've linked to, note that paraphrasing is different and acceptable in some circumstances for short bits. But if you write an entire article based on an entire other article or a mishmash of other articles, paraphrasing the content, there's a very strong chance that it will be deemed plagiarism, no matter how well you paraphrase or credit the original author. Or even if you are the original author.

I'd be willing to bet that most cases of plagiarism of ideas occur in writers who have no idea they're plagiarizing. And I think one reason is that many are confused about the difference between using sources and copying ideas. Now, I'm not a copyright lawyer or a noted expert on intellectual property. But here's the way I understand the concept of plagiarism:

You take information, facts, short quotes or ideas when you source. You always credit the source, except in the case of using facts that are common knowledge,
You take a relatively greater portion of word-for-word text or the expression of ideas when you plagiarize. The expression of ideas doesn't cover opinions, themselves, but rather syntheses and organization of information, among other things. In copyright lingo, it's all about the concept of substantial similarity.

Plagiarism can also be confusing because you'd expect there to be some cold, hard objective criteria when determining whether something is plagiarism. You might think to yourself, if I paraphrase it, is it plagiarism? If I credit the author, is it plagiarism? Are these things allowed or disallowed? But it's not as simple as that.

There aren't any easy objective criteria. Whether or not a piece of writing constitutes plagiarism is ultimately a subjective call by those deciding in disputes, whether it's the courts, a school, a print or an online publisher. That's because language and the expression of ideas are subjective. The concepts of "adding value to work" and "stealing" depend on your reader's interpretation.

You might think: That's not fair! It's just someone's opinion. But actually, that's not a flaw in the concept of plagiarism; that's the nature of the concept itself. Without that element of subjectivity involved in the act of interpretion, the concept of plagiarism couldn't protect people's expression of ideas - and that's one of the things it's supposed to do.

When deciding whether or not your rewriting constitutes plagiarism, your best bet is to use your own subjective judgment. If you think it might be plagiarism, then it probably would be determined as such by the author and any deciding body. Writers are usually aware of the difference between putting creative effort into work and adding nothing of value to an existing work.

Why Bother?
Rewriting has very little value if you want to earn over the long-term. The real potential for earning by revenue sharing comes in finding your own niche or niches and writing something that helps readers more than what's already there. That is so powerful a thing that I wonder why people don't do it more often, but instead just rewrite existing articles or produce something that doesn't have lasting value.

Every one of us has something of lasting value to add to the web that Google would love to index and rank well, and so much of that can make money. Maybe you don't know what it is. Maybe you don't have confidence in your own knowledge, expertise and intuition. All I can say is - get creative. Try. Really hard.

While I don't think rewriting is a horrible, evil, morally reprehensible thing to do, I do think it's a bit silly to bother with, offering only a temporary benefit, and yes, it happens to be plagiarism. So there it is. And there's no need to rewrite and plagiarize. Really. If you can rewrite, you can write, and if you can write, you can do it without stealing.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Oh, No, the SERPs Changed! Why Google & Bing Search Engine Results Devolve

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 02:37:00 +0000

I hear "I don't understand why my web page rankings have changed on Google Search" a lot from writers with revenue share articles. I've asked the question myself. What have I done wrong? My article is great! What's changed? Why me? This is just wrong!

As I've learned, there are concrete reasons our pages get de-indexed or lose relevance to searches - algorithm changes, what I tend to call the "Google Shuffle," and other factors. This post is not about those specific things. Explaining the causes never really satisfies people, because what they really want to know is "How can I fix it?" (And besides, I'm not a techie. What I know about the making, breaking and changing of algorithms can be counted on one eyelash.)

This post attempts to answer the question, "How can I fix it when Google and Bing supposedly are improving their search engine - but now my wonderful page, which has been offering value all these years to visitors, is suddenly being ignored?"

My answer is, you can't fix it, except by

waiting, and
optimizing to give search engines what they want even as what they want changes.

So that's the short answer. The long answer is in the link to #2. But there's something else that can help you understand what's happening. If you're going to earn money by revenue sharing, expect change. The idea that your web page has a fixed place in any SERP (search engine results page) is outdated now.

I'm going to say that another way, because it's important: Search engines are becoming more and more dynamic. They are updating their results faster and faster. For example, you may notice that Google Search appears to be moving away from fixed results. Fixed results means displaying Site A, Site B, and Site C always in the first three slots irrespective of who is searching and when. Instead, Google is moving towards displaying different results to different people for different searches. This is a shift toward a long tail model of search results.

To use an analogy: Ice cream. Imagine a society where this treat is only available in ice cream parlors, in a few limited flavors. You can tell someone to "go get you an ice cream" and they will always return with a cone of vanilla, chocolate, or strawberry. These are fixed results. They are not long tail results.

But over time, the technology of making ice cream at home gets better, the distribution of ingredients gets better, the infrastructure of equipment gets better, and the dispersion of recipes gets better.

Now you tell someone to "get you some ice cream," and you might get anything - an ice cream bar, an ice cream maker, an ice cream cone, or prepackaged gourmet ice cream of any of a hundred flavors, just to start. Whether or not you get the ice cream you want depends on how well you and the fetcher communicate.

Since so many options are now available, the fetcher tries hard to figure out precisely what you want, or else you'll ask someone else the next time. The fetcher makes some mistakes at first, but over time learns to take cues from you to figure out what you want.

And search engines do the same. When a search engine does it, it's called artificial intelligence. Search engines read signals via their algorithm to figure out what searchers want. And they're not very good at it yet.

Change is the Norm for Web Page Rankings

Just because your web page comes up number one today doesn't mean it will tomorrow. A web page has to prove it deserves its rankings over and over. Why? For one thing, because the pages on the web change all the time. Pages get changed; new pages get added; old pages get deleted or moved.

In case you're wondering if the web is really that big, consider that in 2008, Google added its one trillionth URL to the index . That's twelve zeros, three more than a trillion. There are less than 7 billion people in the world. That makes about 145 Web pages indexed for every person on Earth. And that was two years ago. And it doesn't include all the deep web that Google's not yet able to index. In other words - the search engines have an enormous task before them.

But a web page is also called on to prove it is worthy - or, technically, its relevance to any given query - because the search engines know for a fact that they haven't got it right yet - determining an authority page, that is. Google, Bing and Yahoo are not 100 percent confident in the status quo. And they never will be.

Search engines try to make sense of a constantly updated data stream using frequently applied algo changes. This means they continually must keep remapping the geography of the entire web world. So with every change, they must reconfigure what is what and which goes where and when.

The criteria used by Google, Bing and Yahoo to figure out all this stuff change over time as they get better at it - supposedly. Often, the search engines take a few steps backwards in the process and produce what's popularly called "garbage results."

What is "it" that the search engines are getting better at? The search engines strive to better figure out:

what a search query means (what the user's intentions are when he performs a search) and
the best places to send him to answer that query.

Search Engines Try, Try and Try Again: the Frustrations of Personalized Search

Search engines keep trying to get it right, but they make a lot of mistakes.

Recently, as part of their efforts to figure out what a search query means, Google Search has been working toward personalization of search results. Personalization of search results is, when you think about it, a step toward making search engines a type of AI, otherwise known as artificial intelligence.

[Edit: July 27, 2010 - Speaking of artificial intelligence, Google recently introduced implicit triggering into their SERPs for word definitions, meaning if you type in a word and Google "thinks" you want it defined, it will give you definitions even if you didn't ask for it.]

When the search engine adapts a search to what it thinks the visitor wants, based on the visitor's navigation habits, geolocation, search history, and other data tracked by Google, this can help get a user relevant results, but it also can yield results way off the mark. The search results can be irrelevant to the particular search.

Think You Know How You Rank? Maybe You Do...Maybe You Don't.
Incidentally, many writers are now seeing personalized results when they check their own articles' web page position in Google Search. So when they see themselves ranking for search terms but not seeming to be getting the associated traffic, it's probably because these are not universal rankings. Their own search results are skewed by their search history, preferences, where they are located, etc.

There's the matter of trying to determine user error. Lately, for instance, Google Search has been displaying an annoying (to this writer) tendency to ask "Did you mean...XYZ" after you search for WXY, and not only that, but presumes you did, and gives you XYZ results first as a default.

That's a change from the past, when they didn't assume quite so boldly, but instead gently gave you what you asked for, then offered you the option to say, "oh, yes, right, that's what I mean."

Why the change? Presumably enough people happily clicked on the "oh, yes, you're right, Google, that's what I meant" link to give Google Search confidence that they were right in their guess far more than they were wrong. (I pesonally hope they lose that confidence soon, though, because they're wrong most of the time in our household...!)

The point is, as search engines evolve, they can seem to devolve. The SERPS degenerate into nonsense sometimes. This is not a reason to get alarmed - not unless you enjoy getting alarmed.

If you're like me, it's a reason to watch and wait and, if you detect a long-term pattern, to analyze the difference between the pages that are showing up on the first page of the SERPS and your page. That will tell you the way to go.

Search engines change - it's an obvious fact that everyone knows, but many writers don't realize what it means. They take it to mean that search engines change on whimsy and are like a force of nature that can't be predicted.

I disagree. As content writers, we're not left helpless. We simply must watch the clouds, feel the wind direction, and develop an approach to content that is adaptive.

Further Reading

Are self-created backlinks worth the effort? Not for me. Read about the pros and cons of building your own backlinks.

Think writing online is a temporary, fleeting opportunity? I don't. Learn why the future of writing is on the Internet.

Confused by your fluctuating earnings on your revenue share articles? Here are 20 Non-SEO Reasons Earnings Go Up and Down.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

How to Optimize for Google, Bing and Yahoo Without SEO: A Philosophical Guide for Writers

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 02:20:00 +0000

This is not an SEO guide for web content writers, webmasters or publishers. There are no tips or tricks or techniques here. And you know what? Many search engine optimization techniques lose value when they become popular, anyway.

What is here is a description of the way I believe the Bing, Google and Yahoo! search engines "think." Why is that useful? Because understanding the way search engines think can illuminate how to get good rankings in the SERPs over the longterm. The goal is not to trick the search engines into ranking your website for every keyword imaginable, but to give them what they want so you get ranked for the terms you should be ranked for.
This article comes on the wave of some rapid and intense changes in the Google algorithm and index - specifically changes known as Mayday and Caffeine.

Search Engine Engineers are Cartographers

You probably know what search engines are. But for now, try thinking of them a different way. Think of search engines as constantly updating road maps. Think of the people who search for stuff online as tourists. The brains behind the search engines think much like the brains behind tourists' street maps - they design for the lost tourist. A lost tourist is someone who has a vague or specific idea of what she wants, but doesn't know where it is. The popular search engines Google, Bing and Yahoo are all trying to guide the lost tourist to her destination.

But because they compete with each other, Google, Bing, Yahoo, and the other search engines also try to keep tourists coming back to use their own maps. So they strive to keep their visitors loyal. They must make sure that in the process of telling the tourist the best places to visit they don't:

lead the tourist astray into dangerous areas,
waste her time with disappointing results, or
abandon her by failing to give any results at all.

Neighborhoods of Content

This means the search engines must identify the good and bad neighborhoods towards which to guide their "tourists."

They also must identify which neighborhoods to leave off the map altogether (in other words, which pages to exclude from the index), and which doubtful but promising neighborhoods to merely display in tiny faded print where only a tourist desperately poring over a map for detailed instructions will be able to see it (which is how I think of bad ranking for an indexed web page - it's deep in the index, but good luck finding it).

Make Yours a Good Web Neighborhood

What is a "neighborhood" exactly? A neighborhood can be a website with its own network of connected pages. Or it can be a network of connected websites. Or it can be a network of connected pages on various websites. Each network changes over time.

Google, Bing and Yahoo are trying to figure out if each page's "network" places it in a good neighborhood for a particular visitor performing a particular query.

That doesn't mean the search engines will never send you a tourist if your page is situated in a bad neighborhood - because maybe it's an authority on some of the more obscure and targeted searches. Just as a friend might send you to a somewhat dubious neighborhood in the real world to try out a fantastic "dive" of a restaurant, because you can't get food that good anywhere else.

But each web page is called on continually - at every search, plus after every algorithm change - to "prove" that it's still in the neighborhood the searching tourist wants to visit.

It's not enough that the web page is on an adjoining side street, with lots of links to and from external websites. And it's not enough that the web page is a good-neighborhood wannabe, becoming the popular spot of the hour after a Facebook or Twitter special.

To a search engine, the page has to be exactly what the tourist is looking for. Or, if the search engine can't put its hands on the exact destination, then the best available option.

Search Engines Have a Problem, and It's Not Just Spam

A big part of a search engine's problem is filtering out spam. But another dilemma occurs when legitimate, original web pages seem to present themselves as the place to be for various search terms (keywords), but they're not really. Search engines have to figure out whether or not a page is truly relevant to a query.

Many content publishers have a different agenda. They try to rank for keywords, whether or not their pages merit the ranking. Google doesn't care for that. Put simply, the search engines don't want your page to rank if it isn't the best of all available places for the visitor to be.

The better the search engine gets at giving the visitor what he wants, the more you might find your page, which was considered valuable for certain keywords before, now considered irrelevant to them - in other words, all but spam. Not in the eyes of a human, necessarily - so don't take it personally - but in the eyes of the search engines.

The Search Engines Need Our Help

Google, Bing and Yahoo can't rank all those billions of web pages all by themselves. They're not quite intelligent enough for that. They guide content producers in best practices because they need us to tell them what our content is. That's what SEO is. Optimizing for search engines. However, they encourage us to use SEO techniques only for factors that they can't determine themselves.

For example, one search engine might say "don't use the meta-so-and-so tag anymore" because it no longer needs that tag to perform its algorithm, though it once did. And it might say "use the meta such-and-such tag" when it still has no other way of determining the information.

But Bing, Google and Yahoo then try to develop a way of determining exactly that information as fast as they can, because they must try to beat out the people trying to manipulate the algorithm to their advantage, thus making the search results less relevant.

Google has to keep changing the criteria they use in ranking, and the weight given to each criterion, in order not to be manipulated by publishers. I used to think that was poor-spirited. I mean, isn't there good honest manipulation and bad deceptive manipulation? And wasn't I a good guy?

It's not that simple. The ultimate aim of the search engines is to be able to evaluate content as well as a human being would - or better.

As the boss owning most of the market share, Google Search especially is aiming toward figuring out what content is all on its own and urging people to not to worry about gaming their rankings, except insofar as they ask for help. "Put up stuff visitors find useful," and "Use readable text, not text on images" and "create relevant anchor text" and "be part of a good neighborhood" is what they're telling us. Because they can do the rest.

We have a hard time with that, of course, because we're trying to make a living, here. We want to know how to compete. How to scramble to the top. The inside SEO tricks.

But our efforts backfire. The more manipulation that occurs and that results in "undeserving" pages getting ranked highly, the more imperative the need to get those search engine engineers honing that part of the algorithm so our tweaks and manipulations mean nothing.

Pages that Don't Deliver Will Go Down in Rankings

The practical advice to take from this is to do what the search engines say. It may look silly and naive to some, but it's the only way I can see to make a success of a web page in the long term with the existing search engines.

If you want your pages to rank well over the long term, you must figure out what the search engines are trying to figure out: who your visitors are, what they want, and how to give it to them.

Don't try to trick them. Don't deliberately withhold the information they need. Don't mislead.   If you do, you may get a revenue click today, but tomorrow, Google will be figuring out how to send them to the places that do give them what they want.

So what should you do? That's always changing. Look to the search engines themselves. Read their blogs and help pages to figure out what SEO to use, because they will tell you what they are looking for. Then try it. Do exactly what they say. And while you're doing it, write valuable Web pages that offer something others that rank for those keywords don't.

Read the Yahoo Style Guide for Web Content.
Read about SEO for Bing.
Read about Optimizing for the Google Search Engine.

Deliver What's Promised

So let's say you've had a web page called "Buy Green Widgets" and you're not actually selling green widgets there, but just making money from advertising on the page, such as Google AdSense. Chances are good that over time you'll lose ranking for those articles as Google tries to give visitors searching for "buy green widgets" a place to accomplish what they're trying to accomplish - an actual purchase.   Either give those visitors a better experience than the sites that aren't ranking, or give up on ranking for those keywords.

Be Fresh for a Caffeinated Google

Content "freshness" is important with Caffeine's implementation. What "freshness" means is still to be determined.

I personally take it to mean not the date of publication, but whether a search for "green widgets recall" means the recall that just happened this month rather than the recall of two years ago. So developing a neighborhood of pages linked to the latest info on the green widgets recall is better than spending hours trying to rank well for an article about the obsolete green widgets recall by backlinking. That's called squeezing juice out of a stone.

Evergreen Content Optimization

For evergreen material that's floundering in the rankings, freshness means providing what people are searching for even more precisely. A search for "Acme green widgets warranty" might previously have turned up your page, "Guide to Green Widgets." Now, you need to optimize for the the Acme brand of green widgets and specifically include information about the warranty - either on that page, or on a linked page.

Why should you have to do this if your page is already the best there is? Several reasons:

Competition is greater - there's an explosion of content on the web, some of it providing more relevant content than yours.
Searchers are getting more savvy about asking for what they want.
Search engines are getting better at delivering it.

And remember, optimizing means really giving people the specific information or resources they seek. This means second-guessing your traffic's intentions and doing the work to fulfill their needs - becoming a service provider, in fact.

Say Bye-Bye to Obsolete Content

I believe some web content becomes obsolete over time. A particular culprit is content that performed a function that search engines now perform. An example that I noticed recently is directory articles. Before, a page called "10 Green Widget Sellers" would rank highly for a search for "green widgets sellers." Now, it might fall off the map in favor of actual sellers of green widgets.

The love-hate relationship between content producers and search engines will continue. Writers will keep trying to analyze how to optimize with Google, Bing and the rest. Google, Bing and the rest will keep trying to learn to read us better than we read them. And throughout it all, our SERP rankings will fluctuate - it's almost guaranteed.

Wonder why Google and Bing are changing constantly what they show on the SERPs? Here's my explanation. It'll be obvious to the old hats and maybe not so obvious to the newbies.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

What is an Affiliate Marketer and Why Are Affiliates the Bad Guys?

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:44:00 +0000

There's a certain embarrassment about being an affiliate. When I talk openly about being an affiliate marketer, it's usually to someone who's never heard of the role, or someone who is herself an affiliate marketer. The rest of the world looks on and disapproves.

In particular, affiliate sites have an increasingly bad reputation with search engines. They also have a bad reputation in other online communities, for a lot of reasons. The major ones are that they're seen as spammers and they're a new kind of professional animal that nobody fully understands.

Are Affiliates All Spammers?
Some of the more visible affiliate marketers offer negligible content and try to squeeze themselves between the customer and the retailer, pushing the customer back until the retailer pays up. They "spam" up the web in the eyes of those who notice them.

Of course, the less spammy affiliates don't stand out as affiliates...but they are there, offering content of real value. However, I believe that even some of those who do little more than virtually park outside the retailer's front door add some value. Because they holler out to customers in the street who would have passed right by - or they make the establishment seem the "place to be."

These are subtle intangibles that can make a sale that otherwise never gets made. If only there were stats on "what might have been."

What is Affiliate Marketing, Again?

Affiliate marketers are people who sell products from links on their websites and get paid a commission. Seems simple, but it's not, really. Affiliates comprise a new type of profession, and people don't know what to think. So they disapprove. As far as I can tell, the newness of their field is the biggest strike against affiliate marketers.

For example:

Affiliates are not exactly hired salespeople. They sell, but sometimes pretend they're not selling. They're a weird hybrid of real individual and business entity and many aren't entirely sure, themselves, whether they're helping their customers or tricking them. In the US, the FTC's new guidelines on endorsements are aimin' to clarify things for everybody.

They're not visionary entrepreneurs. When most affiliates are starting out, it's not with the visionary genius of an entrepreneur, but with a kind of helpless "what do I do now?" attitude. They look for guidance as to how to make it big, and when they figure it out, evangelize to bring everyone collectively on board. And many rely on keyword tools to tease out the winners. But there are a visionary few who see potential in new areas.

They're not celebrities offering traditional style testimonials. They're just lil' old bloggers or pied pipers, with their own following.

They're not independent reviewers. They sometimes review products, but they sure have a stake in that review, since they get paid (usually) by commission. However, they sure aren't paid by anyone else for flipping thumbs up or down - so how else should they be paid for their reviews, exactly...?

They're not, for the most part, widely acknowledged experts. They just spend days and weeks researching a niche, or promote products they have an interest in as consumers, themselves. How, then, are they lesser experts than the family, friends and neighbors consulted before purchase? And how precisely would you certify an expert in a marketing niche today?

They're not retail buyers or retail stores. They just make sure they offer products relevant to their markets and provide a convenient one-stop location for those products . Hmm. Maybe it's time to redefine what a "store" is...?

Affiliates are neither the customer nor the manufacturer nor the retail store. They're the "middleman" wedging themselves between the store and the customer to gain his or her trust. Hmm, the store. And what is a store, again?

Oh, yes. A middleman wedging himself between the manufacturer and the customer to gain the customer's trust, select out products, store the physical objects, and sell them conveniently. But people are shopping online. Who needs objects stored in stores anymore? For products not needed immediately, isn't the bricks and mortar store becoming the middleman, and the affiliate middleman becoming the essential bridge between the manufacturer and the customer?

As far as I can tell, good affiliate marketers are all those things - store, salesperson, expert, personality, visionary, etc. They're a hodgepodge of roles and something else: they're individual people - moms, dads, young people, people who can't find an upwardly mobile job in the worldwide down economy...who don't have much to invest except time and their skillset. The last time a group of people were seen like this, it was the early twentieth century - the depression era people who laid out the infrastructure of a new kind of commerce to prepare the way for the mid-century boom.

One of author Chris Anderson's points about the long tail is that the Internet is noise, noise, and nothing but noise without a filter. Search engines provide one type of filter. But middlemen provide another. The "middleman" - the blogger, the reviewer, the affiliate marketer - is something to be cultivated, not pushed aside, as we progress to an online commerce system of unprecedented scope.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Pros and Cons of Backlinks: Not Worth the Effort Anymore?

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 10:17:00 +0000

Writers or web content publishers who are also search engine marketers often tout the value of backlinking their own work. I'm a maverick. I think backlinks created for "link juice" are pretty valueless and getting cheaper daily. I write web content for revenue share, and I don't systematically backlink, and my articles, many of them hosted at HubPages, don't do badly at all. And I think I'm not alone. I know, I know. A lot of people swear by creating strategic backlinks. But there's another group of people that don't touch the things and let the backlinks develop organically. And it's looking like that may be okay.

What is backlinking? It means building backlinks. Backlinks generally refer to external links, as opposed to internal backlinks, which are links within your own website or profile pages. The purpose is not just to gain traffic to your pages, but also to improve their PageRank so they will show up higher in the SERPs.

Building backlinks can be done by developing relationships with other websites and attracting links from them by having valuable content. But these days, people build their own backlinks via article marketing and social media. Backlinking is, in short, a strategy in which SEO marketers themselves publish links to their content on other websites or through Internet media.

Historically, those links have given their content "link juice" or "Google love" or whatever you want to call it - basically, they helped them rank well in the search engine results pages (SERPS), which increases web traffic. That is now changing, I believe - even though Google's proprietary algorithm for ranking pages is all about PageRank, and PageRank is mostly about backlinks. But more on why I think it's changing later...

After almost two years of content writing, dabbling in backlinking and most especially seeing what others have done, I've decided that for me, backlinks take more effort than they're worth. And especially, that an online writer's energy is better used writing articles that attract enough targeted traffic via SEO (search engine optimization), revising them when necessary and adding fresh, useful content that other people will want to link to.

Backlinking isn't dead, by any means. It's still got power, especially if you're writing in topics that are time sensitive rather than evergreen. If you're writing on the latest products or events that will be outdated by next season, you don't necessarily have the luxury of time to wait for articles to "mature" and natural links to develop organically.

But there's a catch - several catches, in fact - when you create backlinks. It's hard work (or expensive if you pay for it) and you already have to have your "backlinking infrastructure" in place - like established websites or community memberships. Virtually no forums are dofollow any more. External backlinking via articles or social media can work, but only when done with great discretion and sparingly will it make you more money.

On the rare occasion when a backlinking blitz works and the monetary rewards are great, they're also short term. That's because it's a way of "gaming" the system. Google Search uses backlinks to calculate PageRank because it can reveal the usefulness of a web page. When people vote for themselves multiple times by creating thousands of backlinks, they're masking the true usefulness of the page. I believe Google Search is always working out how to stop people doing that, and they're getting better at it by the day.

Why Gaming the System Isn't the Best Way to be Competitive in the Internet Age

There's nothing wrong with trying to show the search engines you've got a relevant page. They like that, in fact. But over time, they will combat your efforts to rank highly based on artificial props like self-built backlinks.

This is a new economy we're in. In the olden days (well, okay, the 1960s through the mid 1990s), professional and commercial competition was fierce. The only way to succeed was to "game" the system in the approved manner.

The type of gaming was different back then. It involved getting a college degree, doing local networking, acquiring references, building a great resume, learning interviewing techniques, and cultivating other "proofs" that you're better qualified for the work or sale than others.

A lot of people are still thinking they're in that world of cut-throat competition - too many workers, not enough jobs - limited products, limited customers. They feel that the only way to rise to the top is to use tricks.

But that's an old strategy. Today better resembles the economy of the early 20th century when improved communications and the automobile expanded commerce in unprecedented ways.

There's lots of opportunity, and though there's plenty of competition, there's also more than enough room for a large number of people to succeed. Online.

Which means that very little gaming is necessary; it's mostly about performance.

For writers, it means to write good content. Learn what your visitors want. Learn the few rules of the game you do need to know.

The search engines need our articles "search engine optimized" to find our content, because the Google, Bing and Yahoo search engines are not quite AI (artificially intelligent) enough yet. So that much "gaming" is necessary.

But it's possible to do well just by producing content organic visitors find helpful and by keeping up with current (and constantly changing) SEO strategies.

And judging by what webmasters are saying, Google Search in its ranking algorithms is already beginning to devalue - or at least, differentiate - external backlinks.

A revealing article containing an interview with a Google staffer, Maile Ohye, says a lot about the recent Mayday and Caffeine changes and about the direction Google is taking. It's not much different from what's on their own blogs, webmaster documents and help pages, or what's being discussed in webmaster circles, but it goes a bit more in depth. In the article, Ms. Ohye says that links are a "big part of [the] PageRank algorithm" and that quality is far more important than quantity.

What I'm reading between the lines is that Google is getting better at differentiating between low quality links and high quality links. And backlinks bought or created by web marketers are quite often low quality links.

How to succeed without backlinks? Google Search likes content that users like.   In fact, Google seems to define spam not just as content that "looks" like spam, but as content that users don't like when they do a particular search.

Whether or not the search engine is doing a good job at filtering the content is another issue - it's certainly a work in progress.

That article contains a clue about the disadvantages of building external backlinks. While some folks find backlinking to be a valuable strategy and are able to devote the time, effort, and/or money to create high quality backlinks, those investments can also backfire.   And I think that the historical value of backlinking is beginning to change, and the links are not going to be weighted as highly in the very near future - which is now.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Suite101 Scam? No, It's Not. You Just Can't Ignore SEO.

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 22:25:00 +0000

Many writers wonder whether Suite101 is a scam. I've been writing for Suite101 for over 6 months, and I like it. It's not HubPages; it's suited to different types of articles. So is Suite101 a scam? My answer is that it depends how you define scam. Suite101 is a legitimate company and they have freelance writers with professional portfolios writing for them. They ask for no investment but time. They pay in a timely manner. They have a solid reputation in the online publishing industry.

But Suite uses one of the new earnings models known as revenue sharing.

Suite101 outsources their writing to writers who are not paid, except insofar as the articles earn money from advertising. And that can be pennies, or it can be thousands of dollars per month.

Online revenue sharing is not really like any of the traditional publishing models, nor is it like a traditional job. For people who believe that payment for writing should be in direct proportion to work put in or skill in writing or years of writing experience, it might look like a scam, because that's not how revenue share payment is structured, at this or other revenue sharing sites.

It's more like writing a book and getting paid no advance, only royalties, but without the assurance that ANY of your books will sell.

The upside is that compared to writing, marketing, waiting for a response, submitting again elsewhere, repeat ad infinitum, finally getting accepted, making revisions, checking proofs, waiting for publication, waiting for royalty checks, and doing your own bookkeeping, writing for rev share sites means much less of an investment in time.

You learn SEO, do preliminary SEO work, write, submit, maybe make a revision or two, study the article's performance and do some tweaks over time, and then do your taxes at the end of the year. And you do it all in stages, gradually increasing your time investment. This is critical, because it means that you don't invest more time than you can afford. And that's what makes it superior to traditional publishing.

If you write 20 articles at Suite101 and find you are not earning, stop. Learn more SEO. Optimize those articles. Rewrite. Don't be afraid to change the title. Don't be afraid to overhaul the article. If the article is not commercially viable, then change your approach. Whatever you do, don't keep writing the same old thing if after three months or so you're not seeing earnings that look promising.

How much is promising? It depends on you - how long it takes you to write articles, and whether the earnings justify the time expense. For some writers, it's worth it to write thousands of revenue share articles if they bring in $1,000 per month, which amounts to pennies per article. For others, it's only worth it to write an article if it brings in $1 per month, while others aren't satisfied with less than $4 per article per month, average.

The downside of writing for Suite101 and other revenue sharing sites is that it's hard to learn how to earn a steady, reliable income. Very few people can do it over the longterm. Few writers can do it, because to succeed at Suite101, you have to be a marketer, as well. And if you're not already a marketer, you have to learn how. It doesn't mean you have to be cut-throat. But it does mean you have to think about your writing as product-related, and about your visitors as consumers.

Very, very few articles go viral. Social networking is not the way to succeed at article writing. Paying for advertising or visitors to your articles is prohibited on most revenue sharing websites. Therefore, the only way to succeed - to have your articles found and read by people who can make you money - is to apply search engine optimization techniques.

And it's not easy. There's no quick way to learn how to write articles that earn on Suite101. Specifically, to learn search engine optimization. There are no complete sets of lessons out there, fee-based or free. As soon as a new SEO rule is discovered, the rules change again, making any so-called SEO lessons quickly obsolete.

Why does this happen? SEO is changing all the time, because the search engines are changing all the time. The goal of people writing search-engine-optimized content is to get seen by visitors, and the goal of the search engines is to filter all the content on the Web. Writers and search engines are therefore at odds, the search engines trying to get rid of spam, the spammers trying to scam a living off of revenue share, and the legitimate writers trying not to be seen as spammers and getting caught in between.

Google just launched Caffeine, a major new index structure for their database, and "Mayday," a new algorithm for how online content is ranked. Besides that, they change their algorithm practically every day. Things change so fast that I've learned there are only a few rules about succeeding on Suite101 and other revenue sharing websites:

Write content people need to read. Don't follow the advice floating around to "tease" the reader with non-information. Don't tell the reader everything you know about a subject. Tell the reader just what he or she wants to know. Put yourself in his or her head and treat him like the customer he is - remember, your writing is your product.

Keep up with search engine changes - especially Google, Yahoo and Bing. Especially Google. Read Google's webmaster help pages. Visit Webmasterworld and lurk there. The information's out there and readily available. And don't be afraid to write articles and study what works and what doesn't. Ask your family and friends about their online shopping behavior. Don't rely on Suite101 forums, or HubPages forums, or eHow forums, for all the answers. The answers are not in the writing sites or the scam SEO sites; they're in your own intuition and your experience with your subjects.

So no, Suite101 is not a scam, but yes, there's a good chance you'll make no money there. To increase your odds, learn all you can about SEO and about writing web content people find useful, and then keep learning. Don't stop, or the rules will change on you. And you'll suddenly become suspicious of Suite101 or HubPages and assume they're scams. They're not scam sites - not unless you define any kind of investment gamble as a scam. And they don't really present themselves to be otherwise. (Or do they? If someone's had a bad experience there, I'd be interested to hear about it.)

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Why Writers Write: To Communicate

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 23:12:00 +0000

I hear a lot of writers talking about why they write. "To express myself." "Because I have to." "Because I'll bust a gut sneezing if the writing doesn't flow regularly out of my literary sinuses." Whatever. I'm more inspired by George Orwell, who demystifies the act of writing in A Collection of Essays in pieces such as Why I Write and Politics and the English Language.

Orwell was a genius, obviously; I'm not. But he was also a writer who wrote for money, and I can raise my hand here safely. Like Orwell, I don't think of writing as a spiritual calling or some kind of autoerotic emotional purge. I write to make money - naturally, because I need to earn a living and I can do it with writing. But I make money specifically by writing rather than something else because writing is putting words together to communicate an idea or an emotion, and I like communicating that way. I write to communicate.

I write to communicate ideas and emotions. That's my job and it's what I like to do. If I couldn't find a way to make money at it, but a reader told me happily, "*Ah - now I get it!" I'd be okay with that. Not thrilled, because I like to pay my bills, but I'd keep plugging away. And if a reader said, "I disagree" or "I hate your characters," I'd be okay with that, too, because he or she got what I was writing - they just didn't agree or like it.

But if all I heard was, "Uh - what's your point again?" and "That was kinda a boring story" then I'd be depressed for a month. Even if I made good money at it.

I write to say something and have someone else get it. Whether it's "paperclips are really interesting" or "Foucault was a postmodernist for the Internet Age" or a nice story about a boy and a girl doesn't matter all that much to me. Just that my target reader understands and, better yet, is moved by something I wrote.

And that's why I read, too. If somebody writes something that makes me nod meaningfully or affects my emotions, I'm impressed. And if I like the way I feel when I read that stuff, I'm happy to surrender myself as reader to the power of the writing. Some authors of such feel-good books are Helen Cresswell, British children's writer of the hilarious Bagthorpe Saga, Diana Wynne Jones, another British children's fantasy writer, Connie Willis, author of the To Say Nothing of the Dog, and Barry Hughart. Those are fiction authors. But this applies to nonfiction, too.

Why this post about why I write? Because I see too many writers - in articles about authorship and in freelancer forums - discussing writing as though it were an a priori virtue, writers who say that if the reader doesn't get it, it's too bad for the reader - the piece wasn't written for the reader, anyway, but for the author's expressive urges, or whatever. Well, okay. It's a free world. But I think they're not doing justice to their readers. Writers should provide a service to their readers, or at least make an effort to truly communicate. Not everyone will get it or be delighted. But some should. Some should.

I don't see writing as a virtue - or at least, not any greater a virtue than any other profession. Writing in itself isn't anything noble. Writing isn't about the act of writing - or if it is, that's not writing in my book. That's keeping a diary. Writing is fashioning provocative ideas for someone else. Entertaining readers. Informing readers clearly. Doing the hard work so readers don't have to...doing the creating, organizing, and hard thinking so readers can surrender to you, the writer, for direction when they're looking for guidance...or simply a fun ride.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

EHow No Longer Publishing Articles Except by Demand Studios

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 16:06:00 +0000

I've been suggesting writers new to revenue sharing at article sites and writing online web content in general start with an account at eHow.com. However, minutes ago a pop-up appeared on eHow.com stating that "Demand Studios is now the exclusive platform for writing new articles for eHow.com." This means that community members can't self-submit articles anymore. There is a note to check your email for details, but that email has yet to arrive.

Without seeing the email, it looks as though the WCP (Writer's Compensation Program) will continue, and existing articles will remain on the site rather than be deleted, but the site will no longer be crowdsourced.

Simultaneously, the forum's been upgraded with a new look. Apparently this unannounced upgrade and policy change has taken everybody by surprise.

It's an interesting development, but not entirely surprising given the publishing issues that have occurred on eHow recently. Of course, it could be an error. If this is an error, it's a pretty major one. If it's a premature announcement, it's a pretty major one. And if this is the way it's going to be, it's a major change.

Edit: Got the email. It looks like some writers are automatically moved and given an account on Demand Studios. Looks like I need to study this one before I report...but suffice it to say there are major changes afoot, starting now.

10:28 AM Pacific Standard Time: It's official. No new writers will be accepted to the WCP. Current articles will stand and continue to earn. Rights for WCP articles remain with the writer. Any new articles published on eHow, though, will be through Demand Studios. And you lose your rights to those articles.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Why Opportunities for Earning an Income from Writing Online Aren't Going Away Anytime Soon

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 19:58:00 +0000

The chance to earn an income by writing online can seem almost too good to be true. While the economy's shriveling, writing opportunities online are growing as they haven't in nearly a century. Writing sites are everywhere. Is it all a scam? No. Not all of it. It's hard work, but the best kind of work. You work from home, you work convenient hours, you have no boss, you can take time off, you're far more in control of your income than if you had a job...all while getting paid to put words together on a page, bless your soul.

But before you invest a lot of resources in your writing career - specifically, the resource of time, as most legit writing opportunities are free - you may be doubting this pipe dream can last. Well, I don't doubt it anymore. I think it's here to stay. And here's why I think so.

The World Needs Cost-Effective Online Content Produced En Masse
Internet City needs content. The Internet is growing faster than the offline economy is shrinking. While the rest of the economy worldwide is sinking deeper and deeper into an economic depression, writers are experiencing more opportunity than they've had since the pulp era of the 20th century.

That's because, as in the Golden Age of fiction, we're experiencing a new and cheaper mode of product manufacturing and distribution. The Internet is becoming the new road system, post office, paper mill, printing press, film studio, music studio, advertising venue, and retail store all rolled into one. All this advertising and e-manufacturing means that the written word is at a premium.

Not yet a premium in pay, mind you - that will come after this economic depression ends and writers have more leverage as a group. But in labor demand. The name "Demand Media," the company that owns Demand Studios, an online company that hires creative people to produce content, is no coincidence. There really is a demand for writers. And there's even a demand for writers who work only for themselves.

The Economy Supports a Growing Worldwide Team of Writers
The worldwide economic depression means there are a lot of people out of work and no jobs to be had. Many of these are writers or writer wannabes. New and experienced freelance writers both are clambering to find writing work online if not offline. Many of the people who want to write wish to do so, not because they love writing, but because that's where the opportunity is, just as people wanted to build the railroad and the roads because that was where the opportunities were in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

So the labor is there. Indeed, the very failure of the old economic model is what's providing cannon fodder for the new one.

The Rush to Write Hasn't Even Really Begun Yet Because "Real" Writers Doubt the Internet is Legit
You don't hear people talking about online writing as a legitimate opportunity very much. Perhaps people don't know what's going on - why the economy is collapsing in one sector while it's booming in the virtual sector - or perhaps it's so obvious it's not worth mentioning.

To me, though, it looks like folks seem unaware that the old ship is sinking and that hope lies on the new ship. They talk about content on the Internet as though it's worse than print content, when in reality, it's about the same - some is good, most of it is bad.

But then, it took us several decades to appreciate the value in the "pulp" of the Golden Age, too.

But that's okay. All that's important is that something's working. And as far as I'm concerned, writing online works, if you have time, talent, the desire to learn, an instinct for marketing, a solid work ethic and a flair for making decisions - all features of a self-employed writer. The problem is that many of us were trained to fit into the corporate employment model, and we have to learn or re-learn the entrepreneurial skills necessary for becoming paid writers.

If you get "into the paradigm," though, you have an edge over folks who don't yet have confidence in this impossibly vast publishing medium called the Internet.

Writers Can Afford to Break Into Writing
In so many other professions, you need degrees and credentials. Not for writing online. Writing online for money requires little or no investment for the writer. The main investment is an Internet connection and learning to write well for the Web and taking the time to do it. Many revenue share websites are free to sign up with and write for. You do need to be good at what you do - at least, to succeed in the longterm. But you have a fair chance.

Why do I say this? Well, even in print, new writers couldn't break easily into the print market, because it was saturated due to the problem of limited distribution. Publishers had limited print runs and only so many publishing spots. Competition occurred at the level of being published at all. Only a few were so honored.

Now it's easy to get published - you just do it yourself by throwing up a blog on Blogger - voila, here we are. The competition still occurs, and it's even fiercer than before. But the competition lies not in being published, but in being seen. This means everyone with Internet access has a pretty much equal opportunity. Theoretically.

Reasons Not to Work for Yourself as a Writer Are Going Away
Self-employment used to be a luxury requiring not just time and monetary investment, but the risk of your health and that of your family. With the new Healthcare Reform Bill in the U.S., American citizens now have the possibility of being self-employed without disastrous consequences to their health. Staying in a low-paying job and not trying to earn a living as a writer makes sense when employment is tied to health care. Not so much when health care is available for anyone who works.

Oh - Except for Fiction
When it comes to writing fiction, though, it's not all glory. Not yet. If you're a fiction writer like I am, you may need to hold off on publishing until an effective way to monetize fiction on the Internet shows up or you invent one yourself.

That's because the print market for fiction is going slowly bye-bye and self publishing by print-on-demand and eBook format has yet to become feasible for an individual writer to monetize.

But until then, there's writing work to be had, whether it's from earning by revenue sharing, writing articles for hire, or getting contract work.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Published in Print But Not Making Money Writing Online? Tips for Moving to Writing for the Web

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 22:08:00 +0000

Many nonfiction freelance writers published in traditional print media - specifically, magazines and newspapers - are eager to start writing on the Web, but learn quickly that writing online is a whole new ballgame. Many don't understand the different business models for earning money online, largely because the models are still so new and constantly in flux. And if they do get how to earn money by writing online, many think the business models are inherently unfair and exit the game barely after beginning. Which is a shame, because the Web needs the talent being bled from the dying print market as much as the writers need the work. And the work is there.
The problem is that professional freelancers who make their living in print media mistakenly assume several things:

That you can write the same things online that you did offline. You can't - or at least, it's much harder to make money from newspaper and magazine-style pieces. Writing for readers' casual entertainment is not what Web writing is all about, unless you're a mega-blogger. Being a mega-blogger is great work if you can get it. Otherwise, writing for the Web means providing content for which your readers search instead of stories for their browsing amusement. Confused? Try this example. I love to write about how to write. When I started this blog, I focused on teaching writing techniques, because I like that stuff and because I thought that's what I thought people wanted to read. But they don't, really - or not many do, anyway. What most writers searching on the Web want to know is how to earn a living writing in a world that's changing super-fast. And since I like talking about that, too, here you go.
That fair pay means pay equivalent to the print market. Nope - that's like comparing apples and oranges. An electron neither costs nor weighs as much as paper and is hardly distributed the same way. And besides, the pay isn't based on the service of writing hit-based entertaining copy. It comes from money stemming from a "long tail" online commerce model - a new model of business exclusive to the Internet. For more information on the long tail, see Chris Anderson's The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More.
That if it doesn't pay a flat fee, it's a scam. Nope. Only if it delivers false promises is it a scam. If it uses a business model that disappoints or exploits its writers, it's that, but not a scam. The Web is full of weird and wild payment and business models, many of them legit in my book. Check out ChaCha.com for a business model I find bizarre and brilliant. Check out any of the zillion revenue share websites, each of them slightly different from each other.
That money is always made in a straightforward process. No way. Though write-for-hire work is pretty straightforward, money made online by writing revenue share articles is a wonky, irregular thing that emerges from vaguely worded Terms of Service that are nothing like a standard writer's contract. As I've said before, Internet City is still a raw, young thing.
That quality writing means quality pay. Nuh-uh. Writing good quality content improves your chances of being paid well in the long-term. Writing bad quality content increases your chances of only gaining in the very short term. But "good writing" is no guarantee. There are plenty of brilliant writers online who are not bringing in a brilliant income, or even a dimly hazy income. Although good Web writing really is necessary to suceed over the long term, pay is based on many factors besides good writing.
That seniority and offline writing credits matter. Sorry. Print credits, while admirable, matter very little to a writer's online writing success. You can start with no credits to your name by publishing on your own and building up your own credits. This is good news for young writers starting out. But for older, more established writers...unless you're a superstar, having writing credits in traditional media gives you only a slight edge over others. And, um, on behalf of Generation X and the Millenials...woohoo! After fighting so long to break into a saturated market where obtaining writing credits was like pulling an ogre's teeth, I'm so very grateful we younger upstarts now have half a chance to compete.

Paradigm Changes Are Needed
Freelance writers published in print need to learn to think differently about writing to succeed online. The same rules simply don't apply. It's not about what's fair; it's about what is. To start earning money, I had to let go of a lot of assumptions and learn a new writing paradigm, then be willing to put it into action.

I was never a freelancer in print. Rather, I'm a fiction writer. I had near-sales for years before I had a single story published by a traditional-style electronic publisher. And then I began to explore the world of nonfiction freelance writing on the Web and learned that my ideas about publishing were "old model."

The new model of publishing is not only new, it's trending. Writing for print is going away. Writing for an online market is growing and will continue to do so for a long time.

Writing Online Pays Very Well...or Very Badly.
It's hard to find writing work online that pays the equivalent of print or better. It exists. It's just hard to find. I no longer seek it. It's as highly competitive as the print market is and requires writing credits I don't have and (ugh) pitching.

I hate pitching. I hate researching markets, taking the time to write cover letters and follow requested manuscript format, and waiting three to six months on a query, only to find that only agented writers are now being considered. I hate going to writers' conferences and schmoozing with editors. I can take rejections, but I don't have the stamina for that kind of head-beating.

What I really want is to write at home so I can take care of my kid and get paid. I get to do that by choosing among the lower paying markets, though it means putting my fiction writing on hold for a while.

Lower Paying Writing Work is Readily Available...and That's a Good Thing
It's not as hard to find legitimate writing work online as it is to find it offline. Although it pays less well, it pays reliably, and the future looks bright. And to be honest, despite the low pay, I've had better experiences at oDesk, Demand Studios and Textbroker than I ever had dealing with print editors.

For example, a rewrite request at Demand Studios is a bit of a fuss. I must tack on another hour to revise the piece.

But it's nothing like going to a writer's conference, pitching the book to an editor at a major publishing house, sending the cover letter and manuscript, getting called by the editor, being told the manuscript proposal is great but can I cut 100 pages from the book and then resubmit, doing so, acquiring an agent, waiting several months before the editor decides to pass, attending a writer's conference again, pitching the manuscript to another editor, and months later getting a rejection because the market isn't quite ready for that book. For the time I spent dealing with editors and an agent and waiting, I had zero monetary gain and even some loss in postage and conference expenses.

In two hours I can write a Demand Studios article that might not pay very well, but will put more cash in my pocket than my e-book fiction royalties did in a year. I can write many of these a month, if I need to, and it adds up.

Or I can put up a profile at oDesk, apply to a few jobs, get nowhere and focus on other things, then get contacted through oDesk by a client who wants a critiquer for a ghostwriting project, and over the course of several months work for the client, earning not a lot of money, but not a negligible amount either. I came out ahead here, too, for far less fuss.

Or I can write articles for revenue share for HubPages and earn kinda-sorta residual income. (Kinda-sorta because the articles do require maintenance and updating.)

Because it is so easy to find, you may think the work should pay very well. If writers are in demand, we should be paid in kind, yes? Well, yes. And I believe we will be - soon. The problem is that the world of online commerce is changing so fast, nobody knows the value of anything anymore, including writing. We set the price by showing what we're willing to work for.

Web Writing Involves Different Payment Models
Web writing isn't paid according to traditional payment models. In traditional models, your pay covers, among other things:

your large time investment in finding work
your time and monetary investment in conducting research.

The time it takes to find work online is generally shorter, so you can spend much more actual time writing. And original research, while an important component in some types of Web writing, isn't necessary for all Web writing projects. I look at it this way: writing online costs less for everybody than writing for print, and thus it pays less, too.

Web Writing Involves Writing in Volume
It's not just quality, but quantity that's important, at least when it comes to earning by revenue share or doing write-for-hire work for a client (who, if not someone putting together an eBook, is often someone who themselves wants to earn by revenue share). You can't live off of four well-researched stories a year, or even ten - or at least, if you can, I'd love to know about it! You'll need to write a lot of articles - hundreds. Thousands, maybe. If out of the need for cash, credits or writing experience you do a lot of write-for-hire work at places like Demand Studios or Textbroker, you can then branch off with what you've learned to write for yourself. You earn less at first, but in the long run you may earn more.

Professional Freelance Writers Have an Advantage Over Newer Writers
Although print writing credits don't mean much in the online world, professional freelancers who've written in print and sold their work regularly have a couple of huge advantages when it comes to writing online:

Professional freelance writers write well. The Web is fiercely competitive, and good writing stands out among the schlock.
Professional freelancers are realistic. They're not writing purists when it comes to their topics. They treat writing as a business and know that writing nonfiction professionally is less about "answering the muse" than it is about writing for a paying market. As a freelancer, you write what the market wants to read. The Web is exactly the same. New writers are often told they should be "sensitive" and "artistic" and write for the sake of personal expression - which is fine, but rarely profitable. Freelancers know it ain't gonna happen that way.

Essentially, before you can start making money writing in online media, you need to change your expectations. It's hard to do - very hard. But if you can redefine for yourself freelance writing for the Web, you can "monetize" your writing in a way you wouldn't with "old model" kind of thinking.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Why Earnings Increase and Decrease So Crazily at Revenue Sharing Sites

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:33:00 +0000

Here are 20 factors affecting the rise and fall of earnings on revenue share articles (before you read this, read the introduction on page 1, 20 Non-SEO Reasons Earnings Go Up & Down at eHow, HubPages & Other Revenue Share Websites):

Your click-based pay varies. A lot. The CPC (cost per click) you see in the various keyword tools might give you the misleading impression that avertising bid amounts are fixed, and that how much you will earn on each click is predictable. Nope. The data is just a broad estimate. How much money you earn changes all the time - because on a day-to-day basis, advertisers' bid amounts change, too, and by fairly wide margins. Revenue from Google AdSense is based on bids by advertisers, who set daily budgets. These budgets get continually adjusted by the advertiser and according to the internal algorithms of Google AdWords. For example, advertisers set their advertising budget over a period of time - say a day or a quarter and even over a fiscal year. During this time span, their bids go up and down as they figure out how to optimize their campaigns and, toward the end, run out of allocated funds. We writers earning by revenue sharing see the effects of these fluctuations daily as lower or higher earnings.
The ads on your content pages change. Even with excellent keywording, the ad relevance - how well suited the ads are to either the content of the article or the visitors' interests - changes depending on various uncontrollable factors, like changing Google AdSense algorithms, new advertiser networks entering the program, and the presence or absence of advertiser competition. So if your click-through rate goes down, it may be because the ads your visitors see (which are not necessarily the ads you see) are not as tempting and "juicy" as they were.
Weather events affect the geographical regions they hit, and beyond...and also the behavior of Internet visitors. Winter storms, floods and the like mean not only power outages in some areas, but also people in the nearby environs being watchful in case they are affected. This means little or no "shopping" type of internet use in that region. If you have your own Google AdSense account, you can test this one by studying where your earnings and visitors are coming from using Google Analytics. For example, I noticed by studying Analytics that during bad weather on the East coast, I had fewer AdSense clicks than normal on my HubPages from the Eastern U.S. regions.
Newsworthy events affect Internet visits. When there is political unrest, a major crime, or any particularly juicy news item, some people who would normally be reading our articles and shopping choose to spend their time keeping up with the news.
Other events occupy potential web visitors elsewhere, such as sporting events, holidays, and major television awards ceremonies. Wondering why both your impressions and earnings are down? Check out the national and international news to see what celebrations and fun events are going on elsewhere in the world.
The day of the week affects earnings, and it varies for different niches. For example, some writers report lower earnings during the weekends, while others notice their earnings peaking on weekends. Plot your earnings daily over the course of months, ideally broken down by niche, and see what your trends are.
The time of year affects earnings. Seasons, holidays, college and school terms and breaks, and financial cycles affect when money is spent in different sectors. This again varies by niche.
Different article websites seem to use different timelines for their earnings calculations. Some follow strict reporting schedules (the Amazon Associates affiliate program, for example), whereas others that rely on reporting from more than one advertising program (like eHow) are more irregular in their earnings reports. This doesn't mean they're not accurate - just that the earnings will appear more erratic from day to day.
Google AdSense itself doesn't always report in real time for all regions. There are occasional delays which might possibly be attributed to variations in the performance of the different servers they have worldwide, regularly scheduled updates, and unscheduled downtime.
Google AdSense earnings reflect the quality of a web page's (or website's) traffic. Pages that were earning well suddenly stop earning so well, depending on how valuable the advertiser found the traffic coming from them. Smart pricing is not a myth - it's real. So, it seems, is "stupid pricing" - my name for what happens when a page gets an unexpected increase in eCPM.
Backlinks to your articles appear and affect your PageRank. When your articles receive good backlinks from high-ranking Web pages, you may notice a marked increase in visitors and/or in earnings. This can happen suddenly when the traffic increase is due to people following the link en masse, or over time when the traffic increase is due to a rising PageRank.
Backlinks disappear or get devalued. As quickly as they can come, backlinks to your articles can disappear if taken off of the linking Web page. Or Google Search might start valuing some backlinks less (something I think is only a matter of time for author-originated backlinks posted on major article sites like EzineArticles or sites designed to provide backlinks, like RedGage or SheToldMe.)
Articles get de-indexed temporarily or permanently. It happens.
Articles get shuffled about in the search index. New articles get a shot at getting noticed on the front page briefly, shoving more established articles behind them, then fall back and have to rise naturally to their more-or-less fixed status (actually, more of the less, since very little is fixed on any search engine - usually, any article's search engine position is only temporary).
The way your articles are indexed can change dramatically when the various search engines make major long-term changes to their indexing algorithm. The changes are rolled out differently in different geophysical locations over different time periods, producing what can look like a seriously wonky effect from person to person. The so-called "Caffeine" changeover is one such change. It's not a ranking algorithm, but it can indirectly affect how pages appear in the SERPs. The Mayday algorithm change is another.
How your web page ranks on the SERPs (search engine results page) and the way ads display on your web page can change dramatically when, say, Google Search starts using personalized search for everyone or when Google AdSense starts using better contextual matching. Keep up with the search engine and advertising blogs to understand the major changes going on.
Traffic from social networking sites like Facebook, StumbleUpon, Digg and Twitter can skew a writer's impressions-to-earnings ratio. Impressions coming from links at social marketing sites do not lead directly to earnings, typically - this is not generaly considered "high quality traffic" in the marketing sense of the word. Indirectly, it may help earnings by increasing the ranking of the page, or, theoretically, it may hurt earnings by lowering the eCPM of the page and getting it "smart priced."
Competition will spring up, almost guaranteed. You may have "owned" your keyword up till now. But that was just until something better or newer came along. You can't stop competition, but you can improve or add to your Web page, file DMCA complaints if they have copied your content, or just wait it out until the newness of the competing content wears thin.
Your earnings may not really be fluctuating as much as it looks like, because your statistical sample may be too low. This one's a bit abstract, but it boils down to the fact that your numbers may be too low to approach statistical accuracy. In other words, what looked like regular earnings might not have been. Even when you've been observing a pattern that seems as regular as clockwork (such as $3 to $5 per day for two weeks straight), you may have too few articles, or articles that have been up for too short a time or that get too little traffic, to tell what the pattern really is. So when one day occurs with earnings of just $0.85, you think, hey, something must be up! Well, no. In general, the rule is, the fewer articles you have, and the shorter a time period the've been up, the less steady your earnings will be, and the more extreme any day's variations will look when they do show up. For example, let's say you have 100 articles posted and they've been up for two months, and get about 500 visits per day, and that you earn $2 per day on average, give or take $1.00. You suddenly have a zero earning day even though you have the same number of impressions. Although the change looks dramatic from your perspective, it might not be statistically significant - meaning the change is within the normal expected change for that volume of articles, with that volume of traffic, over that period of time, in that niche. When you have more articles - say, 1,000 - and better traffic, and they have been up a full year, you are better able to calculate a reliable standard deviation and be able to determine exactly when a variation from the norm is statistically significant.
The economy is changing. We are in an economic depression. What happens on Wall Street and in the international financial sector affects advertiser spending and earnings from Google AdSense as well as affiliate programs - both directly and indirectly, and both for the worse and for the better. This is stuff out of our control.

You May Also Enjoy...
Here's my primer on how search engines think. Some of this may be obvious, some new, and some debatable. Read it now: How to Optimize for Google, Bing and Yahoo Without SEO: A Philosophical Guide for Writers

Why Opportunities for Earning a Living From Writing Online Aren't Going Away Soon discusses a case for a permanently changing economy and why taking the time to write online can be a good investment in a world where job security is nil.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

20 Non-SEO Reasons Earnings Go Up & Down at eHow, HubPages , & Other Revenue Share Websites

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 00:33:00 +0000

Writers often notice mystifying fluctuations in earnings while earning money with revenue share programs at websites like eHow, HubPages, Suite101, Squidoo, About, Triond, Helium, Xomba, InfoBarrel, and others. One day earnings are up, the next they're decidedly down. This rise and fall happens even when writers write perfectly good SEO articles (search engine optimized). Watching a radical decrease or even increase can be frustrating for writers trying to understand why they are earning the amounts they do - all the more so because the algorithm for calculating earnings is already shrouded in mystery at many of these article sites.

Happily, this up-and-down variation in earnings is not necessarily a sign of bad things. It's quite normal for earnings to vary wildly from one day, week or month to the next. That's simply what it means to be a writer earning by revenue sharing through programs such as Google AdSense and other contextual-based advertising and performance-based affiliate programs, which have an organic rather than fixed model for income.

But the curious want to know why earnings vary so crazily, especially when they seem to have been following a sort of pattern and then suddenly break out of that pattern. Exactly what is going on to cause these variations when they're not caused by SEO issues?

This article covers 20 such factors that can significantly affect writers' earnings at revenue sharing sites like HubPages and eHow and other article websites.
As you may already know, some factors that affect earnings by revenue sharing are controllable - choosing a good niche, optimizing for keywords, improving the organization of your page, writing useful content and other SEO techniques. You'll find lots of information about how to improve your revenue share earnings all over the Web. This article is not about that stuff.

This article covers the stuff people don't generally talk about - the forces that are out of your control and affecting how much you're earning. Any one of these forces is enough to send earnings into a downward or upward spiral. And on any given day of the week, one or more of these forces can be at play. They might not always be visible, and they can tend to average out. But I'm as sure they're there as I am that my name's Nerd Writer Mom.

Some of them are a matter of common sense. Others not. Either way, understanding these forces can be helpful for two reasons. Sometimes knowing the kind of causal factors operating will tell you when to just chill and wait for better times or, if things are going unexpectedly well, to prepare yourself realistically for a future fall. Other times understanding what's going on can help you optimize further so that you don't experience as many slumps in earnings.

Note that some "old pros" who've been earning at revenue sharing websites for years will tell you wisely that there's no predicting earnings fluctuations. This is very true. But understanding the general forces at work can help you get to that zen place and not panic when earnings take a temporary nosedive.

The observations on the next page are, for what they're worth, based on what I've learned through 18 months of earning by revenue sharing, reading professional webmaster forums like Webmasterworld as well as Google AdSense and AdWords help pages and forums, not to mention my own wacky way of interpreting what I see, and information that's commonly available online. In other words - nothing proprietary or secret here, and all derived from my own opinion. So let me know if you disagree or if you have more ideas.

So here they are - 20 reasons your revenue share earnings may go up or down that are not related to SEO. And if you can think of more, please leave a comment and contribute to the discussion.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Signs of an Economic Depression: End of Daycare As We Know It

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 05:06:00 +0000

On the writer's forums at Suite101, an online magazine, the topic of the loss of availability of daycare (not just affordable daycare - but any daycare at all) came up today. As a mom who works at home writing, I'm not currently directly affected by this, but I have the utmost sympathy for the mothers and fathers who are.

I am, however, afraid that this is not a temporary thing. Daycare as we know it is being phased out before it ever really had a chance to get going. It never had the government sponsorship it should probably have had as women were compelled to enter the workforce and their kids were left out in the proverbial cold. And now it's too late.

Because I think the cause of daycare's downfall is the restructuring that's occurring as the world shifts to a new economic model (of which we work-at-home writers are a part - and anyone who makes money on the Internet). The economic shift is manifesting as a worldwide depression/recession.

As I stated in my post earlier today on Depression Economics, in the early part of the 20th century, it was the car. Today, it's the Internet. With the new "transportation" medium that changes where people spend their time, we find that fewer people are congregating together and working in centralized locations.

Instead, more people are working at home online - or are simply out of work and living at home as fallout from the depression itself. And not even always in the same old home. They're moving out of the cities and beyond the suburbs - because why not? There's no work to which they must drive. And it's certainly cheaper...

Or how about this scenario: With the lowered demand for daycare, and the correspondingly increased cost, and baby boomers retiring and having more time on their hands, more people may be teaming together to help each other out. One of my family members is a single parent raising two children. Two members of her family, one of them a retired baby boomer, help take care of the kids during the daycare gaps. And I think this kind of pulling together is on the rise.

Ultimately, there's a lack of demand for daycare. While some families are desperate for daycare, on a larger scale, people are moving and working farther and farther away from each other and daycare relies on people congregating together.

And so it steamrolls. Without enough customers, businesses fail. Daycare is a business. As happened with the Great Depression, the worldwide recession/depression going on now is shaking things up, and daycare is one of the smaller, less visible casualties.

Extended families, and the unstructured but reliable daycare that occurred within them, seem to be a thing of the past. On the distant horizon, though, may be other alternatives. Neighborhood cooperatives, possibly. Closer-knit communities. Or the opposite - more isolated family units, but an infrastructure set in place to assure that kids are not left wanting. I don't know what it will look like.

But I know something has to be done if we don't want to see our kids neglected. A temporary solution to the daycare problem needs to happen during this transition time. Unfortunately, it won't work if it's simply the same thing that already existed, because that's already no longer affordable for many families, even when it's still available.

Do you have any ideas?

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Depression Economics: Why Making Money Via Revenue Share Is the Wave of the Future

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:40:00 +0000

Writers making decent money at revenue share sites such as Suite101 or HubPages may wonder if this is just a flash-in-the-pan opportunity, or if there's really a future to it. After all, we're in a recession (actually, I'd say a depression, though, like the Great Depression, it won't be called that until some time has passed). In an economic downturn, things are unstable, right?

The answer is, both are true. There's a future to it because the world is shifting to a new economic model. It's flash-in-the-pan for the same reason - because we're shifting to a new economic model.

So if you're game, take a deep, relaxing breath for a rather meandering but brief sociological bus tour of 20th century history. On this tour, you'll learn why I think we're in the Greatest Depression and what's caused it. We'll be back in less than twenty minutes in the familiar world of revenue sharing.

Before and during the Great Depression in the early part of the 20th century, society changed radically all over the world. In the U.S., the modern middle class, based in the existence of the car and suburban living, sprang up. (See The Houses That Sears Built.) The new middle class became the parents of the baby boomers, the grandparents of Generation X and the great-grandparents of Gen Y. They caught on to new economic opportunities then arising.

These opportunities arose on the heels of a small number of major technological advances - the most landmark being not, as you may think, the telephone or radio, but the car. The car redistributed demographics in a way not seen since...well, the train. And before then, the horse.

The car moved hoards of people from centralized cities to outlying areas. Unlike the railroad before it and the airplane after it, the car moved individuals at will, not just groups of individuals on a prescribed and pre-routed schedule. The only limitations were the roads on which the cars drove.

The automobile was so quietly radical that in the U.S., FDR's New Deal focused on building an infrastructure of roads. The flexible and far-ranging auto dispersed people all over the country, creating entirely new demographic patterns that allowed for the creation of suburbs and commerce organized around new kinds of criteria.

While the new demographic patterns opened the door to new commercial opportunities, it closed the door on others. The world looked very different after the Great Depression, during the decades-long economic boom during the period of the baby boomers' coming of age.

This is more or less exactly like the Internet.

When you think about the way it moves individuals - or more precisely, changes their movement patterns - the Internet is less a new communication medium than it is a new transportation medium. People began to do commerce in an entirely different way. People began to conduct business in an entirely different way. People socialized in an entirely different way. They changed not just what they were saying and doing, but where they were saying and doing it.

I think the "Greatest Depression" we're experiencing now (and yes, darn it, we are!) is less due to the corruption of individuals or the greed of industries than it is to the growth of the Internet and a redistribution of what had been centralized, monopolistic-style wealth. People have always been corrupt. They've always been greedy. What they haven't been before, though, is transported by electrons.

Small changes on an individual scale translate to massive changes demographically. Because people no longer need to fly quite so much, or drive quite so much, or buy houses in centralized locations quite so much, or work in an office building, or shop at the local retail spots, the auto industry, the airline industry, the banking and lending industry, the construction industry, the bricks-and-mortar retail industry, and oh-so-many other industries are toppling like dominos.

The "Greatest Depression" that we're experiencing now is no mystery. It's been caused by the technological developments of the computer and the Internet.

To bring this back to writing content for revenue share on the Web...These online writing sites are new business models based on the new transportation medium that is the Internet. A housewife like me can work at home. I have a better chance of finding work online than I do finding it in my local area. The last time the average housewife was needed more in the home instead of out in public working was...the fifties? Sixties?

(Back then, people thought women had a duty to stay at home - and I believe the underlying reason for that is that it made the most economic sense given the nature of the economy at the time. And when women started pushing en masse for their right to a career in the sixties, it was because that, too, was an economic necessity. But anyway, that's another tangent for another time...)

Getting Internet access into every household and supporting new legitimate online business models, including building content on the Internet, is literally part of creating the new infrastructure, as building the road system was after World War II.

We're talking a long-term change here. Unless the world somehow loses access to the resources that make the World Wide Web and its home, the Internet, possible, legitimate business models that appear online are not flash-in-the-pan.

But as it grows, the Internet is also rapidly changing, becoming almost unrecognizable from one year to the next. So the business model of revenue share - and for those who haven't been following my posts don't know, revenue sharing is earning advertising revenue from content-based Web pages that you publish - is guaranteed to change as it grows. Many business models will appear and disappear in the next several years. Some major players who've taken the field will be forced to play fair. Scams will proliferate. New laws will regulate the shanty-style financial activity that has been of necessity set up in the "Wild West" that is Internet City. And revolutionary changes will occur to the world's commerce patterns, distribution of resources, and - dare I venture there - politics.

If you buy this theory, then you know now what to do to keep your head afloat during this depression. What not to do is fight tooth and nail all the changes that are afflicting the commercial model we've been living in since World War II. Instead of saying, "The old way was virtuous! The youth today have no values!" we should be saying, "The old way is dying! The youth are adapting to a new reality! We should learn from them!"

We should be watching the trends and doing what we can to enable the new Internet model of commerce. Not because new is automatically better. But because society changes as a whole when it needs to change. Not adapting to the change means not surviving. And the longer the old model persists in a struggle for power with the new one, without either side winning, the longer we'll be sunk in an economic depression.

So yes. We're on a sinking ship, and unless we bail and board the bright new one, we're in for seriously stormy seas.

Tell me what you think.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Using Ubuntu Linux and Why It's Like Wikipedia

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 21:09:00 +0000

This is not exactly related to writing, except insofar as we need computers to write. But computers are always on my mind, especially since I seem to go through them like candy. In the last reincarnation of our computer, we switched to Ubuntu, a platform for Linux, an open-source operating system (i.e., an alternative to Microsoft Windows).

I've been using Ubuntu for, hmmm, coming onto a year now, is it? I'm no techie by a longshot (that's the territory of my husband), but I like using the Ubuntu version of Linux very much here on the user's end. Downloading software is easy and quick - graphics handling, word processing, and browser are the basics in our household - and the whole system pretty much does everything we need, with the occasional bit of troubleshooting.

We've toasted a couple of computers this year, and Ubuntu has allowed us to access files that would most likely have been lost with that big-ol' proprietary MS Windows.

And best of all, we have ease of mind about security issues. Not that Linux isn't vulnerable - I'm sure it is, somewhere - but it's the lack of STRESS that we were after, and we got it. Before the switch, my computer was being invaded at every turn, it seemed. Since then...nothing. Blessed peace. And less bugginess all-round.

And now for a segue. In a funny way, Ubuntu seems to me to be like Wikipedia. You know, Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. They both work through the law of averages.

People rail against Wikipedia because of its historical inaccuracy and its lack of certified experts. "Why, anyone can write for Wikipedia!" But the very thing that makes Wikipedia inaccurate is what makes it better than picking up a print encyclopedia. It's a dynamic document that improves over time.

Through sheer numbers, Wikipedia averages toward being right, the more so as time goes on. In its early stages, it was filled with spam and inaccuracies. Now, not so much.

Same with an open source operating system like Linux / Ubuntu. It was rockier terrain when it began, so I understand. Now it's better.

That's because it's out there, a completely modifiable operating system that positively invites contributions. There are more quality controls in place because there are more standards, more users, and more people engaged and vested in its success.

People care about it and work on it, either out of impassioned desire, curiosity or self-interest - all of which are at least as motivating as keeping your job, the bottom line for many paid professional software developers. Thousands, maybe even millions of motivated creators means nearly as many people vested in quality. Which means better quality as time goes on.

As you can see, I'm a big fan of open source. It's what keeps the Internet going. The law of averages - the tendency toward the normal curve, the bell curve - the irresistible triumph of probability - these are part of the new Internet model of quality maintenance that is slowly taking over the old "establishment" model governing traditional publications and services. The old model, that of peer review and professional certifications, with its many filters defining who is qualified and entitled to contribute, while it professed to guarantee quality, in the end only guaranteed control.

The problem is that the Internet is growing at such a fast rate that that kind of rigid control is more inhibiting than it is enabling. At least, at the moment. Eventually, we'll need more clear-cut standards. But for now, we're trying to set up shop in the Wild West, and we've got to hire ourselves a sheriff, some builders, some cooks and some ranchers - and all we need is for them to be willing, honest and competent. Come one, come all.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

Easy To Use CMS, Where Are You? Talk About a Brilliant Business Startup Idea

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 04:14:00 +0000

In my search for an easy to use CMS, I've been following a thread on the Webmasterworld forums on the best content management systems. I've been using Wordpress to create my websites, and though I like it well enough, it's not exactly what I'd call easy. I've been looking for an easy way to build a site for a long time, and despite the truly educational threads on Webmasterworld, I'm not getting anywhere. Anybody looking for brilliant startup ideas? Matt Cutts from Google has some ideas, or maybe you can tackle my problem.

My problem is this. To create a website from scratch, a non-techie like me can use a supposedly easy-to-use content management system such as Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, or the less well-known ones like ModX, Textpattern, and, oh, a lot more. Or you can use a WYSIWYG HTML editor (what-you-see-is-what-you-get, referring to the fact that you can use it like word processing software to format your web page) such as Dreamweaver, Frontpage, KompoZer, and oh, so many more. Or you can code your own CSS, HTML, PHP, or whatever using a text editor. Or you can use pricey and much-promoted plans like the very expensive Site Build It. Or you can pop up a website on someone else's pages, as with Google Sites or Blogger or Yahoo! SiteBuilder, or even publish on Hubpages, eHow, and other content sites.

Each method has advantages and disadvantages. But none has everything that I want. Call me arrogant, but I think that what I want is the same thing a lot of people want. I want an easy-to-use website creator that's free, state of the art, optimized for Web search and completely flexible. That's all.

(Wait. Scratch the free. I'd pay for one, except right now, as far as I can tell, paying for a CMS doesn't really yield any greater a product. And to be honest, I don't think I should have to. I'd rather public funds paid for it, just as they pay for roads. No, I'm not taking a radical political stance, here, and I don't want to starve brilliant programmers. More in a minute on why I think website building should be offered free of charge.)

So why is an easy and feature-rich website builder so hard to find? I'm truly curious. Can someone explain to me what is stopping there from being an open source, ultimately versatile, easy-to-use-for-non-coders package that:

Does what Google Sites and Blogger do (allow you to easily change layouts & font) - and more!
Doesn't require themes, but has every conceivable (practical) layout possibility and allows you to construct the site as you want it from scratch without knowing any coding, but has coding possibilities for those absolutely bound and determined to make a twelve-column website in size 2 font or whatever
Uses CSS, the most stable version of HTML, and whatever else is state of the art at the time
Has SEO (search engine optimization) features built in
Doesn't disallow affiliate links (see why I think affiliate marketers are not demons from hell)
Has optional features to turn any website endeavor into what it is - an e-commerce site, an affiliate site, a brochure, a forum site, a family site, whatever?

Basically one that allows people totally unfamiliar with creating websites - I mean people who might be able to use a web browser and even word processing software, but whose learning curve is stretched by the idea of Web hosting - to build whatever kind of website they want in a couple of hours. All the CMS offerings combined, only made more spiffy, without the need for the kinds of plugins, external widgets and add-ons that are so much a part of Wordpress, Drupal, and Joomla.

Is it too much work? Not profitable?

The reason I ask is, the market is seriously ready for this. Anyone looking for brilliant startup business ideas should consider this. The economic depression is only going to worsen until a whole lot more people are engaging in commerce online. (Don't think the state of the economy is that dire? Find out why I think we're in a depression.) Make it easy for them, and they will come.

Such a package would be the equivalent of the cheap Sears balloon-framed houses built during the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century - peaking in 1929 and then ending in the midst of the Great Depression (and no, the dates are not a coincidence. Change in economic model then, change in economic model now). They'd make a whole new way of living possible.

Following the technological boom of the railroad (which is how supplies were delivered) and the car (which is how people were made ultra-portable), Richard Sears built tens of thousands of houses and basically seeded the American suburbs that became the structure for the new economic model that rose up after World War II. See the book, The Houses that Sears Built.

Now we're in the midst of creating infrastructure for another economic model - that of the Internet. And the ability for nearly everyone to have a website is equivalent to the ability to live in a house and drive five miles to the supermarket, ten miles to the movie theater, and 100 miles to visit Grandma in the next city. It sets the foundation for an intricate new worldwide economic structure where literally everyone is on the web, buying, selling, and hanging out. Where it's no longer the Wild West, but "civilized" at last.

The people who can do this would be the next IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or eBay. Or so I believe. :)

Anyway, even if you don't buy the argument, and even if you have no aspirations to start a brilliant new business...to all techno-geniuses out there, I beg of you, please do create a CMS or, if not a content management system, a software package that my own grandfather could use to create a website easily. A website creator that is easy to use and versatile and SEO friendly, and that doesn't have a "catch" (i.e., it only works in this browser, or with this software, or doesn't have this feature, or...you get the idea.)

I'm so frustrated by my own lack of technical expertise. For me, learning the backend of having a website is like having to learn carpentry to build my retail store. Do too much of that, and my business becomes designing, not selling. It's rather fun, but it's not my calling.

Copyright Nerd Writer Mom

HubPages Review: A Site to Write and Make Money

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 22:07:00 +0000

I've written about HubPages before, comparing it to eHow as a revenue sharing website. Here is a more comprehensive review than what I wrote earlier, including what I like and don't like about writing at HubPages. My review is based on my experiences since starting posting articles there in the spring, both with the site itself and with my earnings. (Side note: As of 4/5/2010, eHow, a revenue share site mentioned above, is no longer publishing revenue share articles through its Writers Compensation Program.)

HubPages is a site for writers, photographers and other creative people to post their original content and optionally earn money with their own Google AdSense account or their Amazon Associates, and/or eBay Partner Network accounts (commonly called "affiliate programs" by Web marketers). While not everyone on HubPages participates in each of those revenue-share affiliate opportunities, I do use each of them, though there are rumors the eBay one won't last. The only revenue sharing money-making opportunity HubPages offers that I don't participate in is Kontera (both because I don't like the ads and because I've read of various bad experiences with Kontera in the HubPages forums.)

Basically, I still really like HubPages, and I'm trying to get articles up as fast as I can, though it isn't easy while chasing after the wild toddler. My earnings are better what I expected--and I was afraid that nobody could top eHow's money-making model. Yet my per article earnings are nearly comparable to eHow, though my Hubs are only half as old. But it's the website and customer service where this writing site excels. To me, HubPages is the best around when it comes to flexibility of format and the way they treat their writers. And the search engines like them. Given their new status in reaching the Quantcast top 100 websites and an excellent search engine ranking, they're on par with eHow from my perspective.

What I like:

I've had very good customer service experiences with HubPages. It's a small staff, but they know their stuff. Many of the staff post updates on the forums. (Once they never responded to an email I sent, but I forgave them, since it was a busy weekend, and I think some glitchiness was happening around then.)
The article format is extremely customizable. You can publish a multi-article series or a single article. You can put quick links in a hub linking to another section of the same hub.
You can create tables for your articles. You can insert RSS feeds, polls, news feeds, quizzes...it's impressive. You can put in your own tags, choose the words in your URL (great for SEO). You can moderate the comments in your own article, or take out the comments module altogether if you care to.
As long as you're not being overly promotional, you can insert links within your articles where it's natural to put them. If you're careful to follow their guidelines, you can put up to two self-promotional text links in each article, too, as well as backlinks (that are dofollow if your score is above a certain number--I think it's 75.)
You can move your text, photos, and other modules strategically between two columns to get the best ad placement.
You can track the number of impressions for each hub. And you can track the performances of the hubs and stats about visitors through Google AdSense channels and Google Analytics.
There have been no "article sweeps," as occur regularly on eHow. Some people get their hubs "unpublished" (not deleted) when they break a rule.
The CEO of HubPages has published over 200 hubs. To me, this means he's his own customer--which I take as a major vote of confidence in his site.
HubPages has a talented tech team. Their programming is fantastic for a site that offers users so much control of the Web page layout. Every so often, features get buggy or glitchy. But the staff gets on it and fixes it. I haven't often been frustrated by glitches there, because they communicate well and fix them fast.
HubPages seems to continually make improvements to the site. New features, new functionality, new design. Not always what people are requesting, but sometimes, yes. I like that, because it means they do some internal research and development to figure out what's best. New feature launches tend to be well-thought-out and welcome.
I don't even mind giving them their portion of my impressions (they get 40 percent to my 60 percent) because they truly earn the "fee," which I think of as a rental and maintenance fee for the space they let me use.

What I don't like about HubPages:

The forums can get quite hot and bothered. HubPages has a strongly diverse community, with writers and marketers whose opinions are expressed loudly and tenaciously. Happily, they recently added a new home page format that allows you to follow only those forums you want to follow.
The help pages, well, stink. They could be written more clearly and thoroughly and be better organized. Like many article sites, HubPages relies on community members to assist newbies with the basics of online article publishing. You do need to read the help pages, though, and you need to know the policies and terms of use. Skipping over them because they're "just fine print" is not a good idea.
Their home page doesn't look all that professional. Articles get featured automatically, from what I can tell, leaving some pretty weird articles on the front page. As it happens, this isn't a big issue, though, because I gather that most people don't enter HubPages through the home page, but via search engine traffic.
It can take longer to put up a hub than to write and put up an eHow article (although with the recent eHow publishing bugs, that's debatable). It is worth the extra time, in my view.
I don't particularly like Kontera, the network that provides their in-text content ads. But I venture to say there will be other offerings in the future, given the innovative changes HubPages regularly makes.

Constant-Content: Scam or Not? No Way, Not in My Experience

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 21:35:00 +0000

I've been so busy defending HubPages from being thought a scam that I've neglected Constant-Content, which some writers have found great success with, and which others have been unhappy with or not had massive success with. Having just received notification that I recently sold a $125 article (of which I got about $80 as my cut), I've begun to renew my excitement with this article writing website. I should say first, though, that I think I understand why Constant-Content might be thought to be a scam.

The way Constant-Content works is you upload your document--an article you write--and specify your choice of subject, with your preferred sale price and the rights you wish to grant--usage rights, unique rights, full rights, etc. Each type means something specific. If your article has previously been published anywhere, for example, then it's only eligible for usage rights sales.

After upload, your article goes to Constant-Content's editor to review. If it gets accepted, it gets listed as a product for customers to buy. Customers purchase articles according to the rights they select. If they buy your article, you get a percentage of the purchase price - slightly higher than half. Some rights allow you to resell the article - but if they buy unique or full rights, you're selling all future rights to the article. Wise writers price their work accordingly.

The big reason I think the site is thought to be a scam is that, unlike at a lot of article sites, articles do get rejected. And that can hurt and seem unfair, especially since it's a three-strikes-you're-out kind of site. And especially since the editor can be picky. If you don't follow CC's writers guidelines and submission format guidelines exactly--and that's "exactly" in big, bold capital letters--your article gets rejected.

Another reason I suspect people may think Constant-Content a scam is that the business model is atypical of the larger Web writing websites. It's not revenue share. It's not for backlinks. You don't get paid outright. It's more like selling your work on consignment. Most article websites do things differently - allow links in the articles, for example, or offer revenue share. Constant-Content is a site for writers, but not a site for marketers who dabble in writing. As far as I'm concerned, I'll leave the revenue-share opportunities to awesome sites like HubPages. Constant Content is where I sell the pieces I can't sell elsewhere.

The last reason I suspect people assume it's a scam is that writers don't read the terms of service, or forget that they don't get the full 100% of the sale price. Constant-Content is very clear--authors get 65% of the price, and Constant-Content gets 35%. That's why you set your price higher instead of lowballing it.

I have sold hundreds of dollars worth of articles there and always gotten paid. I've experienced excellent customer service. They've been placed under new ownership in the last year and the powers that be are proactive. The writer's forums are wonderful and supportive. There's even a forum to explain your rejections.

And we're not talking great volume. I've sold less than 10 articles as of this writing. Not that I think that's everyone's experience--I suspect most people who have just a few articles up and who price themselves low might sell a couple of $20 articles a year.

But when I got the email telling me of my latest sale, I was so pleased and surprised. It happens like that at Constant-Content. If you have a lot of articles up, the sales come more frequently. I have only a moderate number, and they come months apart. Given that I haven't written there in ages, I'm not complaining.

I recommend it to writers who like to write for people instead of search engines...or for Web content writers who don't know where to place certain pieces they write. Submit them to Constant-Content.

Humor and Puns: I Must Have Bad Comma

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 04:59:00 +0000

Every once in a while, I feel the need to write something that's just purely pun--er, fun. Recently I had a death in my family. According to our family tradition, tragedy goes hand in hand with comedy. When someone close to us dies, we use humor to help us deal with it.

So I thought for a break I'd post this piece that my husband and I worked on together. Last year, we sent it in to the Reader's Digest black hole that is their submission pool and it got sucked in, never to return.

So here it is, for the enjoyment of writers and editors everywhere. If you know somebody who would appreciate our rather silly style of humor, send them a link to this page.

Dear Sally,

Honestly, I must have bad comma! I sent my story to the editor to check. Well! When he was through it felt like my colon had been hit with a semi. He said that on the uppercase, it was a bold story, but on the lowercase, it was too much for him to asterisk. My “quotations” he marked as questionable? Then he punctuated the insult by asking if it was my period. (!!!)

Somehow I kept from hyphenating. As I pounded out his number, I saw that he’d bracketed out “braces”—but that word had never crossed my ellipses! So naturally I called him a virgule back-slasher and said I really resented his parenthetical re-marks, and I simply had to dash.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “but you see, italics like it is!” Then he underlined that if I failed to capitalize on his edicts, it would mean a death sentence for our noun-verb agreement.

At that point I had no choice. I issued a complete contraction. Basically, it was a total apostrophe!

Kisses forever,
Pundalite

Hire Writers for Web Content Work: Outsourcing Tips

noreply@blogger.com (Writer) — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 05:46:00 +0000

Outsourcing writing jobs is on the rise as Internet marketers become more and more specialized and their projects larger. If you are interested in hiring freelance writers because you have a great idea for a money-making website, but not the time to write all the content you need, your biggest problem isn't going to be finding writers - they're everywhere. Your biggest problem is finding quality writers who can write the Web content you need. Here are tips from a freelance writer to help you make sure you hire the right freelance writers for your job.
Professional Writers or Amateur?
Seek writers who are actual professional freelance writers. That sounds funny, but the truth is that many people are hiring themselves out as writers who are not well qualified. They're lacking in grammatical skills, they're out for a quick buck, or they simply copy what other people are writing.

How Much Does it Cost to Hire Writers?
You'll be surprised by how cheap are the services of writers on the Web. Writing that might have costed hundreds or thousands of dollars offline can be found for less than $100. The Internet has changed the pricing structure for write-to-hire work: Because writers don't need to spend long hours pursuing leads, they can charge less.

But the old adage that you get what you pay for remains in effect. Due to increasing unemployment and new online opportunities, people are turning to writing Web content who never wrote anything more professional than rough school papers. Some - both native English speakers and non-native speakers - lack facility with the rules of standard English. The result? Hire cheap writers, and you may get bad work that ultimately is no bargain.

On the other hand, this doesn't mean a cheap freelancer is a bad freelancer. The good writers may start cheap, but as they get more of a portfolio, they can charge more for their efforts. The excellent writers may not be affordable if you're on a strict budget.

For basic, small-scale Web content writing, depending on your project, you might not need "excellent" - competent might do very well. But keep in mind that professional-quality writing might have long-term benefits for your website. If you're offering $5 for a 500-word article, you're far less likely to receive quality work than if you offer $50 or more.

And if you want to hire a writer to write you a sales or landing page, expect to pay more - much more. But make sure you're getting somebody qualified.

Recognizing Quality
It's not always easy to recognize a good writer, let alone one who can write the content you need. When a portfolio looks impressive and the price is right, you may be eager to buy. Wait. Read writing samples. Specifically, read samples of the kind of work for which you'll be hiring. Is the writing clear? Would it sell to you, if you were a customer?

If you're hiring writers for "keyword writing" - my term for text that centers around a keyword instead of a topic - then make sure the writer produces articles that don't sound as though they were written for search engines. Which brings me to...

Hire Writers Who Know Writing, Not Just Fancy SEO Tricks
Lastly, seek writers who write for humans. Why? If nothing else, because of search engine ranking. Yes, of course the writer should have strong SEO (search engine optimization) skills and know all the white-hat techniques for driving search engine traffic to your pages. But your search engine rankings hinge largely on how readable your content is and how useful it is for the reader. If it's not well-organized, clearly written or grammatically correct, it's on its way out of the ranks.

It boils down to this: Outsourcing writing jobs takes its own special kind of talent. Whether you're a writer yourself or just want to hire a freelancer, you'll need to become proficient at recognizing a good freelance writer when you find one. You certainly don't want to spend the money to outsource, only to find you need to rewrite the darn thing, anyway.