As y’all know, I fancy myself as a writer. I think at this point I can qualify that statement with all the different types of things I write and have written. I thought about recounting all the things I write, but then decided it was easier to link you back to a previous post on how much I write. Actually, I’m writing more than what was in this post at the time, which is scary.

However, I wanted to talk about editing for a little bit. There’s always problems with editing, especially when you’re editing something that someone else wrote. Editing really comes down to the issue of what you like and are looking for versus what someone else has said. I find that it’s a fine line sometimes between editing to help someone fix typographical or grammatical errors and changing the entire tenor of what someone has written.

About six weeks ago I helped a friend edit her book. She’d had some other people look at it and I guess they’d made some suggestions here and there. I went at it with a critical eye, first looking for typing errors, then looking for grammatical errors, and finally what I consider errors of omission. Let’s take these in order, because they’re quite different.

Typing errors are more than just misspellings. A typographical error could mean things that are capitalized that shouldn’t be and vice versa. They could mean words that are spelled correctly but not the right word for the sentence, such as when we see people always getting wrong the concept of ‘there’, ‘they’re’, and ‘their’. This is actually the easiest thing to fix because most often the rules are cut and dry.

Grammatical errors are in a way the hardest edits to make. One of the issues with grammatical errors is that you have to take into account the fact that people speak differently depending on where they live, and of course where you live. For instance, most places I’ve lived in, when you went outside to throw the ball around, you were ‘playing catch.’ In downstate New York, and it appears areas of Pennsylvania, they call that ‘having a catch.’ Another example is that when I was younger we would ‘go to lunch’, and now people ‘do lunch’.

Those are small examples, but they become important when you need to make sure a person’s home voice is heard instead of the voice of the editor. There are words I often use when writing something that someone will say “I’d have used this word instead.” My general thought is that “You might have used that word, but I wrote it”, so I tend to stick to my guns. However, if someone used the same word four times in one sentence, suddenly it’s a different issue because the readability of the sentence is in question, whether the writer understood what he or she meant to say. There’s also the issue of writing for your audience to understand you, yet, because it’s how you talk, suddenly throwing in a word like ‘perspicacious’ because it hits your fancy, and now you’re sending people scrambling to look it up because you didn’t think of writing ‘using good judgment’ at the time. If it’s honest and how someone speaks, every once in awhile you just have to leave it alone.

Errors of omission are either difficult or hard, depending on the reader and the types of things they’re used to looking for. At my writer’s group, one of the participants is always looking for more detailed descriptions of people and what they look like, little touches in rooms to help her see it in her mind, and other thing such as what foods smelled like, did mouths water, what kind of sound a car made, etc. That kind of thing doesn’t always enter my mind. What I look for are things that don’t explain something that a writer has put into a story. For instance, a character’s name being mentioned without any explanation before or afterwards as to who that person is or was. Or a tale being told that’s missing so much detail that you wonder why it’s there in the first place.

Something I don’t do all that often on this blog is edit. When I write here, I’m kind of in my own Mozart zone; what I say is what I say, and when I’m done saying it I move on. I do look for typos, but as Sire has shown, every once in awhile I miss a word. This blog is freestyle, and I enjoy it for that reason. I edit much more thoroughly on both my business blog and my finance blog, because the audience for those blogs is much different than this one, and the topics always more serious. When I wrote my first book I edited it 7 times, and I asked a few other people to edit portions of it as well. Remember I helped Guy Kawasaki edit his book Reality Check back in 2008, one of many people he asked for help (talk about feeling honored!). That was one time I didn’t speed read.

Editing is a very important component of writing, but its importance devolves depending on what it is you’re doing and your audience. While no one wants to read a lot of stuff that’s missing simple words over and over so that it gets in the way of easy reading, studies have found that most of us will insert words here and there that are missing so that it’s not a big deal. If you’re writing your own blog, do the best you can with some effort, but don’t hurt yourself. If you’re writing for others, or hoping to make money, that’s a different story altogether. Remember the three critical areas of editing, whether it’s for yourself or for someone else.

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I met Carolee Sperry at a local networking event where, unfortunately, it was just the two of us who showed up. As we talked, though, it seemed like we had a lot of things in common, especially blogging. Something else we have in common is the propensity to keep journals. I like logging what’s going on in both my personal and professional life, and it comes in handy when I need to go back to see what might have happened at a certain period in the past. I think that helps me with this blog in knowing where to find older posts to link to. Please enjoy her article here.

Have you ever kept a diary? Many people do. A diary is a way to keep track of daily events, the weather and perhaps a line or two about current events. A journal can be that and so much more.

Write Everything

A journal can be used to work through problems, make a life changing decision, heal relationships, help recognize patterns in our life and even discover the writer within. It can also be a friend in times of need.

They can vary- there are personal journals that not only serve as a diary but also use to work out personal issues that arise in their life.

Business journals help keep track of everything related to running a business. It’s an effective way to keep everything in one place, thus giving one the ability to look back and see what worked and what didn’t.

Other journal types could include, but are not limited to: medical journals, weight loss, parent/child journals, travel journals, dream journals, child discipline and more.

A journal can be anything from a high priced “journal- journal” from a stationary store or my favorite, the spiral notebook.

There are many journaling techniques that one can use to assisting them in working through problems. Even something as simple as “the unsent letter” can help one work through a challenge they may be having with a loved one, friend or co-worker.

Try it the next time you are upset with someone. Instead of saying something you may later regret, write a letter to the person.

Maximum effect seems to happen when the letter is written quickly- just “dumping the junk.” Don’t worry about grammar just get it out!

When you’re done, throw it out or burn it.

There are several other journaling techniques that can be used separately or in conjunction with the Unsent Letter.

To learn more about Journal Writing, and how it can help your personal or business life join my next class!

Carolee Sperry is a WAH (work at home) mom who homeschools her 12 year old daughter. She is also the coordinator of the Central New York Network Marketing group. You can check out her sites by going to Blogging4You, Advice for Work At Home, and Working In Jammies.

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I’ve written enough times on how it seems I’ll visit a blog because a topic got my mind going, only to see that it’s something I’ve not only read before, but almost word for word at the same time. A question I addressed in my blog writing series was how to think about what to write about.

Here’s a great example of how I find things to write about. Someone I met on Twitter named Rachel Lavern writes a wonderful blog that used to be called “Fearfully ‘n Wonderfully Made, but is now called… actually, I’m not quite sure what it’s called. If you follow the link below, you’ll see what I mean. Anyway, it’s a great blog with lots of content made to make people feel good and to think about things, but it’s one of those Intense Debate blogs, kind of like Disqus, which you know I don’t like, so I won’t comment there. Instead, I will comment through this blog which she’ll see on a trackback.

Anyway, her post is entitled What Will You Create, and in this case she has a short video on creation, then 10 ways to stem creativity by a guy named Jeffrey Baumgartner, whom I thought I knew but I don’t. Anyway, his 10 ways to stem creativity aren’t bad, but no one says you have to do it his way. As a matter of fact, though I’m not going to go through the 10, as I want you to check out Rachel’s blog, I will counter one of them.

He recommends that you don’t watch TV. I’m not going to suggest that, but what I am going to suggest is that you think about what you’re watching and see if there’s any concepts in any of those shows that you think are something worth commenting on. I mean, could I have written a top 10 TV shows if I’d never watched TV? You know, the most mindless drivel is entertaining to someone, and maybe if that person wrote about it, others would see it in a different light; or not. lol

I once wrote that I thought creativity was obsolete, but I really don’t think that’s the case. What I believe is that there are some of us who don’t want to challenge ourselves to be different, to make a statement, to give something that no one else has given before. That’s the safe route; what fun is being safe all the time? Well, unless you’re thinking about doing something really stupid like this (this is going to take you to a video that’s kind of an adrenaline rush; no embed, otherwise I’d put it up here). Then again, watch that video and tell me this guy wasn’t creative.

Probably one of the most creative blogs out there is Marelisa’s Abundance Online. Man, talk about wonderful words to read each time I’m ready for it. She really puts a lot into each post, like her latest one called The Paint By Number Approach To Accomplishing Your Goals. She writes beautifully, gives a lot of information, often gives a lot of leads, and I’m telling you, if you ever needed to find ideas on what to write about, her blog will give them to you.

How will you show the creative side of yourself in your next few blog posts?

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Last summer, Sire and I noticed that one of our blogging friends seemed to be posting things that were lifted from another source. They were word for word what was on another website; we considered that a serious breach of ethics.

I finally had the opportunity to ask him about these posts, telling him that I had noticed that they were the exact same thing is on some other websites. He told me that he had purchased some PLR (private label rights) articles and was using them because he didn’t have time to write anymore but wanted to keep new content on his website. I pointed out that it didn’t look right, and that when people usually use PLR articles that the idea was to modify them so that they would become one’s personal articles.

As some of you know I now offer writing and blog writing services as part of my business. With one of my blogging clients, I knew his industry really well, so I didn’t have to do much research with it. With most of the other writing that I’ve been doing, there has been a fair amount of research. What you start to find out is that as you read on the subject enough times, you start to get the feeling that you know it fairly well and can pretty much write totally original content more than half of the time without having to do any research at all.

But there are those times when you have to do some kind of research. On most topics, what I will do is think of what I want to write about, pull up four or five resources, read them all, and then start writing. If the majority of the resources quoted exact same information, then I would use that exact same information, but will alter the words if it’s possible. Sometimes it’s not; if you have a list of things that have to go in a particular order, you’re pretty much stuck using what’s there. For instance, I once wrote an article regarding something called “revenue codes“, which is a health care term. I listed a whole bunch of numbers and descriptions, and no matter what resource I might have had to look at, those numbers and descriptions would have been the exact same everywhere.

I think when it comes to writing there has to be some kind of ethical standard that a writer has to have. It doesn’t do a writer any good to copy blocks of words from someone else’s articles without giving them attribution. One of the gripes I’ve written about often on this blog is seeing people on other blogs saying the same thing over and over that they got from another blog. True, there may not be many new ways to say “create great content” when talking about ways to improve one’s blog or to encourage visitors to stop by, but that’s part of the essence of what writing is supposed to be about, that being creativity. I’m sure that someone else has probably written about ethical writing in the past, but I’m also betting that no one is ever written about it in quite the same way that I’m writing about it right now. That’s the kind of thing that makes us all unique.

There’s also the question of rewriting articles. Many people believe that’s unethical, because they’re taking one source and basically saying the exact same thing that someone else said only in a different way. I have kind of a different take on that one also. I have rewritten my own stuff from time to time, and as I am the original source for that information, I have no qualms about doing that rewrite. I also think that it depends on what you’re writing as to whether doing a rewrite of something is ethical or not. For instance, if you’re writing something about a new story you read, and you can only find that information in one place, I don’t think there’s anything unethical in writing that in a different way; after all, that’s news, and it’s what all the major newspapers around the country do when they get those newsfeeds from places such as the AP and Reuters. I do that on my finance blog all the time, although I also didn’t comment on those stories which make them unique.

What are your thoughts on ethical writing? Do you think I’m too strict, too lenient, or something else? Inquiring minds want to know.

At the time I was originally asked this question about how much I write, I thought it was an odd question. My initial inclination was to say that I’m always writing, but that’s not necessarily the case. I do write a lot, but not all of it is what I’ll call creative writing. That being writing my blogs, writing my articles, working on my book, writing for webpages, etc. But most of it is. I thought I’d talk about it a little bit here, just so y’all can see what I do with myself most of my days, unless I happen to be on the road consulting somewhere.

Let’s start with my blogs. You can easily see how much I write here. The first full year of this blog I wrote 300 posts. At the clip I’m going now, it’s going to probably come in around 275 for the year, as my anniversary date is the 12th. I just hit my 200th post on my finance blog, Top Finance Blog and on the anniversary date I wrote post #201. On my business blog, Mitch’s Blog, I just wrote post #622 earlier today, and I’ve had that blog just over 4 years, which means I average about 150 posts a year for that blog; not too shabby if you ask me. So, all told, that’s over 600 blog posts a year.

Next, my newsletters. I write two newsletters, one on general business issues, the other on health care billing issues. I’ve been writing them since 2003. I put the first one out every 2 to 3 weeks, which means at a minimum 18 a year, and the second one, because it takes more time, I write maybe 5 or 6 a year. Each one is a minimum of 800 words, often getting near 1,500 words each.

I write blogs for other people. At this point I’m writing 3 other blogs, each one getting at least 200 words, but y’all know me; how often am I writing anything less than 350 words? Those are all at 20 articles a month.

I’ve been writing articles for other people. My main client has me writing 27 articles a week, almost all of them at least 400 words. One of my other clients has me writing one article a week of around 500 words. I write articles for two other websites that I’m not going to mention here and average 3 to 4 articles at each a week.

I’ve mentioned in the past that I’m subscribed to around 200 blogs or so. I’m starting to whittle that number down because some folks aren’t talking about things that are keeping me as interested anymore, plus it’s really time consuming trying to keep up with that many blogs, as you can imagine. Being kind of a news junkie, I also read a lot of news sources each day, plus research for articles has me reading even more material. Anyway, I make it a job, so to speak, to comment on at least 5 blogs a day, but some days it can go as high as 30. I don’t write one line comments because that would be disingenuous, and only comment when I have something to say, but I also know that blog commenting is what helps drive traffic to your own blog.

I write articles and other things for my other websites, some of which I’ve talked about here before. I try to write one new articles every couple of weeks for my medical billing site, Medical Billing Answers. I need to write more articles for my reviews site, Reviews of Everything, and I now have a different perspective on how writing reviews could lead to product sales, thanks to these ladies at Affiliate Blog Online, and at my anti-smoking site Smoke Not So Much. I should be adding more articles to my other site Services and Stuff, articles, which actually has a few of those articles being read often, and is my own ezine article exchange that I should be taking more advantage of. By the way, anyone else who’d like to have an article listed on that site, contact me.

I’m also always writing outlines for projects I’m either planning or am working on. For instance, last week I gave a presentation at a medical billing meeting here in town, and I put together an extensive outline for the presentation, which lasted a week. Sometimes I have even more writing that has to come out of those presentations. For instance, when I gave my presentation this summer that resulted in the webinar I’m marketing at the top left of this blog on social media, that came out of an outline I had to write.

And finally, I think, my books and stuff. I’m working on a detective story and, of all things, an advice book for young people. The second was supposed to be a joint project, but it looks like I’ll be doing it all on my own at this point. There was another story also that was supposed to be a joint project that I think, once I get extra time, I’ll be writing that one on my own also. And I have two more ideas for websites that aren’t even at the outline stage yet, as I’m trying to determine how I’d like to work it and what I’d actually put on it and whether I believe anyone would actually come to it.

All that, and the occasional request for other articles and such, and I’m kind of a writing fool. Oh yeah, I didn’t mention the forums, Twitter, Facebook, the 150 emails a day that I actually download and respond to as opposed to the hundreds of others that I eliminate through Mailwasher every day; oy!

Is it fair to say that writing is my life? How do I get it all done? Well, some days I plan it out, and other days I just wing it. But I never miss a deadline; my credibility is always on the line in that respect. And yeah, at times it’s pretty hard work. But I don’t think I’d want to have it any other way, at least right now.

I’ve been a part of a couple of interesting discussions in the last couple of days. One occurred on a blog written by a commenter here, Anne, called About Freelance Writing. Another was on the Digital Point forums site.

On Anne’s site, she wrote a fairly innocuous article that took on a life of its own when one writer actually called some other writers “hacks” because they’ll write some low paying articles for other websites. That one pretty much sparked its own version of a class war that still hasn’t died down.

On Digital Point, the topic was whether people could find quality in paying writers a penny a word or less for articles, and if those writers were bringing down the rates for everyone else.

I have to admit that I’m kind of in the middle on both of these topics. Let me explain myself, if I can.

On the first topic, I certainly wouldn’t call anyone a hack. You already know the rants I just wrote about Demand Studios (which I might back off a little from, as I’m not as mad at them as I was before) and Helium (I’m still mad at them, so it’s not happening).

What my gripe was not about was how each of them paid. I mentioned it in passing on the Helium article, but Demand Studios pays a bit better, and if you can find something in a topic you know and don’t have to overly research you can make a nice chunk of change, though it can also be hard to find articles to write at times. If you could write one of their regular articles in an hour, or two of their shorter articles in an hour, and get them approved, that ends up being at least $15 an hour. That’s not overly great, but it’s twice minimum wage, and if you could do that 8 times a day during the regular work week, or 5 to 6 times a day seven days a week, it’s not bad.

For the year, that’s around $30,000 a year or so; as I said, not overly great, but not bad if you don’t have a lot of bills. But let’s look at the second topic. When I decided I was going to try to make some money writing, I started out with the penny a word thing. I was able to do it, but I hated myself with every article I wrote, especially on topics I didn’t know well, and topics that I thought were, well, stupid.

For instance, one of the last batches of articles I wrote were on epilators. For the guys, an epilator is a hair removal device. Women use them to remove hair from mainly their arms and legs, though they can be used in other areas as well (that is, if they want to use things like wax or electrolysis; I doubt most women would want to deal with the pain elsewhere). This guy wanted 30 articles on epilators. And he gave me the keyword phrases he wanted, and he wanted each phrase at least 3 times per article, for 400 words. They were all for a penny a word, and I barely made $100 for 14 hours of work; that’s why it was pretty much the last time I did it.

The point, though, is that, if I consider myself a quality writer, then it proves that quality writers can be found for a penny a word, possibly less. However, they won’t stay there for long, which means they’ll have to work hard to convince others that they’re worth more than that, or lose out to those people who really value quantity more than quality. And those people aren’t paying much attention, because when they have to rewrite stuff they’ve been sent, it’s killing their time and taking money out of their pockets.

The freelance writing business isn’t all that easy. Many people tend to devalue it just like they devalue training. I know because I do that as well. Remember the survey I asked people to take some weeks ago (it’s now closed)? The overall indication is that most people want live seminars if they’re in town, but will do online seminars. The survey also indicated that most people believe paying $25 for a live seminar is as high as they should go, and around $15 for an online seminar; $10 for a podcast.

Just like training, it takes a little bit of time to write. Sure, I write fast, but that’s on topics I know. If I don’t know a topic, it could take up to three hours to learn enough about some topics to be able to write a quality 500 word article. That’s because more people are protecting their information online, so it’s harder to find exactly what you need. Sure, you can be creative, but only if the basic information is solid. If you want something good, time is money.

I won’t take $15 for something I have to research more than an hour; it’s a killer. Does that beat not writing at all, thus not making any money? Probably not, but everyone has to draw a line somewhere. Been there, done that, looking for better stuff, better writing opportunities. I have gotten a couple of $100 assignments, but not nearly enough. That’s why I’ve been talking about it more often around here. I feel everyone has a right to make a nice living if they’re willing to work for it and someone else is willing to pay for it.

Just another thought for the day; what say you?

Yesterday I castigated Helium for some issues I was having with them. Today, it’s Demand Studios turn.

I’ve written about them twice. The first time I wrote about them, I was introducing them to you as another site where writing might not be such a bad idea. The second time I wrote about them, I decided to update you on how I was progressing, so to speak.

Today, I’m telling you that I’m done with them, and I’m going to tell you why. In this case, it’s two things; I’m not sure how the third thing is going to play out just yet.

In the update, I mentioned that they had turned down one of my submissions. There were two problems with this. One is that they don’t tell you why they’ve turned it down, other than to say it doesn’t meet their standards and to read their pdf about it. Well, I’d read the pdf, wrote in their format, and they didn’t like it. I even totally rewrote the first submission, only for them to kill it.

It happened again on Thursday. One of the articles I wrote they asked for rewrites of a couple of areas. I did that, resubmitted the article, only for it to be rejected without a reason why once again. That’s enough of that, I figure. Understanding that I’m not perfect in writing in a style for someone else, I’m willing to try to learn and try again. However, if they don’t give you a clue, there’s nothing you can do about it.

Also, on the Demand Studios site, you have a work desk area where your performance, money, etc are all listed. Everything disappears once they process things except the articles that they reject. It stays there forever, like a scarlet letter, and there’s not a single thing you can do about it. Sorry, but I don’t need a constant reminder of my supposed failures; I’m not a dog who needs his nose pushed into his own urine on the carpet.

One other quick gripe. They changed up their article formats, and that really started to spell the end for me. They have articles in different formats. Two I worked on were “about” and “how to.” “About” was my favorite format, and relatively easy also, because you could write the entire article, come up with at least 5 categories to place your information in, and that would be that. There used to be lots of articles in that format, so you had a lot of pretty good choices. Suddenly, they changed up on us, and the majority of articles were now “how to.” Now, there’s not a lot wrong with that, except with those articles, you’re supposed to lay out a step by step process for getting something done, then provide reference links that back up your article.

What’s the problem? Here’s an example. Before I realized that they had changed the format, I wrote up an article on how to bring down one’s blood glucose, something I’ve talked about with my modified eating plan (and, by the way, it’s working like a charm; also lost 5 pounds). When I went to the site to post it, I realized it had changed to a “how to” type of article.

The problem now was that my article didn’t fit because there’s no one way to give a true step by step process for how to lower glucose levels. I certainly wasn’t going to be able to find any reference material relating to it. With the initial article, I talked about lowering carbohydrates, eating more fat, eating many smaller meals during the day, which are all covered somewhere online, so I had lots of references. With the new format, nothing fit. Then I realized that all the articles I’d selected to write on were in the new format, and none of them fit; at least they didn’t fit if you asked me.

So, earlier today I got paid for the last articles I’m ever going to write for their site. Once I saw the payment in Paypal, I went to their site to close my account. Lo and behold, once again, there’s nothing on their site I could find so I could close my account. What the hey? So, I’ve had to write them through their help desk to ask them to remove me. I haven’t heard anything yet; we’ll see.

One big thing I’m now learning is that, before I sign up with anyone else, I need to make sure I can easily leave if I want to. I always thought most sites had that sort of thing, but I now see that’s not true. Very lackluster on my part to not notice that; I’m going to try to learn from this mistake for the future. However, the main thing, once again, is that Demand Studios turns out not to be the panacea I had hoped they’d be. I did make some nice money there, but with the changes and other stuff, it’s just not going to get it done for me.

Oh well, back to the drawing board; who else wants some writing services?

Last year, I decided to give Helium a try after having a guest post here by one of their editors. This past week, a couple of things happened that made me realize these people weren’t for me, and it seems to continue into today.

The first thing is that I got email from them telling me they had removed one of my articles because I had self promotion in it. The thing that irked me is that I posted that article with them last November or December, and this is the first I’m hearing about it? It was an articles I wrote for my business newsletter that I figured I would repost on their site. In that article, I allude to my book Embrace The Lead, and when I posted the article to the site, I hadn’t even thought about that one line being in there.

Anyway, that was enough to irk me, as I’m not much for letting folks get to me more than once these days, so I went looking for a way to delete my account. There wasn’t a single thing on their site about getting out of it; ugh. So, I decided to write the help desk to ask them to kill my account.

Within a couple of hours, I get an email from them asking me why I want to remove one of my posts. That showed they didn’t even take the time to read what I’d written them, which irked me even more. I responded to that email saying they hadn’t read it, and that I wanted to immediately cancel my account.

A few hours later I got another email from them, but it’s not addressing my request. Instead, it’s saying that they’re deleting another of my articles for plagiarism, and one more instance of that and I’ll be banned from the site. Now, as nice as that would be, the thing is that I’m the original author of the article. I have it on one of my other sites, and last year, when I had talked to the lady who wrote the guest post through email, she said that if I wrote it, even if it was previously published, I could use it. So, great, I’m now accused of plagiarizing from myself; sheesh!

I returned that email also, saying that I was the original writer and that the article was on my site, and that I had put through a request to cancel my account and I was still waiting for that to happen. Today I get one more email, but this time it’s a Helium newsletter; what the hey? Isn’t anyone at Helium paying attention to my requests?

Well, I’m done with them. In the course of time, I earned 7 cents; they obviously can keep that. I was still left with the same feeling I had when I wrote my original post about them and freelance writing woes in general, only I can take it further now. One of the things you really have to do, if you’re going to decide to look into it, is to go really deep in trying to find a topic already listed that someone else supposedly has already come up with. Man, that was more work than the articles themselves were the first time I wrote them.

Then, after you post an article, you have to spend at least 10 minutes rating other articles. They give you two articles on the same topic, and you have to decide which one you like better and by how much you like it more than the other one. Then they put the article you favored against another article, and you rate once more. After that, it’s two more articles, and it all starts again. They also score you on how you rate articles; wow!

So, I’m done with them, and I’m hoping they cancel my account soon. If not, so be it, as I won’t be going back. No, I don’t recommend them, and there you go.

Now, if you think this is my only rant against a writing website, stay tuned for tomorrow’s rant.

Back in August, I wrote about trying to join, then finally being accepted to, Demand Studios as a writer. I thought I’d post a follow up to let you know how things are going.

Let’s start with this; I’ve made money. That’s a big deal, I must say. I’ve made $15 for every article I’ve written except one, where I made $7.50. I was doing really well with it until Mom got sick; then I just couldn’t concentrate on it. At some point, once a consulting gig I’m doing completes, I’ll get back to it.

Next, finding things to write on isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. They set all the titles, and you don’t get to change them up. In my field, there are some titles I haven’t touched because they just don’t quite fit, and I couldn’t figure out what kind of article to write about it. With others, I knew the information, but one of the things Demand Studios wants are links to places where people can get more information, and that I just couldn’t find. Well, some of it I could, but it’s restricted, which means no one else could get to it.

Titles are my worst problem, though. When you run out of titles in your topic, and you will, then you have to determine to see if you can write on topics you know nothing about. That’s where the research part comes in, and I’m not bad at that. What I’ve found happens often, though, is that there’s either no information about something or the information you find doesn’t conform to the article title you’re hoping to write. For instance, there was one topic on something that wanted an article on the side effects of this one thing I’d never heard about. I went looking for information and it turned out there were only two side effects; headache and nausea. Kind of hard to write a 400 word article on two things, so I had to give that one up.

Next, you find that trying to write to someone else’s style can be difficult. They require what they say are action words, not passive style words, and passive is the style I write in best. So, we’ve had some issues with that one. They also say they don’t like any throwaway sentences; in other words, you can’t set things up for the big hit. I find that hard to do also, since it doesn’t quite conform to storytelling, but of course this isn’t storytelling with them. And sometimes it’s confusing when you use a term that they pick out and say they need more information on it, when at another time they didn’t pick it out at all. Adding definitions helps you with the word count, though, so there’s no real gripe there.

I’ve had all except one of my submissions approved. On the one that wasn’t approved, I actually rewrote an entire article, just so the guy could tell me that he didn’t think he was learning anything new. Well, sometimes you’ve communicating information that someone else just might already know; that’s the title you selected after all. My thought is that not everyone else would know that information, but they have their standards. I’ll probably find a place for that article somewhere; have to work on that one, though, as it’s a topic that doesn’t fit here in any way.

If you can figure out a way to write at least one article an hour for 7 hours, you’ll earn $105 a day. That’s not so bad if you have nothing coming in. I haven’t tried to write any of their revenue sharing articles, which I mentioned in the last post, mainly because I haven’t seen a title that I feel I can research yet. But one of these days I will, if I need to. After all, it would be nice seeing some residual cash coming in from something I wrote.

These folks aren’t easy to write for at times, but overall, they’re fair, and it’s money if you can write at all. Of course, me being me, I’m always on the lookout for better paying things. As I find them, I’ll mention them; stay tuned.

About six weeks ago, one of my friends, Josh Shear, mentioned this new site to me that has writing assignments for money that wasn’t all that bad. It’s called Demand Studios. I socked it away in my email folder and didn’t think about it for awhile.

Then about 2 weeks ago, another friend of mine on Facebook mentioned that she needed a little bit of money, and was wondering where to get it. Later the same day, a different friend said the same thing. I knew both of them did some writing, so I sent both of them to Demand Studios. Then I realized that I hadn’t even looked at the site myself, and figured I best look at it if I was going to keep sending people to it.

You don’t get to see much unless you sign up, but it looked interesting enough and I did sign up. Or at least I almost finished signing up. Seems they require a resume of some sort, as well as writing samples. I had writing samples, but my resume,… well, it’s 3 pages long, and has more about other things I do rather than writing. I didn’t want to send a resume, and almost turned the whole thing down, but decided to bite the bullet, recraft my resume, and submit to be a writer.

Later that same day, I got an email from them; they had turned me down! Man, was I shocked. Everyone else I told was shocked also, as it seemed everyone else had been accepted. I was somewhat irked, and I mentioned it on Facebook. That wasn’t good, but I wondered if maybe they thought my background was too pigeon-holed for anything they might get.

I let it bother me for almost a week, which also isn’t good. I had other things to do, including my poker tournament, but I just couldn’t get it off my mind. On my drive home from the poker tournament, after making myself feel better with the Donna Summer music, I decided I was going to write the site and ask them why I’d been turned down. It just didn’t make sense to me, and I wanted an answer.

I wrote them on Saturday afternoon and asked what the deal was. They wrote me back later Saturday evening saying they couldn’t open my resume file. They said to reapply, but I had to use a different email address. Man!

Well, I bit the bullet, created the resume in a pdf format, and sent it in with a different email address; I have enough of them after all. Hours later, they approved me, and I was ready to go.

Basically, from what I’ve seen so far, they have three levels of payment. One is $5 articles, how-to articles. The second are $15 articles on various subjects. The third level is part of revenue sharing, which means your article could possibly make money over and over, and you get a piece of the action. Thing is, the article might not make anything, in which case it’s just sitting there and you might feel like you’ve wasted your time.

There are tons of subjects you can write on, but with a caveat. Some of the titles seem limiting in many categories. However, you can suggest titles, but initially, until they get to know you better, you can only submit how-to article titles, which means the $5 variety. And they may not like how you write your title, and they don’t give you a real answer as to how to change it. For instance, I initially put through a title called “How To Enjoy Opera” that they accepted as a title they’d review, but another one I put through called “How To Enjoy The Symphony” said it wasn’t in the proper format; go figure. I canceled the first one, though, after I realized it was a $5 article. By the way, I like opera, at least half of it, and I love symphonic music, especially the romantic period.

I bid on, and wrote, and submitted my first article Sunday early evening. It was on a health care topic, one I know very well. It was approved an hour later, and I was a published writer with their group, and $15 richer. At this point, I’ve submitted 4 articles to them. Three have been approved, and one is under a plagiarism review, which I know I’ll pass because the part they’re saying is plagiarized is a list of categories, which is widely available everywhere on the internet, and the article can’t be completed without it. The first article I submitted had the same thing, but for that one I mentioned it in the editor’s notes area, where you call tell them something you want them to know about the article; I should have done it for this one as well.

For every article approved by Wednesday night, you get paid through Paypal on Friday. My one article isn’t approved yet, but on Friday I should be getting paid $45. That’s not bad for three articles, and I have claimed 3 more article topics that I need to write before September 1st. You get a week to write any articles you claim, and you can claim up to 10 at a time. I just wanted to see how things work before deciding how much further I’ll go with it.

And there you go; my review of Demand Studios. Hey, it’s not a bad part time job, and if you can write fast, it’s not a bad full time one either. Let’s see how things progress for me from this point on.

As most of you know, I’ve been talking more lately about writing for others. Indeed, I have been making money writing articles, and I have some blogging clients also.

The thing is, there are two problems with my model. One, I’m not generating the kind of money I thought I’d be generating; two, some of the things I’ve been asked to write about have been, well, kind of impossible for me to write on.

That’s hard to admit to because when I first announced I would do writing services, I assumed there wouldn’t be a topic I couldn’t write on. What I hadn’t thought about was if there’s no information to research on, then I’m stuck. And trust me, not everything is on the internet, it would seem.

So, this weekend, I went to the Digital Point forum to ask a general question about how much research people do on topics that seem impossible to write on, especially when asked about specific keywords and the like. I got some responses, and they seemed, well, a little harsh. Still, I decided to write two of the people private messages to explain to them what I was talking about and what I was getting paid.

Both of them enlightened me. They both said that I’m basically giving my writing away; I was stunned. I did know I was underpaid, but I hadn’t realized by how much I’ve been underpaid. If I were getting paid the rates that I should, research time becomes affordable, and easier because people aren’t asking for stupid stuff.

It was something I needed to hear, and sometimes something we all need to hear. With my main business, or what up to now has been my main business, I knew how to price my services because I understood just how exclusive they were. With writing, I thought I had to compete with the low ball folks and scratch out my living by trying to write so many articles that my mind goes nuts. Nope; turns out that, based on what some of these folks have been doing, and are recommending to me, I could actually make a very good living writing as few as 10 articles a week.

Wow; that would be great! I could still write my blogs, still have blogging clients because I enjoy that, but I could drop all the low dollar writing gigs and concentrate on other stuff all around. Man, life would be sweet doing that.

I share this with y’all because most of us go along doing things that we think is the right way to do it, only to learn that someone else is doing it easier than we are, and succeeding. This doesn’t mean I’m giving up on my affiliate marketing either; I have plans for doing more of that, as well as plans for adding at least two new blogs into my repertoire. It does mean, though, that I’m ready to embrace a new mind shift towards bigger and better things.

Anyone got a problem with that?

There was a New York Times article from a little over a month ago called Blogs Falling In An Empty Forest, talking about how many people stop writing in their blogs because of different reasons. One lady dropped because she started to freak when people noticed her out in public; she lives in NYC. Another person dropped it because she didn’t get a lot of comments and was disappointed by that. Still another person dropped blogging because he thought he’d make a lot of money from it quickly, but didn’t.

Blogging is both easy and hard at the same time. It’s easy because all you have to do is write. It’s hard because what you have to consistently do is write.

There’s not much problem with writing for many people, per se. What the problem becomes if trying to think of what they want to say. It’s one of the problems with niche blogging, when a person has defined their niche so rigidly that they don’t know what to write about pretty soon because they feel they’ve covered it all. They might not have, but that’s how they might feel.

If they’re not a niche blogger, they may feel like, all of a sudden, blogging is a chore. Suddenly, it starts to feel like work to them. Well, if your intention was to make money, of course it’s work. If your intention was just to write, and you didn’t feel the passion just to write when you started, you made a mistake.

There were a couple of statistics in the article. Per Technorati, only 7.4 million out of 133 million blogs they track had been updated in the past 120 days, or less than 5%. Also, CEO Richard Jalichandra said that, at any given time, there are 7 million to 10 million active blogs on the Internet, but “it’s probably between 50,000 and 100,000 blogs that are generating most of the page views.”

Heck, I’m glad to see it’s that high. It means I still have a shot at breaking into the big time with this, or any of my other blogs.

Now, I’ll own up to having some of the same feelings with my business blog some years ago. I was on the verge of giving it up back in 2006. I was on the road a lot, it seemed like a lot of trouble for almost no return, and then my ISP had lost all my content in a total system crash. I had a perfect reason to give up the ghost and move on with my life. Instead, I decided I still had lots to say, and would dedicate my time to making sure I kept writing updates. I guess I felt I still needed a place to say certain things, an outlet to vent, mainly about topics relating to my business. But it’s amazing how one can turn a post about almost anything into something that can be related to business.

See, inspiration really is everywhere and anywhere. Just as I found my inspiration for this post in the NY Times article, anyone can find inspiration in things they read, see, or experience. And if you have any passion whatsoever, you will, and you’ll continue blogging. And it won’t matter how often you blog, or how many posts you have. It will to potential readers, though, because if you don’t post often enough, people won’t come back. So, you also have to decide how much you care about that.

In the end, it’s not about money (though we want it), and it’s not about comments (though we crave them); it’s about self expression and knowledge. How much do you love blogging? And how will you express yourself today?

Back at the beginning of April, I wrote a post titled I’ll Write Articles For You – For A Price. It was my introduction into the world of writing for others and getting paid for it; makes sense, eh? I thought I’d give an update on how things are going in what is kind of a career move.

It started out slowly, which also makes sense. Luckily, one of my article packages was kind of popular, so I did make some money off that. The other one still sits there without anyone even thinking about buying it, but that’s okay. That’s what experimentation is all about.

Meanwhile, I started getting some clients with my initial offer of how much I’d charge. I quickly learned that I deserved more than that, needed more than that, so I increased my rate. And I still got customers, which is telling. I haven’t written a single article that someone has come back and said it wasn’t written well. I did write a set of articles that the requester liked, but said they weren’t what he was looking for, which I then turned into a new anti-smoking website, but to date, that’s the only minor setback I’ve had.

I now have some weekly clients who request a certain number of articles a week. It’s not enough so that I can live only off that yet, but it’s a nice start, and luckily I make money in other ways so that what I’m making now isn’t all that bad. Sire has recommended that I go back and give Helium another try, and I just might do that when I have a little bit of free time. I actually enjoy writing, and if I can make more from it, all’s the better.

But I also have to admit that it’s not always so easy. What you find when people want you to write for them is one of two things. One, they’ll give you topics and let you write whatever you want to write about them; I just love that. Two, they look for certain keyword phrases and want you to work those phrases in as much as you can, even if it destroys the flow of the article. You sometimes feel silly doing it, but hey, it’s money.

However, even with the people who let you write on certain topics, some of the topics can be hard to think of week after week, especially if you’re writing multiples of them. One of my clients, for instance, wants 7 articles on this one topic each week, which means I have to be really creative in thinking about what to write. Luckily, as I’ve done a lot of research on the topic for him, and he was my first client, I’ve learned a lot about it, to the point where sometimes I don’t even have to do new research, I can just write something from memory. That’s an unexpected benefit of writing for one person all the time; too bad it’s not something I can use in my real life.

Finally, I did have one major caveat that I’ve stuck to, and will continue to stick to. I won’t write anything for someone else that’s a part of my core businesses. After all, if I do that, I’m just taking away from myself. This means I won’t write on SEO, or leadership or diversity or healthcare. I am writing on finance, though, which could be taking away from my finance blog, but that’s okay because it’s a wide field; always lots to write about there.

Writing is easy and hard at the same time. If I could only get someone to let me write about anything and everything, and get paid for it, I’d be a happy guy. Oh yeah, that’s what this blog is for; now to only get paid for it.

In looking for some extra cash, you know I’ve started doing some freelance writing on the side. Ever since I wrote about Helium, then had the guest post by Barbara Whitlock talking about its benefits (which I still haven’t really noticed, but that’s okay), I’ve been checking out some other sites that offer different types of freelance items, not just writing. But I figured this article is a pretty nice follow up to my last article on writing articles for others.

One day I came upon a post on a blog called Just Make Money Online, my friend Shai Coggins‘ site, titled Freelancing For Cash. It was a guest post by Lisa Folder of the blog Practical Money Maker. In the article, Lisa referenced three specific sites to look at for freelance writing work: Elance, Guru, and ScriptLance. This is my review, of sorts, of the three.

Elance was the first one I looked at, and the only one of the three that I discarded, though I might still go back. Overall, it looks like a site where you might get paid better for services you provide than the other two sites. However, as a service provider, you also agree to pay them a percentage of whatever you get paid. This means Elance is taking money from both sides, which is probably why those who advertise on it have higher paying jobs than the other sites.

You have the option of registering as either an individual or as a business, but if you register as a business there’s a higher fee. However, the fees you either pay or don’t pay give you the opportunity to bid on more jobs and the like. I guess it’s not bad, but it wasn’t the option I wanted to go with at the present time.

Guru was the next site I looked at, and I did sign up for them. With Guru, you create a profile and you can add samples of your writing, as well as a resume if you’re looking for other types of work.

Something I hadn’t paid attention to, though, was that you don’t get paid directly through them. Instead, if you get a contract that you bid on, the purchaser of services puts a portion of the pay into what they call an escrow account, and Guru holds your money until the project has been completed and approved of by the client. In essence, they’re kind of the arbiter to make sure both parties do what they’re supposed to do.

One of the problems with Guru is that you have to create profiles, but you only get to create one profile for free, which means you need to select the right profile up front if you’re looking to highlight one specific thing. Instead of going for writing, I decided to create a profile for my business consulting, which might not have been the best move, because I have fewer options to choose from than I might have if I’d selected freelance writing. Oh well, lesson learned.

The final site I checked out, and also joined, was ScriptLance. This site offers computer projects as well as writing assignments, so I signed up, then went to check out some of the offers.

There’s a mixture of both low and high paying assignments on this site, but most of the writing assignments don’t pay all that well. Also, some of the people who post projects have them sitting there for upwards of a month, which means if you’re looking for something quick, you may not find it here. I found that problematic because there was one I thought would be great, but they weren’t going to be making a decision for two weeks.

However, I still got on their mailing list, which I get once a day. It shows me the latest projects out there based on my profile.

And there you go. If you’re interested in freelance or project work of some type, you can’t hurt yourself in taking a look at any of these sites to see if there’s something for you.

As some of you know, I do writing on the side from all the other stuff I do. You know about my book writing series which is listed above, and of course I’ve talked about writing articles for pay and creating article packages, of which one is now off the market.

A question I wanted to address is how one can write articles about things one knows nothing about. Most of us adults have forgotten what it was like to have to write research papers when we were in school, and truthfully, I’m not sure that skill hasn’t been lost with today’s kids. Anyone can parrot back what they can find on the internet. The real test of skill is taking researched content and putting it into your own words.

I’d like to talk about a writing project I did last Sunday for a new client, which will give an example of how it can be done. I was tasked to write 7 articles on a subject that I knew nothing about. Though I was given some keyword phrases, the purchaser told me I could pretty much write on anything I wanted to, as long as I got the topic right.

The first thing I did was copy his keyword phrases into Excel. Then I went to Google and typed in the main topic, just to see what came up. Based on the first page, and I have my main Google page set to give me 50 links at a time, I came up with 13 article topics I thought I could write on. I wasn’t sure those would be the final choices, but I was going to start there.

I went to 25 of the first pages that were listed, just to see what they were all about. When I saw information that I thought would help me, I copied it and pasted it into a different Excel spreadsheet, then formatted the columns so I could read it all. I then looked at certain words I was going to highlight, and looked to see how many different articles I felt I could get out of the original content I’d copied.

I came up with four ideas immediately, and three of them fit the topics and keywords that I’d initially been asked for. I decided to start off writing about the main topic, which I knew would lead into writing the other articles. This is always how I do things; for instance, when I wrote my first article package, which was on Twitter (that’s the one that’s now been pulled), the first article was on what Twitter was all about. That’s always the easiest article to write when you know something about the topic, but even when you don’t, it’s usually the easiest topic.

Next I went ahead and wrote the other four articles based on the information I already had. I didn’t plagiarize a single thing; every line I wrote was original, even if I used the same content. It was easy to do because I had multiple sources for each topic, and they all described the same thing either with the same exact words or different words. If the words were all the same, I’m creative enough to figure out other words; if they were different, I just altered some of them, rearranged others, and still came up with original wording.

At this point I still had three articles to write, so I decided to do some research on a couple more specific topics the client had mentioned, just to see what I could come up with. And I was able to figure out how to write two more articles on those keywords, and it really wasn’t all that difficult in the end. The thing is, if there’s enough research information on any topic, it’s fairly easy to write articles, and on these topics, there was.

Now it was time for the final article, and with the original research, I actually already had another topic in there, so I decided to go ahead and write it, and then I was done.

I shared the first article with the client to see how he liked it; he loved it! He liked it so much he went ahead and paid me before I’d even asked him to; how’s that for writing love? Two days later, he commissioned some more articles, and life isn’t so bad writing for him, even though one of the topics was somewhat difficult, as it didn’t have as much original material to pull from.

These articles ended up being between 439 and 656 words, and he only wanted each article to be more than 400 words. And, for that first set, it took me less than 2 hours to write them all. What’s he using them for? I didn’t ask, as, when you’re writing for someone else, you just write and give them away, and that’s that.

Anyway, that’s how I did it. If you have any more detailed questions, other than what the articles were on (no, I’m not giving that up), I’ll be glad to answer. For those of you who do write articles on something you have to research, how do you go about it?