Please Don’t Feed the Writer

There doesn’t seem to be a lot of writing going on around here lately, but if you think that’s because I haven’t been writing you would be terribly, horribly, incomprehensibly and emphatically wrong. The fact of the matter is that my daily writing totals have been running somewhere around 2,700 words by the time all is said and done at the end of the day.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t updated this little slice of the Internet pie while cranking out all those words I would have to point out that while writing about writing is an interesting sideline, it isn’t what brings home the bacon. Writing about food pays my bills, though there are other projects I’ve been devoting some pretty serious time to as well. Those projects are something that may be of use or interest to some of my readers, so I’ll get back to them when they are ready to unveil.

For now dear readers, I have a few updates I’d like to throw out over the course of the day, so stay tuned, there’s more coming!

Getting writing jobs is a whole lot simpler to do if you are known for your work.  While there are no shortcuts to gaining a reputation, there are methods that you can employ to make the process a bit more predictable.

Maki, the enigmatic voice behind Dosh Dosh, a blog dedicated to helping you make money online, spells out these steps in his article How to use the Web to Build a Powerful Reputation In Any Industry. I’ve gone over this article several times, and as a 20 year veteran of the Internet game, I’m going to say that I agree with his insight on this one.  If you follow along with the steps he’s outlined, you’ll have little problem gaining name recognition within 12 months time, if not sooner, and let’s face it…  As a Writer, your name is everything!

If you’re looking to become a power writer for the web, Dosh Dosh is one of those sites you just must have in your RSS Reader or bookmarks.  He really will help you make oney online.  He’s helped me to do so already!

If you’ve ever wondered how some sites get to the front page of social media sites like Digg or Stumbleupon and wondered how you can get your content placed there as well then Dustin Brewer might have the answers you’re looking for.  Dustin just penned a post on his blog titled Top 5 ways to create interesting content for social networks which details the methods that he feels will get your content moved from social networking obscurity to current buzz of the day.

While social networking sites will never get you the kind of traffic that good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) will garner over time, they can be great for spikes in traffic of anywhere from 20 or 30 visitors to well over 1,000 in a single day. The hope with this surge in attention is that at least some of the people that stop by will sign up for your site feed or bookmark your blog for a later visit, but regardless of the long term results it is an exhilarating feeling to see your page views jump by hundreds or thousands for a day.

This blog started as a method for me to chronicle my development as a writer in the traditional sense.  My goal at the time was to write novels.  This goal has changed, and the focus of this blog is changing with it.

I discovered that my particular writing style is best suited to short articles (less than 3,000 words).  I can produce several of these per day, where a full length novel is something that, at least for the time being, is an unreasonable goal for me.  To be honest, I went mercenary.  I like to get paid, and I like to be sure that I am, in fact, going to be paid sometime soon.  It’s easier to shoot for three to six $10.00 jobs per day than it is to slave at a keyboard while always facing the selection process and the chance of rejection at the end of that process.

To that end, I’m refocusing this blog to meet the needs of those of us the rest of the world has dubbed “Pro bloggers.”  I make my living doing this.  I see no reason that you can’t do the same, the world is a big place, there is still a lot of room in it for people to make at the very least a comfortable second income.

I’m going to help you get there.

Wanna come along for the ride?