Starting the Freelance Life

Starting Your Writing Business

If you are thinking about starting your writing business then there are a few things to consider before you start. You need some sort of system, whether you use a notebook, dedicated software or a spread sheet, you need a method of keeping track of clients, deadlines, invoicing and payments - all that as well as dealing with tax issues.

Stick With Your System

Once you have decided on a system then stick with it until you come up with something better, but you must keep track. The writing business is very much hills and valleys and you can find yourself overloaded with work if you're not careful at points (although there is always outsourcing). At other times there may be a work famine. This is the time to promote your business vigorously and to look for other sources of work. Read this book for more ideas and markets - and look out for part two on here.

Take a Look

Blog Hosting

You may have seen my interview with the author Patricia Guthrie a couple of weeks ago, here.

Yesterday Patricia offered to host my (as yet not quite finished novel) Two Women a Week on her blog. Needless to say I jumped at the change. If you want to see the interview, read a clip from my book or wonder what I do when I am not rambling on here then just click this link.

Page Rank and SEO

The Importance of Keywords

If you want to improve your site's search engine ranking then you need to know the importance of keywords. Keywords should be related to the title of your page and to your meta tags.

Don't overload a page with keywords, usually 1-2% density should be enough, so if you are writing a 500 word article then your key words should appear between five and ten times. You should vary your key word phrases, either break them up here and there or find synonyms.

Take care where you place your keywords, the most important places are the first paragraph,in the middle and in the last paragraph because this is how Google reads the page. The next thing that you need to improve your page rank are links. Read some more on all this here.

The Importance of Linking

Google likes links, only they have to be the right kinds of links.SEO gurus will all tell you that one way links from higher ranked pages than your own, can really help
Click Here!


The other thing that helps your pages to get ranked higher by Google are internal links. For some really great information on this you should see whamwriter's post.

Post script: When I really thought about what I had written here I had forgotten that I had written this post.

Life Manual For Over the Hill Frenzied Freelancer?

Frenzied Freelancer

I was reading Life Hack today and have come to the conclusion that if there was a life manual for an over the hill frenzied freelancer then I should have a copy. My latest escapade was to post to the wrong blog.

Scribefire

I was catching up with my blogs this morning, entering text blithely and hitting publish once I'd checked for errors only I had clicked the wrong blog and the post that was meant for my creative writing blog ended up here. Only I didn't realise it had published but I did notice I had the wrong blog ticked, so I ticked the other one and clicked publish again. Voila, it is now on both blogs I hope Google doesn't string me up for duplicate content.