Great Week For Guest Blogging

It’s been a good week for me this week. In addition to getting repeat work from old clients and landing a couple of new gigs, I’ve had posts published on several blogs. These are professional blogging gigs, which means that people pay me to blog. Here are some of my posts from the past week:

• Feeding Myself With Feedly
• Profilactic: Lifestreaming Made Simple
• Why Article Marketing Still Rocks
• Lifestreaming: First Look

I really love blogging and am interested in a wide range of topics. Contact me if you want me to contribute a paid post to your blog.

Spotting The Plurk Difference

Plurk: Spot The Difference is the title of my first post on the brand new TechGerm blog, where I hope I’ll be blogging regularly. It’s about five ways in which new microblogging service Plurk is different from the others. See whether you agree.

Twitter Client Review

Twitter In The AIR is my review of Adobe Air Twitter clients. It’s published on PiggyBankPie today, and is another in my series of guest posts on that site. See if you have any to add to the list.

Into The Plurkiverse

Social media - whether you love it, hate it or are mystified by it, it’s hard to avoid it. I’ve been playing with one of the latest microblogging services, Plurk, and I’ve written about the experience for PiggyBankPie. The post is called Exploring The Plurkiverse: MicroBlogging Gets Conversational. Enjoy!

How To Advertise Your Home Based Business For Free

If you are starting out with a home based business, the chances are that your budget for promotion does not exist. When you are new to working at home, you may be lucky to afford all the electronic equipment you will need. However, promotion is essential if you are to grow your business and make a success of it. Here are some tips which can help you to promote for free.

First of all, set up a website or blog. Although it is better to spring for the cost of registering and hosting your own domain, you can also take advantage of free blogging sites such as Wordpress and Blogger. Wordpress is slightly better because there is less spam and you can set up a static home page that looks like a normal website.

Use your site or blog to publish details of your skills, services and products so everyone can see them. Be sure to do some research and include keywords relevant to your home based business in your site content. That will help people to find your site through the search engines.

Next, let people know it is there. Write an article related to your business area and submit it to a free article directory such as EzineArticles or GoArticle. Be sure to include a bio box at the end that says what you do, links to your site and includes a call to action. This article will be reprinted on hundreds of sites, all of which will have a link to yours.

Register with forums that relate to your business. Post and comment regularly, using a link to your site in your signature. People will click on the link and will find your business.

With any luck the word will start to spread, but you can still help it along by commenting on relevant blogs and including a link to your website. No spam, please – keep your comments targeted and relevant and that’s exactly the kind of traffic you will get.

Of course, not all your promotional efforts have to be online. You can also put a sticker in your car window showing the address of your website or blog. You can also take out free ads both offline and online which will describe your business and make it attractive to prospective buyers.

All of these strategies will help you to raise the profile of your home based business and they won’t cost you anything but the time it takes to do them. This time is well worth spending if it means that your business is a success.

Want to use this article on your site?  Contact me about licensing rights.

Five Things I Can Do That Are Not On My Resume

Men with Pens wrote today about how a great reputation can ruin your business, making the point that sometimes the work you publicize creates a particular image of the skills you have. It occurred to me that all of us have skills that we don’t promote, but which we use competently. Here are some of the things I have done that are not on my resume:

• I have bought domain names and arranged hosting for several sites.
• I have customized Wordpress themes, including changing the colours, sidebar and footer on this one (the banner design is from Men with Pens)
• I currently manage a website on a volunteer basis, as well as several of my own.
• I write resumes for people.
• I advise people on managing their writing careers.

In other words, I do more than just write SEO articles and ebooks and blog.  So if you’re on this site because you’re wondering what I can do for you, these are a few things to add to the list - and I will add them to my resume one day.

June Work Update

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I thought I’d bring you up to date on what I’ve been doing in June.  I started the month with articles on eco-friendly travel in Florida, and wrote some new posts for Daily Writing Tips, where one of the posts that got the most attention was on travel writing resources.

For a site which should go live in the next couple of months, I’ve written on safety for children and pregnancy ultrasounds. Meanwhile, I’ve continued to work on a book on management and on posts for Daily Tech Bits. I wrote a report on Twitter and have been writing about eco friendly living in Canada, as well as penning a couple of articles on writing for a books site.

Twitter Marketing

My latest guest blogging gig has been for Mixed Market Arts, with a series of three posts. The second of those is all about web marketing with Twitter, and it’s been published today. I discuss how it can be used to promote your own work, to work with others and to get help if you need it.  If you’re wondering what Twitter is and how you can use it, then web marketing with Twitter is a good place to start.

Writing About Social Media

I recently had the chance to write about one of my favourite social media/networking sites, Twitter. It’s amazing how much information is out there. Although I’m a Twitter user, I started out not knowing as much as I could have about what makes it tick. I knew a lot about how people used it, and was able to use that information to produce a well researched report.  The client loved it. This is an area that I enjoy working in, so I’d love to do more of this kind of research.

Hire Me To Write Your Press Release

If you can write the news, you can write a press release.  As I’ve shown in my posts on Daily Writing Tips, the techniques for writing news stories and press releases are identical. As a former journalist and editor, I have read and written plenty of press releases, and the secret is simple:

• a killer headline
• a good angle
• decent quotes

Here’s how I work. You hire me to write your press release. I will ask questions about the purpose of the release, the target audience, and the company. I will try to find out what will give us the best angle for the release, and I’ll create a release that will meet your needs.  I am fast, accurate and reasonable.  Check out the top of my testimonials page for feedback from my latest client.