Internet Writing :: Inklit.com

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Stop in the middle.

credit: smokegirl_rebekah

Happy Friday.

I don’t usually go for confessional blogs myself, so I usually try not to write like mine is one. You know the genre. They usually have a tagline that starts with “Just”, to qualify their author’s efforts. “Just my thoughts on the war”, for example, or “Just the ramblings of a chain smoking pregnant teenager living with her boyfriend behind a music store in Taiwan”.

However, sometimes I live up to my own standards so poorly that I would make a great Republican. So this is just a happy Friday post, depending on the kindness of strangers, living behind the music store. It is just a confessional post, with the following confessions:

• I love how easy it is to self publish online, because it means there are lots of opportunities.
• I hate how easy it is to self publish online, because it means that every chain smoking pregnant teenager living with her boyfriend behind a music store in Taiwan is in competition with me.
• I also hate how easy it is to publish online because I can get confused about which of my projects are important. Given the terrible, self-imposed imperative to become awesomely popular and the number of chain smoking pregnant teenagers I’m competing with, I feel like I have to come up with a definitive domain / topic / killer app within the next few days or I’ll die penniless, with my young nemeses selling my clothes for cigarette money.

Now you know why I hate confessional blogs.

In the interest of replacing this funk with some creative work, I’m going to shift gears now and work on one of those projects. If you see any teens catching up with me, for God’s sake, won’t you please let them know how bad smoking is for the baby?

Hey, isn’t this blog supposed to be about writing? How did these design elements get here?

I like the second one better. It looks better if you click it to see it full size.

My wife likes the current look and feel better than that one, though. There’s something about the whole black and white that must be a guy thing.

Readers, what do you think?

As an Internet writer, I love hearing about the death of print.  All your newspapers and magazines are going to fold any minute, and then everyone will be online all the time looking for rising young pundits like me.  Well, "pundits like me", anyway.  The main thing is that we won’t have to deal with those inconvenient literary agents and editors whose poor jobs Andrew Keen is so concerned about.   Then we can just hoist up our content and claim our AdSense Money.  I want my MTV.

My Favorite Death of Print Picture

Here is my favorite picture showing how print is dying, a chart of the stock for McClatchy Company over the last few years.  McClatchy is the company that owns several newspapers including my home town paper.

This chart shows print dying on schedule.  If you read what some of the McClatchy papers have to say about their troubled fortunes, however, they’re more likely to put most of the blame on the declining ad revenue caused by the troubled real estate market.

I think they’re just blowing smoke.  Print is dying, I tell you.  Didn’t they hear the rumor?

Other Numbers Tell A Different Tale

I don’t know if print is dying fast enough for my taste, however.  Every time I go to Borders, I find three two-sided shelves, fully loaded with print magazines.  You’d think they’d be down to two shelves or something if print were really in its death throes, but so far they’re still hanging on quite nicely.  There must be at least two dozen magazines dedicated to women’s abdomens alone.  Fortunately they only cover the top 1/10th of 1% of women’s abdomens, too, or they could fill up the entire store.

As if all these magazines weren’t problem enough for the death of print rumor, along comes the web site of the MPA, or Magazine Publishers of America.   This site publishes all sorts of magazine circulation statistics, for both single issue sales and subscriptions.  For example, here are the 2006 subscription figures for the top 100 ABC magazines.  Let’s see how fast print is dying.  The two top magazines are AARP magazines at about 22 million subscribers each.  Of course, AARP circulation has a captive audience of AARP members, so this number is artificially high.  Let’s check out the number three magazine, Reader’s Digest.  About 9.7 million people subscribe to that.   (I guess it really DOES pay to increase your word power). 

Now let’s see how the blogs are doing.  Technorati’s top blog as of today is Engadget, with no subscription numbers available.  Fair enough.  Tech Crunch, the number two blog, boasts some 734,000 subscribers.

As you can see, the number three ABC magazine has twelve times as many subscribers as the number two blog.  Of course, the real readership in each case is harder to measure.  How many of those Readers Digests are sitting in a dentist’s office somewhere?   We don’t know.  Based on my own subscriber and traffic numbers, I would expect TechCrunch’s daily visitor count to be somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.5 million to 6 million, so Reader’s Digest still wins has a pretty handy lead based on circulation numbers alone.

I’ll leave the rest of the discussion / spin for the comments.

I hope you enjoyed this essay content, and invite you to subscribe for more.  I need big subscription numbers for when I release my blog to Kindle.  Hey, wait a minute, wasn’t Amazon.com the company that was selling us all Segue’s a few years back?  Whatever happened to those…

Those of you who know me from my real estate brokerage may also know Purva Brown, who contributes to my real estate blog. Purva also hosts a fine real estate blog of her own, The Sacramento Real Estate Gal. Purva joined my real estate company last year. She originally thought she was taking on a mentor when it comes to search engine optimization and Internet marketing, but as it turned out, Purva’s helped me to expand my writing horizons at least as much as I ever helped her.

Purva and I are currently hammering out an agreement to collaborate on several projects. Our first is putting up an online store to help us market and sell e-books and PLR content. If all goes well we should be launching our first product together, Purva’s ebook for real estate investors, before the end of March.

As a real estate investor herself, Purva and her husband, James, went through their share of landlord horror stories. Landlord Land Mines is the book Purva wished they’d had when had when they were getting started. Landlord Land Mines is written both from her own experience and from the experience of many other landlords who she interviewed for the book.

Forget the theory and the spreadsheets — Landlord Land Mines puts together decades of collective experience and stories from real investors, who teach you what you need to know and what you need to avoid.

Subscribe here to learn more about Landlord Land Mines when it becomes available. Avoid the land mines — because blowing your leg off can ruin your whole day!

RSS stands for "Really Simple Syndication", and it allows you to subscribe to blogs and news sites you like so you’ll be able to read them whenever they get updated, without having to go check the site to see if there’s anything new.  You do this using an RSS reader, which can either be a web site type reader or software that you install on your computer. 

When people say "subscribing", they simply means adding a site to a reader.  Often you can just enter the address of the blog itself into the reader, and it will figure out where the "RSS feed" is.  An RSS feed is just a web page in special format that an RSS reader can read.  Most blogs have a subscribe link like the one on my blog, and that link is taking you to the RSS feed itself. 

On this blog that link looks like this:

If you click on this link, you’ll have the option of subscribing in a reader if you already have an RSS reader account set up somewhere.  But what if you don’t?   Well, let’s try one on, shall we?   It won’t take long.

Introduction to Google Reader

Let’s keep it simple and look at one popular RSS reader, Google’s Reader, which is at http://www.google.com/reader.  If you have a Google account (Gmail email address), you should have access to this already.  If you don’t, click the big blue create an account button and get your free Google account, then when you login you should go straight to the reader.  (If not, use the link above again).

When you enter Google Reader for the first time there’s a short video you can watch if you want, then you’ll want to start adding subscriptions.  You should see an "Add Subscription" link on the left hand side of the screen.  (Tip:  if you don’t see it, look for a gray arrow on the left that will make the left hand navigation window visible). 

The button should look like this:

Click the "Add subscription" link and you’ll see a place where you can add the web address for the blog or feed you want to add.  (Remember, behind the scenes you’re always adding an "RSS feed", but most blogs are set up so that if you just add a page or the home page from the blog, it’ll work.)  So just copy the web address of the blog you want to add here. 

To add this blog, for example, enter http://www.inklit.com/blog/ and then hit the add button:

You’re almost there.  You won’t necessarily see anything yet, but if you look at the upper left hand corner of the page, you’ll see a link called "Home" right below the  Google Reader Icon:

Click that home link and you’ll see that the recent articles for the blog you just added now show up.  It’ll look something like this. 

Why Should I Go To All This Trouble Just To Read This Blog?

Well, if my blog is the only blog you read, you shouldn’t go to all this trouble.  You should just come here and read it.  Oh, and by the way, thank you, thank you, thank you for your rapt attention.  I really appreciate it!. 

No, as compelling as I am (ahem), the chances are you read lots of different blogs and news sites that are updated regularly, and when you read such sites, you want a way to be able to just go to one place and see what’s new.  Readers like Google Reader let you go to a single place and read all the news you want to read, and nothing you don’t, without having to manually visit each blog to find out what’s new about the topics of interest to you.

Now What?

Now that you’ve got your reader set up, your world gets a lot easier.  If we visit another web site and click on the subscribe here link, we can add that site as well.  Let’s say you’re over at CatalystBlogger, for example, and you click on Jennifer’s "Subscribe Here" link.  You’ll end up at her feed.  You’ll see a bunch of buttons on the right hand side, and if you click the Google button you can add her right into Google Reader easily.  Next time you add a feed, you may find a single link that says "Subscribe with Google", since FeedBurner (the site where many of these RSS feeds live) will remember that you like to use Google Reader.

So now go find your favorite blogs and enjoy reading them!  And if you haven’t done so in the tutorial above already, thank you for adding the feed for Inklit.com to your reader.

Pick up any book about writing or read any blog about writing and you’ll read the same thing over and over again:  It’s important to write often, and it’s important to go fast.

One of the reasons that setting goals is so important is that you’ll end up further ahead of where you would have otherwise.  In Setting Writing Goals, Making Room for the Good Stuff I talked about the importance of setting goals as a way of making time for the ones that really matter, yet the very next day I noticed that I’d redefined the ones that mattered.  Still, what I noticed in the process of setting goals was that I wrote more than I would have otherwise, even though my writing goals were fairly modest.  This principle is time honored, and was best expressed in Browning’s "Man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?"

The same principle applies to non-writing activities, to be sure, such as promoting one’s web site.  Shooting for more than I really think I can do (in my heart of underestimating-myself-hearts) is the principle behind trying to get 101 subscribers in 30 days.  How many do I think I would have had at the end of thirty days if I didn’t run this contest?  Oh, I don’t know, maybe fifteen.  How many do I really think I’ll get?  Well, I don’t know.  But let’s say I only get fifty.  That’s still ahead of where I would have been otherwise.

So setting goals is an important productivity tool in the best of times.  But what I’ve found is that it’s even more important to have goals in place when conditions are unfavorable.  Today, for example, there were several had-to-be-done tasks that knew were going to wreak havoc with the overall schedule, so I had to do two important things.  First, I had to revise the goals downward because I knew that otherwise I was just kidding myself completely.  But secondly, and more importantly, I had to live up to the goals I finally did set.

Another way to say all of this is that setting goals help you go further when you succeed, but equally as important, it helps you lose less ground when you fail. 

This is true whether you’re writing online, or learning to speak French, or whatever it is you’re trying to do.

The day will go by whether you move in a direction or not.

If you’re looking to make money writing online, when all else fails, write something online.

Those of you who read Selling Your Writing (Part I: The Wrong Way) were no doubt waiting for me to get to Part II, where I show you the right way, preferably in 600 words or less, because naturally you’re busy. 

OK, I can do that.  Here it is in four words, that I’ve borrowed from David Taylor’s The Freelance Success Book:  Write it.  Sell it.

That’s pretty simple, right?  Those of you who wanted the short answer are already done.

The Longer Answer

So if that’s so simple, why isn’t everyone online writing and making money?  

In part one, we talked about five ways to fail, and only one of those ways was about failing to write.  All four of the other ways to fail were different ways to fail at selling.  So it stands to reason that the much of the rest of our journey, in this article, on this blog, in our careers as people making money by writing online, is going to be about selling, not about writing.

Getting better at selling our writing will involve us in two fundamental tasks:  exploring markets for our writing and exploiting them.  The exploration phase is first — we need to know approximately where the gold is before we start digging.  But even before we go out exploring, it helps to have a basic sort of map of the territory.  We can draw a better map as we get more information, but for now let’s divide the world of making money by writing online into six major continents.  (We’ll leave off a seventh in case we discover Antarctica later).

Six Ways To Make Money Writing Online

1. Write to Support Sales in Another Business
   This was the first online writing business model that I learned how to do.  In fact, when I first did this, I didn’t know I was a professional writer yet.  I thought I was a former software developer who had become a real estate agent.  About four years, ten web sites, and eight hundred blog posts later, it dawned on me that my real business was not home sales, but professional writing.  Home sales was just a niche and a revenue vehicle. 

   One way of looking at this business model is that you’re a freelance writer with a single client, where the single client is you, and you get paid strictly on contingency.

2. Writer For Hire — The Traditional Freelance Model
   Another time honored way to make money writing online is also a time honored way of making money offline, by being a freelance writer.  This is someone who gets paid largely on a per-project basis, either on a fee or fee plus royalty basis.  This probably comes closest to capturing what most people think of when they think of professional writers.

   Most people probably think of novelists first, but in reality most freelancers make their living selling non-fiction of one form or another.  David Taylor’s book, quoted above, is largely about magazine feature publishing.   Online variations include web site writer, blog ghostwriter, and the like.  Another popular niche in this business model is copy writing, such as writing for direct mail, or the online equivalent, direct response web sites and landing pages.

3. Write An Information Product that Sells Advertising
   If you can write well enough and often enough and promote yourself well enough to get a significant online readership, you can make a living exclusively from the sale of advertising space on your web site or blog.  This can take any number of different forms.  AdSense is probably the most popular and well known, but other options include banner ads in a variety of different horizontal and vertical formats.  One new format that’s becoming ubiquitous on many blogs is the 125×125 pixel ad. 

   Many of the Internet’s most popular blogs use this approach to good effect.  The limitation of this business model is that unless your readership is large enough to support it, the revenue you make from hosting ads on your site is likely to be a trickle of pennies per day at best.

4. Write An Information Product that You Sell Directly
   In my opinion the single coolest thing about online writing is the extent to which it allows you to be both author and publisher.  Do you have a series of blog articles on a topic that could be turned into a book?  How about packaging them into an e-book?  Yes, there’s the issue of why people would buy material that’s otherwise available free — part of the exploration we’ll go into on this blog will be how to overcome that.  In addition to e-books, there are many other possibilities, such as paid subscription e-newsletters or Internet e-learning.   Public Label Rights articles also fall into this category.
    
5. Write An Information Product that Someone Else Sells For You
   Many of the information products you can sell directly can also be sold by someone else.  A $29.95 e-book on my blog may make me $29.95, but if it makes me $9.95 on your blog, that’s fine, too!  The main benefit of this approach are that you can get more traffic (and hence — more sales) than you could if you limit yourself to only selling your material only on your own site.  I would be cautious however about using this approach as your sole approach to getting paid online.  Sites like Helium and others where you submit your articles and have to participate forever and might get paid someday might be a good low-carb meal for occasional consumption, but if you make them a diet staple I would not be surprised (though I would be saddened) to see you starve.
    
6. Some Combination of the Above
   I believe the best approach to success as an online writer is to cultivate a masterful combination of the techniques listed above.  In my own case, for example, item 1 ("Write to support sales in another business") is the model that is my main source of revenue now, so I’m continuing my work on that area.   I am in the process of setting up an online store so I can really work on doing variations on "Write an Information Product That You Sell Directly", and I can see how a lot of those products might support each other internally as well as serve as promotional pieces leading to freelance work (Item 2).  Ad sales are an area I would like to explore further, but I would very much like to learn what’s beyond AdSense and how to create mutually profitable affiliate relationships — since I think that’s the key to both quality sites and better revenue in the long term.  Having said that, however, I am resolved to revisit AdSense for some of my blogs in the short term to see what I can learn.

Patient, raising his arm a certain way:  "Doc, it hurts when I do that."

Doctor:  "Well, don’t do that."

A lot of people want to be writers.  As in any profession, a small group of superstars make it look glamorous.  Who wouldn’t want Steven King’s income?  I don’t even know what it is, but I’m pretty sure I want it.  OK, so maybe Steven King’s not glamorous, but he still has more nickels than me.

Of course, there are a lot of writers who aren’t Steven King who nevertheless make a decent living — though I’m sure there are also a lot who are struggling. 

So there are superstars, there are those who are just in the profession in one way or another, and there are those who want-to-be-writers. Angela Booth has an excellent article on her writing blog where she talks about the want-to-be-writers, who fall short of their dreams of writing in the simplest and most time-effective way possible:  by not writing.

Beyond this, there are several other ways to not make money as a writer.  Most of these boil down to either not selling your writing, or not selling it the right way. 

By way of learning how to get paid, let’s brainstorm how to fail at getting paid — and then not do that.

1. Don’t Write Anything
   As we said earlier, this is the simplest way to not making money as a writer.  Just don’t write anything.  If you’re not going to get paid, this is the fast track.  The benefit of this approach is that you free up 100% of your time so presumably you can go get paid for doing something else.

   This is my approach to painting.  Remember the Bob Ross show about learning how to paint?  I used to watch that show and tease my wife that I was a painter — just a very low producing one.

2. Write for Nothing
   There are millions of people on the Internet writing for nothing one way or another.  In fact, if you had to prove that millions of people want to be writers, the Internet is the most eloquent, real time demonstration you could find, since millions of people like writing so much that they do it for free.  In 2006, USA today reported that MySpace had 47.3 million members.  I don’t know how many writers Wikipedia has, but I’m sure it’s a fair number given their content.  If you write for Wikipedia, you write for nothing, though interestingly enough they have started to pay illustrators.  Apparently it’s only us writers who have the strong claim to amateur standing!
3. Write for Almost Nothing
   One step up from projects like Wikipedia that pay nothing are projects that pay no money, but offer some (real or imaginary) benefit to the writer, like recognition or incoming links.  Don’t read me wrong here:  distributing articles and writing on other people’s sites is a time honored way to promote your own web site, especially to the extent you can manage to get your article placed on a site that’s a lot better known than yours is. 

   Where the problem comes in is when you confuse what you do for advertising with what you do for a living.  Web sites like ActiveRain have thousands of users who will write screenful after screenful of content thinking they are promoting themselves, when often if they’d spent the same amount of time on their own projects they’d have more work than they could do.

   In fact, let me offer a new definition for that least-likely-to-have-a-definition phrase, "Web 2.0".  Web 2.0 is a generalized mass hysteria characterized chiefly by the belief that building your web site is more profitable than building mine.

4. Write for Next to Nothing:  The Job Boards
   I almost shut this blog down cold and never looked back the other day, when I took a look at one of the job boards.  Wow, really, $12 for an hour’s work?  No kidding?  Be still my heart!  Look, I don’t want to seem elitist here or anything, and if you’re going after twelve dollar per hour jobs and making a go of it, I certainly don’t want to insult your efforts.  And as a guy who’s brand new to the freelance writing business, one could argue that I’m simply talking through my hat on the whole issue.  But seriously, if professional writing pays twelve dollars per hour, it’s worse than professional typing (which I’ve also done).  As a professional typist I can get $12.00 per hour and let Manpower book 40 hour per week gigs — week after week after week. 
5. Write a Ton and Don’t Sell It for Enough Money
   I’m going to get personal here and let you in on a little secret:  this is my old business model / ailment.  I am in recovery.  

   For many of us who are already writing, the person we met at the outset who doesn’t write anything is a total foreigner.  We write all the time.  So the issue for us is not whether we write at all, because we can’t stop writing.  Instead, the issue boils down to this:  can we sell enough writing products and services often enough at a high enough price to make the sort of living we aspire to?  In my own case, my niche blogging activity already makes me an income that some people in my area make on their full time jobs.  Even this year, with the market falling apart, it’s probably more than I’d make as a full time typist, but I am working on doing better.

I just wanted to quickly welcome those I met on ActiveRain and elsewhere and thank you for the visit!  I’ve been checking out MyBlogLog and it’s nice to see some familiar faces.

Sorry the content is still such a mixed bag, but I’m working on it!