This article’s perfect for our “SEO content” theme on our freelance writing blog.

WordPress.com News

We get a lot of questions about SEO here on WordPress.com, and no wonder — you work hard on your site and want to get the word out! SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. SEO recommendations are intended to help your site rank higher and more accurately in search engines, like Google. Say you write a blog about sailboats. When someone Googles “sailboats,” how many pages of results do they have to scroll through before they see a link to your blog? The goal behind having good SEO is to increase your website’s SERP (Search Engine Results Page) ranking.

Ideally, you want your link to be on the first page of results. The best ways to accomplish this are:

• consistently publish useful, original posts about sailboats; and
• promote your blog in intelligent ways to people who are looking for information about your topic.

The more traffic your blog receives for sailboat-related searches, the…

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Top 10 Fun Ways to Increase Your Writing Income

Want to increase your writing income? Here’s a little slide deck to give you some easy and fun ideas.

Write to Sell FAST: Top 10 easy, profitable and clever ideas to increase your writing income TODAY from Angela Booth

You’ll find an article with more on these fun ideas on my freelance writing blog.

Enjoy, and do tell me if you’ve developed your own fun and easy ways to make money from your writing.

Want to Get Paid $2 a Word For Your Writing?

You’re the star of your life story

This week, our theme on the freelance writing blog is personal writing — writing essays and books based on your personal experiences.

This can be extremely lucrative in a couple of ways. Not only can you sell material based on your life stories, you can also help others to share their stories, as a ghostwriter.

I’ve just posted this article to the blog, “Writing to Sell: Sell Your Experiences In Easy Personal Essays”:

You can write an essay about anything, and if your essay or book based on personal experiences strikes a nerve, you’ll make money. The book which first convinced me of this was Betty MacDonald’s “The Egg and I”. Published in 1945, this blockbuster about the struggles of a chicken farmer sold a million copies in a year; an enormous number of books for its time.
Are personal essays profitable? Consider that in 2013, O, The Oprah Magazine, pays $2 a word for personal essays, and other writing.

In conjunction with our theme, I’ve responded to many requests for the Memories Coaching Workshop.

The “Memories” Coaching Workshop Has Become Self-Guided

I’ve been receiving a stream of requests about our original “Memories” coaching workshop. At almost $600, this workshop is out of the reach of many writers. Of course I understand that, so I’ve created a self-guided version: a workbook, with accompanying videos.

If you’re interested in writing about your own experiences, for $2 a word or more modest amounts, it will help you to get started.

Watch for more articles on writing from personal experience on the freelance writing blog this week.

On another front, Google is killing the RSS reader, Google Reader …

If You’re An Online Publisher, Is It Time to Worry?

On the Creativity Factory, I’ve written about the sunsetting of Google Reader several times. Reader sends traffic to blogs. Sadly the death of Reader may lead to the death of some blogs.

photo credit: Mr. Carls via photopin cc

Make Money Blogging Topics: Diet, Sex and Money

Want to make money blogging? Create a niche blog. Here’s how to find a topic: investigate magazines, and focus on diets, sex and money.

Want a transcript? You’ll find it here.

I’m Back, Got Hacked, Fixed It

My home town Sydney, looking at the Opera House from the zoo. Nice giraffe 🙂

I established this blog way back in 2006, as a teaching aid for my writing students. My original goal was to use this space as a directory to my writing; a personal portfolio if you like.

Seven years on, let’s do that. I’ll talk about my writing, and post links to my blog posts and articles, as well as to stuff I find interesting. Of course, I’ll also talk about blogging and WordPress, since I’m a blogging evangelist — 13 years of blogging! — and I adore WordPress.

It’s midday in Sydney, and I haven’t done much at all, other than think and write about hacking.

This afternoon I’ll be working on another ebook.

Speaking of which, I love this idea. Tristan writes and sells Kindle ebooks, and includes audio versions:

Including a free MP3 version is something I’ve done in a couple of my other books, namely 101 Blogging Tips and How to Manage Multiple Blogs. I like doing this because it provides a lot of value. I mean, you get a Kindle book and an audio book for $3.

Very clever.

When your WordPress blog gets hacked (shock, horror)

Late last night I was just about ready to turn off my computer when I noticed one of my self-hosted WordPress blogs had been hacked. This morning, I wrote about it. It’s not the first blog of mine to be hacked, and it won’t be the last. All fixed however, so that’s a relief.

Over on my “name” blog, I posted:

What to do if your WordPress blog is hacked

If you’re anything like me, you’ll panic. Don’t do that, it’s not necessary. Your blog can be fixed, often it’s something very simple. My first option is always to get someone else to fix it, I’m a writer, not a technician.

This week’s offering

We have a special offering most weeks, and this week’s is spectacular: my Blogging for Dollars bestseller, with a “blog power” consultation. Check it out if you haven’t seen it.

Questions? Please ask.

photo credit: tarotastic via photopin cc

I’ve just started to use Draft; love the distraction-free environment, and the word count.