Tag Archives ⇒ freelance

Earn Money and Build Your Reputation As A Freelance Writer

· Brandon Hann

Building your blog takes time. In most cases it also takes actual writing skills and dedication to your craft to start pulling in traffic. In the meantime however, there are ways to get your content in front of viewers to use as a platform for promoting yourself and/or your website.

Think of it this way: imagine you had a website and you want to build your reputation rather fast. You come across a website that allows contributions from outside writers and you submit an article. This article is now accessible on an already existing website with a large traffic flow. When people read your article, they see your name (and profile). This information then leads to your own blog or website and instantly you become known in the blogosphere!

Ok, so maybe it’s not as easy as it sounds! But the point is, if you know your content is good and you want to get it in front of people relatively easy, this is one sure way to do it. Check out my Associated Content profile to see how people will view you.

AssociatedContent.com


AC is touted as “The people’s media company” and it is essentially a collection of over 2 million articles written on almost every topic you can think of. The best part is that these articles are written by people like you! That’s right. You are a contributor to a growing collection of content and at the same time, building a name for yourself.

To sign up, you simply need to head on over to the AssociatedContent signup page and fill out the required information. Afterward, you’ll be sent a verification email. Once verified, you’ll be taken into your account and you can start publishing content right away!

How does AssociatedContent work?

Once logged in, you’ll have access to your dashboard. It’ll look similar to this:

From here, you can do a number of different things like publish new content, check messages, edit your public profile and connect with other writers. Once you get going, this is generally how the site works:

  1. Pick the format you want (Text, Video, Audio, Images).
  2. Pick the topic that the content is about.
  3. Answer some copyright questions about how you want your work distributed.
  4. Choose a payment method.
  5. Publish your content!

Within your dashboard, you can also see a number of previously established assignments that you can choose to fulfill if you’d like. Don’t worry about writer’s block either! Associated Content will provide you with ideas if you’re stuck.

How much do I get paid?

The main payout option is Performance Payments. The rate is $1.50 per 1000 pageviews. This amount can be upped to $2.00 after certain requirements are met. This is the description of Performance Payments as outlined on the website:

Performance Payments are payments based on the traffic to your content and allow you to earn unlimited cash from your text, video, slideshow and audio submissions long after they have been published. You earn money for every one thousand page views your content generates (PPM™ rate). The baseline PPM™ rate is currently $1.50 – meaning if you generate 30,000 page views, you’re paid $45.00 in Performance Payments. As your library of content grows and your total page views accumulate, your Clout level increases. When you reach Clout 7 and beyond, your PPM™ rate will gradually increase up to a maximum of $2.00 per thousand page views. Check out the quick stats (under total payments) on your Account dashboard to see your current estimated earnings, and track your page view statistics per piece of content from the Content page. Click here to read more about the Clout system.

Another payout option is Upfront Payment. Your content is subjected to a review by the site editors and based on its originality and quality, you will receive an offer. At this point, you can choose to accept the offer or not. There are stricter rules for submitting this kind of content.

More Information

There is a LARGE amount of information you may want to peruse through before you get started, but if you’re interested in becoming a freelance writer and/or build your reputation along the way, you will love this site. For more information, please see AssociatedContent’s FAQ section.

To sign up now, go to AssociatedContent.com!

Social Bookmarking – Technorati

· Brandon Hann

I’m sure at some point in your blogging career, you’ve seen an article or two that pops up on the mega blog site, Technorati.com, but you probably didn’t know much about it. Don’t feel bad; neither did I.

We all know and love Google for they’ve been able to accomplish in the Internet industry (it’s amazing that we can now call this an industry!), and now we can love Technorati for doing great things just for blogs. As a reader, you’re able to search some millions of blogs all around the world talking about anything you can imagine. From there, you can leave comments, Digg articles, re-tweet your favorite bits of information, write for the site as a free lancer and even advertise your business there.

Freelance Writing

But as a writer, you can do one more important thing: promote your blog. Everywhere on this site, you read about posting quality content, finding backlinks and getting ranked high in Google. Well, here’s another way to promote and all it requires you to do is create an account. You can use Technorati to promote your blog and gain exposure and web traffic for your site.

Once you create your account, you “claim” your blog by adding a link to it and then Technorati will have you place some random text somewhere on your site. Within a few days, they will have found your site, verified you’re the author of it and then added it to your account. Now, whenever you post an article on your site, it will be referenced in your account and therefore, searchable. The more you post, the more likely your stuff will be found and that equals more traffic for your blog.

The advantage here is that you are listing your content specifically to a blog community. Being listed here can only help your cause over at Google. One thing to remember is that above and beyond any tips you’re going to find about how to create a successful blog, the most important one is whether you’re credible or not. I’ve said it many times before, but I’ll say it again. You can have a wonderful site with tons of content, but if nobody cares about what you have to say, then you’re lost and your site is considered dead.

Technorati Ranking

Technorati will also rank your blog against every listed blog in the database so you can watch your site gain popularity as your rank climbs higher and higher. Here’s a screenshot of my account page showing my claimed blog and ranking:

As you can see, at the time of this writing, I’m ranked at 40,606! I plan to drop this number as fast as possible and if/when I do, I’ll post a follow-up to this post to give you an idea of how long (and how many posts later) it took to get to that position. I may also post the traffic/rank ratio to help you get an idea of where your site ranks.

I think another great thing about Technorati is that you can claim multiple blogs. Just keep adding them to your account and you can then compare ranks between them to find out which ones are more popular. You mix this site together with your WordPress stats and Google Analytics, you will know exactly how to fix your blog if you need to.

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