Venture Outside Your Niche

I’m a big proponent of having a niche speciality. Not only does make it easier to find writing jobs, it also gives you credibility for a specific area. My niches include personal finance and small business.

Just because you’ve chosen a niche doesn’t mean that’s all you can ever write on. In fact, I think it’s a good idea to write outside your niche every once in awhile.

Learn something new. I recently did a editing job dealing with converting electric motors. Not anything close to personal finance, but I learned a lot about electric motors, how they work, and how they’re better than gas motors. It’s not a topic I’d necessarily seek out, but it was very enlightening.

Freshen your writing skills. There’s something about a different topic that makes me take a closer look at my writing skills. I always come back with more words in my vocabulary, more creative ways of saying things.

Take a break from the norm. Whenever I take on a project outside my niche, I’m always happy to come back. It’s like coming back home from a vacation. The vacation was nice, but there’s nothing like home.

If you’ve chosen a niche, do you take jobs outside your niche or do you prefer to write only within your niche?

Don’t freelance like a full-time employee

There’s a big difference between working full-time for someone else and freelancing for yourself, and I’m not just talking about being your own boss.

When you work full-time, you’re pretty much guaranteed to get a paycheck. So you seldom work the entire 8 hours. Actually, it’s probably more like 4-6. You spend the day chatting with co-workers, taking coffee/smoke breaks, browsing the internet, or other leisure things.

You can’t do that when you’re a freelance writer.

Your income directly depends on the amount of work you get done. If you have some downtime between gigs, you can’t afford to spend it perusing the internet or chatting on the phone. You have to spend your downtime doing other things related to your business - marketing, networking, organizing, and planning - especially when you’re just starting out.

That’s been the biggest change for me. I’m not used to working consistently throughout the day, so I find myself taking frequent breaks. What helps is having a to-do list and reminding myself that I have to get through it by the end of the day. It just takes some old-fashioned discipline to break the naughty habit of browsing the internet every few minutes to see what’s going on.

How to catch a content thief

I usually think about finding content thieves only after I’ve discovered a thief. I think to myself, “This can’t be the only one out there.” Usually, I’m right. Content thieves think they’re flying under the radar, but there are plenty of ways to catch them.

Google your keywords

I discover most thieves this way. I Google one of my targeted keyword terms to see where I’ve placed and there’s the thief, ranked right up there with me. I go after these people hard because they’re stealing the most traffic from me. Not only that, my site could lose credibility with readers because the content appears somewhere else. That’s personal speculation, but I’m not willing to take the risk.

Set up a Google Alert for incoming links

You can set up a Google Alert for any searchable term. When you write, include a backlink or two to your own site. Then, when the lazy thief reposts your content with links intact, Google will send you an alert letting you know that someone linked to you.

I’m not sure how Google runs this alert or up the search is updated, but this one doesn’t always work. For some of my sites there are far more links out there than I’ve been alerted to. Even so, I still use and recommend this as a way to catch thiefs.

Copyscape

Copyscape.com is probably one of the easiest ways to find copies of your webpages. There are some limitations to using it though. You must search by URL. If you have 100 different pages on your site, you’ll have to manually search all 100 of those pages. You are limited to a certain number of searches per domain each month. When you have several pages on your site, you can easily reach your free limit.

Copyscape has a premium version that lets you do more searches for a fee. You might check this out if you find that you’re consistently hitting your free search limit each month.

Google your content

The old-fashioned way of catching thieves involves Googling random phrases from an article to see if any results are returned. The key is to pick a sentence or phrase that’s not likely to appear on other pages unless they’ve been stolen from you.

Going after thieves can be a full-time job especially when you have a large site and lots of traffic and revenue to consider. Still, it’s worth it to keep your content yours.

What do you do to catch content thieves? How often do you find your work has been stolen?

How to punish a thief

I try not to get so angry at content thieves because some of them really don’t know that you can’t just take someone else’s content and put it up on your site. These are the best kinds of “thieves” to deal with because they take your content down with a simple request.

When I find stolen content, the first thing I do is contact the person and let them know the content is copyrighted and can’t be used without permission. You can offer resell rights if you want to go that route or just request that they take the content down. Give them a reasonable amount of time, e.g. a week, to take the content down. If a week goes by and you don’t get a response and the content’s still there, it’s time to take it to the next level.

Have the site de-indexed and shut down by their host.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act allows you to have the copyright violator’s site taken down. You can exercise your rights under this act by sending a DMCA notice to the search engines and to the webmaster’s ISP. SEO Logic has instructions for sending DCMA notices to all the major search engines.

Next, find out who’s hosting the site. WhoIs.com and DomainTools.com are two good places to start. Look for the Name Servers part of the page and the middle part will tell you who’s the host. If that doesn’t work, there are some more techie ways to find out the host. Google “find website host” and some of the results will give you an idea of what to do.

Simple eBook covers with PowerPoint

I recently released a short report, but based on the target customer I could get away without having a cover for it. I thought about making the sales page more appealing by adding an ebook cover, but I didn’t want to pay a professional and I don’t have PhotoShop or any other graphic editing programs. So, I used good old Microsoft PowerPoint and this is the result….

Not too shabby. I could do a little more work with the actual cover design, but you get the point.

I used a rectangle for the main page and parallelograms for the other pages.

There are some other free template out there, but they’re tilted in 3-D and difficult to edit without photoediting software. With this “template,” I could regular text boxes to add text to the cover.

Here’s a blank one. If you think you can use it, click for the larger version, then right click it and choose “Save Target As…”

The Two Best Things About Wordpress

I’ve wanted to move my blog to Wordpress for awhile, but I kept waiting on a domain to open up. The owners aren’t doing anything with the site, so I figured they would let it expire and I’d be able to grab it. Not so. So I registered an alternative.

I’m so glad to have finally made the move to Wordpress.

I blog in spurts. Using Blogger with that kind of blogging pattern, meant I would have several posts showing up on a single day. I didn’t like that so I wouldn’t blog at all. Wordpress allows you to set posts to show up on different dates in the future - it’s a “spurt blogger’s” dream come true.

By far, I’ve seen the best templates on Wordpress. I actually found this template a few months ago and saved it immediately because I absolutely loved it. It doesn’t have much to do with “writing,” but it does spark creativity. With blogger, I could never find a template that I just loved.

Do you have a Wordpress blog? What do you like most about it?

Full-Time Writing is More Than Writing

For the past few months, I’ve been freelance writing full-time and let me be the first to tell you that freelance writing full-time is more than just typing articles on a computer. A freelance writer is, in essence, a business owner. As a business owner, you’ll be doing things that business owners must do if they want to be successful.

Marketing. I’m not working in a Field of Dreams and putting it out there that I’m a freelance writer doesn’t mean that clients will come flocking to me. In fact, if I didn’t market myself, I’d get just about as many jobs as I would if I was not a freelance writer…none. So, I challenge myself to do one thing to market myself daily.

Bookkeeping. Sounds boring, but it’s a necessary part of being a business owner. You have to know what’s coming in and what’s going out. If you have enough money to make ends meet or not. By the way, here’s an article I wrote on variable income budgeting - something that freelance writers should know given the fluctuating budgeting.

Communications. I get questions and comments from clients and prospects that must be answered. I don’t spend the entire day on email, but I do take 10-15 minutes at the beginning, middle, and sometimes end of my day to respond to clients.

Planning. You know what they say, “failing to plan, is planning to fail.” I have a to-do list everyday that includes things I need to accomplish and things I want to accomplish. I use my Outlook calendar to schedule out my time. I don’t always stick to it because schedules are sometimes restricting to me, but I make sure to complete everything that should be completed. It’s a good idea to plan by day, week, and month. That way you always know what’s on the horizon.

Idea Generation. When I’m not doing work for clients, I’m working on some of my own projects. It requires some thought. I spend time coming up with ideas for blog topics and information products to offer. It’s a “how can I generate more income streams” type of thinking.

Writing. Then, after I plan, schedule, and get the work, it’s time to actually do the work. This is actually my favorite part. There’s nothing more refreshing to me than sitting down at the computer screen and typing away.

Are you freelancing full-time or moving in that direction? What’s the work you find yourself doing outside the actual writing?

Work the Wave

For some strange reason, writing jobs tend to come in waves. Sometimes there’s no work at all. But when there is work, there’s lots of it.

So what do you do during the drought?

Space your work out. When you get hit with a lot of work at one time, spread your deadlines so they don’t fall within the same short period of time. If you don’t have any work scheduled for next week, push one of your projects to that week.

Work on your own projects. It’s a good idea for writers to have their own projects outside of client work. Use your “drought” times to work on your own niche websites or blogs. Thinking about making an information product? That’s a good time to work on it.

Market and network. When you don’t have any work, use that time to get more work. Do some extra marketing. Network with fellow writers and even professionals within your niche.

What do you find yourself doing during down times?

Writer’s Brew is Back!

You may remember me from such blogs as writersbrew.blogspot.com. Well, here I am again. New domain, new host, new look.

I tried to use the nifty Wordpress tool to import all the old posts from Blogger, but it didn’t work. So, I’ll be starting anew. New domain, new host, new look, new posts.