I was recently asked by a young writer about the best advice I could give him.

Since “take up accounting” is not something I would tell — or wish on — anyone, I decided to give him some actual advice. What I told him applies to everyone else who wants to, as sportswriter Red Smith put it, “open your veins and bleed.”

Here are a few tried-and-true pieces of advice — maxims, if you will, because that sounds more important than “pieces” — I’ve picked up over the years:

Carry a Moleskine and a Pilot G-2 pen with you everywhere you go, and write like mad.

1. Write every day. That sounds easier said than done, and is almost one of those “let down” pieces of advice. (“Seriously? That’s all you got?”) In fact, I have always thought this was the stupidest piece of writing advice, and whenever I heard it, I rolled my eyes so far back into my head, I could see my third grade memories. But it really does make a difference. Just like anything else you want to get good at — woodworking, sports, music, art — you need to write every single day. In fact, as stupid as I thought this was, this has also been the most important piece of advice I have ever gotten. You’re only going to get better by writing on a constant, regular basis, not by reading books on writing, or only writing when you feel inspired. Your skills are going to develop only as long as you put energy and effort into it. Write every day, and you get better that much sooner.
2. Read A LOT. Not just your favorite genres, but other genres, even ones you don’t particularly like. Find some favorite authors and devour everything they’ve written. Identify those things they do that make them your favorites, and see if you can incorporate a few of them into your own writing. You’ll discard a few of the techniques you borrowed, you’ll change and develop others, and you’ll create a hybrid style that is all your own. (That’s how those writers did it, and it will work for you too.)
3. Avoid books on writing, except for Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird and Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
   (affiliate links). (Okay, there are actually three others I especially like, but those are for another day, after you’ve read these two.) Everything else has already been said, and it’s too easy to mire yourself in every single book on writing, but they’ll only delay you from actually writing. It’s too easy to read writing book after writing book, and say that’s part of your learning process, but eventually that becomes a crutch that keeps you from actually writing. Too many new writers hide behind their tall stack of writing books, saying they’re not ready to start because they haven’t read the 23rd writing book they just got from the library. Remember maxim #1; it’s not “read writing books every day.”

   The same holds true for writing exercises. Skip those. If you want to practice writing, write something. A real something, that will actually be read by real people. Write a blog post, write an article and submit it, write an essay and email it to people.

4. Seek out one or two good mentors. Find people who will mercilessly edit your stuff and not give a shit about your feelings. Don’t connect with someone who wants to be mean, but you also don’t want the person who will pat your head and say you did a good job. So, don’t ask your mom. She loves you and wants to protect you. But you don’t need protection, you need education. If you ask your writing friends, they’ll be professionally jealous and will rip you a new one harshly enough to be helpful. Basically, if someone reads your stuff and says, “yeah, it’s pretty good,” they’re not good mentors, because they’re not giving you anything to improve or pointing out your weaknesses.
5. Write even when you don’t think you’re doing a good job. In fact, that’s when you need to write. Never let your doubts sink your goals. Even if you don’t think you’re doing a good job, focus on your writing goals. Those feelings won’t ever go away — even the most successful writers have them — but you’ll get better every day. You just have to ignore the self-doubt and keep writing. Eventually you will outgrow the feelings, and learn to recognize the negative self-talk for what it is. You’ll learn to trust your abilities and your work, and know that your work is better than your doubts let you think it is.


This is fellow humor writer and online buddy, Bruce Cameron. He writes very funny, successful books, and is more than happy to selflessly share advice and support to other writers. I hate him.

6. Never EVER compare yourself to another writer’s success. “Never compare someone else’s highlight reel to your day-to-day stuff,” I read once. You’ll make yourself crazy. Years ago, I used to compare myself to Bruce Cameron, a fellow humorist and member of the NetWits, a humor writers group. I would see everything he was doing, and despair that I would never have that kind of success. I would get depressed every time I paid close attention to what he was doing.

   And despite what I just said, you’ll do it too. You’ll see their publications and their success and ask yourself “why can’t that happen to ME?!” It will. You just have to go back and do #1 and #5 more and more, and keep submitting your work, publishing blog posts, going to seminars, re-reading Bird By Bird and On Writing. One day, you’ll look up and realize you’ve done just as much as the people you were comparing yourself to all those years ago. You’ll also find that someone newer and younger than you is making themselves crazy, comparing themselves to your publications and successes. Just keep your head down, keep your eyes on your own work, and don’t worry about what anyone else is doing. Later, you can salve your wounds with sweet, sweet schadenfreude when you spot their books in a bookstore’s bargain bin.

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• 

Michael Koploy, an ERP analyst for SoftwareAdvice.com, wrote an interesting article — Adding a Pinterest-Twist to Fix Facebook Commerce — about why companies shouldn’t put a lot of effort into their Facebook pages, like setting up an ecommerce site (or as Koploy calls it, an F-commerce site — ‘F’ for Facebook).

Many experts have weighed-in on why Facebook storefronts are often unsuccessful. A large part of it simply boils down to the fact that Facebook isn’t an e-commerce site. This results in a contextual disconnect.

“Most people don’t go to Facebook wanting to purchase something,” says Josh Davis, social media strategist at ITFO Communications and blogger at LL Social. Davis believes that retailers were initially excited by the advertising potential, but are now realizing shopping-intent isn’t there.

In short, the context for F-commerce is wrong. Forrester analyst Sucharita Mulpuru accurately likened F-commerce to “trying to sell stuff to people while they’re hanging out with their friends at the bar.”

Facebook’s core focus is clearly stated on its login page: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” Facebook is not about shopping. And it’s not about retailers. But Facebook is good for connecting people to each other.

Last week, we discussed why it’s a bad idea for companies to quit blogging to go with Facebook: Facebook owns the channel, you don’t. When they change their rules and their interface, you’re screwed. When you change your blog, you can decide what, where, when, and how.

But companies like Gamestop, J.C. Penny, and Nordstrom all pulled their F-commerce efforts after failing to receive any kind of pay off. And that’s just a year after investors swore up and down that F-commerce was going to put the hurt on online retail giant Amazon.com.

I hate predicting failure of new ventures, and pointing my finger and going “neener neener” at people who tried something and failed (unless they’re complete a-holes; then they deserve it). But I’m not surprised, and am rather pleased, that these companies got smart and cut their F-commerce efforts before they lost their shirts.

The big surprise they would have had — and it’s the same damn surprise that businesses who put a lot of money and effort into Facebook always get — is that one day, Facebook will decide, “we don’t want you to have X on your page any more, so we’re going to ‘improve’ the network.”

They did it with FBML in 2010 (Facebook Markup Language, which companies spent hundreds and thousands of dollars on to design these gorgeous sites). They did it with Groups, after begging organizations, companies, and loose collectives to spend all their time and effort to get people to join. And they did it with the non-Timeline iFrame pages, after people spent hundreds and thousands of dollars to recover from the whole FBML fracas.

Orangutan feet. I don't know what orangutans read for inspiration.

Facebook, like Koploy reminded us, is a place to connect. It’s a place where friends gather. We don’t hang out with our friends at the bar to buy stuff. Companies that are doing F-commerce need to pull out before they get the big F-U.

Put your money into improving the SEO of your ecommerce site, doing more social media marketing, and using Facebook for what it’s intended for: posting Instagram pictures of your feet and gag-inducing GIFs of your favorite inspirational sayings typically found inside the doors of high school lockers.

Photo credit: Abandoned storefrontColes County Tales (Flickr, Creative Commons)
Orangutan feet Macinate (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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• 

Cathy Day’s recent blog post, “Last Lecture: Am I a Writer?” took me back to my own days of struggling with my identity as a Writer.

I’ve been writing for 24 years, but I’ve only accepted the mantle of Writer for the last 17.

It’s an odd thing to wonder about one’s self. Either you’re a Writer, or you’re not, right?

You’re a professional, literary, word slinging, spell-it-with-a-capital-W-by-God Writer, or you’re just some wannabe hack who doesn’t deserve to even call what you do “writing.” (You even manage to speak the word with invisible quotes around it.)

Ernest Hemingway: This dude was a capital-W Writer. He also drank a lot and shot things.

Someone who does plumbing is a plumber. Someone who does accounting is an accountant. And someone who cooks food is a cook.

But ask someone who strings words together if they’re a Writer, and they’ll think about it for a minute.

“No, because I haven’t been published.”

“Yes, as soon I published my first book.”

“No, I’ve only been doing it for a couple years.”

“Yes, after I received my first check for a magazine article.”

New writers hesitate to call themselves one, as if this thing we do is sacred, and they’re not worthy. Writers don’t just string words together for people to read in an email. We tell stories to entertain people, inform and educate, persuade and rally. We can string words together that provoke, comfort, or incite. Scribblers use corporate jargon and fifty dollar words in five cent emails.

Even when I first started writing, it never occurred to me that I was a Writer, until a more experienced one said, “Don’t you write stuff?”

“Yes, every day.”

If you do this a lot, you may be a writer.

Since I didn’t have a good answer, it was easier just to mumble, “Well, I guess I am.”

That’s how most Writers are crowned, with a mumbled realization, rather than a pomp-filled ceremony, complete with gleaming pens carried proudly on red velvet pillows by pages, to be presented by the queen amidst the fanfare of trumpets. (Although wouldn’t that be awesome?)

To be sure, Writers earn their title. That capital W is not just granted to every schmuck who took a high school English class and pounds out the occasional email to coworkers. That’s not writing. That’s written communication, but it’s not writing.

There may be standards for calling one’s self a Writer — you have to write 100,000 words first; you have to submit a piece for print publication; you have to get paid — but no one has figured out what that is yet. Self-granting the title varies from person to person.

But one constant remains: you’re not a Writer until you call yourself one. The very minute you can say, “I’m a Writer,” and say it without that question mark at the end? That’s when you are one.

Otherwise, no one is stopping you. Go ahead. Take it out. Try it on, and see how it fits. You’ll grow into it over time.

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• 

After yesterday’s post on Suggested Freelance Writing Rates — Midwest Edition, I was asked why it costs so much ($75 – $125) to write a blog post.

“It’s 350 – 450 words. How hard can it be?”

Actually, that depends. It depends on what you’re writing. If you’re writing a personal blog entry about the hamburger you enjoyed at lunch with your besties, that’s not hard at all. Takes you 15 minutes tops. But I have yet to meet anyone to hire me to ghost write their personal blog entries.

Writing corporate blog posts is a different matter. The actual wordsmithing — spinning out 350 – 450 words — is pretty straightforward. Yes, you’re paying for the writer’s expertise and skills (remember, this is a trained professional who has dedicated himself or herself to the written word), but there are other factors that go into corporate blogging. Here’s the basic process that most professional bloggers follow:

• Regular research of the client’s industry. We have to know as much as we can about your industry, reading related blogs, trade journals, and news articles.
• Interview the client. For Pro Blog Service, I interview our clients about that month’s blog posts, record the interviews, and we write the posts based on that.
• The writing. This is the act of putting the words into a word processing document.
• The editing. Any writer will tell you that the editing process is just as crucial as the actual writing. As first draft writers, most of us vary from horrible to passable. There are very, very few people who can write a great first draft. So the editing is just as difficult as putting down the actual words.
• Publishing to the blog. This includes adding photos, any outbound links, using tools for SEO like WordPress SEO and Schemas. This is the other place people have problems, because they don’t have the time to dink around with finding photos, creating links, etc.
• Promoting each blog post. You can’t just throw up a blog post and let it sit. You have to promote it to your social networks. And you have to grow those networks. A full-service professional blogger will also include that in their offerings, helping you grow your network so you can reach a bigger and more target audience

Blogging is much, much more than just spinning out the actual words, although that’s certainly the most important part of it. Without the research, the editing, and the promotion, you’re just writing in a diary about whatever randomly pops into your head.

If you’re thinking about blogging, more power to you! Please do. It’s an important part of social media marketing. But just remember that it takes about 1 – 2 hours worth of work to come up with a single blog post. That’s why you either need to hire it done, or allow for that much time in your schedule.

In future posts, I’ll be talking about what makes a good writer, and why, even though we all learned how to write in school, those skills are not enough to make an effective writer.

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• 

What are some different freelance writing rates that freelancers ought to be charging? It depends on where you live. If you live in America’s Heartland, where the cost of living is lower, you’ll charge less. If you live on one of the three coasts (that includes Chicago), your rates will be much, much higher.

It always makes me laugh when clients from Out East or Out West think that we aren’t charging enough here in Indiana, because our rates are often 50 – 100% less than what they’re being charged by hometown writers. We’re able to charge so much because our cost of living is so much lower. Rent is anywhere from $600 – $1,200 here in Central Indiana, but in New York, that’s the the cost of a gallon of milk.

But things aren’t as good if they’re not as expensive, so the smart freelancer raises his or her rates to meet expense expectations when the client is from Away.

Having said that, here’s a typical freelance rate for the Midwest (excluding Chicago; see above “Out East or Out West”). Also, keep in mind that these rates may be higher or lower, depending on whether you’re a new freelancer or a seasoned professional:

• Blog post (300 – 500 words): $75 – $125
• Web copy (1 page): $75 – $100
• Press release (1 page): $100
• White paper (6 – 10 pages): $300 – $600
• Market copy (2 pages): $200
• Newspaper or magazine article (< 1,000 words): $300 – $1,000, depending on the publication.

To that, I would add:

• To fix what you already wrote: $50/hr.
• If you edit the work, and I have to go back and fix what you did: $200/hour
• You’re from the East/West Coast, and think we don’t charge enough: Double the above rates until we reach your desired expectations.

Update: I’ve received a lot of feedback on this particular post, both in the comments and messages scrawled in blood on the flaming bags of dog poo on my front porch. This is a contentious issue for some, because they make much more than this from their freelance work. For others, they can’t believe I would advocate charging so much (those are usually the people who hire freelancers).

The point of this post is to get you thinking about what freelancers should be charging, at least as a starting point. Your mileage will vary, depending on your experience, where you live, and who you’re writing for.

Writing a magazine article for a small startup magazine in small-town Indiana is going to be way different than writing a cover piece for Newsweek or US News and World Report. Giving one price for a magazine is like saying, “A car costs $18,000.”

So, if you’re thinking about hiring a freelancer, these are prices to start with when hiring freelancers here in America’s heartland. If you’re looking to launch your freelance career, this a good guideline if you live in the Midwest. But if you’re a freelancer who’s already earning more than this, ignore these numbers, keep doing good work, and charge what your clients are willing to pay.

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• 

The number of companies that maintain blogs dropped by nearly 25% from 2010 to 2011.

That’s not a very smart move.

But it’s a growing trend. According to an article in USA Today, more companies quit blogging, go with Facebook instead, the percentage of companies on Inc. magazine’s fastest growing 500 dropped from 50% in 2010 to 37% in 2011. And only 23% of Fortune 500 companies had a blog in 2011.

Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, the UMass Dartmouth professor who wrote the report, and world-class social media academic, told USA Today that blogging may not be the panacea that businesses thought it would be.

“Blogging requires more investment. You need content regularly. And you need to think about the risk of blogging, accepting comments, liability issues, defamation,” she said.

The problem is, the companies are taking their energy and efforts to Facebook instead. That’s not a dumb strategy. After all, at 800 million+ users, you have to fish where the fish are. And there’s a whole lot of fish on Facebook.

But if you’re giving up blogging, you’re giving up so much more than a little time and energy.

Blogging is Still the Smartest Strategy

Let’s assume you can get a handle on the liability and defamation issues. Let’s assume you have bloggers who understand basic journalistic rules and know not to libel people in a blog post. If you can do that, it’s still one of the best social media strategies you’re going to be adopt for your company.

Here are five reasons why your business blog is still better than a Facebook strategy.

• Blogging wins search, Facebook does not: Right now, Facebook is blocking Google. They don’t let Google index their content, which means your Facebook content will go unseen by the search giant, which owns 75% of the search engine market. And when you consider that most of the people coming to your site will be first-time visitors, they don’t even know you have a Facebook page. But your blog is constantly being indexed by Google and the other search engines, including Bing, the search engine Facebook is working with. All the blog posts you write can be indexed by Google, and found by customers. All the Facebook stuff you cannot be indexed, and therefore goes unseen.
• Facebook is finicky, your blog is not: The only people who control Facebook is Facebook. They don’t listen to what the users want, they don’t pay attention to the fact that people don’t like Timeline. Don’t like the new news feed. Didn’t like it when they dropped FBML (Facebook Markup Language), after they spent a few thousand dollars on an FBML page. Didn’t like it when they dropped Groups in favor of Pages. So you’re especially not going to be happy if they change something else with the business page you’ve spent so much time, money, and energy on. Do you really want to spend all that time, effort, and money on something that could be gone in the blink of an eye? But you own your blog. It’s your design, your content, and your effort. You’re not subject to the design whims of someone outside the organization who doesn’t give a rip about your time, money, or energy. No one will change your blog without your permission; Facebook will change itself as often as a high school kid changes his underwear.
• Your blog is still the hub, Facebook is a spoke: Your social media campaign needs a hub that you’re going to drive all your traffic to. It’s the center of the wheel, the middle of the circle, the center of the spider web. Facebook is no more than a spoke on that wheel, or thread on the web. Facebook is no more the center of a strategy any more than Twitter is. You wouldn’t rely on Twitter to be the center of your content strategy, and the same is true with Facebook.
• Blogging is still about content, Facebook is about conversations: You’ll want to present all your big ideas, all your big plans, the answers to your big questions on your blog, not your Facebook page. For one thing, Facebook doesn’t lend itself to long-form writing — people won’t show up to Facebook, hoping to read a 500 word announcement about your new product, they’ll go to your blog. For another, Facebook is not easily searchable — you won’t get people searching Facebook with a question only you can answer, and they won’t plow through nine months of posts hoping to get the answer to their questions; your blog is easily found, and you can even search within it. Facebook is not the place people go when they want information, it’s where they go when they want to interact with other people. That’s what your blog is for.
• The pendulum will swing back the other way: Eventually, businesses are going to learn that Zuckerberg and company truly doesn’t care about the user experience in interacting with businesses. Do you know who cares? The businesses! Business who truly care what experience the users have, and whether their sites are found on Google, are the ones who will design their entire social media marketing strategy around a solid blogging and content marketing strategy, not around a channel whose design they can’t control.

Are we saying to drop Facebook from your social media plans? Not at all. Facebook is a valuable tool and a great way to reach the largest online audience possible. But blogging is a great way to target people and get them to use one of the strongest marketing tools you can possibly harness, Google.

And until Google and Facebook learn to work together and get along, you’re going to have to keep a foot firmly planted in both camps.

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• 

After Monday’s post, “Writing For ‘Exposure’ Is Not Payment,” travel writer and photographer Mark Eveleiegh emailed me a great response that helped me crystallize my own thoughts. With his kind permission, I am reposting his reply here (not a differing response, but more of a ‘hell, yeah!’ reply), because he makes a very important point.

Mark Eveleigh is a professional photographer, travel writer, and journalist. I also like his tattoo.

(Note: Mark is British, so any ‘misspellings’ are actually English writing styles and spellings.)

When I was starting out I had a golden rule NEVER to write for free. The magazines that want your free work are rarely the ones that can offer the best exposure (also most pros and editors know you wrote for free, thereby lowering your professional credibility). Will the day come when Nat Geo will expect us to write for free? After all it is the best exposure we will ever get.

When times were hard I was reduced to selling ‘travellers tips’ for USD10 to a travel magazine. They only paid for the best tip…but I figured that a pro ought to be able to stand up to that sort of competition and I welcomed even this minor challenge. I remember bending the golden rule just once when a good friend was launching a new magazine and I wrote a story for him.

Times have changed though. Finally – after 16 years living from freelance travel journalism – I’m accepting the fact that we need to write for free. We market, advertise and promote ourselves online through blogs and social-networking.

I’ve just finished a tight deadline that’s had me on assignment for 10 days. I’ve been writing and polishing images for much of the last 72 hours. Pay rate for that was decent (several thousand dollars). Tonight though my task is to write a 500-word blog post on travel scams. Payrate for this is a big fat ZERO.

My old theory was that work that was not paid for was worth nothing – now I have even had to rethink that. The important thing if we are going to write for free is that the quality of the work we file should nevertheless be right up there with our best commissioned work. Why should we expect to market ourselves with sub-standard work? I want my best work ever to be on my blog. Many people publish sloppy writing with bad grammar and spelling and defend themselves by the statement “well, it’s only blogging.”

We need to stop this slide into a new era of true hack writing. Whether you are writing a magazine cover-story or a blog post you should be proud to have your name on the piece.

Finally, one of the greatest things about this new era is a revival of the pure sense of fun that comes from writing about something simply because it fascinates you, or because it’s a challenge. I’ve rarely had so much fun with writing as I’ve had in the months since Erik Deckers convinced me that I ought to set up my Parallel Worlds blog.

I’m enjoying this new era and as long as I can keep pulling in the paid magazine commissions I for one intend to keep ‘writing for free’ as much as possible.

Mark Eveleigh is the founder of THE WIDEANGLE photo agency and, as a photojournalist and author, has worked for more than 50 publications, including Geographical, CNN Traveller, Sunday Times, The Guardian, Africa Geographic, and National Geographic.

Undercover news assignments have taken him from besieged Zimbabwean farms to high-security Bolivian prisons, but charging African elephants, Spanish fighting bulls, and a randy Peruvian llama have taught him the real importance of ‘journalistic footwork.’

He is rated #27 in official Press Gazette (UK) listing of the 50 most influential travel writers.

—–

Mark’s letter made me realize an important distinction in my thoughts on “Writing For ‘Exposure’ Is Not Payment.”

Exposure is important. It’s crucial to building our personal brand. It’s how people know us. And sometimes writers, especially professional writers, sometimes have to write for free. I write this blog for free. Mark’s blog is free. We don’t get paid for writing our blogs, or writing guest post’s on other people’s blogs.

However, it’s not payment. Don’t tell us that’s the reason we should do it, because it shows a shallowness of thinking and understanding how a writer works.

What we ultimately get out of it is payment through other works. I write blog posts about social media, business owners and marketers read it, and they hire my company to write blog posts for them. Mark writes blog posts about adventure travel, marketing executives at travel-related companies read it, and they hire Mark to tote their products down the Amazon and write about it.

We don’t just do the free stuff for exposure. We do it for exposure to the right people.

And therein lies the difference. It’s not a payment. It’s a long-term benefit.

(But we still want the money.)

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• 

Yesterday’s clarification by Judge Marco A. Hernandez about treating bloggers as journalists points out the need for bloggers to follow basic ethical principles, especially as it relates to accepting money or requiring payment for our services.

Oregon blogger Crystal Cox had been sued for defamation — and lost — after writing blog posts that were critical of Obsidian Financial Group and its co-founder, Kevin Padrick. Cox had claimed she was a journalist and used Oregon’s Media Shield Law as her defense. But Hernandez decided she wasn’t a journalist at all.

The reason she lost, the reason she was deemed to be not “media,” was that she basically tried to get Obsidian to pay her to repair the damage she was causing. As Hernandez wrote:

“[T]he uncontroverted evidence at trial was that after receiving a demand to stop posting what plaintiffs believed to be false and defamatory materials on several websites, including allegations that Padrick had committed tax fraud, defendant offered ‘PR,’ ‘search engine management,’ and online reputation repair services to Obsidian Finance, for a price of $2,500 per month.”

(Source: Courthouse News)

Not only was Cox’s action not in standing with what a journalist would/should/could never do, we bloggers have our own set of ethics that we must never violate.

There are three ethical principles bloggers cannot and should not violate:

1. You cannot ask for money to write about a product.

You can ask for money to advertise a product on your blog, but you cannot ask to be paid for a review. If you were a radio station, and you demanded payment to play a particular song, that would be payola, and it’s illegal.

Sending a PR flak your rate sheet for reviewing a product is in poor taste and unethical. That would also make your review an advertisement, not an actual review.

Now, you may keep the product, if they offer, and you may also accept the goods or service necessary to write a review (i.e. a stay at a hotel, a meal at a restaurant, theater or movie tickets, etc.), but you have to disclose the receipt of the product/goods/service, according to FTC Guidelines:

The revised Guides also add new examples to illustrate the long standing principle that “material connections” (sometimes payments or free products) between advertisers and endorsers – connections that consumers would not expect – must be disclosed. These examples address what constitutes an endorsement when the message is conveyed by bloggers or other “word-of-mouth” marketers. The revised Guides specify that while decisions will be reached on a case-by-case basis, the post of a blogger who receives cash or in-kind payment to review a product is considered an endorsement. Thus, bloggers who make an endorsement must disclose the material connections they share with the seller of the product or service.

2. You cannot accept money or goods in exchange for a POSITIVE review.

The great thing about bloggers is that we are free to give our unbiased, unvarnished thoughts on a product. If it sucks, we get to say it sucks, even if the company itself sent us the product.

It’s one thing to be asked to write a review. It’s a completely other thing to be asked to write a positive review.

If a company offers you money or lets you keep a very expensive product in exchange for your glowing review of it, that’s a bribe. The company should let you say what you want about the product; if they don’t, they’ve got some unreasonable and unethical expectations, and you should turn the offer down completely.

Yes, we want to say the product was good, because they were so nice to us. And they’re our new friends, and they said they liked our blog. We want them to be happy and continue to be our friends, right? That’s an understandable feeling, but you have to resist the urge.

If the product wasn’t good, you have to/get to say so. If it was great, you have to/get to say so.

Now, you have the right to only write about products or services you’ll like. And it’s not required that you hate something or pan something. When I was a music reviewer for Indie-Music.com, I never panned anyone in 150 album reviews. I never hated anyone’s work, and never said anyone should pour their heart and soul into their life’s work of being a bartender. However, there were a few albums that I listened to that I never wrote about, because I didn’t want to pan it or say something was awful. Our whole editorial attitude was our moms’ old trope, “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.”

We were able to make that choice, because the owners decided that was their right. As a blogger, you are free to define your blog’s attitude too. Want to be a hater? Be a hater. Want to only publish positive reviews? Publish them. And just ignore the items that don’t fit with your overall attitude.

You have the choice to only write blog posts about great products, but you don’t have an obligation to say only positive things. You also have the choice to only write blog posts about how things suck, but you don’t have an obligation to seek out the worst in anything and everything you see. (Besides, that gets tiresome and people won’t want to hang around you.)

3. You cannot ask for money to undo something you did.

If you wrote negative content and it’s ranking high on a search engine results page (SERP), you can’t ask to be paid to remove it or hide it with positive content. That’s extortion. You expect this kind of behavior from men in shiny suits running protection rackets.

I can’t say much more about this, it’s pretty straightforward. This is not only unethical, it’s pretty stupid. It’s akin to doctors running around, stabbing people, in order to generate more need for their ER services.

Bloggers need to adopt the same ethical standards as professional journalists. We’re still fighting for recognition as real journalists and real media, and we need to live up to the same standards in anticipation of the day that there’s no recognizable difference between the two professions. One of the only ways we are going to be taken seriously is if we follow the same level of ethics that they do.

Photo credit: Images_of_Money (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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Hooray, bloggers are real journalists again! Just not one in particular.

Back in December 2011, we learned that a U.S. district court judge had ruled that bloggers in Oregon are not part of the media, and therefore, are not protected by Oregon’s media shield laws.

This may or may not have happened after Judge Hernandez's clarification

But Judge Marco A. Hernandez has clarified that he did not mean for his ruling to apply to all bloggers, or at least all Oregon bloggers, only to Crystal Cox.

Cox had been writing critical blog posts about Obsidian Financial Group and co-founder Kevin Padrick, and was sued for defamation by the firm. Cox lost her case after trying to use Oregon’s media shield law as her defense. Hernandez had also awarded Padrick $2.5 million.

Cox appealed the ruling to Hernandez’s court, when he ruled that as a blogger, Cox, could not use Oregon’s media shield law to defend herself.

This sent most of us bloggers into a tizzy. I was especially concerned, since I’ve been a champion of bloggers as citizen journalists. After all, if we’re not considered journalists, then how and why would we serve to educate and inform our communities?

It turns out that’s not what Hernandez meant at all. According to a Courthouse News article, Hernandez wrote:

“In my discussion, I did not state that a person who ‘blogs’ could never be considered ‘media.’ I also did not state that to be considered ‘media,’ one had to possess all or most of the characteristics I recited.

“[T]he uncontroverted evidence at trial was that after receiving a demand to stop posting what plaintiffs believed to be false and defamatory materials on several websites, including allegations that Padrick had committed tax fraud, defendant offered ‘PR,’ ‘search engine management,’ and online reputation repair services to Obsidian Finance, for a price of $2,500 per month.

“The suggestion was that defendant offered to repair the very damage she caused for a small but tasteful monthly fee. This feature, along with the absence of other media features, led me to conclude that defendant was not media.”

(Source: Courthouse News)

This was always something that always bothered me about Cox’s actions. It’s the same thing Yelp was accused of a couple of in 2009 and 2010 (a class-action lawsuit against Yelp was dismissed exactly one year ago):

You cannot ask for payment to undo something you did.

There are people, my company included, that do search engine optimization (SEO). They help companies get their positive news and content to the top of the search engines. But they do not do it to overcome the negative information they put there in the first place.

In other words, if you try to screw a company, you cannot ask for money to unscrew them. If you said negative things about a company, you cannot be paid to then hide those bad things. (We’ll leave the question of Cox’s defamation aside for the moment.)

And that’s what Cox did that made her “not media.”

I’ll talk about blogging ethics in a day or so, but in the meantime, I’m going to breathe a sigh of relief that Judge Hernandez has recognized that bloggers can be considered journalists, and therefore, entitled to a journalist’s defense under Oregon’s media shield laws.

Photo credit: kslavin (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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I’m still surprised at the number of writers who will write for the promise of exposure by websites, blogs, magazines, and newspapers. I was offered that a lot when I was a budding writer. It was fine when I was first starting out, but after a year, I didn’t want exposure, I wanted money.

That’s what any writer wants.

Not that kind of exposure

We don’t write for fame, we don’t write for glory, we don’t write because it’s a cool thing to do. We write because it’s our job, and it’s how we feed our family.

Our families can’t eat exposure, and our mortgage holders don’t accept, “but my article was seen by 2,000 people last month.” Our grocery stores and our banks want money, not readers.

Dorm Room Logic

Back in the 90s and early 2000s, when Napster was all the rage, you had plenty of people engaging in late-night dorm room logic, thinking the only thing musicians ever really wanted was fame. By downloading and stealing their music, they were giving the musicians exactly what they had wanted all along: to be recognized and revered for making good music.

What the downloaders failed to realize was that the only reason the musicians were able to feed themselves and pay for shelter to keep themselves healthy so they could play music was because people were buying their albums, and not ripping them off.

So it goes with the editors who want writers to write for the “exposure.”

“Exposure” is publisher talk for “we want to put you in front of all of our readers who will be so impressed by your work that they will soon become your slobbering fans and put their hard-earned money into your pocket in a desperate grab for anything you produce and sell.”

Oftentimes, what it really means is “we don’t have very much money.”

I hear the “exposure” excuse now that I’ve moved most of my written content online. Sometimes it’s a money thing.

I respect when the editor says they don’t have the money. I understand the problem, and appreciate the honesty. I’m more likely to say yes when they’re honest with me, even if it’s a one-off project for them.

But when the magazine has fewer readers than I have Facebook friends, and they’re promising me exposure? I’m not interested. I can get that level of exposure in 30 minutes. In cases like that, I think the better deal is that they pay me money, and I’ll tell my social networks about them.

If you’re still at the stage in your writing career where you need more readers, use some of the social profile building techniques I’ve discussed on this blog and PersonalBrandBlog.com. Build your readership up to the point that you don’t need the exposure, but rather that you’re doing the publication a favor by telling people that your stuff is available there.

I Write for Free When I Choose

There are times I will write for free, because I know that I am getting in front of a brand new audience. And these are people I would have a hard time reaching on my own. At the same time, the editor or publisher actually knows how to help me convert those readers into my own readers and fans, and will share that with me. A lot of editors aren’t able to do that.

At the same time, guest blogging is one of those things you should be willing to do for free. It does give you traffic, and it introduces you to another, hopefully more successful, blogger’s audience. They’re not only willing to share their limelight with you, but they’re going to tell their audience all about you. If they’re a successful blogger, they’ll have a readership of least a few thousand people.

But more importantly, that person you guest wrote for will do the same for you. So while money doesn’t change hands, there is a quid pro quo agreement between you both — you’re exchanging a post for a post. If they paid you, then you need to turn around and pay them the same amount.

So while you shouldn’t have to take any and every freebie offer that comes your way, check out the publication’s target audience and market size and see if that’s a group you want to reach. If it is, see if you have the time to do a good job. If it isn’t, ask for money. If they say no, you say no.

What Harlan Ellison Has to Say About Writing for Exposure

Photo credit: kthypryn (Flickr)

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