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Three Unrelated Skills to Make You a Better Writer

Every writer gets the same advice when they’re starting out — write every day, read a lot, practice writing exercises — but that can only get you so far. There are other skills to develop.

It’s like a baseball player who only practices hitting and catching. Yes, those are important skills that he needs to practice over and over. But there are other skills he can practice that will also improve his playing ability: lifting weights, sprint workouts, and even off-season work like chopping wood and playing basketball, will improve his ability to swing a bat.

Erik Deckers speaking in public
Doing this taught me to be a better writer.
For writers, there are related skills they can develop, through other activities that exercise their writing muscles, but don’t actually have them writing the same same stuff over and over. These other activities can improve your communication skills, which will ultimately improve your writing.

Twitter

I always thought I was good at concise writing, until I fell in love with Twitter. After using it for a year, and learning how to fit a single thought into 140 characters, I realized I was doing that in my regular writing. When I went back and compared my work to the previous year, I could see how everything was tighter, and how I expressed ideas more fully with fewer, better words.

Twitter has especially helped my humor writing, because I’ve learned how to set up a joke and deliver the punchline in a single tweet. This has had a huge impact on my humor column writing, because I’ve been able to squeeze more jokes into the same number of column inches.

To learn how to tweet effectively:

  • Distill your thoughts into the most expressive nouns and verbs.
  • Cut the adverbs.
  • Use adjectives sparingly.
  • Avoid first person references. Instead of saying “I had lunch at @BoogieBurger,” say “Had lunch at @BoogieBurger” or even “Ate at @BoogieBurger.”

(This last one is more of a space saver, but it also teaches you how to write with greater punch.)

Want to make it a real challenge? Avoid abbreviations if possible, and never, ever use text speak. Then, make your thoughts fit into the required space. That’s the best training you can ever do for yourself.

Public Speaking

If you speak in public, you already know how to deliver information clearly and directly, making it easy for your audience to understand and be interested in it. If you’ve been doing it for a while, you’ve already got a speaking style. (And if you don’t, find your local Toastmasters club, and learn to speak in public.)

As you develop that speaking style, try to tailor your writing style to match it. As you’re reading, imagine yourself delivering the material to your audience. If you speak with strong declarative statements, write them. If you’re funny in person, be funny on paper. If you’re calming to your audience, be calming to your reader. Basically, your spoken word choice and delivery should affect your written word choice and style. And as more people hear you speak, the more they’ll hear your voice when they read your work. Match the one to the other in tone, word choice, and even rhythm.

Storytelling

I don’t mean become the kind of storytellers you see at festivals or hear on The Moth, although that helps. Rather, focus on telling stories to friends over dinner. The story should have a beginning, middle, and end. It should create suspense, and have an interesting payoff at the end.

If you can easily tell those kinds of stories out loud, you’ll learn how to tell those stories on paper. Any story or blog post you write should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. It needs to have an interesting payoff. (Of course, with blogging and journalism, the payoff comes at the beginning, so you’ll need to learn how to deliver the punchline first, and turn the setup into its own a-ha! moment.)

As you’re writing your articles, write it as if you were going to deliver it in public, but as a five-minute story. If you can shift the storytelling architecture to your writing, that makes your work easier to follow. You learn how to keep people involved from a post or article from beginning to end.

These are the three skills I have worked on over the last several years, and they have made a big difference in what, how, and how well I write. And I’m always looking for the next new challenge or skill to master to make it even better.

How about you? What challenges are you taking on yourself to become a better writer?

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Can You Make Money Blogging? Maybe.

Can you make money blogging? Will you get rich? Does it lead to the same illustrious career as, say, a biz-tech nonfiction book writer?

No. No. And mostly.

Unfortunately, blogging is not the way to untold riches, despite what the people who offer courses on “how to get rich blogging” tell you.

The best way to get rich blogging? Write a regular blog about how to get rich blogging, offer webinars about it, charge people $799 to attend. Tell people how to write a blog and host webinars.

Otherwise, the odds of you getting rich from this are about as good as you getting rich as a singer or actor.

Because the amount of time and effort you’ll put into everything else but blogging — marketing, promotions, PR, programming, design — is about the same amount of time and effort you’ll put into anything else you want to do, like starting your own company, selling a product, or launching your singing or acting career.

No, Seriously. Can You Make Money Blogging?

Okay, yes. You can make money at blogging. It’s not a lot, but there are ways to make more money than others, but some are easier.

Let’s say you have a fairly popular blog, netting around 10,000 visitors a month. It’s taken you a couple years to get to this point (which, if you thought you could get there after a couple weeks, forget it). There are a few options open to you:

  • Banner advertising. This is the easiest option, and the first one most people think of. It’s also the lowest paying, because you’re trying to get visitors to click through the ads. Even if you had a 1% clickthrough rate (which would be awesome), 10,000 visitors would equal 100 clicks. And at $.05 per click, that’s $5 — “cheeseburger money,” as Jason Falls calls it. What’s worse, you’re constantly trying to fill space, and end up spending a lot of writing time selling instead. There are advertising services I’ve seen that will place ads for you, but they’re still struggling to get advertisers to buy in. Think of it this way: In the late 90s and early 2000s, banner advertising was all the rage, and was how a lot of Internet news sites were trying to make money. The fact that they’re not around anymore should tell you something.
  • Google AdWords You make a few cents on an impression, and several cents on a click-through. You’ve got the same issues as banner advertising, although you’re not chasing down advertisers. It’s more passive. The more traffic you get, the more impressions you get. I have one friend who paid for his son’s college with the banner advertising on his site, but he wrote on it every day and promoted the bejeezus out of it.
  • Affiliate sales. A definite possibility. Of course, this takes a lot of social media networking (more than the actual writing), because you need for people to trust you enough to click through your ads. But I know a few people who do it, and they make pretty decent money this way. Not quit-your-day-job money, but they can eat cheeseburgers every day.
  • Product reviewer. This is the least likely way to make actual money, even worse than banner advertising. BUT! it’s a great way to get cool stuff, because companies are always looking for product reviewers. They’ll send you a product, or passes to their business, and ask you to write up a review (this is called blogger outreach, and is becoming a staple of marketing/PR people). If you’re a mother of young children, you may be able to sample a week’s worth of new diapers in exchange for a writeup. Or you get to try a family-friendly restaurant for dinner. It won’t put cash in your pocket, but it will pay for the occasional night out or get you something useful. As a travel writer, I occasionally get to take little mini-vacations around the state. You can’t accept money for reviews though, since that would be unethical, but you usually get to keep the product.
  • Ghost blogging. This is the biggie, the one and only way you can definitely make money blogging. On the downside, it’s not your blog. You’re writing for someone else, and your name will never be seen in public. On the upside, you’re a professional copywriter, and you can demand professional copywriting wages. In fact, of all the blogging jobs I know, this is the easiest way to make a full-time living. (My company, Professional Blog Service, is a ghost blogging agency.) However, it also means you have to be a very good writer. Good writers get good money. Okay writers get okay money. And beginning writers get beginning money. Still, if you know what you’re doing, have a decent grasp of the English language, and can spell all your words correctly, you’ve got a good chance at becoming a ghost blogger.

Ghost Blogging = Ghostwriting

The ghost blogger hard at work.
Ghost bloggers are basically ghost writers. A ghost writer is a writer who works for someone else and publishes their work under that person’s name. They’re never seen, never heard from, and they moan about the injustice of it all. They’re ghosts.

A ghost blogger makes their money by being marketing copywriters, only they’re specifically trained to write for the web. They know the SEO requirements and tactics, but more importantly, they can write SEO copy so well that the reader still enjoys reading it.

While there are still only a few people doing it, it’s a growing field. That’s because blogging is important to search engine optimization (SEO), but now content marketing — using content to educate your customers and sell them on your product’s benefits — has become the watchword of 2013.

In fact, given all of Google’s algorithm changes over the past couple of years, and the importance their placing on written content, 2013 is going to be the year of the writer. If you’re looking for a field to break into as a writer, this may be it.

Photo credit: Money bag – 401(K)2013 (Flickr, Creative Commons)
Ghost writer – Erik Deckers

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How to Make a Living as a Writer

A lot of people dream of making a living as a writer, or at least making money from it, but it’s getting harder, thanks to the Internet.

Stupid Internet.

The irony is that the thing that’s made it easier for people to get published has also made it harder for people to get paid for doing it. And yet, it has also created new ways for people to get paid for writing.

But here’s the sad, scary irony — you will almost never make a decent, full-time, support-a-family living as a professional writer.

Okay, we’re NOT really ghosts. I mean, you can actually see us.

Every other novelist I know, and I know a few good ones, makes their living doing something other than writing novels. Most of them make their living as teachers, and they write novels as their nights/weekends job. (Even William Faulkner was a postmaster. One of our country’s greatest novelists, and he sold stamps!) The few magazine writers I know only write articles as a sideline. And I have yet to meet a blogger who writes for himself or herself as their only source of income. (There may be a few in existence, but I haven’t met them yet.)

Here’s why:

  • Novelists get paid advances, and then receive royalties on book sales. Advances and royalty checks are getting smaller as publishers’ margins get smaller. So unless your last name is Grisham or Patterson, you’re not going to make a living this way, unless you work it at constantly. There are a few novelists who write 10 – 12 hours per day and produce a novel a month which they sell as ebooks, but they’re few and far between.
  • Magazine writers get paid a few hundred dollars. Let’s pick $500 as a nice round, almost-attainable number. If you wanted to make $60,000 per year, you would have to write 10 magazine articles per month. That’s doable, but you’re working constantly, more than you would at a corporate job. Also, you’ll take quite a while to reach that level, so be prepared for a few years of that constant work at little to no pay.
  • Nonfiction book writers (me included) make squat from our book sales. I own my own business. My friend, Kate, is a freelance book editor. Other authors support their book sales with public speaking gigs, or use it to promote their actual business.

The sad truth is that it’s very difficult to make a full-time salary solely from writing, unless you’re a journalist, and even those people are facing uncertain futures.

The Secret to Making Money as a Writer

There’s really only one way you’re going to make money by sitting down at a computer and churning out words by the bushel: write for someone else.

Seriously, that’s it. That’s all there is to it.

The people who make money writing are the people who don’t get to put their name on their work. They give up the credit and recognition in exchange for a paycheck.

Political speechwriters get paid to write speeches for people who will never give them public credit. They don’t get to put their name above, and the speaker will never say, “I’d like to publicly thank my speechwriter who crafted these words.”

Marketing copywriters write copy that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars for their employer, but they never get to put their byline on a brochure. (They also rarely get any bonuses for their work, even if their work directly led to a 30% spike in sales.)

In my own company, we ghostwrite for other people, not ourselves. This blog post right here? I’m publishing it under my own name, but I won’t get a dime for it. I’m hoping it will attract the attention of a client who’s willing to hire us though. Instead, we write blog posts for clients under their name, help them win search, and convince clients they know what they’re talking about. But because we’re ghosts, we don’t tell anyone who our clients are.

For people who want to make money by, as Hemingway put it, sitting at a typewriter, opening a vein, and bleeding, be prepared to do it for other people. Farm out your talents as a hired gun and craftsman. An ink slinger and a wordsmith. The pro from Dover who does what no one else can.

Ultimately you have a choice: be well-known and struggle, or be hidden and satisfied.

My suggestion is to do both. Write for other people during the day, and write for yourself at night. Ultimately, you’ll get the best of both worlds.

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Ten Commandments of Hiring Freelancers

1. You may not pay less than a living wage. What’s the living wage? Figure out what a professional supporting a family of four in your part of the country needs to make per year. Divide that number by 1,000. That’s the freelancer’s hourly rate. If that number is your budget for the entire project, don’t call them until you can afford them.

Moses and the Ten Commandments

2. Always set — and have — clear expectations. Make sure you know up front what the freelancer is going to do and not do. If you’re hiring a website designer, make sure you know who’s going to provide the written content. If you’re hiring a printer, make sure you know who’s proofreading everything first.

3. You may not ask a freelancer to do project work on spec to see if you like it, and then pay her if you accept it. You wouldn’t do it with your dentist, a plumber, or a mechanic. You hire them based on their past work and their vision. You work with them to make sure they give you what they want. But you pay them for it.

4. You may not refuse to pay a freelancer just because you decide not to use their work. If you decide to go in a different direction, or abandon the project, tough. He did the work, you have to pay him. You wouldn’t do that to an employee whose project you canceled. (Exception: If their work just downright sucks, you can cancel payment, but you cannot salvage their work and use it anyway.)

5. Pay for “feature creep.” If you hire a company to write copy for a marketing brochure, and you want them to lay it out too, be prepared to pay for that. If you’re getting a new logo created, and you decide you want your business cards to have a new look, that’s going to cost extra.

7. You may not compare the work they do to your nephew’s and expect the same fee scale. Don’t say, “but my nephew who just graduated from college can do the same thing for $500.” If he really can, hire your damn nephew. The fact that you’re having this conversation with a professional means you don’t actually think your nephew can do the work. Otherwise, you’d have called him. You’re talking to a professional because you want pro level work, so be prepared to pay pro level prices. Don’t expect a pro to compete with your inexperienced family members.

7. Trust your freelancers’ understanding of their technology. If you’re hiring an SEO specialist, don’t make him follow the SEO rules you learned in 2005. If you’re hiring a web designer, and they say “no Flash,” don’t make them use Flash. In most cases, your freelancers know more about the technology they’re working with than you do (e.g. There is no “clean up button” like you see on Law & Order). If you’re asking for something they say can’t be done, it can’t be done.

8. You may not dismiss what freelancers do as a commodity. Freelancers have devoted years of their life to honing their skill so they excel at it. Writers do nothing but write, designers do nothing but design. They don’t go to weekly staff meetings and committee meetings, and they don’t file TPS reports. If you think this is something that any schlub can do, hire your nephew. You leave your home’s plumbing and electrical work to trained professionals, rather than hiring your nephew, right? Treat your outsourced work with the same seriousness.

9. Always pay on time. You wouldn’t delay paying your employees or withhold their paycheck because you’re worried about cash flow. Don’t delay payment for your freelancers. You — hopefully — pay all of your other bills on time, pay freelancers on time. Believe me, freelancers give drop-everything service to their best clients. Clients who think payment is optional get when-I-have-time service.

10. Always approve the final product. Make sure you read and okay everything. Test it out. Make sure it works. Freelancers will always send you the final product, but that doesn’t mean it’s done. You have to pay careful attention to all the details, because you know more about the subject than anyone else.

Photo credit: Functoruser (Flickr, Creative Commons)

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Co-Citation Will Replace Anchor Text, Make My Life Harder

SEO professionals are about to lose another search signal in their optimization work, only to have it replaced by something that requires more work by content marketers, but will ultimately make Google better.

According to Rand Fishkin in a recent Whiteboard Friday, we’re about to lose anchor text.

Anchor text is a string of text that links a word or phrase to another page. In the previous paragraph, Whiteboard Friday is the anchor text.

I never thought I’d write about how Hungarian football relates to blogging.

It’s long been an SEO practice to backlink to a website by linking a keyword or phrase. For example, Pro Blog Service’s president, Paul Lorinczi, runs a Hungarian football (soccer) website. If he wants to promote the site with anchor text inside a backlink, the html code would look like this:

<a href=”http://www.hungarianfootball.com/”>Hungarian football</a>

This tells Google “this link, HungarianFootball.com, is about ‘Hungarian football.'”

Problem is, all that is dying. Stupid spammers.

Spammers Ruined It For The Rest Of Us

For all good things that SEO did and was, the spammers screwed it up for the rest of us. They’re the ones who created the link farms that had thousands of backlinks on hundreds of pages. Pages completely unrelated to whatever the links pointed to. A link to a site about jewelry from a page about construction equipment.

Fishkin says anchor text will nearly die — it won’t die completely — and instead be replaced by co-citation.

Co-citation is a new method where Google looks at important words on a page, not just official keywords, and draws a relationship between them. Then it determines what the page is talking about — e.g., does it refer to another page or brand? — and makes the association that “these words and these words go together. And they’re referring to the topic of this website over here. So we’re going to assume that the two go together, and we’ll give the website a little boost.”

In other words, instead of backlinking to a page about Hungarian football with Paul’s name, Google now has an entry in its giant massive database where the two have been linked just by being mentioned on the same page.

Another Co-Citation Example

I write a lot about Ernest Hemingway and blogging, including one post about whether he would be a good blogger or not. I’ve written about the two topics so much that when I do a Google search on “Ernest Hemingway blogging,” my tag page on Ernest Hemingway shows up (a compilation page of all posts I’ve tagged with Hemingway’s name).

(In fact, it’s ranked 6th on Google, which would be cool if anyone actually ever did a search for that term.)

Next, let’s say I had another website called ErnestHemingwayBloggingTips.com. Google would be able to make the association between my blog posts on “Hemingway and blogging” and this new website. Google would essentially say, “Here’s a blog post about Ernest Hemingway and blogging, and — ooh! — here’s a whole website devoted to that topic! SCORE!”

What would further cement the relationship is if my name appeared on both pages, like, say, in an author bio. Then, Google has another link in that chain, and whenever someone did a search for “Ernest Hemingway blogging,” my new website has a better chance of ranking very high because of the co-citation between Ernest and blogs.

This tells us some important things about co-citation:

  • I don’t use Hemingway’s name in every headline, just the one post, but Google still picks up on the keyword “Ernest Hemingway” in all of the posts. It understands, because of the tag and the body copy itself, that Papa is integral to the text. That means while headlines may be useful, your posts aren’t going to be ranked only on headline keywords.
  • The tag page is a dynamic page created by WordPress. If I add another post with “Ernest Hemingway” as the tag, like this one, the page will change. That means tags are important to Google, so use your tags properly. Don’t abuse them. Otherwise, Google’s going to take those away too.
  • Google is indexing synonyms. It’s not only looking for the word “blogging,” it’s also keying in on the word “blogger.” How long will it be before exact keywords are no longer important, because Google will understand what we mean, and not just what we said.
  • Freaking out about keywords and trying to find the exactly-perfect-bestest one is (almost) unnecessary. It used to be you had to limit your headline and topic to a single keyword, and you scoured Google AdWords and WebCEO to find just the right one. Now you’re going to get some Google juice for different keywords and their synonyms, not just the one in your headline.

Like all things Google is doing, co-citation is going to make life both harder and easier for content marketers. It’s going to drastically change our strategy, and make us have to work harder. Because, as you can see in Fishkin’s video below, co-citation doesn’t always help your page, unless it’s on someone else’s page. That’s what anchor text and backlinks did for us; we linked back to our sites using the right anchor text.

And since Google is focusing on quality content — because crappy content farms were decimated by Google Panda, and Penguin foreclosed on the link farms — that means we need people to talk about us and our keywords on their sites.

That leaves us with two strategies, both of which will take a lot of work, but will have a huge SEO payoff.

  1. Blogger outreach. This has been a public relations function. Now PR has to work with SEO in order to boost rankings. This means PR flaks who have already been doing blogger outreach will be at an advantage. They’ll be ahead of the game once co-citation becomes a real thing.
  2. Create extra content in offsite blogs. Can’t get other people to talk about you? Start another blog on another site. But you can’t put up crappy content that’s been run through an article spinner. You have to write real, effective, valuable content that real people are going to read. Google Panda killed the low-value schlock that some black hat SEOs were using, so your offsite blogging has to be just as good as your onsite blogging. And since a lot of people are already struggling with their actual blogging, this extra work is going to be a killer. Advantage: good bloggers and guest bloggers.

I can’t decide if I’m happy or annoyed by co-citation. We were already doing some of this at Pro Blog Service, which means we’re in a position to take advantage of it. But now that it’s going to become a real thing, it means we have to do more of it.

 

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“Write Good Content” is a Stupid Strategy

It doesn’t matter which article on “Five Pieces of Blogging Advice You Need RIGHT NOW” you read, including mine, they all have the same tired cliché:

Write good content

I’ve decided that this is a stupid strategy.

In fact, it should not be a strategy at all.

This is the foundation of what you do, the very essence of your success. Your raison d’être, which is French for “reason for existence.”

To call “write good content” a strategy means that the default position, the strategy you would have done is to write bad content.

That’s like telling people that one of the five keys to being successful in life is “don’t kill people.” We’ve pretty much got that one nailed down, and we understand it. Which is why you never see it addressed in Emily Post or Ann Landers.

Writing good content — hell, creating good anything — needs to be our default position. It shouldn’t be a happy accident that comes after years and years of practice, or being inspired after slipping in the shower and hitting your head and having a vision of the flux capacitor.

Let’s stop telling people to create good anything. They want to. People really and truly want to do a good job. They don’t intentionally want to suck at anything, so telling them to do a good job is more like, as Douglas Adams once said, exercising our lips. If we don’t do it, “(our) brains start working.”

No one tells Albert Pujols “get a hit.” No one tells a bull fighter “don’t get gored.” Telling someone to write good content is like telling a football team to go out and win, rather than just going out to play.

So for those who keep on telling us to “write good content,” I have a few words for you: