freelance writing

Writing For a Result

Posted on July 10, 2010
Category: Writing | 2 Comments

Its probably about time I went back to grass roots and wrote a post about writing, which is what I do! This one is not of the tutorial type, nor is it probably going to inspire anyone to get into this business unless they are already determined that it is what they want to do.

Let’s just get a few things straight, before I get started. I’m not going to be talking about writing novels or writing editorials for magazines, newspapers or journals. Not even content writing for assignments with other website owners. This is about writing for myself (or in your case, yourself).

First of all, you have to know why you would want to write for yourself. You can’t pay yourself for the finished result and if you are not going to sell it to someone else, then you might be forgiven for wondering why you would even do it! To illustrate that point, I’m going to tell you why I do it.

In the beginning, when I started in this business towards the end of 2006, I built one real website, which was my hypnosis site (www.hypnosic.com) as this was my profession back in the 1990s and I wanted to recreate the free site I built back in 1996 and improve on it with my own domain. My plan was to once again sell my own hypnosis CDs online, a side to my business that actually worked for a while back in 1996! For the record, I didn’t sell enough (it was cassettes then) and dropped the idea. Mmmm.

Come back to 2006 and I felt there was more to the Internet than just trying to sell a few CDs. So I also built a collection of free blogs on a variety of subjects and started writing posts in the belief that if I put enough content out there in the web-o-sphere, then I would eventually attract readers and that would attract advertisers to my blogs and I would make pots of money and retire to a beach somewhere. Oh, just a mo… that sounds a little like The Internet Marketing Dream!

Of course, I failed to make a dent in the money making side of that plan but this time, I didn’t give up. I could see the potential despite all the scamming IM gurus that were milking noobs like cash cows and was thankful that I didn’t get sucked into that side of the business. I got lucky in a way and was gifted with a pre-launch free copy of a marketing ebook called My Secret Articles by a well respected and honest marketer called Steven Wagenheim. It taught me a lot of what I needed to know and how to avoid the pitfalls that trap so many other newcomers to this business. It covered just about everything from Affiliate Marketing to basic SEO and the many ways of promoting an online business. It was my bible in those dark days when there was not much else available.

One of the most important things I learned from Steven was how to write articles that I could sell. I started selling them via Constant Content and made some money but made more by attracting some paying clients who liked my work. That was great for a while as it meant I could make my living directly from the Internet doing something I enjoyed doing.

Like most things with me, I soon get disillusioned with certain things that don’t do enough to keep my interest. Writing was okay, but I soon realised that in order to keep earning money, I needed to keep writing. if I stopped writing, I stopped earning money. On the other hand, if I were to build more websites and promote them in the right way, I would attract organic search traffic that would buy whatever that website was selling. I had already bumped into Griz and Vic by this time and could see the way in which they were making a killing with this model. The trick was to work very hard at it because there was no easy way.

It was like looking over the fence at the greener grass on the other side, except I knew with full conviction that the grass on that other side really was greener.

I made the decision to put more of my efforts into building more and better websites that were better targeted to selling things that people wanted to buy. Then I went about finding affiliate programs that would enable me to promote products that I would earn commission for selling them. All the while, I kept writing to pay the bills while I watched my passive income start to trickle in. I should also mention Adsense here, as some of the websites were laid out better for that kind of PPC income and some started to attract income from that quarter.

But things were growing way too slowly. The sites I was building were not ranking well enough in Google to attract the traffic that would mean plenty of sales and/or clicks. I started devoting more of my writing time to building up those sites as well as some supporting sites that were built around what is known as long tail keywords (longer phrases that people search for regularly in the search engines) so they could also rank for their own terms and then send links to the main sites in their relevant niches.

This started to show promise as some sites started to rank better and with more original content and backlinks, were starting to outrank some of the top sites for certain keywords. It was still taking a long time to really happen, but I could see that light at the end of the very long tunnel and being a tenacious bloke, I just kept on and on hammering away at it. I was writing a huge amount of articles, using Hub Pages, Ezine, Infobarrel, Squidoo and other free places to build mini-sites that could send links and traffic to my main sites. The number of original articles I have written for this, to date must register in the several thousands. I lost count of them all some time ago.

The result so far is that I now devote nearly all my time to writing articles for my own websites, blogs and those mini-site places and am rewarded with a full time income from those websites. I haven’t stopped, by the way. There is plenty more to do and more money to be made from further expansion and a ton of more work in writing, building and promoting.

That’s why I succeed in a business where so many fail. Because I know what I have to do and I do it. Its hard work and most people will shy away from hard work, but if you want to make a success of this business and make a full time income from the Internet, then its the only way that is going to happen. Working hard and writing for a result is my way.

Terry Didcott

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The Internet Marketing Dream

Posted on May 3, 2010
Category: internet marketing | Leave a Comment

Hi all – don’t ever let anyone believe they know what you are going to do next. Surprise them every so often, it’s fun and it’s what makes life interesting. Enjoy:

Ok, I couldn’t resist trying this out for myself. After Splork’s excellent movie “Talking About the Web Sewers” using the same tool on the topic of the proliferation of crap articles spammed across the web, I thought it might make a nice movie to bash the A-listers and their e-books that scam noobs into believing they can make easy money online. Its all a bit of fun, which is what life should be!

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Talk About the Weather!

Posted on March 2, 2010
Category: home life | 8 Comments

Hi once again! I’m back again in this hotbed of activity that is my own personal space that I can do pretty much whatever I want with. And you can tell how keen I am by the prolific posting that goes on here! Ok, let’s get down to why I’m spending some time in here when I should be spending it on more profitable sites.

I’d almost forgotten that this blog was initially intended as more of a scratch pad of my thoughts and ideas than what it seems to have become lately, which is more of a “what I’m doing with my online business” diary. So for this post at least, all that will stop and its back to the original aim of the blog. Which is what I’m up to other than the online stuff which seems to have hijacked most of my time.

So here I am, in a beautiful, warm country that is geared up for blisteringly hot, sunny days and for the past few weeks it has rained like it has never rained before! Ok, just yesterday Jan and I took baby for a lovely walk along the beach in the sunshine, but it was a brief respite as today it is raining again. How can this be? There are large expanses of Andalucia that are currently underwater where rivers have burst their banks and flooded low lying areas!

This is the sort of stuff I expect to hear in England where all it ever seemed to do was rain and be freezing cold. It cools down here in Southern Spain during the winter months, but rarely drops into single figures (Centigrade) and rainfall is something that the farmers pray for every year and rarely get enough to wet the ground. Every year since I’ve been here, we’ve been constantly reminded that the reservoirs have barely enough water in them to last the summer and we are on constant drought alert. This is normal as this part of Spain is naturally hot and dry.

It is why I chose to live here – I loathe the cold and the rain of England!

But this winter that all changed. The reservoirs are all full and the flood gates are all open because they can’t hold any more water. All low lying roads are deluged – ok, it doesn’t take much for that to happen as they have no camber and drainage is a joke. As I said, this part of Spain is geared up for hot… not wet!

Its as though the rest of Europe has finally managed to snare this temperate little corner of warmth and dragged it into its cold, clammy clutches at last!

I know this is only a temporary spate of unfortunate climatic shenanigans and someone “up there” is probably chuckling heartily at the irony of it all. I know that in a few weeks time it will all be forgotten and I’ll be back in the groove. I’ll be able to take an hour or two away from my frenetic battle with the Internet to wrest as much loot as I can from it. Then I’ll go strolling along the beach heading for a cold beer and a shady spot in which to drink it as if winter was a far off memory. But right now, all this extra wet stuff out there is keeping me in here and I’m having to spend even more time on this which is why I have found the time to come to my own personal space and write this!

Oh, and another reason why I live here in southern Spain is I was just so fed up with listening to all the negative Brits back in the UK going on and on and on about the confounded weather…

Terry Didcott

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