Entries from April 2007
The next edition of Writing Lab News is out in a few days. Here’s what I’ve got planned:
– How To Promote Your Way To The Top Of Google
– A guest article on freelance writing success
– Diary Of A Working Writer
– Five Essential Reference Tools For Writers
– An insight into a writing market
– I Must Be Doing Something Right
and more.
Last month’s issue can be found here.
If you want to make sure you get it as soon as it comes out, there’s a subscription box next to this post (at the top of the middle column). So go on – subscribe. Lots of good content about writing and I’ll only mail you once a month. You have nothing to lose so sign up now.
Categories: Writing
Tagged: Writing
Have you seen the new look on Hubpages? It is awesome. They have been rolling it out in pieces for a little while, but I got quite a shock when I logged in today and it was all there. I love that site. It’s a great place to use my blog posts and combine them in different ways to make something useful. Have a look and see what you think.
Categories: Writing
Tagged: Writing
6. Blogging – Again
Once I had written a few free articles, it was time to look for work, so I signed up with various freelance agencies. However, it was blogging that has proved the best move in promoting my freelance writing career, both in the search engines and in terms of paid writing work. It was on blogging sites that I first heard of the opportunities that lead to more writing work. It was through blogs that I connected with other writers. It was through blogging that I continued to hone my writing skills and to find a niche. And hundreds of my blog posts are indexed in the search engines, making it easy for people to find me.
7. Linking Where Relevant
One of the key aspects of getting search engines to notice your site is the authority your site gains from inbound links. These should not be any old links, but links that are relevant to your site content. And they should be deep links, to actual pages of content rather than just the home page. As a writer, the links I have sought and given have been from writing sites, which makes them more relevant to my site content and gives my site more weight in Google.
8. Let’s Play Tag – And Ping
One of the best ways to get your blog posts noticed is to tag them, using your chosen keywords where these are relevant. If you want your blog to be known for a particular subject, research the keywords, use them in your blog, and use them as tags. If you look through my blog, you’ll find that tags on the early posts are all over the place, while tags on recent posts are much more focused. The other thing to do is to let people know that the content is updated, by pinging the blog search engines. This is automatic in many cases.
9. Rinse And Repeat
I’ve learned how to promote myself by trying things to see if they worked. I’m no genius, so if I can do it, anyone can. I do a lot of reading about promotion and decide what to do based on the time I have and how relevant it is to my writing business. There’s always something new to learn and something new to try. In the last six months, I have refined the keywords on my website and optimized my blog. And even though I am tremendously busy, I still try to find an hour or two to spend on promotion at least once a week. I know that I’ve got to keep promoting if I really want my efforts to be successful. That concludes my series on self promotion, at least for now. I hope you have some success with these strategies.
Categories: Writing
Tagged: Writing
Categories: Writing
Tagged: Writing
I came across this meme on two blogs, the first Mom and More, the second skouba’s and I couldn’t resist joining in. The idea is that you highlight in bold all the ones you have read and then comment at the end.
1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) – there’s a great bio of Charlotte Bronte on the History and Women blog
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
The Silmarillion
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25 . Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
The Restaurant at the End of The Universe
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
The Chronicles of Narnia
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
Tis
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) 1/2
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
Rumble Fish
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)
Well, it didn’t come as a surprise that I have read a LOT of books. I’ve been a voracious reader since I could hold a book and my mother told me I used to read stories to my dolls when I was four and couldn’t quite read yet. A lot of my favourite books are in there, but then some have been missed, like Pride and Prejudice and my favourite Shakespeare tragedies. Some of the ones I haven’t read (Lord of the Rings, for example), I’ve tried and failed to read several times. There are others, like Tuesdays with Morrie, that I plan to read some time. Care to join in?
PS. Yes, I did notice that there are more than 100 books on the list, but I decided to let it slide. 
Categories: Writing
Tagged: Writing
What makes an ideal blogging site? For me, it’s all about the conversation. One of the blogging sites I have enjoyed most in almost 18 months of blogging has been WritingUp, a site with a thriving community of writers and others. On that site I have made friends, and we have shared experiences of all kinds. People have found consolation when loved ones have passed away, help to meet deadlines, and advice on working from home. It’s a great site for community – one of the best I’ve seen. However, it’s not perfect.
That brings me to the second requirement for the perfect blogging site – uptime. The site should be up most of the time. All sites have teething problems, but that site is way past the teething stage. Someone joked the other day that it should now be called WritingDown. It didn’t seem so funny this morning when for the fifth time this week I couldn’t get into the site.
This is one of the reasons why I have backed up my freelance writing mentoring blog on Blogger. Blogger may be home to a lot of splogs, but it also has a heck of a lot of quality content and it is hardly ever down. It is simple to make a post, it is easy to find all my old posts and if the community isn’t there yet, I’m sure it will come. Just look at sites such as DomestikGoddess and Freelance Writing Jobs and you will see what a thriving community can exist on Blogger blog.
I haven’t completely abandoned WritingUp – I’ve gained too much from the site to cast it aside altogether, but like many others I will be shifting my focus and I hope some of my WritingUp friends will drop in at my blog’s new home.
Categories: Writing
Tagged: Writing
Earlier this year I started working with a group of writers. So far, so good. There have been positives and negatives, which I describe in this post called My Writing Team. Here’s an excerpt:
To say I was incensed would be to put it mildly, so I waited till I had calmed down before pointing out that a last minute approach didn’t leave me enough time to find an alternative – a couple of days would have been better.
I’m looking forward to the next few months.
Categories: Writing
Tagged: Writing
3. Blogging To Build Traffic
About five months after I started the site, I added a blog, and that was when my site traffic really started to increase. Again, I didn’t think it through all the way. I should have decided on the niche for the blog and made it all about freelance writing. I have a couple of successful freelance writing blogs in other places. At the time, though, I wanted something broad enough to let me write anything I liked – and Sharon’s Writing Lab was born. Blogging was the best decision I ever made. Not only was it good for traffic, but it was good for creativity and for showing new examples of my writing.
4. Search Engine Submission
Submitting my site to search engines was the next move, with Google, Yahoo and MSN being my primary targets. I also submitted to DMOZ and other directories, though in some cases it has taken more than a year to get listed. It was sometimes difficult to find exactly the right category for my site but I managed, and now I can see the results in search engine hits and site traffic.
With directories I took two approaches, starting with those that did not need a link back to their site. I also submitted to a few that did, as long as these were relevant to my core freelance writing business.
5. Writing For Free
Free articles have been the single biggest traffic builder I have used, at least until I discovered the social web. I wrote free articles for EzineArticles.com, GoArticles.com, ArticleMarketer.com, ArticleBlast.com, SubmitYourNewContent.com and many others and got links back to my site with each article. Some of those are still being picked up by new websites and some of the freelance writing ones have been published by heavy hitters such as Freelancewriting.com, which is good news for my site. Links from a well regarded site count for a lot. I also honed my writing skills by writing reviews on the consumer review sites and I am now republishing those as free articles.
Categories: Writing
Tagged: Writing
Web conferencing has become a key part of my writing life, which is something I never envisaged when I first became a freelance writer. I’d even go so far as to say I couldn’t do business without it. Web conferencing is a good way to meet up with potential clients and to discuss projects with buyers. It’s also been useful for building up relationships with other writers who are doing just what I do. The support of all these writers is wonderful and I never leave an online chat without having learned something new.
Categories: Writing
Tagged: Writing
Eighteen months ago I launched my freelance writing career. I set up a website and began the process of getting that site noticed so I would be the first port of call when people wanted freelance writing and ghostwriting. Along the way, I made some mistakes and I had some successes, but I kept going. And last week I did a search and found that I was top of Google for the keywords ‘freelance writing ghostwriting‘ (without the quotes). That proved to me that I must have done something right and I’m going to share with you the steps I took.
1 Domain Name Choice
OK, I made a mistake with this one. I should have gone straight for sharonhurleyhall.com, because as a writer, my name is my brand. But I was still figuring things out so I went for doublehdesign.com. The ‘doubleh’ was my last name; the ‘design’ was because I was doing web design and Quark page layouts. I’m not doing either of those now. However, doublehdesign was what I had and doublehdesign was what I promoted. I’ve now got links into the site and lots of traffic, so I plan to stick with it. As for sharonhurleyhall.com, I’ve used that as a portfolio blog and will eventually use it for book promotion. (more…)
Categories: Writing
Tagged: Writing
