With all the changes happening in the media business, freelancers are likely to have heard the advice to start a blog as a way to keep up with the times and enhance their versatility as writers. If you’re interested in going after paid blogging gigs, having a blog can show potential customers you know the territory.

But it’s one thing to resolve to start blogging, and another to decide what to blog about.

Many writers hit on a blog topic right away. Some have had an idea rolling around in their heads for a while. Others have a book in the works – or at least a book proposal – and have heard the drill about a blog being a good platform for book promotion.

But what if none of those scenarios describes you. How should you decide what to blog about? Here are a few ideas:

Write about what you know. Think of the areas you specialize in as a writer. Is there one nook or cranny of your work you’d like to explore further? If you blog on the same topic you write about, the leftover bits and pieces of research you’re done for stories can serve as starting points for blog posts, a nifty time saver.

Write about what you want to know better. Some writers use a blog to research areas they want to learn about to better develop pitches for magazine,  newspaper or website stories. I did this myself when I came back to freelancing two years ago after a long hiatus and needed to get up to speed on what had been happening in the tech and media business while I was away. After researching topics like podcasting and content aggregators for blog posts, I successfully pitched stories on the subjects to publications I’d started writing for.

Write about a popular topic. Some writers use blogs as revenue-generators rather than just for marketing or research. If you’re counting on income from advertising networks such as Google AdSense or BlogHer, or from selling e-books, online courses or other products and services you want to maximize the traffic coming to your blog. The best way to do that is to pick a topic with broad appeal to draw in as many people as possible. The more people who visit, the higher your page views and the more you’ll make from ad networks, or the greater the likelihood you’ll sell products.

Consider how much you like a topic. Good bloggers post on a regular basis – daily, weekly, multiple times a day – as a way to keep readers coming back for more. To post consistently you need a topic you’re passionate about v. a topic you feel like you’ve already done to death in your other writing. There’ll be days you won’t want to post and if you’re already in a love-hate relationship with your subject matter, it’ll make it that much harder to muster up the energy to blog.

Find a niche that’s not too crowded. You don’t want to be the 20th or 200th blogger writing about parenting toddlers, backyard gardening or U.S. politics. If you are, it’ll that much harder  to come up with interesting new takes on the subject, and to get your posts to show up high in search engine rankings. On the other hand…

Find a niche with a few well-known blogs. ….You don’t want to be the only person on earth blogging on about high school wrestling in Arizona or outsourcing for small businesses. It’s nice to have a couple other blogs related to whatever it is you’re blogging about so you can form a loose affiliation of bloggers who can function as each others’ cheerleaders, guest posters and sounding boards. If a couple of these are also high profile blogs run by magazines or newspapers  all the better for you – they could notice you and link to your blog, which will increase traffic. Or you could become a frequent commenter and end up being invited to write guest posts.

Avoid the ‘random musings’ blog. It’s OK to use a blog as a journal or diary, something you do more for yourself than the general public. But if you’re blogging and you want the world to know – and come visit – it helps to let people know what to expect. That means avoiding what I call the “random musings” blog, where one day you write about your struggle writer’s block, the next your vacation to Whistler, and the next a great recipe you discovered for skirt steak. One successful writer/blogger solved this problem by splitting the different subjects he was interested in writing about into their own blogs. Now his main website links out to each blog, so if readers want to track his cooking blog, they can subscribe only to that one, and readers following his other blogs can do likewise.

If you’re a writer who blogs how did you decide on a topic to blog about?

Notice anything different?

If you’re looking at this on a reader, you won’t be able to tell.

But if you’re reading this on my blog, it should be obvious something’s changed.

As of today, I’ve joined the BlogHer ad network. You can tell by the ad in the far right-hand column. In the future you may see a second small BlogHer ad here as well.

After two-plus years of blogging purely to keep up with the times and share a career’s worth of accumulated wisdom about writing, journalism and freelancing, I was ready to explore turning my little enterprise from a nonprofit to a money-making venture – to develop an alternative revenue stream as they say.

When it comes to ad networks, bloggers have a lot of options.

BlogHer wasn’t an obvious choice for me. Although I’m a mom and a blogger, I’m not a mommy blogger, a fact that kept me from investigating BlogHer and similar networks for some time.

But when I did, I found a lot of compelling reasons to join. The BlogHer network has 2,500 bloggers, not a huge number, which gives WordCount a chance to stand out. There aren’t a lot of other BlogHer blogs covering freelancing or the media business, another opportunity for me to shine. BlogHer has grown beyond its initial mommy blogger roots: the company recently announced an initiative with The White House Project to get more women to run for office in 2010.  With more than 20 million unique visitors a month, it’s getting noticed: BusinessWeek included the Belmont, California company in its February 2010 list of America’s Most Promising Startups. Writing in Forbes, in November 2009, CBS anchor Katie Couric included BlogHer cofounders Lisa Stone, Jory Des Jardins and Elisa Camahort Page in a list of the most powerful people in new media.

I also picked BlogHer because it maintains a newspaper-type editorial code when it comes to bloggers accepting free gifts and junkets. At a time when many bloggers think it’s OK to take free stuff and write positive things about the companies that gave it to them – with or without acknowledging the relationship – I appreciate that BlogHer holds contributors to a higher standard. You can read the entire editorial policy here.

Have I sold out? You could say that. Am I OK with it? It took me a while, but yes, I am. Do I expect to make lots of money? Not at first. I see it as the latest step on my journey as an journalist entrepreneur.

To do great writing, read great reading. Here’s some great writing I’ve been reading this week:

A newspaper lover’s newspaper – How could you not love Dave Eggers? He comes out with a book that redefines the memoir. He edits a respected literary journal, he makes movies and on top of all that, is incredibly good looking (here’s photographic proof in case you need it). He’s also an unabashed newspaper lover and Panorama is proof, as this Chicago Tribune Q&A with Eggers shows. Panorama is a McSweeney’s Issue No. 33, a one-time only, Sunday-edition size print newspaper, the San Francisco Panorama. It came out over Thanksgiving 2009; copies are $16 and you can get one shipped via FedEx. Or you can see images here.

Reinventing the metro daily – That’s what Jonathan Weber says he’s setting out to do as editor of the yet-to-pick-a-real-name Bay Area News Project, the Warren Hellman-funded nonprofit news organization. SF Weekly.com’s The Snitch caught Weber’s Feb. 24 presentation, which was part explainer, part job fair. Right now Weber’s hiring 15 people, half of them reporters. Interested parties can read more about open positions here.

No apologies – How many blog posts have you read – or written for that matter – that open with an apology? “Dear Reader: I’m sorry it’s been 3 months since my last blog post.” Or “Dear Reader: I’m so busy I don’t have time to write something longer.” Hey, so what? We really don’t care why you were away so long. We just want to know what’s on your mind today. Marketing guru Seth Godin nails this one in typical Zen master fashion in a post called Why are you apologizing? The post isn’t about blogging, but it could be. It’s also an example of good writing that’s short: not everything worth reading has to be long.

A picture’s worth 1,000 words – Not everything worth reading is words either. Case in point – this chart put out by the Obama administration showing U.S. job losses from December 2007 to January 2010, roughly the length of the recession. All politics aside, look at how striking that image is – a deep V that bottoms out right around the time George Bush left office, and starts creeps back up again once Obama shows up. Sure, there’s some text on the page, but really, what else do you need to know?

Great writing doesn’t always equal the most page views, but that’s OK - Om Malik is a respected analyst, pundit, blogger and all around smart guy who built the GigaOm network of seven blogs covering Silicon Valley and the tech industry. Malik came to his own defense recently after another blogger called him out for not having the traffic of a TechCrunch or Mashable. That’s true, but it’s not the point, Malik wrote. Instead of going for quantity, go for quality, value and relationships.

Though it’s still January and spring seems like it’ll never get here, May will come sooner or later and with it the 3rd annual WordCount Blogathon, where writers across the country challenge themselves to blog for 31 days straight.

Last year close to 50 writers participated in the blogathon. In addition to putting up a list of all participating writers on our respective blogs, we had an official guest post exchange day and a real-time wrap party on Twitter to discuss what we loved, hated and learned.

Here at WordCount world headquarters, I’m already hatching plans to make this year’s blogathon the best ever. Already in the works: an official button participants can prominently display on their blogs to show the world what they’re doing. And once again we’ll have an official guest post exchange and a real-time wrap party.

I’d like to take it to the next level – but what is that exactly? Contests? Prizes? Guest posts from editors? Pre-blogathon posts to help you plan how to blog every day in the month of May without going crazy or stopping everything else you do?

Since this is a participatory event, I’d like to hear from you. Whether you took part last year, think you might this year, or just want to have a say in things, I’d love your input. Please take the following poll to let me know what new things you’d like to see this year.

And don’t forget to check back here regularly for more WordCount Blogathon 2010 updates.

How often do you check your blog stats?

Once a week? A day? An hour?

I’ve been known to obsess over blog traffic, especially if I’ve written something I think is especially profound and want to make sure the whole world shares my opinion.

Checking your blog’s traffic stats is actually quite useful, and not just for massaging your ego. By carefully studying what people are reading, where they’re coming from and where they’re clicking through to you can learn a lot. Including:

1. What topics are popular, so you can write more of the same. Based on a careful reading of my stats, I know that the most popular posts on WordCount have been on writing basics, blogs for writers, market intelligence and the fates of specific freelancers, good or bad.

2. What post formats work best, so you can write more of them. Based on stats, WordCount readers like posts that are lists, best ofs and how tos, plus posts on controversial subjects such as whether or not to write for content aggregators. Armed with that information, I now look for opportunities to do more of those types of posts. I’m also thinking of ways to aggregate those types of blog posts into an ebook or something else I could self publish.

3. What days of the week get the most eyeballs, so you can be sure to post on them. I get more traffic on weekdays than weekends, so unless it’s the May blogathon I sponsor every year and I’m blogging everyday, I blog M-F and take weekends off.

4. What reader-commenters are also fellow bloggers, so you can befriend them by leaving comments on their blogs or adding them to your blog roll, helping boost traffic for both of you.

5. What keywords are bringing readers from Google or other search engines.  If you know what people search on to find you, you can be sure to tag future posts on similar subjects with those same keywords. Top keywords and phrases that bring people here: word count, michelle rafter, qualities of a good editor, freelance story ideas and hyperlocal news.

How often do you check your blog stats? How has checking your blog stats changed how you blog?

With so many traditional freelance markets drying up, writers are investigating new opportunities online, including paid blogging gigs, or if they’ve started their own blog, joining a blog advertising network that pays affiliates a cut of advertising revenue.

The most well known of these blog ad networks is Google AdSense. But there are others. One of those is BlogHer, the network of blogs for women that’s now 2,500 bloggers strong.

Four-year-old BlogHer has become so successful it now competes with some of the largest women’s magazine publishers for Fortune 500 advertising dollars and will “quite likely” be profitable for the first time in 2010, according to BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone. She talked about the business and the opportunities it presents for freelancers who blog at the recent Online News Association annual conference.

If you’ve considered running ads on your blog, here are some things to know about working with BlogHer. One important thing to note: as of early November, BlogHer was not accepting applications for new bloggers. But you can put your name on a waiting list.

BlogHer co-founder Lisa Stone (Photo: BlogHer)

Expect editorial guidelines. Before bloggers can join BlogHer they have to sign editorial guidelines prohibiting them running things like hate speech or allowing similar nasty comments from readers. To drive home the importance of this, contributors have to print out, sign and fax in this agreement. “I’ve learned that if you make it unsafe for (people) to say ‘I support McCain and here’s why,’ for example, you’ll never be able to grow the community the way we want to,” Stone said in her ONA address. These days, spam has overtaken hate speech as the biggest thorn in Stone’s side, including bloggers trying to embed commercial messages into their posts. “We have a very adept ‘Mark as Spam’ function,” Stone said. “We ignore spambots and go after people who are abusing our community practices agreement.”

They use editors. BlogHer has 7 to 10 headline editors on staff, each policing 200 to 300 blogs to make sure they don’t violate terms of the network’s community practices agreement.

They share ad revenue. Most individual bloggers get a cut of ad revenue. For every $1 in advertising on BlogHer, the company takes 10 percent off the top and splits the rest 50-50. Ad rates are based on CPMs, “So if they have 10,000 viewers and we have a $10/CPM, she’ll get $4.50 if she has a typical arrangement with us,” Stone said. The company doesn’t cut a check until a blog has accumulated $25 in ad revenue. BlogHer also has special arrangements with 79 contributors who are paid $50 a post, Stone said.

It’s OK to be small but it pays to be big. Traffic on some BlogHer blogs is quite small and Stone is OK with that. “We’ve always said we don’t care about quantity, we care about quality,” she said. “But some people go supernova. We have bloggers on the network who are earning five-figure incomes and are living off of that.”

‘Fish where your fish are.’ While Stone encourages bloggers to use SEO, social network and other tactics to improve site traffic, she believes building a blog following involves more than that. “The goal is to fall in love with a subject area, write expert content about it and go discuss it with other people. Fish where your fish are. If you’re blogging on health care or taking fantastic pictures of your children or pioneer women joining a network like ours is a great option” because it puts you in touch with blogs on similar topics that you can build alliances with. Building alliances with newspapers, magazines or other publications in your area is another. “Coalition building is everything in this space,” she said. “The bottom line is if you build it they will not necessarily come. It takes a village to building a blog following.”

Readers come before content. Stone, who has a journalism background, says she started out thinking content came before audience. But her BlogHer experience has taught her to think the other way around. The network started out with 34 parenting blogs, grew to 180 and mushroomed from there. Based on what readers asked for, Stone and her two co-founders eventually moved into different subjects, then added conferences, a news service, publishing network and other services – all because that’s what readers said they wanted. “We had guidelines first, then wrapped the business model around it later,” Stone said.

Changes are coming. Stone’s convinced initiatives the network undertook to cover last year’s presidential campaign and health care reform are the wave of the future. “We think women in our network care as much as the future of journalism as they do about Manolo Blahniks,” she said. “Our goal is to listen as hard as we can to where they want to go with the tools we have. We lead by listening. That’s the way we’ve been able to success so far.” Expect to see more changes in the not-too-distant future, as BlogHer moves into other forms of media, including books, radio and video, she said.

Since I undertook the big WordCount redesign there’s been a big “Coming Soon” sign on the page marked Best of WordCount.

No more.

As of today, the Best of WordCount is home to 30+ of this blog’s most well-read posts conveniently sharing the same page. Call it the WordCount Collector’s Edition. Or my WordCount greatest hits -get it, hits?

Whatever you call it, take a look.

You’ll see posts on writing, running a freelance business, why writers should blog, social network tools for writers and how the Internet is changing the media industry and what that means for freelancers journalist entrepeneurs.

If there’s a subject you’ve been dying to see me cover here, please feel free to let me know.

When it comes to Twitter, does it feel like the parade’s passing you by?

Don’t let the fact that 50 million people discovered it before you stop you from giving it a whirl. If you have a blog, Twitter is not only a good way to promote your blog, it’s also an idea factory you scan for things to write about, and a virtual hangout you can visit to discuss the latest blogging issues and trends.

Here to make a convincing argument for integrating Twitter into your blogging life is Jane Boursaw, an entertainment industry writer and blogger at TV Squad, Film Gecko and more. If you like what you see, consider taking Jane’s upcoming blogging class, which she mention’s at the end of the post. Hit it Jane:

Blogging and Twitter: The Perfect Match

For better or worse, Twitter seems to be here to stay, and that’s a good thing for bloggers. I manage five Twitter accounts for my various blogs, and get tons of traffic coming from Twitter for each one. Here are five tips and tricks to help you blend Twitter into your blogging life:

1. Feed those blog posts. No, I don’t mean give them grains and veggies. I’m talking about feeding your blog posts automatically into Twitter. There are several programs to do this, including TwitterFeed.com, but my current favorite is RSS2Twitter. The site is clean and simple, it supports multiple Twitter accounts, and once you sign up and set up your Twitter accounts, it starts immediately feeding your posts into Twitter automatically. No muss, no fuss.

2. Access Twitter easily. There are a number of programs to help you keep track of your Twitter followers and traffic, including TweetDeck, TweetGrid, and Tweetie. My favorite is Seesmic.com. Basically, what these do is provide a place to easily update Twitter, manage conversations with @replies and direct messages, stay organized with groups, see what’s trending, and manage multiple Twitter accounts easily.

3. Check out Twitter’s Help section. It’s a little bewildering getting up to speed on all the Twitter-speak like hash-tags, RTs, @names, trending topics, and everything else. Twitter actually has a great Help section that helps to sort it all out. So if you’re ever stumped on anything, that’s a great resource.

4. Build your followers. If your Twitter goal is to help build your brand and niche -– and not just to tell people what you’re having for lunch – the more followers you have, the more you’ll spread the word about your blog. To get followers, follow others, but focus on people and groups within your niche. For example, to build my niche of entertainment and get people clicking through to my blogs, I follow lots of people and groups in the movie, TV and celebrity niche.

5. Include updates that aren’t blog posts. It’s considered bad form (by whomever created the social media rules) to have ONLY blog posts going into your Twitter account. So in addition to your blog posts (which should be automatically feeding into your Twitter account – see Item #1), be sure to include Twitter updates about other fun things in your niche.

For more on Twitter, social media, and all things blogging related, sign up for my online class, Blogging for Passion and Profit. The next six-week session starts Monday, Oct. 26, 2009, but feel free to sign up after Monday, as well, and I’ll get the lessons headed your way. Email me if you have any questions or need more info, jboursaw@charter.net.

Jane Boursaw blogs at TV Squad, Film Gecko, CliqueClack, Ruby Shoes, and ifollo.com. Home base is Reel Life With Jane.

Twitter wants its new Lists feature “to go nuts.”

Twitter co-founder Ev Williams said as much when he talked about the new feature – which the company rolled out in wide beta yesterday – at the recent Online News Association conference in San Francisco.

Twitter has been working behind the scenes on a Lists feature for some time, but this is the first glimpse of it most of its millions of users have had.

The Lists feature lets users organize followers into groups that other Twitter users can see and follow. It’s like the TweetDeck groups function  – only better, because it can be shared.

A Lists tab now appears in the right-hand features column on a Twitter user’s profile page, along with Trending Topics, Saved Searches and Followers.

To create a list, click on the New List link and give the new list you’re creating a name. You can then add followers to it by clicking on a person’s Twitter user name and then on the Lists button that appears at the top of their profile page to the left of the tools button. Clicking on the Lists button opens a drop-down menu that displays every list you’ve created, which allows you to add someone to one or more lists. The List feature also lets you create a new list anytime you pull up someone’s profile page.

Another key feature of the List function: you can can keep lists private or make them public, in which case anyone on the network can see what lists you’ve created and who’s on them. People can also sign up to follow your lists – more on how that could be a good thing for journalists and other writers in a minute.

According to Williams, the potential uses for Twitter lists are huge. “We created a list of people who work at Twitter,” he told a SRO crowd at the  October ONA conference in San Francisco. “You could do a list of funny people, favorite journalists, and as a way to crowdsource. You could have a list of everyone at this conference to see what they were saying. It’s about controlling the information flow.”

Not every Twitter user is going to go to the trouble of creating lists – for one thing, if you’re following hundreds or thousands of people on Twitter, creating lists and then categorizing all those people into one or more of them could take hours (unless somebody designs an app for that though I’m not sure how they’d do that).

But Williams expects that journalists will be among the number that do. “Jouranlists will curate these lists. That would be a value add, just like editing is,” he told the convention audience.

Twitter’s List function is the latest evidence that the service is best thought of as a network, not a destination, Williams says. It’s an underlying technology that other companies will use to build stuff on – like many Twitter app builders already do. “The list content will be available through the API and through widgets that journalists or media organizations can take and put on their site and integrate in interesting ways,” he says. ” That will make it much more powerful.”

Two weeks passed between the time I heard Williams talk at ONA and the Lists feature went into wide beta, giving me plenty of time to think about how I’d start using the service when it came out. At least initially, I’m using it to segment the people and organizations I follow on the network into the following categories, which you can see on MichelleRafter’s Lists:

• Subjects I write about on a regular basis, including tech, finance, small business, workplace issues and media
• Fellow freelance writers
• News people and organizations
• Portland people, places and events
• A feed for this blog

Other journalists, writers and bloggers are using it in different ways. Here are a few examples:

Danny Sullivan, editor of SearchEngineLand.com, a blog about search engines, set up lists for each of the major search engine providers he writes about, Google and Microsoft, as well as for other subjects he writes about, such as search marketing and social media. If you clicked on any of those links, you’d have discovered they take you right to that list – which means you can share them on blogs like this one, and on Twitter (as in, ‘Hey, check out this cool list Danny Sullivan published called @DannySullivan/Potpourri‘)

Robert Scoble, aka The Scobelizer, the noted Silicon Valley techie blogger and hard-core Twitter user, has already created 20 lists, which is the maximum number any one person can create right now, including one for People I have met – a substitute for keeping sources’ business cards perhaps? – and another for analysts that track subjects he follows. Scoble also follows 20 lists created by other people, including a couple from Danny Sullivan, but also a list of entrepreneurs created by Twitter product designer Vitor Lourenco.

Josh Weinberger, managing editor of CRM magazine, a computer industry trade publication, created a list for conferences and trade shows he’s attended, going to attend or just curious about; PR people he deals with, and The New Yorker, for when he wants to do a little light reading.

These examples are from hard-core tech geeks. But they’re not the only writer types who could benefit from using Twitter lists.

This morning I read Matea Gold’s Los Angeles Times story, Demi v. Perez? See Twitter, on the celebrity feuds taking place on the microblogging network. Gold, the paper’s TV reporter, could easily set up lists to track broadcast and cable TV networks, TV show fan websites, and in the case of today’s story, actress Demi Moore, blogger Perez Hilton and the other celebs mentioned.

Are you using Twitter Lists? If so, I’d love to hear how you’re using them for research, reporting or other writing-related activities.

So I wrote this whole long blog post about the future of news, lessons learned from going to the 2009 Online News Association conference last weekend in San Francisco. The conference was great on so many levels – one session after another of journalists taking about the cool new tech tools they’re using to tell stories, how they’re connecting with the communities they cover in new ways online, and how those communities are being empowered to get in on the storytelling process.

Then the computer ate my blog post. Actually, I got busy with some other projects that day, decided to finish the post the next day and shut down the computer without realizing I hadn’t saved all my brilliant work (and apparently whatever auto-save feature WordPress.com uses isn’t available on WordPress.org, or I haven’t activated it yet). All my brilliant observations vanished into the electronic ether. And I haven’t been able to face doing it all over again.

Then it dawned on me. One of the biggest takeaways from the ONA conference was that good enough is good enough. There are some times when anything less than perfect won’t do, like an investigative piece that’s based on number crunching, court documents and multiple interviews. There’s no way to publish that kind of thing before it’s cooked.

But for some things, like blog posts that are observational v. reported, good enough is good enough. Sure it would have been great to have had the complete 10-step manifesto I’d almost finished on what journalists need to do in order to make it in the brave new world of online media. But I don’t.  And I was stuck on not having perfect. So instead of going with what I had, I stalled out, waiting for inspiration to strike, or enough time to materialize on my calendar to write the whole damn thing over again.

Well, that’s not going to happen, thanks to a confluence of work and life events that’s made me busier than I have been in a while.

So I’m going with what I’ve got. And I’m asking readers to make this an interactive experience. I’ll share some of the tidbits I picked up at the Online News Association conference, and you share what you learned. And instead of one big long blog posts, I’ll share my lessons learned in a trickle, with your help, starting tomorrow.

I’m adopting the ‘good enough’ mind set for my paid assignments too. Sometimes if a project is important enough, it pays – literally – to spend that extra day doing additional research or that extra hour or two writing or editing. But other projects don’t call for that kind of meticulousness. I’m not talking about fudging the reporting or failing to live up to the terms of a contract. A 500 word story doesn’t have to be the definitive account of a subject: if you write about something often enough, 500 words might cover one small corner of a topic that you can revisit again and again.

I’m also taking a similar approach to the redesign of this blog, which some of you have already noticed has changed rather dramatically in the past week. Once again, I wanted to wait until everything was perfect before announcing it to the world. Instead I’m taking a page from my techie friends and going with what I’ve got now, and will tweak what needs tweaking as I go.

I’ve been working behind the scenes for the last couple weeks with a very talented Web design partner and fellow freelance writer Ron S. Doyle to give WordCount a look worthy of the subjects I cover. I think he did a splendid job – a round of applause for Ron please. If you usually read WordCount through your RSS feed, come take a look at the site and let me know what you think.