Photo courtesy misteraitch

Dear WordCount is an occasional advice column that answers your questions about freelance writing, blogging and working as a self-employed writer. During May, I’m answering questions posed by writers in the 2012 WordCount Blogathon.

Dear WordCount:

I received an email and a comment from the same sender and both say the same thing: “I would like to be a guest blogger for (your blog). Do you have submission guidelines?” I’m wary of taking a risk with someone I don’t know. How do you handle guest post inquiries from people you don’t know?

– P

Dear P:

Good question. Getting queries from potential guest bloggers comes with the territory as your blog gets more popular, so in a way, it’s a good thing because it means people are starting to notice you. But it’s a bad thing, because more often than not, pitches asking to guest post on your blog aren’t really about you, they’re about getting whoever’s making them wanting to feed off your blog to get themselves more publicity.

WordCount receives a handful of guest post requests a week. Ninety-nine out of 100 I immediately delete. They’re carpetbombing blogs like mine with guest post requests to bring traffic back to their own blogs. But they wouldn’t add any value to what I do. If they include suggested topics for posts, the topics are more often than not so generic I couldn’t use them. Once or twice I’ve agreed to have someone write the post since they were offering it for free. But the writing was such SEO-driven drivel I couldn’t use it.

Why It Pays to Do Due Diligence

A good way to decide whether you’d want a guest post from someone who contacts you out of the blue is to check their website or the website of the company or organization they represent. It like asking a guest attending a masked ball to uncloak themselves so you can get a peek at who they really are. Ask yourself:

• Does it look profession?
• Is the subject related to what I blog about?
• Would I want to be affiliated with them, even if just through a blog post?

If you answer “No” to any of those, don’t feel bad about writing back to say, “Sorry, it wouldn’t work for me.” Or just delete the request. If however, you like what you see, ask the would-be guest poster to send you a couple of their published posts and propose a couple topics, so you can further assess whether they’d fit into your blog. If what they produce doesn’t pass muster, don’t feel bad about turning them down. After all, it’s your blog, and as the publisher and editor in chief, it’s your call what you run or don’t run.

When it comes to guest posts, I’ve had better luck making the first move. I ask writers or bloggers I know if they’d be interested in writing a post. I’ve had the best luck approaching writers or bloggers who are promoting a new book, ebook, blog, etc., because they’re already in promotion/marketing mode and are happy to write something that would interest my readers and help them push their own work.

Create Guest Post Guidelines

I finally wised up and created guest post guidelines. Now when someone who seems semi-legitimate writes asking to give me a free guest post, I send them a link to the guidelines and ask them to send me ideas for a couple posts. It’s enough to scare away anyone who’s not serious. Here’s a link: WordCount guest post guidelines.

Don’t get me wrong: I love guest posts, and run them all the time. I’m just very particular about the kind of guest post I run because they, like everything else I publish, represent me.

If you’ve never run guest posts on your blog, here’s some information on how to get started: Dear WordCount: How do I run guests posts on my blog?

If you have a blog, how do you handle requests from people you don’t know to write guest posts? Share your story by leaving a comment.

Photo courtesy sexyninjamonkey

[Editor's note: It's another theme day for the WordCount Blogathon, when everyone is writing on the same topic: If I started a blog today, what would I do differently? Here's my answer. -- MVR]

When I started blogging, I didn’t have a clue. I’d been doing the stay at home mom thing when blogging first got popular, and jumped into it as part of my re-entry into the workforce.

I put zero thought into why I was blogging or what I was going to write about. I created a blog on Blogger on a lark and wrote my first post the same day.

That was mistake No. 1. The initial result was all over the place – like a kid finger painting.

Instead of diving in, I should have considered how blogging fit into my freelance business, researched good blog practices and compiled a backlog of posts before going live.

That’s just the start of the newbie mistakes I made as a beginning blogger.

Here are 5 other blogging missteps I made, and what I’d do differently if I started over again today:

Mistake #1. Hosting a blog on a free service.

I started out on Blogger but quickly switched to WordPress.com. I keep WordCount on WordPress.com for close to two years, until it became clear that I wasn’t going to be able to do all the things with my blog that I wanted using the templates available on the free site. I also was starting to think about using the blog to generate revenue, which isn’t allowed on blogs hosted by WordPress.com.

In fall 2009, I hired a website designer to port the site to a self-hosted blog using WordPress.org software and give it a new look and feel – and never looked back.

Mistake #2. Writing about whatever I wanted.

Picking a subject and sticking to it is good for everyone: readers like to know what to expect. Sticking to a topic can make you an expert at it, which is a good way to interest companies or organizations in becoming advertisers or sponsors.

After casting around for a couple months, I settled on writing about the freelance business, a great topic for the time because of the changes taking place in the business. It gave me the chance to write about writing basics, books, and other subjects related to being a freelance journalist that I enjoyed dissecting. And it helped introduce me to an online community of other writers, a nice substitute for the real-life workplace camaraderie I always enjoyed when I worked as a staff writer.

Mistake #3. Running posts without pictures.

When it came to including images with my posts I was extremely inconsistent until this year. That’s bad, because SEO like blog posts with pictures, and readers do too.

Then I discovered Pinterest, the social network that lets people share images they find online. Pinterest has become a popular way for writers and bloggers to promote their work - but you can only do that if your story or blog post has an image that you can share.

Since I started using Pinterest a few months ago, I now include an image with every post I write. It’s not that hard to find sources of free images: sometimes I run logos or other corporate materials that are free for the taking (as long as you give due credit to the source). Other times I create screen captures to run as images. Occasionally I run my own photos.

Most of the time I use images I’ve found doing a Creative Commons search on Flickr or Google that the authors have granted permission to re-use (again, with the proper permissions). For more information, read a post I wrote on where to find images for blog posts.

Mistake #4. Blogging for free.

It took me years to wake up to the fact that I could be making money from my blogging efforts. It’s true that within months of teaching myself to blog I was pitching and getting assignments to write about blogging software companies – but I’d been a tech reporter for years so that wasn’t all that surprising. It took me a lot longer to start looking for ways to earn an income directly from my blog – and I’m still not doing a very good job of it.

I discovered BlogHer, applied to join BlogHer’s advertising network and got accepted within a month or two. But it took me about three or four months to actually fill out all the paperwork to start running ads on my site. I also joined Amazon’s affiliate program, but so far it’s been a bust: I don’t run enough posts about books, and when I do, I sometimes forget to use the special Amazon affiliate code when I include links and images of books.

I’ve talked about using the blog to sell ebooks on writing basics and other subjects, but whenever I’ve been ready to start on that in earnest I’ve landed a great assignment and put it on the back burner. Will this be the year I actually pull the trigger? Stay tuned.

Mistake #5. Being disorganized.

The first couple years I ran this blog, I jotted down ideas for posts whenever and wherever they came to me, including on the yellow legal pad I use as a daily to-do list, and in a journal that I kept in my bedside nightstand – very low tech. Then I started creating posts in Draft mode and writing ideas down there – which explains why I have more than 100 unfinished posts in Draft mode.

Around the time of last year’s blogathon, some other bloggers turned me onto an editorial calendar plugin for WordPress blogs. It’s an application that creates a calendar inside the main WordPress dashboard that you can use to schedule and start writing posts. You can configure it to show three or more weeks at a time. It’s got a drag and drop feature so if you’ve got a post scheduled for a Tuesday and you decide you need to run it on Thursday, you can drag and drop the post from one date to the other. Brilliant. Maybe because I’m a visual person and love calendars, but using it has made it easier to schedule posts days or weeks in advance, to program standing features (like the “Dear WordCount” advice column that runs here on Thursdays) and figure out how to cover myself by re-running older posts when I know I’ll be especially busy with other work.

Here’s another post I wrote about common mistakes that beginning bloggers make: Bad beginnings: 10 newbie blogging mistakes and how to fix them 

If you were starting a blog today, what would you do differently? Share your experience by leaving a comment.

I’ve been on the BlogHer Publishing Network for several years and am frequently asked about it by writers looking for ways to make money from their blogs.

BlogHer isn’t the only blog ad network out there, but it’s a popular one, especially among women bloggers.

Being part of BlogHer’s ad network hasn’t made me a lot of money, at least not directly — but I’m in it for more than cold hard cash. In 2011, I earned $261 in click-through revenue from BlogHer ads running on WordCount. That’s more than double what it was in 2011, and almost enough to pay for my domain name registration, website hosting and web developer costs for the year. Some bloggers make more — much, much more — and some make a lot less. It all boils down to how much traffic is coming into your site, and what the revenue sharing arrangement is with the ad network you sign up with.

I also like being associated with BlogHer because it lends a measure of credibility to my blogging efforts – I must be doing something right to make it through their vetting process. Plus, it looks good to have ads running on the blog, gives it that magazine or newspaper feel.

And as I mentioned in the editor’s note above, being part of BlogHer’s network also helped bring me to their attention late last year, which resulted in me doing a two-month editing stint for them for a very nice fee.

If you’ve been thinking about joining an ad network and are considering applying to join BlogHer, here’s what to know:

1. Just because you want to join doesn’t mean you can. BlogHer publishes ads on about 3,000 blogs that cover parenting, recipes, fitness, careers, fashion, politics and more. These blogs make up the BlogHer Publishing Network, which is part of but distinct from BlogHer.com, the company’s website, which reaches 37 million mostly women readers each month. BlogHer takes applications from bloggers interested in joining the ad network and accepts new bloggers when they need them. That can take days, weeks or months. Fill out BlogHer’s online application to put yourself in the running. One very important note: you can’t join BlogHer Publishing Network if your blog is hosted by a service such as WordPress.com that doesn’t allow you to run ads.

2. BlogHer ads get prime real estate on your blog. If and when BlogHer accepts you into their ad network, you can run their ads on your blog. However, you can’t just stick them any place you’d like. When you join, you agree to abide by BlogHer policies and rules, one of them being that whatever BlogHer ad unit you place on your blog will be located “above the fold.” That means it will appear high enough on your blog’s front page that readers don’t have to scroll down to see it. There are other stipulations: that ads from other blog ad networks you may belong to don’t get higher placement, that your blog hosting service allows advertising and that you’ll stick to their editorial guidelines. One of their guidelines is that you post at least once a week – if you’ve been an infrequent blogger in the past, it might be a good idea to start posting a couple times a week on a regular basis before applying so you’re in the habit.

3. You can opt out of ads that aren’t a good fit. If you aren’t a parenting blogger, you can opt out of running ads for diapers and baby formula. BlogHer gives bloggers the choice of declining to run ads in multiple categories, including ads for diet products, political parties or the military. Vegetarian bloggers can opt out of ads showing meat or dairy products.

4. Ad rates vary, therefore so will revenue from BlogHer ads on your blog. Like many other ad networks, BlogHer charges advertisers on a rate per thousand impressions, generally referred to as CPM. Those rates range anywhere from nothing for public service announcements to upwards of  CPM of $9 or $10. BlogHer takes a cut of all ads and the balance goes to the blogger as a commission. How much money you make depends on how many of your readers look at a page on your blog featuring a specific ad and how many of them click on the ad. One ad on my blog had 14,000 impressions, i.e., 14,000 separate views, but received zero revenue because it was a public service announcement. On the other hand, another ad only had 1,200 page views but I made $5.30 because the CPM was $7.50.

5. You only get a check once you reach a certain level of ad income. BlogHer pays bloggers 45 days after the close of the month, but only if their share of ad revenue for that period is $25 or more. If it’s not, the company hold funds until the accrued value reaches that amount. Bloggers issues payments as checks or deposits into your PayPal account. Once you’re in the network, you can use an online revenue reportig tools to look up ad activity on your blog and see what commission you’ve earned in a specified time period.

6. Ads aren’t the only way you can make money. If you’re part of BlogHer’s ad network, you’re offered many other money-making opportunities. The company periodically offers bloggers the chance to earn $20, $50 or $100 by reviewing a book or other product, or to enter sweepstakes drawings. The BlogHer editorial staff could ask if it’s OK to run the beginning of one of your posts on their front page, which could increase traffic to your site, which in turn can increase your ad revenue. If they choose to syndicate one of your posts, which means it runs in full on BlogHer, it’s an extra $50 in your pocket. Use this online form to submit a post for consideration for syndication.

7. It’s easy to keep track of what’s going on. The BlogHer team produces a weekly e-newsletter with updates on the network, ad campaigns and more.

8. BlogHer gives bloggers in and out of its ad network opportunities to get together in person. BlogHer’s annual conference got so popular, the company has created a series of spin off conferences on food, business and other on specialty topics. The 2012 annual conference takes place Aug. 2-4 in New York City. You can read more about it on the BlogHer ’12 conference page.

To find out more, read comments from other bloggers in the BlogHer Publishing Network.

And stay tuned next week for descriptions of 8 other blog advertising networks, including Izea, Federated Media and Living on the Cheap.

If you’re running ads on your blog through BlogHer or another ad network, what’s your experience been?

Eclipse, May 20, 2012

It was cloudy here in Portland on Sunday evening during the annular eclipse, when the moon passed between earth and the sun to partially obscure the sun. We were out on the street at 6:30 p.m. PDT anyway and saw what there was to see. Unfortunately it wasn’t as clear as this picture, which came from Japan.

The eclipse inspired today’s post, though, which is a poem because today is Haiku Day in the annual blogathon.

******

Ring of Fire

Mist and clouds parting

Reveal shining sun eclipsed

By slow shadow moon

]]> http://michellerafter.com/2012/05/21/blogathon-haiku-day-ring-of-fire/feed/ 3 http://michellerafter.com/2012/05/20/6-ways-to-defend-your-blog-copyright/#utm_source=feed&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=feed http://michellerafter.com/2012/05/20/6-ways-to-defend-your-blog-copyright/#comments Sun, 20 May 2012 13:00:02 +0000 Ron S. Doyle http://michellerafter.com/?p=9552 Ahoy there, blogarinos! For those of you participating in Blogathon 2012, I salute you—you’re 20 days deep into one of the most rewarding blog challenges on the Interwebs. You’re probably exhausted, but your blog muscles are getting stronger, your typing fingers are fast and nimble, and you’re feeling great—until you see this tweet:

Yep, even if this is your first time blogging, odds are very good that your nimble blogging fingers start cramping when you think about web villains stealing your precious content. Don’t they realize how many beads of sweat and tear drops and buckets of perfectly good neurons you poured into that blog post? Didn’t they notice that blog copyright notice in the footer? It even has the ©, for Pete’s sake!

Unfortunately, the same technology that makes it possible to self publish a blog and syndicate for distribution also makes it exceedingly easy for unsavory sites and individuals to copy your content. And by golly, it’s just not right. So let’s do something about it! Here are six steps that will help you protect your blog copyright, thwart the evil no-gooders, and lose ten pounds in time for summer.

(NOTE: I may have exaggerated on that last point. But you get the idea. Onward!)

6. Find out if folks are copying your blog posts and images.

You can’t get all Avenger on the bad guys unless you know who they are. Sites like CopyScape and CopyGator will scour the Internet for exact duplicates of your content. If you’d like to drill down deeper or you’re concerned about a particular sentence or blog post, you can paste it into the classic Google search bar (between a pair of quotation marks) and Google will return results that match your copy. For images, try Google Images, TinEye or PicScout—just upload an image file and these handy-dandy sites will analyze it and show you identical or similar images on the web.

5. Issue DMCA takedown notices.

The Digital Millenium Copyright Act puts the burden of stopping infringement on the copyright holder (that’s you!), which is why you just burned up a Sunday night searching the Internet for blog burglars. Now that you’ve found all the malicious moochers and digital doppelgängers, it’s time to let them know the jig is up! A take-down notice is an email or letter notifying the other person and their web host that A) you are the true copyright holder, and B) you’d like them to stop using your copyrighted material without permission or license. Send ‘em a form letter and then ask Google to help remove their links from search results.

(NOTE: Since very few people understand copyright law and copying is so pervasive and easy on the web, the DMCA includes a safe harbor clause that protects first-time offenders. If the copycat removes your content quickly, they are immune from prosecution.)

4. Use excerpts and insert trackback links into your RSS feed.

While it’s romantic to imagine an evil copyright vampire out there lusting over your creative work and trying to suck the life out of it for their own benefit, the truth is that most copyright infringement on the web comes from scrapers—sites that find RSS feeds, scrape them of content, then repost it. Many scrapers are benign or even benevolent, and many bloggers even opt into these sites so their content will have larger audiences, but they can be detrimental to your traffic and search-engine ranks.

To fix this, simply change your RSS feed settings to only display an excerpt of your article—then folks will have to click through to your site if they want to read the entire blog post. So Google, Bing and Yahoo! know who originally wrote the article, append a link to your site at the end of every RSS feed entry. Your web developer or WordPress plugins like WordPress SEO by Yoast can do this for you.

3. Disable right-click on your blog posts and images.

Many of my clients ask for this feature—a special script that stops the occasional visitor from right-clicking on an image or snippet of text in their blog. Your web designer/developer can do this for you, or you can turn to one of the many WordPress plugins that handle this for you automatically. No more right click, no more theft!

Sweet, right? Maybe not. This also means that visitors can no longer copy short, fair-use quotations from your blog posts. It doesn’t stop them from snagging your images from Google. And a really persistent thief can simply disable Javascript on their browser to break through the barrier.

2. Turn your blog into a paywall site.

Your blog posts are really worth their weight in sweat, tears and neuron buckets. Why are you giving this stuff away? A paywall will block access to your content to the general public unless they’re willing to fork over a little money for access. You can follow the model of the New York Times and allow limited access or block the entire site, charge for full-site access or charge per blog post. It’s time to stop being a victim and start getting paid! Paywalls are working out great for newspapers and the music and film industries, right? WE’RE NOT GOING TO TAKE IT ANYMORE!

Ahem. Maybe it’s time to read this:

1. Reframe your attitude toward the issue of blog copyright violation.

Wait, I should share the precious?

Nobody likes a mooch. Thieves need to be stopped. And by Jove, your blog has worth!

But there’s a fine line between protecting your blog copyright and guarding your precious content too tightly. After all, why did you start blogging in the first place? To keep others from finding it and sharing it?

For some, blogging is a compulsion to write and create; a blog is a gift to the world. For others, a blog is a testing ground where we experiment with ideas or a forum where we can discuss topics that matter to us with our readers. And for most of us, a blog is a marketing tool, like a free sample tray at a farmer’s market. It’s an easy way for us to share our tasty talents freely with the world, in the hope that the most appreciative readers will buy what we’re really selling, whatever that may be—and copycats are simply a signpost on the path to success.

By all means, stop blatant copyright offenses when you find them. But before you start sweating Internet thieves and start building the Great Wall of Your Blog, ask yourself: Does copying help spread my message and achieve my goal of super Internet fame? Is it better for me and my blog to be ubiquitous or to be, well, invisible?

Ron S. Doyle is a freelance writer and the Creative Director of Waterday Media, a boutique media strategy, web design & development company in Denver, Colorado. For more about Ron, visit his website or find him on Twitter.

Blogger and writer Jackie Dishner. Photo courtesy Jackie Dishner

This week marked the half way point of the Blogathon – we’re on the downward slope and it feels great.

In the past seven days, bloggers had fun swapping guest posts; you can read the guest post that Portland writer and writing teacher Sarah Moon wrote for WordCount on optimizing your blog for mobile devices, and my post on Sarah’s blog on writing lessons from five famous authors.

The week’s other highlight came when SecondAct, Entrepreneur Magazine‘s website for people over 40, invited Blogathon bloggers to share their second act stories in posts on their respective blogs on Wednesday. I updated a post that I’ve run before on how blogging helped me reinvent my career.

Dozens of people shared their stories stories of life and career reinventions, including Arizona author, writer and blogger Jackie Dishner, who’s pictured above riding the bike that figures prominently into her second act story. Instead of recounting all of them here, I’m going to point you to the recap I did for SecondAct:

*******

Every May, I host a contest on my personal blog challenging both beginning and experienced bloggers to write every day of the month. Close to 250 people are participating in the fifth annual blogathon, many of them in their 40s and older.

SecondAct.com invited these bloggers to share posts this week about how they’ve reinvented themselves. Their stories about following passions to change careers, take up new sports, re-enter the dating scene, lose weight or become a parent for the first time are intimate, heart-felt and often inspiring.

Read the entire story on SecondAct: Bloggers Share Their Second Act Stories

Dear WordCount:

I am learning a lot about structuring my blog in the blogathon. But I need to subscribe to an RSS feed. I also need to learn how to do individual tags on posts. I have wasted THREE HOURS this morning trying to do either, and am very fed up. I’ve checked Blogger help, I’ve Googled for how to do this, I’ve started to enroll in some feed services and given up in despair. Does anyone know of a really simple instruction page for any of this?

– KL

Dear KL:

Don’t despair. Both of the things you’re asking for help with are easier to tackle than you think.

Setting up an RSS feed

Let’s start by answering your question about setting up an RSS feed. By “I need to subscribe to an RSS feed” I take it that you mean you need to add something to your blog that gives readers the ability to subscribe to your posts, so they can read them in a blog reader (like Google Reader) or via email. If so, Feedburner is good for that, and very easy to set up. You’ll end up putting this familiar orange square called a chicklet (see right) in a prominent spot on your blog’s front page that people can use to sign up.

• If you use Blogger  – If you use Blogger to host your blog, here’s a good explanation from a blog called Blogger Hints and Tips for how to use Feedburner to add an RSS feed to a Blogger blog.
• If you use WordPress – If you have a WordPress blog, either on the free WordPress.com platform, or a self-hosted WordPress.org blog, here’s a 9-minute video from tech expert Julie Salgado with step-by-step instructions.

Tagging Blog Posts

Now let’s move on to how to tag blog posts.

Tagging posts makes them easier to find in searches, both on your blog and on the web, so don’t not tag them. When it comes to labeling blog posts, there’s a difference between categories and tags or keywords. Categories are the over-arching subjects or themes that you write about. My web designer recommends picking no more than 5 to 7. For my blog, which is about freelancing and the business of being a writer, my categories are: blogging, writing, freelance, media industry, technology, Oregon (because I often write about the media business in the state), and my stories. Most of the time, my posts fall into four main categories: blogging, writing, freelance and technology. Also on the advice of my website guy, I use one category per blog post, which is better for search purposes.

Think of tags as sub-categories. I use up to 6 or 7 tags per post. If I write a post about the blogathon, for example, I’d tag it with: 2012 WordCount Blogathon, blogging challenges, blogging tips and whatever the specific post happens to be about.

• If you use Blogger – Blogger uses the term “labels” instead of tags. Here’s a tutorial from Google (which owns Blogger) on how to add tags to your blog posts.
• If you use WordPress – For WordPress, the category and keyword structure is the same whether you use the free WordPress.com platform or a self-hosted WordPress.org blog. Here’s a post from Pro Blogger – it’s been around for a while but the material is still relevant – that explains the ins and outs of using categories and tags on WordPress blogs.

 Got a question about freelancing, writing basics or blogging? Send it to me at wordcountfreelance@gmail.com and I’ll consider it for a future “Dear WordCount” advice column.

The world loves second acts – what’s your?

Today is the day SecondAct.com Managing Editor Donna Wares invited bloggers in the 2012 WordCount Blogathon to share their reinvention stories. Donna encouraged anyone who wanted to write about how they have, are or plan to reinvent some aspect of their life. That could be changing careers, going back to school, moving to a different country, becoming a parent, going to work for a nonprofit or starting a business.

Donna and I will go through all of the stories and select a few to highlight in a post on SecondAct.com in coming days.

Meanwhile, I’m sharing my own career reinvention. It’s a story I’ve told here before, of how blogging helped me step back into a career as a journalist and freelance writer after I took time off to be a stay at home mom.

The original version of this post ran in 2012. An updated version ran in January while I was doing a guest editing stint for BlogHer, the women’s blog network.

********

Sometime in June 2010, I pushed the “Publish” button on the 500th post on my blog.

Those 500 blog posts changed my life – by helping me reinvent my career. In two and a half years, I went from stay at home mom to full-time journalist and blogger making a lot more money than I ever did as a staff writer at a major daily newspaper.

It all happened because I blogged.

Since then, I’ve written more than 800 posts on WordCount, my blog for freelance writers, and contributed hundreds of other posts to the publications I now write for on a regular basis.

I don’t point this out to brag. I am proud of what I’ve accomplished, especially at a time of change in the media business when many freelance writers question their ability to continue working in a manner to which they’ve been accustomed.

The main reason I’m sharing is to reassure you that if I can do it, you can too. All it takes is commitment, confidence -– and a blog.

How Blogging Reinvented My Career

Here’s how blogging played into my career reinvention:

In late 2000, I put my work as a technology journalist on hold to have a baby. That made three kids, a husband, dog, assorted lizards and goldfish, a house and yard. It was too much to handle all of that and work without constantly feeling stressed out.

By the time the baby was a toddler, I dabbled with a little part-time work: a semester teaching journalism school here, writing a couple articles there. But no way was I prepared to take the full-time plunge.

That happened a few years later when our oldest went to college and our youngest went to first grade.

It turns out that writing was the easiest part of re-entering the freelance business.

Much harder was figuring out everything else that had changed since I’d been away. I’d quit during the dot-com bust and wasn’t up to speed on online innovations. At coffee one day, a friend casually mentioned LinkedIn and I needed her to explain it to me — me, who’d spent years keeping everyone else informed on the latest and greatest tech news.

To get myself up to speed, I started a blog. I signed up with Blogger but quickly switched to WordPress.com because, honestly, the free version of WordPress had prettier themes, and more of them.

At first, I blogged with no specific subject in mind. Most of my initial posts were marginal, though a few have held up surprisingly well.

The Transformative Power of Blogging

I got the hang of it soon enough, and the next two and a half years blogging literally transformed my writing business. Here’s how:

By teaching myself the mechanics of blogging, I nabbed assignments to write about blogging and social media for publications like Inc.com.

By teaching myself to blog, I made myself more marketable by showing perspective clients that in addition to writing news, features and columns, I was proficient in another writing form, no small matter as more publications add contributor-written blogs.

By using the blog to showcase my resume, bio and clips, I landed one of the biggest freelance gig of my career, a contract to edit a corporate finance website for American Express that launched in spring 2010. I later learned that prior to contacting me, the website’s project managers vetted me by reviewing my work experience on my blog and in my LinkedIn profile.

By showing I understood the medium and could post week in and week out, I was asked to be a paid blogger at SecondAct.com, Entrepreneur Magazine’s website people for over 40. You can read my posts on job hunting and careers on SecondAct twice a week.

By using my blog to track what’s happening in the digital media industry I’ve been invited to speak at journalism conferences and industry groups, including the American Society of Journalist and Authors’ annual writers conference.

By inviting other writers with blogs to join me in a personal challenge to blog every day for a month, I started the WordCount Blogathon, an annual event that’s created a community of writers and bloggers and become one of the highlights of my year.

By holding myself to a regular blogging schedule and strict editorial standards, I qualified to join the BlogHer Publishing Network, which pays me to run ads on my blog.

I realize not everyone reading this is a professional writer -– but you don’t have to be to make a blog part of your career transformation.

Alana Mautone

Think blogging 31 days straight is hard?

As of the first week in May, Alana Mautone has posted 373 days in a row – and is still at it. Her blog is Ramblin’ with AM, and on it she writes about “upstate NY, flood recovery, gardening, wildflowers, the Civil War, FarmVille, sustainable agriculture, chocolate, the universe, and everything in between.”

Mautone was inspired to blog every day by the 2011 WordCount Blogathon, and afterward it was over, just kept going.

I did an email interview with Mautone recently to find out how she keeps blogging, when she writes and how she gets ideas. Here’s what she had to say:

WC: How many days in a row have you blogged?

AM: 373 days as of today.

WC: When you sat down to write on May 1, 2011, did you plan to blog this long? If not, how did you decide to keep going?

AM: I only planned to make it through the 2011 Blogathon. Prior to that I don’t think I ever posted even a week straight.  But the Blogathon energized me so much I joined another blog challenge soon after which required 31 posts in a month, and it just snowballed. I’m not sure when I decided to try to shoot for posting every day for a year. I think it was sometime last September when I realized I only needed to double what I had already done. I’m noting here that I do not write for a living (other than what my corporate job requires in letter writing and emails), so perhaps in a way it is easier for me to blog than for a professional writer who is doing it to make a living. No pressure….

WC: Why keep blogging so often?

AM: In the book, Outliers, The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell, he talks about needing to practice a skill for 10,000. hours to achieve greatness. I hope that, by writing at least 1/2 hour a day, I will grow as a blogger. I will explore that more in my May 16 post.

 WC: Do you write every day or pre-write several days at a time?

AM: I sometimes pre-write on weekends for one or two posts. I also pre-write if I am going on vacation. Otherwise, I usually blog each day. Or, if I am posting on a challenge site early in the morning, I will write the post the night before.

WC: What’s your favorite time of day to write blog posts, and how long does writing one usually take?

AM: I get home from work around 5 p.m. on weekdays, and will try to blog between 6 and 8 p.m. in the evening. Writing one usually takes 30 to 60 minutes, depending on how inspired and how tired I am.

WC: How do you get ideas for all those posts?

AM: My initial posts came from writing about my interests, or doing photo essays. Since Tropical Storm Lee flooded the area I live in in September 2011, I’ve had too much inspiration. As of today, I have 59 posts tagged Binghamton Flood of 2011. I will have one or two more this week, as tomorrow and Tuesday are the eight-month anniversary of the flood.

WC: What advice do you have for other bloggers looking to increase the frequency of their posts?

AM: Get into the habit of writing daily. That’s what the 2011 Blogathon did for me – it formed a habit. Next, write about what your passion is. Follow your inner voice. Believe in yourself.

Photo courtesy Sarah Moon

[Editor's Note: May 14 is the Guest Post Exchange, when bloggers in the 2012 WordCount Blogathon are swapping posts with someone else in the challenge. Today, you can read my post on 10 lessons about writing from authors in the 2012 Portland Literary Arts lecture series on Sarah Moon's  book blog, Clear Eyes, Full Shelves. -- MVR]

************

Sarah Moon is a Portland, Ore., writer and communications consultant. She teaches classes on blogging, social media and web writing and design at Pacific Northwest College of Art and works with creative types on web and writing projects. She blogs about books and reading at Clear Eyes, Full Shelves, and co-hosts The Postscript sports and culture podcast. Follow her on Twitter at @SarahSMoon.

I teach classes on blogging and web design at a local college, and when we get to the unit on mobile devices, I have students pull out their internet capable devices to see who uses what. I’ve seen it all: iPhones running various versions of iOS; Android smartphones ranging from old clunkers (like mine) to the latest and greatest; Blackberries, iPads, Nook Colors, Kindle Fires, iPods, you name it. Rarely does someone use a single device — in a class of 10, we’ll often as many as 25 gadgets on the table.

Sarah Moon

It’s important because today, mobile devices are the fastest growing way people are accessing web content, including reading blogs. As bloggers, you need to think about how your posts appear on these devices — otherwise, you could end up driving readers away.

Here’s what you can to do optimize your blog content for mobile devices:

1. Practice smart design. Before you leap into all the options available for mobilizing your blog, you can follow a few basic design steps to make it easier for mobile readers. These basic tips have the added bonus of making your blog more readable overall:

• Increase the body font for your blog to 14 points, or “14px” in web speak. Not only is this friendly to those of us with less than perfect vision, it reads better on a variety of devices than 12px, which was the old norm.
• Increase the line spacing of your content to 1.5 em (tech speak for a line and a half of white space between lines of text), which makes text much easier on cramped screens than single-spacing.
• Minimize drop-down menus. Sometimes they’re unavoidable, but drop-downs can be a nightmare to navigate on small touchscreens.
• Make sure navigation elements in sidebars, post meta area and top-level navigation are well-spaced so it’s easy for touchscreen users to click on the proper links.
• Remove Flash elements. Flash simply does not play nicely with mobile. Beware: many slideshow embeds still utilize Flash.

2. Consider using responsive themes and templates. “Responsive” is the new buzz word in mobile design, with good reason. These blog design themes scale to whatever screen a blog is viewed on. There are a number of them for self-hosted WordPress blogs, many are premium but there are a few freebies as well. These themes are kind of magical, as you can see content reflow as you adjust a browser’s window size; check out the Dear Author blog for nice example. A huge advantage of these themes over traditional “mobile” or “touch” plugins is that they maintain the integrity of sidebar content such as ads or category navigation. Additionally, mobile plugins can make commenting buggy but they play far nicer with responsive themes.

3. Look at mobile plugin options. If you’re happy with your current theme, you still have  options for making your self-hosted WordPress blog mobile-friendly. Many plugins detect the device your visitors are using to access your blog and display a mobile theme. The most popular is WP Touch, which has a number of options and an app-like look (the Pro version supports iPad). You can also install OnSwipe on your WordPress blog, which turns your blog into a slick, tablet-friendly site when accessed from one of those devices.

Keep in mind that it is absolutely critical to test these plugins on a variety of mobile devices to make sure all of your standard features — particularly comments and other forms — work properly when plugins are running.

4. Make use of what’s already available. Many free blogging platforms have mobile options built into their architecture. Unfortunately, those options aren’t also intuitive or obvious. Here’s what to know about mobile options on some of the most popular platforms:

Blogger. Two times out of three when I visit a blog powered by Blogger from my smartphone or tablet, the mobile template has not been activated. To do that, log onto your blog and then click on the “Design” link. Once this option is turned on, Blogger does the rest.

WordPress.com. If you use WordPress.com, you shouldn’t have to do anything — the mobile option is turned on by default. Should you accidentally unselect this option, WordPress.com provides these great instructions for reactivating your mobile theme. You do, however, have to do a bit of work to make your WordPress.com blog iPad-friendly. When logged into your dashboard, simply click Appearance > iPad and then check the box that turns on an iPad theme when someone visits using that device.

Squarespace. Many of my students love the lesser-known Squarespace for both blogging and websites. I’ve completed several projects on this platform recently, including my own blog for book lovers, and all the new Squarespace template options now reflow the journal — Squarespace speak for “blog” — to fit mobile screens. I’m a beta tester for the next version of Squarespace and the platform will be fully responsive in that release.

TypePad. If you blog on TypePad, you’re in a tough spot, because while it’s possible to customize a mobile template, the platform has no ability to auto-detect when readers are using mobile devices to read content. So, even though there are mobile options on that platform, without code-heavy jerry-rigging, there isn’t a method to ensure that mobile visitors will see the mobile version of your Typepad blog. I suggest that Typepad bloggers pay particular attention to my first tip regarding smart blog design.

Ultimately, you’ve got many decisions to make when it comes to making your blog mobile-friendly. Unfortunately, there is no single best solution for ensuring your blog’s compatibility with mobile browsers, especially considering all the platform-dependent variables.

My best advice is to practice smart design, stay up to date with what’s available on your chosen blogging platform and keep a eye on your visitor statistics so you can implement mobile strategies that best match the devices from which readers access your blog.

How have you redesigned your blog to accommodate smartphones or tablet computers? Let us know by leaving a comment.