Michelle Rafter

The Future of Freelancing

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Poll: Where do you spend the most time online?

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in almost five years of blogging it’s that it’s not all about me.

The best part of running a blog is connecting with you – all you readers and subscribers who are freelancers, self-employed journalists, bloggers, followers of the news or news business, and anyone else who considers themselves part of the WordCount community.

Thousands of you visit these pages every month. More than 775 of you get posts delivered via email or blog readers. Another 400 of you get the WordCount newsletter every month.

I’m grateful to every single one of you – you have literally changed my career.

Building a WordCount Community

To continue building the WordCount community, I’m creating an online forum so you can interact not just with me, but with each other.

But where should that community be?

Right now, I use Twitter to host the WordCount Last Wednesday #wclw writer chats. I maintain a Google Group for bloggers who participate in the annual WordCount Blogathon. I’m a long-time user of LinkedIn, which I primarily use to connect with sources. I started on Pinterest about six months ago and have a Pinterest board for fans of the #wclw chat. I have a stack of friend requests from writers on hold on Facebook, which until now I’ve used mainly to keep in touch with family and friends. And Google+ – well, I have an account, but that’s about it.

I need your help. Instead of choosing where to create a WordCount community myself, I’d like your input to help me decide.

Please take a few seconds to take this very short poll:

[polldaddy poll=6504791]

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Comments

  1. Alysson says

    Just my two cents, Michelle… but I’d caution you against giving any other entity that much control over your community. Use those tools to buld your community and to promote & further the discussion, but keep total control of your content by creating your own forum on your own domain using software like phpBB.

    • Michelle V. Rafter says

      Thanks, that means a lot coming from an SEO expert like you. I just know that what I’m doing now lacks focus, so I want to come up with an alternative that works for me and my readers. One thing I’m going to investigate in using Facebook for comments; I don’t know enough about how it works to know whether people would still come to WordCount to comment. I’m talking to my web designer about a few things next week, so I’ll add that to the to-do list.

      Thanks again!

      Michelle

  2. Alysson says

    Sure thing, Michelle. Glad to help. I’ve seen far too many people give over control of their content & their communities to 3rd party sources only to lose everything when that party shuts them down (for something like an inadvertent TOS violation) or even when the 3rd party itself shuts down.

    It is heartbreaking to see someone lose years of hard work with no recourse whatsoever. Good luck! Keep us posted…

  3. Joel Whitaker says

    Michelle,
    I don’t make much use of any of those. What I really like is e-mail. FLYlady.com uses Big Tent, which has the ability to pull all her comments each day into one consolidated stream.

    I’ll second the comments by others about not giving over control of your stuff to others.

    I don’t know exactly what you have in mind, but I get over450 business-related emails a day, and almost never have time to mess with Facebook (which is for teens, it seems to me) or even LinkedIn.

  4. Lisa says

    I have to agree that a forum would be preferable, not just for the reasons Alysson mentioned, but it is so much better for discussion purposes. As someone who has used both forums and social media, I have learned much more and had much better conversations (as far as you can have one online) on forums with strangers than I have ever had on Facebook with my own family or friends.