Freelance Writers and Blogs

Having your own blog, or even several blogs, offers many advantages to freelance writers. However, they can also be detrimental to a freelance writing career if you are not careful. What are some of the advantages to having your own blog, or blogging as a guest in other blogs frequently?

•They can help freelance writers to create and maintain a powerful internet presence.

• Blogs can help freelance writers to display their writing talents to the world and to establish themselves as experts on the subjects they blog about.

•An RSS Feed from your blog can help build readership.

• Your blog can be used to market and sell your e-books and writing services to readers.

•You can point prospective clients to your blog(s) to view your writing style on various subjects when they request samples of your writing.

•With your own blog, you have more creative writing freedom than when you are writing articles and other content for clients.

• Blogging as a guest in other blogs helps build recognition of your name, skills, and knowledge as a freelance writer on different subjects among a broader audience, and you can link your comments back to your own blog, to generate more traffic for your blog.

• Your blog can create an extra stream of income for you and there are blogs that will pay you for making dally, weekly, or monthly blog entries on a wide variety of subjects, for even more income potential.

What are some of the disadvantages to a blog and blogging, which can be detrimental to a freelance writing career?

• Blogging on controversial subjects could be a turn off to some prospective clients.

• Once you have blogged about something, it will be permanently available for others to see. Even deleting blog posts and comments will not ensure that search engines have not already cached them for displaying in search result windows.

•When promoting yourself as a freelance writer through a blog you have to check and then double and triple-check every sentence for proper grammar usage and spelling, to make sure it is free from errors. Someone who has a blog for fun or as a hobby might get away with sloppy blog postings, with freelance writers on the other hand, polished copy, even in blogs, is an expectation you must accept and meet for success as a writer.

•When you blog as a guest in other blogs that permit or write their own questionable content, you run the risk of readers associating you with those blogs and the negative or offensive content they contain. You should read blogs thoroughly before sending entries to blog owners for posting, or leaving comments to them, in order to make sure they best represent you as a freelance writer, and the image of yourself that you want to project to the world.

• Keeping up with a single blog so that you are providing readers with a constant flow of fresh and interesting content to view is not easy. Add multiple blogs to the mix can make it even harder to maintain blogs readers will be enticed into visiting often.

•Some blog entries might be better turned into full-blown articles, and put up for sale to earn you money, rather than used as posts for your blog. Although, it is possible to use snippets from blog posts to enhance articles you write and offer for sale.

• Promoting your blog to increase readership can require a lot of your time and effort.

Overall, I think blogs are great tools for freelance writers to present their writing skills to clients and others in the favorable light that the popularity of blogs presents. It also gives writers another outlet for expressing the creativity that drives them as writers. I would only caution writers to be sure that they want others to see and read something that they have written before permanently placing it into cyber-space for all time to come.