Creating Your Online Writing Identity

Your online identity can really help you in writing. It can also hurt you if you’re not careful as well. Here’s some practical advice on how to create your online writing identity to provide maximum benefit for your writing career. I learned a long time ago that shameless online self promotion is vital to help your writing business. I’ve learned a lot about it and use these skills for myself and my clients.

Writers should be aware that everything done online under your name can potentially be found. A blog comment, a forum post, anything…

Case in point:
I searched on my first online identity and found a forum post from several years ago with a question about a medical product. It was nothing embarrassing but finding it did tip me off to the fact that I need to be very careful about what I say and do online because it can be traced back to me and impact my writing career.
I started out writing when I started my first online blog at a site called WritingUp. I was using a nickname, marleymauve, (my ode to my 12 year old golden retriever who is always by my feet when I work) which I used as my username on forums and anything online that required me to log in. Once I got serious about writing, I decided to use my own name. I decided to write under my maiden name and started optimizing myself for Google.

To optimize my name, I created online profiles in many places and I wrote free articles and posted on forums. Many different areas online can help you establish yourself. There’s still a lawyer with the same name as me and a lady who has a personal family website up on page 1 of the Google results under Dana Prince but the majority of page one and two results now point to me.

I want my online persona for my freelance writing business / career to be that of a professional writer. Anyone wanting to know what kind of writing I do can easily find out by Googling me. That search on Google, MSN and other search engines will show them the kind of work I do, the kinds of places I frequent online and can point them to areas where I showcase my expertise. It also points to what others say about me so that’s a lesson in how to treat customers, colleagues and peers. When applying for a job, instead of just having to show my skills off and talk myself up, I have to realize that I can be investigated quite easily and by being cautious about my online activity, I can almost control what people see.

I’ve seen flame wars in community forums and on blog posts and many people using their own names when they participate. This is something I would never do because if I lost my cool or said something regrettable (which we’ve all been known to do) it could easily come back and bite. You might not even know why you don’t get a call back from a client or not get selected for a job. Despite how good your resume looks, when that potential client decides to search on their own to find out about you, what they see could be a turn off. I do Google searches on all the people that I consider who apply to write for me and do searches on people I consider applying to write for.

Here are a few tips to help you get your name optimized in Google:

1. Create social bookmarking profiles under your name. Instead of a pet or nickname, think about who you’d want to be known as if your name was on the New York Times Bestseller list. Tip: LinkedIn, Stumbleupon, Delicious, Digg and other similar sites have great rankings on the search engines and are a great tool for self promotion. If you do non-related work browsing, surfing, etc. use your nickname for it instead of your professional name.

2. Write articles for online directories. I’ll be posting in greater detail about this in an upcoming blog post. You can establish yourself as an expert and showcase your work in a way that people can easily find when they search for samples online of your work.

3. Post in forums. Forum posts get great exposure on the search engines. Think about what you post and how it impacts your online persona. If you do get controversial at times or get caught up and too casual in forums, only use a pen name and never link to your professional website.

4. Create a professional website. If you’re not ready yet, you can create a GooglePage or Squidoo lens. These index well under the author’s name. If you can, buy your name.com as this will clearly index the best. I couldn’t do that (yet) but came up with a variation that’s working well for me.

5. Write a blog under your name. Search engine spiders love the blogs and it's a great way for customers and potential clients to find you.

Promoting your name online is also something you’ll need to do if you become a published author. Today, many publishers expect writers do to a fair bit of self promotion so why not get started early? ;)

What Is The Biggest Writing Career Danger?

The biggest threat to your successful writing career is complacency. Don’t get too complacent or you’ll find that your writing rates stay the same, the work gets boring and the opportunities might dry up. It’s easy to fall into a routine with your writing once you have work and money flowing in but the worldwide web is an ever evolving medium and if you don’t stay abreast of news and new techniques, you’ll find that the ship of profit is passing you by.

If you want to raise your rates and increase your income consistently month after month you have to work constantly to ensure that it happens for you.

You’ll often hear the adage, “Get in on the ground floor.” It’s very true with the Internet. The dot com boom made many people very, very wealthy because they got in at the right time and timing is very important in the online writing world. With writing rates, I’m told they’ve been cut down by over 60% over average writing rates three years ago because of outsourcing to countries like India where wages are cheaper and in this industry because there are so many people out there more worried about quantity than quality. While that’s a topic for another blog post there is a point: you have to stay competitive, get ahead of the crowd and work constantly to find profitable niches. Keep your ear to the ground to find out about ground floor opportunities before they're too widely marketed. Figure out who is giving out the best secrets so you can find out before everyone else does!

To maintain an upward curve in your workload and rates plus have longevity in this industry you need to do a few things:

-Continuously learn. You have to keep up to date on the lingo, the terms and the needs of your potential customers. Keep up to date otherwise you’ll miss the bus!

-Self promotion. Constantly market yourself to keep your opportunities coming in. If you are on the top of the search engines today you can’t become complacent or you’ll disappear off page one in no time

-Keep looking for jobs. The only way to raise your rates is to apply for new jobs. The only way to get qualified is to apply for better paying, higher quality work so that you can build the experience and expertise you need in order to qualify for the better paying writing jobs. Doing the same tasks over and over will result in complacency. It’s ok to have long term clients but you need to keep working to broaden your skills and horizons as well. Your clients probably won't give you a raise in rates if you don't say anything and if most of today's clients are low paying work, start dressing for the job you want instead of the job you have got :)

-Don’t put your eggs in one basket. Diversify! Get more than one niche and have more than one client otherwise if things drastically change you could be left scrambling. Don’t get too comfy or the rug could be pulled out from under you.

How to avoid complacency in writing?

Each week you should set time aside to read up on your niche and the industry in general. You should also regularly keep in touch with other writers through a group or community forum so you can stay abreast of news and opportunities. You should also market yourself through some way to keep your name in the search engines with new entries at all times. This can be blogs, article directories, e-books, forums or other areas. Staying active in cyberspace will help you tremendously with your writing career.

Team Mentality In Freelance Writing

Today felt good. A regular writing client paid me a great compliment and probably doesn't even realize it. The client sent an announcement to his team about an award the company had received and addressed the team and included me in the distribution list. He doesn't just see me as a subcontractor, he sees me as part of his team. This is how you get repeat clients; become an extension of their business.

If you think like a salesperson, treat your customer's projects as your projects and deliver exceptional service that you can be proud of you can become an extension of their team. That's how you get raises and repeat business.

If you behave as an actual stakeholder, you will see a change in how you are treated by your customers.

I always do my best to:

-answer my customer's requests immediately
-treat their deadlines and desired outcome with importance
-act with honesty and integrity

I hate waiting forever for answers. I am on e-mail constantly so that I can answer or acknowledge e-mails straight away. My customers regularly comment with pleasure at my quick turnaround time.

I respect the deadline and treat it with importance. I'm being paid to deliver and deliver on time and I take that very seriously. I've recently brought writers onto my team and have stressed the importance of the deadline. If they slip, they won't have many chances with me because if they don't meet deadlines, it will impact my reputation.

I act honestly at all times. One client overpaid me once. I told him and deducted the amount from his next invoice. I made a dumb mistake with another, I told her the truth. They respected it and they are both repeat customers.

I'm proud to boast that one client of mine has given me 3 raises in 1 year and another has recently given me a promotion. I believe it's because I treat their business as my business and always do my best to give more than 100%.

Hope you have a great day.

Dana

Great Expectations In Writing

I glanced at my blog yesterday and looked at some really positive posts from myself lately. My positive attitude seems to be paying off! A client gave me a raise today, I have some interesting work on my desk and I'm feeling creative. I have some great expectations for the coming months. I'm also getting ready to embark on an interesting fiction project. My last year has been filled with non-fiction so I'm looking forward to the change.

This week saw the relaunch of inspiredauthor.com. I have been training under Suzanne James for about a year or more learning a lot from her and have launched my topic, Getting Started (as a writer) on the newly designed Inspired Author website. Have a look when you get a chance, there are several talented writers that share information about the craft there. I have great expectations for this site and look forward to contributing to it.

I continue to be amazed at how sharing and open other work at home writers are. This isn't an industry with a lot of cliques or big kept secrets. Writers seem anxious to look out for another. Mothers are anxious to help one another too so WAHM writers are especially giving and sharing.

A One Thousand Bucks A Week Freelance Writing Job

How much can you make as a writer? It varies. I invoiced over $900 last week and I had 1.5 days off. I did feel a bit stressed this past weekend when I had to pull off 20,000 words over the weekend while having a dinner party to attend two hours away on Sunday but it was well worth it when I realized how much I earned last week and because I hit my goals. I love falling in to bed exhausted but fufilled because I did what I challenged myself to do.

I was tickled pink when I started earning a few hundred a week at writing last year. I'm thrilled to be at this level now. I don't expect to earn this much each and every week but it's given me a nice boost both financially and creatively because knowing you'll earn well can be great motivation to write.

I've picked up some great new clients and have been receiving some unsolicited work requests. Last week I even turned down a job because it paid too low when usually I would snap it up because I was so afraid of a famine that I was like a writing hamster with her cheeks stuffed full and her wrists feeling like they were about to fall off.

Two months ago I was ready to pack it in and today I'm arranging for help for overflow. Life is good.

I AM Worth My Rates

Gee, I am worth the money I charge :) Probably even more in many cases.

Last week I decided to do the sacred heart cleanse. I didn’t finish the diet. If you want to read the postmortem, you can stop by my other blog to read about the shameful failure but anyway, here's how I found out that I am a pretty darn good seo writer.

I needed some information about ways to change up the soup recipe and so I decided to search for information. I came upon an article that I wrote for a very popular how to site. My name isn’t on it and due to a non disclosure agreement so I can’t tell you the site name but it got me thinking, “Gee I’m worth the money they paid me for that & more, “ LOL. It even took me a moment to remember I had actually written it.

That’s the second time I’ve gone searching for information and by fluke found something I sold to someone. I guess I’m not too shabby at my job.
LOL.

It’s fun to find our name in print or find out that others are reading our work. I love looking at my google adsense stats and my mybloglog stats to see how people are finding me and what search terms are working.

Sometimes I also go searching for old work that I’ve done to see how it’s faring in the search engines and how it looks on the websites it was designed for. Although I can only admire it from afar since I’ve sold it, I know I have an endless supply of words in me so it’s worthwhile to see why some of my customers come back for repeat business.

Connecting the “Secret” To My Own Success

A few months ago I was flipping the channels on the remote and something on Oprah caught my attention. It was the episode that sent the secret of “The Secret” to the average person. I was stunned because a few minutes into the show, I was staring at a screen that had a picture of a book that I ghost-wrote last summer. I was stunned, to say the least. I did not ghost write “The Secret” but I ghost wrote for someone who released the same idea last summer.

One of the agencies I work for, my first writing agency, actually, gave me my test assignment after they reviewed some of my work. That assignment was to do a rewrite on a one hundred year old book by Wallace D Wattles. The book was called The Science of Getting Rich and I had to modernize it. It was a tough project but I proved myself to my new employer and made my first paycheque as a writer that wasn’t from a blogging or paid-to-post forum job. The book encompasses things I knew but put it in a way that helped me change the way I thought about the world around me. It was very Christian based and I am still a baby in terms of my Christian walk so I do have days where I don’t think positively. But when I do walk in the light, I know I get some great results!

The week that I did that rewrite, I got that job and regular work going forward from that agency. I also started working for a company managing several of their online forums for a decent salary and earned a job ghost writing for a highly respected doctor for his website and learning centre. Pretty good results and I felt like my career dreams were coming true. I exuded confidence that week and it showed through in my writing as well.

I know people who live based on negative thinking and that’s all they have in their lives…negativity. Positive begets positive and negative definitely helps create a negative force field all around you.

The idea of the secret is that you use the power of positive thinking, the laws of attraction and surrounding yourself with positive things to yield positive results. Living with gratitude is also a key factor in personal happiness. I think it worked pretty well for me. I faced burnout recently and am now finding myself working with the idea of the laws of attraction in mind and it’s already netting me some great results.

My suggestion to you:
Always think of the glass as half full and try to surround yourself with positive people. You will see the results very quickly. Read up on the laws of attraction. You don’t have to pay the $40 for The Secret. There are dozens of websites that offer a free download of Wallace D Wattle’s e-book or some variation of it. You never know, you could end up reading the new version that I wrote myself.