Hi, my name is BobbyT. I will be sharing with you on how to earn money freelance writing.

I started blogging this year on February 2008 on the Blogger free blogging service. Yes, you can definitely start blogging without investing any money at all. However, money can be handy if you intend to improve the look of your blog and its ranking as well as market it better.

There are indeed many ways to earn money online, some require initial money investment, while others do not. I don’t have initial money to spend, so I decided to earn money from one of my better skills: writing.

Starting up is one of the most difficult phase of any endeavors. I think if I were to offer my writing services in the commercial world, I will be ignored till today. Instead, through the wonders of Internet, I am immediately hired for several projects and have so far made about $60 after freelance writing for 1 month.

How did I advertise my service?
The internet is not a miracle marketplace. An excellent product or service will still be ignored if it is not advertised at the right place. As for my writing service, I decided to advertise it on bloggers and webmasters’ forums. I even left note about my service in the signature of my profiles. The response has been good and I usually conduct business through PM or I might give out my email to trusted customers.

Was it really that easy to get started as a freelance writer?
Yes and no. It all depends on your final aim. If your aim is to be a full time freelance writer, I will say that you are looking at a hard long road ahead of you. Unless you already have an excellent portfolio as a writer, you cannot expect to earn good money starting as a freelance writer. As for me, my initial aim offering writing services in forums is to establish myself as a competent writer in the market and create exposure to my service. Therefore, the strategies I employed is offering cheap but quality articles and also discounts for customers who are willing to give testimonials to the quality of my work. If you are willing to set your initial targets and rates lower, there will be no shortage of interested customers. I personally think that if you want to start freelance writing and charge high rates, you will face a lot more difficulties.

How to be successful at freelancing?
First you need good communication and networking skills. Negotiation is key to conducting successful business transactions. You also need to have adaptability. Initially I only plan to write about blogging topics, later on I began to write about other topics such as beauty care, technology reviews, celebrities, etc. You can of course insist on being the expert of specific niches, usually experts can charge more steep prices, that is if they managed to set sail at the beginning. I took the easier way out, by being a jack of all trades. Finally you need to have a business mind: think like your customers, what are their needs and expectations, try to fulfill them, make an offer that they can hardly resist.

What are my future plans?
I currently charge about $0.005 per word. I intend to increase the rate after I am more established, somewhere around $0.02 per word (finally I hope to achieve a rate of $0.1 per word, which is standard for a professional writer). I am also planning to set up a professional site soon to promote my writing services and showcase my portfolio. If all those turn out well, I will probably look at the possibility of expanding my role from a writer into a content provider, which means accepting projects from customers and delegating the work to some writers that I hire. A fair percentage of revenue earned shall be shared between me and my writers.

Have you considered a career in freelancing? How did you start freelance? Do you have tips to share to ensure freelance success?

The following article was written by Ryan from Blogging4Everyone dot Com.

Page Rank should be made a thing of the past. I am a blogger, who blogs for the pure fact that my blogs are fun for me to maintain. I NEVER feel obligated to blog on a day where I am sick, too busy, etc, as long as it doesn’t keep happening day after day.

I have had Page Rank on numerous blogs sucked away by Google. Sure, I deserved it. I admit I did PayPerPost on my blogs and I didn’t make it nofollow. However, PayPerPost slapped me back in the face with a wet noodle when they told me I had to have X page rank to take an opportunity.

Great news however from PayPerPost. Ted Murphy, IZEA’s president(PPP’s parent company) has announced that Page Rank has been eliminated from their new product, Social Spark. Blogs with bigger communities and more traffic will benefit under Social Spark, according to Murphy. Ted Murphy also disclosed that they are kicking Page Rank out of the current PayPerPost system after their new product, Social Spark is live.

Alright, so maybe that is just one reason to get rid of Page Rank. Here are some more;

• Bloggers shouldn’t feel tied to a mythical number
• Bloggers shouldn’t have to be pressured to conform
• Blogging should be your choices, and your choices alone.

The list goes on and on. However, the point remains, Google has the money. Will you let them continue to tie you down with Page Rank or will you base your blog on something better. Your community, traffic and I thank you!

Thats right Blogging is one of the new favorite tools of many of the top domainers!

I decided to take Matthews previous post on Domaining being the new pastime for blogging by completely throwing things into reverse!

I started out in online business buying and selling domains, which I guess would make me a “domainer”. Luckily I started out when I was very young which also meant the internet was fairly young. And this meant there was plenty of awesome domains still available to register. But it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that I really started to get into blogging!

But why the hell would I want to get into blogging? Well quite simply, I saw huge income potential in developing and then selling blogs. And im happy to report that I have been selling many predeveloped blogs for around the past 6 months.

But the question still remains, why would a domainer want to get into blogs? See domainers make money from either selling domains or putting up parking pages where you earn on type in traffic. Just take a look at WeddingShoes.com (owned by a prominent domainer) which is a great example of a parking page. A page like this makes a lot each month (im talking thousands) so why on earth would a domainer put a blog on such a great domain?

But what about those not so great domains like doshpro.com or bloglover.info. These domains aren’t anything special and wouldn’t sell for anything much above the registration price and will receive no type in traffic. Therefore, these domain would make perfect candidates for a blog. And with just a couple of hours work these domain could sell for hundreds!

And this is the exact technique many domainers are using to monetize the myriad of worthless domains in ones portfolio.

So if you have any domains just sitting around gathering dust, chuck a blog up, post some content and in a couple of months you will have a fairly valuable asset.

You can find me and my blog at Marketvice.com a blog all about marketing, blogging and of course domaining. I hope to see you there.

We all should know what time of year it is by now. The final days of decorations and Christmas lights. The final days of unnecessary holiday cheer and courtesy and kindness towards family members that we can only tolerate for a limited time. Excuse me if I come across as a Grinch but, whatever.

I personally can’t wait till its over. I can’t wait to get this huge obstructive Christmas Tree out of my living room. I can’t wait to take down these ultra bright shiny Christmas lights that keep me up every night because someone had the brilliant idea to put them right outside the bedroom window. I can’t wait to get on to the real festivities, NEW YEARS EVE!

New Years eve can all but make up for a crappy Christmas holiday and give a little redemptive quality to the overuse of the term, “Season’s Greetings!” New Years even can pick up and turn a bad year around 180 degrees or at the least erase from your memory those things about the preceding year you would rather forget. This year, however, I’m taking a different approach. I plan to make it through the New Year absolutely and positively sober. *Gasp

You may wonder what this is all about well allow me to tell you. I stumbled across a very informative blog post in my usual web travels and it changed my perspective on all things blog (especially all things intoxicating). No, it wasn’t a preachy expose talking about the ills of drinking and warm testimonials from “Those who have been there” but it was about the thing a lot of us do almost every day. I can clearly trace the masses of confused faces in my mind after that last statement so let me continue.

The single dot I stumbled upon in the net matrix is a quaint (simply meaning clean) little blog know as Copyblogger.com. At first I thought it was yet another one of those, “This is the way you blog” sites (Unlike the greatest of them all right here - Blog About Your Blog) but upon digging a little deeper beneath its digital surface I found an article that literally made me stand up out of my seat (Ok, it wasn’t that dramatic but you get my point.) The article talked about, not the ills of becoming physically intoxicated, but the ills and pitfalls of becoming INTOXICATED ON OUR OWN WORDS. Now this can either be taken at face value or you can look just a little deeper.

He talks about how writers have a special gift to make all who read their words become intoxicated and ready to buy whatever they want or even go as far as wearing a blue Santa hat on their head in June (Think the movie Perfume - If you haven’t seen get it at your local video store - lol - seriously). Writers who do this well will get their point across and retain the reader throughout the entire post. Writers who do this not so well will have their readers taking a detour after the first period. Its a delicate balance and the blog author Jonathan Morrow breaks it down exquisitely.

He gives tips on how to know if you’re drunk on your own words and how to redirect your time and energy if you realize that you are going to veer off that cliff. He breaks down all of the things that we bloggers do but points out some fine points that we may have never thought of. The blog post is called 7 Warning Signs That You’re Drunk on Your Own Words and tells exactly what the title suggests. I thought that it would be a perfect segue into the new year as all of us prepare for the night of festivities and reminiscing.

I’m gonna be sitting around sipping on a cool glass of ice and sprite laughing my head off at the others who did “a little bit too much”. In order for me to be this years designated driver I plan on bringing along printed out pages of my favorite BAYB posts and other blogs I frequent to fill in all of the dry spots. I plan on making it into the new year a calm and collected blogger (without exposing too much) and I plan on seeing you all here right after.

Be sure to give Mr. Morrow and his Copy Blogger Web site for more useful tips and articles (I promise that you won’t be disappointed). In closing, I hope everyone enjoys the rest of 2007 and transition gracefully into 2008 and remember…

BLOG RESPONSIBLY

Not too long ago, I started a series called “Thoughts on Civility” that has presented many scenarios and thoughts about life, society and spirit. Today, I was compelled to draft the seventh entry in the series after reading a devotion and reflection on some current events in entertainment and technology.

Before I knew it, it became one of the longer posts I’ve ever entered. You can read it here. Please comment (on my blog or this one) as you see fit.

For parents who are worried their hands-off approach to supervising their child’s online activities lacks the energy they once had, I thought offering this 4-step plan would be just the jumpstart they’d need. So let’s get right to it!

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Step 1 - Give your child free reign on the Internet

Yep, the sky’s the limit! There are a gazillion web pages out there ready to teach your kids for you. They won’t come out and say they’re running a surrogate parenting business, but they’re out there and are eager to help. So act now, by…well, not acting.

Worried how you’re going to handle the “birds and bees” talk? Well, worry no more! There’s porn-a-plenty out there that can help. And it’s sooo easy to find, too. Let your kid exchange ideas and photos with “12-year-old Pat” (who is really a 50-year-old man — shhhh!) and soon they could even teach you a thing or two. Just think of the time you’ll save!

Step 2 - Keep your superpower a secret

Everyone has some sort of special talent. Some can turn away a second helping of pie, while others can program a VCR. But how many are out there that can render a computer to a smoking pile of ashes just by standing next to it?

Don is one such man. He struggles with his superpower everyday knowing that if he ever got into his kid’s computer — POOF! — instant meltdown. But he won’t be telling anyone his secret lest he be captured and studied for science.

Step 3 - Let your kid have their own unsupervised blog

I don’t have to tell you that blogs are showing no sign of slowing down and kids love’em! Because they’re such expressive creatures it gives them a way to tell all their visitors how old they are, what their cell number is, their likes and dislikes, maybe even where they’ll be next weekend so they can meet the “nice” people they’ve met online.

And for the child who is not very articulate, a digital camera or web cam will enable them to do just as well as a budding writer. I mean, honestly: words cannot compare to a provocative pose, am I right? Judges are standing by to help them along with their creativity.

Step 4 - Never cross over into their privacy

Much to their dismay, scientists have yet to discover the exact moment when a kid’s privacy becomes impenetrable. With eyewitness reports saying it’s a gradual process, and others reporting it happens overnight, one wonders why science hasn’t stopped such fruitless research altogether.

Traditional thinking once held that preserving a kid’s safety was more important than their privacy. But the “don’t ask, don’t have to worry” method of parenting seems to be gaining favor among parents who just don’t have the time.

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Okay, switching back to reality now. If a parent loves their kid enough to protect them from strangers on the street, then they must love them enough to protect them from the strangers they’d meet online.

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There’s a major global event taking place on 20th May, when many thousands of people will gather at twelve locations around the globe to meditate and pray for global peace and harmony with nature. What makes this particularly exciting is that the results are to be measured by the Global Consciousness Project at Princeton University, which uses computers to measure the effects of human consciousness. The idea is to prove whether such events can have a real, measurable, beneficial effect or are simply pie in the sky. To find out more about this event, including details of where the gatherings are taking place, see the latest post at The Secret Of Life.

We tend to think of philosophy as something that belongs in a library, but it is possible to put philosophical ideas to work to enhance our everyday lives: to make us feel happy and fulfilled. This is what the course in Practical Philosophy for Everyday Living is all about. To find out more about it, see the latest post at The Secret Of Life.