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If you’re interested in places where you can submit your articles, check out the guest post I wrote this week, Freelance Faceoff:  EZineArticles Versus Associated Content.   Thank you to Jesse Hines at Vigorous Writing for asking me to send that over and for his kind words about the article.

I’ve been doing an article for EZineArtices every few days.  I mention in the Vigorous Writing article, it’s working out quite well.  Here’s my EZineArticles Author Page.  Based on one of the mistakes I made, I can offer you the following tip so you can avoid doing the same thing.  If you’re going to publish an article somewhere else, be careful if you go back into the EZineArticles editor once your article has been saved and approved.  There’s an auto-save feature on the editor.  If you’re not careful, you can do what I did, which is accidentally mark an already-approved article as "changed" and thereby send it through the approval process again.

I made that mistake in the context of trying out another article submission site this week:  Article City.  ArticleCity.com looked really great at first glance, and there were many articles there that had been widely re-circulated.  I tried submitting an article there, however, and after a few days it seems pretty likely that nobody’s home.  It’s not so unusual that my submission hasn’t received a response yet, but at the same time the site hasn’t changed at all in the past few days.  The same article on "Measuring Lubricant Quality" has been on the top of page one during this time, so it doesn’t appear they’ve been approving anyone else’s new articles, either.

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Forthcoming Guest Post on Article Submissions

The past few years have witnessed an explosion in the number of sites promising Freelancers they can make money writing online.  Even in small niches, competition abounds.  The number of sites competing to match authors of paid reviews with paying sponsors has risen to three (that I know of — there may be more).   Every day another freelance writing job board pokes through the Internet like a dandelion on an already ruined lawn, with Copyblogger’s new job board being a famous recent example. 

<bad_attitude_guy>

You, too, can get $10 for each 500 word article you submit.  Unless you write a lot faster than me, that works out to about $11.67. per hour for contract work.  Did you ever start a blog and then say to yourself, why didn’t I pick something profitable, like a blog about working at McDonalds?

</bad_attitude_guy>

With all the interest in transforming online writing from a hobby into a profit center, it’s not surprising that article submission boards have risen in popularity.  Bob Younce recently surveyed five such sites and still had nine left over.

I’ve been asked to do a guest article comparing two such sites, Associated Content and EZineArticles.  It should be out in a day or two.  I will let you know.

It may be time for bad_attitude_guy to go find a mentor or two.

How are we to write well, and consistently?   There are days when writing is simplicity itself, when ideas and connections seem to grow in natural abundance, when we feel the only limitation of human eloquence is our typing speed.  Then there are days when we must write through the dense stickiness of our own stupidity.

This is writing’s horror and its beauty:  only your mind sits between your contribution to the world and the void from which it springs.

Can we trick our minds into performing better?  I believe we can.

I blundered into this Monday knowing I wasn’t wearing my big brain.  It’s the week I finally finish up my taxes and get them to my accountant.  It’s the week I pay my insurance bill.  It’s a week so full of dullness that wearing my small brain is a form of prosaic justice.  It’s a week that would put my big brain to sleep.

Small brain or not, though, I still have to write.

So this week I’m trying on a new trick to keep my small brain from hurting itself while running with sharpened pencils.  The trick is the stack of twenty.   Here’s the trick if you want to try it out yourself.  Take out twenty file cards, and plan your week into twenty tasks.  In my case this worked out to be nineteen cards with either a blog post or online article per card, plus a card for the remaining tax work.  Planning out the week took about fifteen minutes.

The idea is that as you complete a task or article, you put a big checkbox on the card and move it to the done stack.  If something unforeseen comes up and you handle it, write a quick card for it with a big check mark and put it in the done pile.  If you have any cards left over, you can always recycle them into next week, and if you get through the whole stack, your small brain will delight in its accomplishment.

All of this is a way to make your small brain feel good about itself.   You need this if you’re having a small brain week.

Your big brain doesn’t need such a simple trick as this, but if you’re anything like me, you can’t always wear your big brain to work.

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Bob Bly recently asked his readers to talk about the Number One Perk of Freelance Writing.  To me a major perk of freelancing is the ability to sell your writing in so many different ways.  What especially excites me is the ability to bring products to market online.

Selling written products online is a challenge.  Millions of blogs compete for a reader’s attention, and for a reader, the price is usually perfect — they’re free!   A pessimistic view of selling information online is that it competes with such proverbial sales challenges as selling snow to Eskimos.

Of course, the optimist sees the same scene and notes that the Internet is full of very literate people who are thirsty for information.  (Eskimos must like snow — look at where they live!)

Blind optimism aside, it helps enormously if we can add value to the books or article we’re selling online, and many noteworthy authors such as Angela Booth and Brian Clark use this technique to great effect.

Here, then, are five ways to add value and upsell your writing.

1. Teaching Sells.
   Brian Clark’s TeachingSells.com is based on the premise that people will pay a premium to improve their skills.  This is as true today as it was when learning to speak a foreign language or play piano were some the basis for some of the most successful direct mail marketing campaigns in history.
   
2. Ebook plus Consulting
   A variation on the Teaching Sells theme is one that Angela Booth frequently uses, combining an ebook with training and consulting. 
3. The Private Forum
   One way that many authors including Brian Clark and Courtney Ramirez have offered teaching and consulting and upsold their information is by offering access to a private forum, allowing users who are learning access to one another and to the trusted expert who’s doing the teaching.
4. Free Updates
   Is your 39-page ebook only worth 4.95?  $9.95?  How much is it worth if you offer free updates for a period of time?  Your web store should support allowing downloads for a specified period of time (The one I’m presently working on does).  This is a variation on the "Free Upgrades" upsell that has served software vendors well for years.
5. Private Label Rights
   Some products are a natural for this approach.   The best customer for your ebook may not be the reader, but someone who is trying to sell something to the reader.  The ebook can be customized with links to your client’s web site and used as a free download.  Another approach is to sell both the ebook and the sales copy for the contact form to download the free ebook (meantime allowing your client to capture the reader’s contact information).  Can you create an ebook that others will want to use in their own sales efforts?

These are just five ways to add value to your ebooks and articles.  I’m sure there are many others.  Readers, do you have techniques you’ve used or admired?

There was a cartoon once in which a character was accused by some mad doctor type of having “Schizophrenia of the Brainia” — I put up a variant spelling above so you can see how to pronounce it.

Probably it was a Flintstones episode. I was glued to those as a kid.

It’s in the spirit of schizophrenia of the brainia that I reflect today on my web site and blog here. On the one hand I have a personal blog that’s kind of fun, about Buddhism and Depression and what-note that I feel like what-noting. On the other hand, I really want to use this prime “internet marketing real estate” to talk about (and sell) “internet real estate marketing” as a service. Pardon the clever use of dyslexia.

But schizophrenia / multiple personality disorder isn’t really the metaphor I’m going for. The goal of a doctor treating a patient with multiple personality disorder is to get them to become re-integrated. But the goal of doctor me in treating this multiple personality web site, unless I miss my guess, should be to disintegrate it into two separate blogs.

Today I add a new category: writing. Hello, new category. It’s so easy to smile at such a friendly and welcome new visitor.

This first post in this friendly new category is also a bit of homework for a new book, “The Freelance Writer’s Bible”. The point of the exercise was to go write something, as an illustration of how simple it is to get over writer’s block.

I’m not so sure I have writer’s block, per se. I write all the time. What I do wish to remove, however, are my remaining getting-paid-for-it blocks.

One might say that insofar as my real estate business is based on my successful web sites, and inasmuch as my web sites are successful because I write, that I’m also already a professional writer.

What a joy, then, this weekend, to discover that there’s actually a business to be made of the activity of writing.

In my high school yearbook, I wrote down that my dream was to have one wife, one son, one dog, and one published novel. As it turns out, I am fortunate to have a lovely wife, a wonderful daughter, two four-legged dogs, and no published novels. Even to this day, having a novel seems a bit out there, something uncomprehended, a vague possiblity. But it’s less of a stretch for my impoverished imagination to get from a place where I blindly chase for search engine love with a mixed bag of sites both successful and fairly well free, to a place where I work on a business of writing for pay. This journey strikes me as altogether entertaining and worthy of my time.

So best of luck to you, new category. I sense the spark of greatness in you already, your potential to become the fulfillment of the goal I set recently, for this web site to be about something.