Category Archives: Suite 101

Suite 101, writer's platform

102,024 Page Views a Year

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My writing at Suite101.com has, as I feared, taken up most of my creative writing time since I began writing for the site in late June. I’m up to 53 articles posted. My revenue is abysmal. So far I’ve earned $19.00 for about 43,000 words. Of course, since this is a revenue sharing site, if I never write another article, those I’ve already posted will continue to earn over time. Perhaps after a couple of years it will add up to a decent rate per word. At least I hope so.

But what’s gratifying is the page views I’m getting. I don’t know how I stack up against others at the site, but I’m pleased with mine. I track this on a spreadsheet, including a graph. Since daily page views fluctuate, I look more at 7-day page views, a rolling total of the number of total page views in the seven days ending on the latest day. For the seven days ending October 15, I had 1,962 page views, a record for me. And, that multiplied times 52 gives me 102,024 page views per year. This is the first time I’ve broken 100,000. The chart above shows this. Wish it were more readable, but it’s just a screen capture of the spreadsheet graph. The blue line is the 7-day page views, magenta line the daily page views, and the black line is a trend line of the daily page views.

Now that is encouraging. My articles are being accessed 102 thousand times a year. That’s with no growth, and no more articles published. I’m going to publish more articles, and the articles I have are all what they call “evergreen” articles; that is, they will be just as meaningful next month as they are this, next year as they are this. None are tied to seasonal things or current events such that they would drop in page views. Most of the page views are coming from search engine hits.

My latest article, The Intolerable Acts, in just two days had 69 page views and was my second best performing article. That leads me to believe maybe I’m getting the hang of this search engine optimization stuff, and my performance overall will improve at Suite.

Now, if only my revenue will take an upturn, I’ll be a happy camper.
Suite 101, Writing

A New Submittal

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As I wrote in a post some time ago, we are in the fall submittal season for literary magazines connected with universities. I have not yet done the research needed to know what submittals to make, but I think I will have time to do this over the weekend. I’ll hopefully submit my short story to three or four more magazines, and I’d like to submit poems to close to a dozen mags.

If I can do that, I will be up to 32 or so submittals for the year. I’m sitting at 17 right now, having made my 18th this morning. The results of those submittals so far are:

18 submittals
4 acceptances
7 rejections
7 not yet heard
0 withdrawn

I may have to come back and adjust those numbers. My submittal log is at home and I’m writing this from work, going from memory. Edited on 8 October, to put in the correct numbers.

This includes a couple of contest entries as well as a couple of engineering articles that were submitted and accepted or assigned and published. That’s not a lot of submittals for someone who fancies himself a writer, but it’s what I’ve been able to do this year. I suppose I could pad the numbers by saying each of my Suite101.com articles is a separate submission. Then I’d add 52 submittals and 52 acceptances to those numbers. Since each article is reviewed by an editor and could be disabled and eventually deleted if not up to snuff, it might be legitimate to includethem. But I’m counting Suite 101 as a single submission, my initial application.

Actually, my submission this morning was to Suite 101, suggesting a new category of article topics, and proposing that they promote me to Feature Writer over that category. I did some research into how many worldwide Google searches there are in a month for a number of keywords and keyword phrases associated with that category, and what is the typical rate for an ad associated with those keywords. I’m hopeful that the research will pay-off, as will the faithfulness I have shown at writing for Suite. I’m past the threshold number of articles you must have before you can be considered for a feature writer position.

Being a feature writer means: you must write a minimum of one article per week in your category; and you receive a 20 percent bonus on your revenue immediately and another 10 percent bonus when you hit 100 articles. I’m not bringing in much revenue right now, so the bonuses won’t add up to much. But every little bit helps; and the promotion would look good on a writing resume.

Stay tuned.

Engineering, Suite 101

Curve Balls of Life

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This has been a bad week for personal time. It’s been a good week, I suppose, for my engineering career. Monday afternoon the double presentation I made to the site tours of the Arkansas Floodplain Managers Association convention went well. I received many comments on it. This was despite the fact that, at the construction site below the viewing platform, they had decided to jack-hammer out some rock that day, and I had to just about shout my talk.

Then I went to the last day and a half of the AFMA convention in nearby Springdale, arriving back in the office just a few minutes ago. That convention went okay, but I found much of the discussion was over my head. Not the basic floodplain issues; in fact I knew those quite well. But today it was all about digital flood maps and tying them in with various GIS tools, about raster and tif and png, about layers and changing characteristics. It was all more than I could listen to.

Then, as the convention ended, my main client asked me to attend a follow-up session this afternoon and tomorrow here in Bentonville, a session about cities joining/qualifying for the Community Rating System, a relatively new FEMA program designed to reward cities that do a good job at managing floodplains within their jurisdiction.

That’s the curve ball today. I had hoped to spend two glorious hours this afternoon archiving projects. Then I hoped to spend another two hours writing some difficult specifications. I guess the best I can do on those is to tackle them on Friday. But, I may be leaving the office early on Friday to go to a family wedding on Saturday in Pratt, Kansas–a little too far to make it a long day trip.

And I need to write only one more article at Suite101.com to begin earning a 10 percent bonus. Instead of averaging 30 cents a day I’ll earn 33 cents a day. The good part of being unable to write that 50th article is I don’t have to decide where to spend the money.

American Colonial History, Engineering, Suite 101, Writing

A Little Progress

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This was a strange weekend. First off, I ate too much, almost all on Sunday. We went out to eat after church with good friends, and had way too many chips and salsa. I actually ate a smaller entree than I normally do at this place, but the chips were too much. Then we had an evening gathering at church last night, a soup dinner. The event was our Alabaster offering, a twice a year offering for missions building projects. The soup was good (both bowls), the dessert was good, and the fellowship was good.

By the time I got home I felt bloated. I didn’t feel like doing much of anything. We were having Internet connection troubles, and I re-booted the modem and router twice. While doing that, I started a virus scan on my computer. It’s an ancient computer, and it wasn’t done scanning an hour later. I took the time, after playing some mindless computer games, to file papers. I tend to let this go then file a bunch in a flurry of activity. I filed a few, then was down to those that defy being put in a preset category. By evening’s end I had a bunch of those done.

But the big thing to report is that I got back to writing for Suite101.com. I posted two articles: one examining Robert Frost’s poem “The Mountain”; and one talking about British loyalists in the period before the American Revolution. These two articles actually did fairly well with page views over the last three days. I had intended to write the second article about “The Mountain” on Sunday, but after eating so much wasn’t up to it.

So, what’s on for today? In the office I’ll be archiving projects and copying time sheets. At noon I’ll head out to the Crystal Bridges Museum construction site, where I’ll be giving two talks this afternoon, to the Arkansas Floodplain Managers Association, about the floodplain issues we faced in designing the museum. Then tomorrow and Wednesday I’ll attend the convention. I’ll miss this morning’s activities at the convention, but I have to get ready for my presentation.

Engineering, flood studies, Suite 101

Of Public Meetings and Private Depositions

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Yesterday I prepared to conduct that evening meeting at the City of Centerton. The flood study that I had completed for the headwaters of Little Osage Creek will result in 66 structures–primary residences, commercial buildings, and church buildings–out of the flood plain, but will add 23 new properties to the floodplain. Unfortunate, but my best judgment is that those 23 properties are in a flood hazard area and should be so designated. I calls ’em as I sees ’em.

For the public meeting, we expected none of the 66 people coming out to attend and most of the 23 going in to attend. It wasn’t quite that bad, but close to is. No one wants to learn they need to buy another insurance policy for between $500 and $1000 a year. Everyone says their house never flooded and never will flood so how can they possibly be in the flood plain? Everyone says their house is higher than their neighbors so how can their house be in and their neighbor’s house be out? All valid questions, all fielded well, I hope.

Also at the meeting was an official from the Arkansas Natural Resources Commission, who is an expert on both the engineering aspects of flooding and the flood insurance issues themselves. I don’t know insurance, and learned quite a bit from what he said. He also backed me up on everything I said concerning flood waters and how a study like this is conducted and why some properties are in the flood hazard zone and some are out.

Now that this is over and the application for a map change is at FEMA, I get to rest on this for a couple of months. I have another flood study to do for this same city, and will begin that in perhaps a week or so. Now I turn to this deposition I am called to give. One of our former clients is suing the company, saying we are a bunch of screw-ups who cost them a lot of money. We did six or seven projects for them; they sued us over most of them; the judge threw out all but one of the lawsuits.

That one project is the one for this client that I had the least involvement with. I’m not quite sure why. On the others I was the engineer of record and did extensive checks of the drawings, drainage reports, and other documents. I reviewed them multiple times from preliminary drawings to construction drawings. I met with city utility departments to find out what the utility requirements were. I talked with city planners and city engineers to find out what the street issues were. I signed and sealed the final drawings. I was involved with some of the construction issues. But on this project, I checked only one set of 5 drawings, which were considered a preliminary plat submittal to the City. I had no involvement with the project before or after that.

Because I reviewed that one set, and that set was in the file when the opposing attorney conducted his discovery, I must testify. I don’t mind testifying. I’ve done it about a dozen times in my career, all but one time on civil law or administrative law issues. You’re always a little bit apprehensive, however. The attorney across the table from you will not actually be interested in the facts. His sole purpose is to be an advocate for his client. If he can catch you in a false statement, great. If he senses you are hesitant at some point, he will hone in on that and then make it an issue during the trial. He will be looking for where you disagreed with your colleagues and will point that out in the trial.

And, he will take that deposition with him to the trial, months and months from now, and will hope to use it against you if anything you say during the trial is different from what you said in your deposition. So this is matter of concern.

My deposition is scheduled for Thursday the 17th, but they thought they might have time for it yesterday afternoon. They only had one scheduled, the department head, and thought if that didn’t go terribly long they would call me and take mine yesterday. But they “grilled” the department head for four hours or more, and decided to call it quits for the day. Mine will be Thursday as scheduled. This gives me a chance to do a little more preparation.

And, I think I’ll write an article for Suite101.com: How to Prepare to Give a Deposition. I might even qualify as my own expert on that one.

Engineering, Suite 101

Under Siege

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My writing schedule called for me to make a blog post last Thursday. But on Wednesday, while I was preparing to teach a noon-hour brown bag class on a computer program for hydrology studies, the chairman of the board came to see me and said they would need my help on a certain project. It was to be advertised in the paper on Sunday, but he was concerned certain things were not being done correctly. He was mostly concerned about the drainage design and whether the calculations had been done correctly. I was able to go through the drainage report Wednesday after the class, but there was much more to do to check the drawings and specifications to see if they were in good shape. So I cleared my day Thursday to hit it hard.

On Thursday, I learned that the project was far along, but no engineer had yet looked at it, except for the drainage report. Thus began a two-day siege of intense quality control checking of the project on my part. I won’t go into details, but it included work all evening Thursday at home. I got to bed about 1:30 AM on Friday, then was up at normal time on Friday and to work at 7:00 AM to continue. I completed what I could by 4:00 PM, and gave it to the design team in bits and pieces during the day. They had three people working on the drawings and one (an admin assistant) working on the specs.

It’s good to work hard, but that was more taxing than it was when I was a younger man. I was exhausted by Friday evening, and did next to nothing. Well, that’s not true. I did some crossword puzzles and watched the 9-11 programs on the History Channel. They had some excellent programs, of footage I hadn’t seen and of people and situations I hadn’t heard of. Saturday I did the usual work around the yard, and some work with Lynda on stock trading, but otherwise did nothing but study to teach adult life group this morning at church.

I tried to take a nap early this afternoon, but made the mistake of turning on the television and watching the Dallas Cowboys not do so well against Tampa Bay. So got up, came to the computer, finished my latest article at Suite101.com, and played a bunch of mind-numbing computer games. Then came here.

The siege will continue Monday morning, as I left the specs with about eight items to be resolved that I should look at some more. But right now I’m going upstairs to read. I haven’t read for pleasure in about a week, and it’s time to. Hopefully I’ll have a more meaningful post tomorrow or the next day.

Suite 101, Writing

Happy New Year!

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The month of September has always been considered the start of the “program year” for many organizations. This was probably tied to the beginning of the school year, which happens between the third week in August and just after Labor Day depending on where you are in the country. The calendar year may begin January 1, with all its celebrations and resolutions, but the true new year is just after Labor Day.

So, do I have any new program year resolutions?

I wish I did. At the moment my writing is rather dull. Adding articles to Suite 101 is not really adding much to the bank account, though the veterans there say to be patient, the revenue per article builds with time. I hope they are right. As I feared, this has taken up almost all the creative writing time I have available. I made my August goals and September goals, hoping to somehow keep my mind and hands working on other things, but have struggled with that.

So, I really have no new program year resolutions, except to keep on keeping on. I’ll try to get to 100 articles on Suite 101 by sometime in early 2010, and see how things stand. If by then I’ve learned to divide my time, keeping a portion hoarded for other writing endeavors, then I’ll continue at Suite 101. If I haven’t learned that, then I’ll assess my options at that point.

freelance writing, Suite 101

Still Waiting on Freelance Payment and Payoff

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Okay, I’m not holding my breath about freelance writing paying off, by which I mean paving the way for me to break into book publishing with a royalty publisher. I anticipate that will take at least three years–if it works at all. I’m following that path, but I have zero confidence that I will be successful.

So why do I do it? Well, I just can’t sit there. It seems silly to write books, go to conferences and pitch them to editors and agents when the first question back to me will be, “What kind of platform do you have?” Or even to try it through the mails. The same results are most likely: no platform, no book deal. So I hope through freelancing to generate a little bit of a platform, hopefully just enough so that my books will be judged on merit alone, with lack of platform not clouding the issue.

I’m waiting on payout from Suite101.com. As I believe I mentioned before, I just barely had accumulated enough revenue at the end of August to receive payment in September. That should come via PayPal sometime early next week. It is enough to put a couple of fast food meals on the table. I hope for more in the future, but I’ll take this now and be glad for it.

I’m also waiting on payment for my article that was published in Internet Genealogy. That should have come the end of July or in early August. I finally was able to reach the editor and make arrangements for payment, though I have not seen it yet. It was delayed, the editor said, due to summer absences and some cash flow issues. Hmmm, does not bode well for future association.

So far this year I have the following submission record:

  • Submissions made: 14
  • Acceptances: 3
  • Rejections: 4 (Edited on 8 Sept 09; guess I can’t do the math)
  • Not heard: 7
  • Withdrawn: 0

Two of those are actually for non-paying gigs, but I’m still counting them. By the end of September I’d like to have a few more added, perhaps six to get the total submissions up to twenty. I have plenty of poems ready to go; it’s all a matter of market research and willingness to risk the time, and in some cases the postage, to submit.

Even with my limited goals, September should be a busy month.

content writing, Suite 101

3329

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That’s how many page views my articles at Suite101.com have had: 3,329. As I mentioned a few days ago, someone is reading my stuff there. I’ve written a variety of articles. I have forty articles posted: 10 in Civil Engineering; 10 in two poetry topics; 13 in three history topics; 4 in Bible studies; 2 in personal finance topics; and 1 in genealogy. I have two articles partly done in draft that I hope to finish and post today, and about six in mind to write next. I hope to do two or three of them over the weekend.

On the revenue side of content writing, things are still slow, but beginning to pick up a little. I keep a spreadsheet of some basic statistics. Each day I enter how many page views I had and how much revenue I earned. The spreadsheet calculates a few things, including a projection of how many daily page views I’ll have a year from now if the current growth continues, and how much revenue I’ll be earning a year from now, again with the same trends. I also calculate annual revenue projection at the current rate of earnings. With recent averages for page views and revenue per 1000 page views, I could be earning, a year from now, at an annual rate of $2,242 dollars! That includes posting more articles at a good pace, and making those articles a combination of good information excellently written with search engine optimization techniques added.

I wouldn’t exactly call that a “platform” as editors and literary agents would want, but it’s a start. Some thoughts on how to go about this platform-building thing over two to three years is beginning to gel. I may write more about it, or maybe not.

And, it now looks as if I will get a paycheck from Suite101.com this month. You need to accumulate $10 in revenue before they pay you. As of August 26 (last day posted) I had accumulated $9.47. So I only need to accumulate 53 cents in five days. That’s not for sure, but it is likely. I wonder what I’ll do with the money?

I still don’t know whether all this effort is worth it. At the current rate I’m earning revenue, I’ll earn $124 in a year–with no more articles posted. All my articles are what they call “evergreen”, that is, they are not tied to current events, and should continue to earn at the same rate theoretically forever. Actually, all the veterans say articles tend to earn at a somewhat larger rate over time. I’ll believe that when I see it, but it’s something to hope for. And hope makes many things worthwhile.

Suite 101, Writing

Back in the Writers Group?

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I went to the writers guild tonight. I went last Tuesday, but nobody showed up. Since I’m not a regular, they wouldn’t have thought to call me when they decided to cancel for a week. I was the first one there, and waited ten minutes, till about 7:05 PM until someone showed up. Three retired ladies who rode together came in, then one more. We started out by reading one of theirs, then had just started on another when another lady came in. That made six of us, a good number.

This is the writers guild I went to for about five years when we first moved to Bella Vista. Most of the time I was the only person in the group who wasn’t retired, though from time to time another working stiff wandered in. I left the group because no one besides me was writing with the goal of seeking publication through a royalty publisher. I say that not to demean their writing goals, but rather to say we were not like-minded and so approached things differently. At the Spavinaw Writers, which I attended for about six months until dropping it earlier this year, they were all seeking royalty publishing, but we were not like-minded in other ways (politically, that is).

I suppose finding a writers group close enough to attend regularly where everyone is reasonably like-minded will be next to impossible. So I think I will go back to this one. Part of the night we discussed promoting the group, including what to call it and how large we would want to get. I’m not sure we were all like-minded in that. Four of us read something. I read the latest article I’d written for Suite101.com, the third in the series on George Washington’s presidency. You can see the link in the box widget at the right hand side of the page. One lady read four pages from her latest novel-in-progress. Another read a short poem and then a brief selection from her journal; she doesn’t intend to publish either. Then a lady read from her novel, but she didn’t have copies for anyone.

It was good to be with this group again. Three of the others were attenders before I left the group; two were new to me (well, one was there when I attended a month ago). It was nice to be in fellowship with other writers again, in real life and not merely on-line.