Category Archives: Suite 101

freelance writing, Suite 101, Writing

Someone is reading my stuff

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As I feared, my work writing articles for Suite101.com has consumed most of my creative writing time. It’s even consumed most of my pleasure reading time. It’s even consumed my recreational time. Last weekend, for example, Lynda and I made a quick visit to Hobbs State Park in eastern Benton County. We went through the newly opened Visitors Center and walked the Van Winkle Hollow historical trail (just a half mile). After we got home, I realized I could write two articles on our visit for Suite 101, which would allow me to count the mileage as a tax deduction. Of course, I didn’t think to bring our camera to obtain pictures to illustrate the article.

As another example, take the book I reviewed recently on this blog, The Presidency of George Washington. As I was reading it–which I intended strictly for pleasure, ideas for five articles on the history of this period came to mind and found their way to a sheet of paper that served as an idea capture medium. I’ve written and posted two of those articles at Suite. The other three are rolling around in my mind, waiting for their chance to get out.

Or, take the Harmony of the Gospels I recently finished. I’ve pulled two articles out of that, and could easily pull out a hundred or two.

All of which makes me wonder: Will I ever be normal again, doing things just for enjoyment and not to serve as freelance fodder? Will I ever get back to that point in the yellow wood, where the two roads diverged, and get back to the type of writing I want to do, rather than writing I’m doing for platform building and a little bit of money?

I’ve only been down this path for two months. I’ve written 38 articles at Suite, probably about 27,000 words. I haven’t yet earned $10, the threshold at which they pay-out your earnings, though I’m getting closer. I don’t know that I’ll reach the threshold before the end of the month cut-off, so my first Suite paycheck might not be until October.

But in the process, my articles at Suite have had 2,630 page views during that time. For the seven day period ending today, for the first time I will cross the 500 mark for page views in the period. I don’t think that counts mine, which the software strips out. I don’t have many page views from family, because none of them check it much if at all. So this for the most part represents page views resulting from search engine searches. People searching for “FEMA flood maps”, and my article URL ranks high in Google, and I get a read. Or any of the 37 other articles. That compares to about 545 page views on this blog, which includes my own page views. So at least at Suite I’m getting some readers. Maybe not followers, but at least readers.

I’ll continue writing at a good pace at Suite 101 for a while yet, for sure till I reach 50 articles, and maybe till I get to 100, then I’ll evaluate whether the time has been well spent, and whether I should continue at a good pace, possibly try to accelerate, or back off some. I can still see the fork in the road, over my shoulder, whereas I don’t see the roads converging up ahead. Not yet at least.

Examiner, freelance writing, Suite 101

The Debate Continues: To be an Examiner?

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When I drove to a noon hour meeting of an engineering organization, I had time to thing about pros and cons of applying to Examiner.com. I’m no where near making a decision yet, but more arguments concerning it are buzzing around in my head, and I’d better get them out in this hour I have before I’m due at church.

For: The visibility will be great. Since Examiner.com is like a newspaper, it will have people subscribing to the topic and checking it out daily. Traffic is not based on search engines alone.

Against: Since it’s like a newspaper, the writing work will be more journalism than essay and general articles. It will involve interviews, perhaps sometimes attendance at events, variety. At Suite101.com variety is of less importance than conforming with the house style.

For: The position I would apply for is Christianity Examiner for Northwest Arkansas. This would be a great position. I believe, with the right combination of articles, I could really impact people. I don’t know that it would lead to conversions, but it would likely strengthen Christians, even if in just a small way. I would have no shortage of articles. It could include: church news, interviews with clergy, news of events, devotionals, Bible analysis, Christian issues, perhaps some editorials. It would not really have to be exclusively about northwest Arkansas. I could write about almost anything Christian that would be of interest to northwest Arkansans. I could even invite local pastors to provide guest devotionals and sermons. I would think with the right mix of articles, and with a good posting frequency, I could establish a popular site.

Against: The work would almost be more that of a reporter. I’d have to learn new skills. I’d have to do interviews. I’m not sure that’s what I want.

Against: I would be quite exposed. I’d have to make sure, really sure, I was right in what I post.

Against: Examiner doesn’t have a site for northwest Arkansas.

For: They would probably let me piggy-back on the Little Rock site for a while, perhaps a long while, until we had enough examiners to justify a local site.

For: The pay would likely be better than Suite 101, and probably more consistent. Since the traffic will be more predictable, I suspect I would make more total money, faster than at Suite 101. Examiner pays about 1 cent per click, or $10 per 1000 page views. Right now at Suite 101 I’m in the neighborhood of $1.45 per 1000 page views. The Suite 101 income will likely continue to rise with time, regardless of whether I have more posts or not.

Against: With the pay being better, you have to wonder if Examiner has a long-term business model that can sustain that rate of pay. With Suite 101, since my income is based on Suite’s income, which is all on advertising dollars, the long-term prospects for continued pay seems viable, so long as the entire Internet advertising scene doesn’t collapse. But Examiner’s paying per click, the payment is based on traffic not revenue. Can it be sustained?

Against: What happens when I want to quit Examiner sometime in the future–if I want to quit? Since the site would be based a lot on current events and less on “evergreen” content, the clicks might stop and with them the revenue stream. At Suite 101, if I quit today my articles, which I’ve tried to make “evergreen”, would continue to earn revenue at their slow pace, even increasing at least for a couple of years.

For: Not everything on Examiner has to be current events. I can mix in some “evergreen” topics and keep some level of page clicks coming.

That’s about it for now. More debate coming later.

freelance writing, Suite 101

Debating Myself About a Possible New Writing Gig

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I’ve been publishing at Suite101.com for just over six weeks. It’s going well, I think. I have 30 articles up and running. I’m getting about 60 to 70 page views a day (not great, but I’ll take it). I’m earning a little money, emphasis on the little right now. I have no shortage of topics to write about. I’ve written in five categories so far, and have a couple more I could tackle with almost no research. Fulfilling my ongoing contract commitment of 10 articles every three months should be a breeze.

Yet I’m starting to wonder how posting at this site will help me with my stated goal of building a platform to enhance the chance to publish my books with a royalty publisher. A platform in this sense would consist of two things: a ready-made audience, and a history of successful publishing. Suite 101 sort of fulfills the second. While my articles are not edited before I post them, they are subject to an editor’s scrutiny after posting, and the editor can call for edits or even disable the article if the writing isn’t up to expected standards. So I see these as (somewhat) real publishing credits.

On the other hand, I don’t believe this is bringing me any audience. Almost all my Suite 101 articles are accessed from search engine searches. Someone looks into a topic and they Google it or Bing it. If I’ve done my writing correctly, using multiple key words in title, subtitle, lead paragraph, and subheadings, I’ll show up on the first page of hits and someone will click on my article. But no one is out there thinking, “I like Dave Todd’s articles. I think I’ll go to Suite 101 and see if he’s written anything new.” Ain’t gonna happen, even after I get to 100 or even 1000 articles. This is because Suite 101’s strategy and publishing model is based on search engine dynamics, not on loyal following. Nothing wrong with that. It’s a valid strategy.

Other alternatives exist for Internet publishing for pay, which I have been slowly evaluating. Some pay up front for targeted articles. Some pay based on page views. Some pay on a mixture. Each one seems to have a different strategy, though all include some degree of search engine optimization.

One site that seems to be a little different from the others is Examiner.com. This is set up as more of an on-line newspaper. When you click on the home site, you will be automatically be re-directed to the Examiner site nearest your location. In their model, the freelancers are identified by topic: the Boston Sports Examiner, the Denver Food Examiner, the St. Louis Stay-at-Home Mom Examiner, etc. They have numerous topics and numerous locations, and are expanding both all the time. Examiners post articles in their topics, each article generating a new web page. The site looks a little like a blog, but also a little like an on-line newspaper. People actually subscribe to the feeds, either through RSS or other means. The articles receive comments.

It appears Examiner is shooting for a combination of loyal reader following and search engine optimization as the means to attract readers. They pay based mostly on page views, but also on unique visitors and length of visit. Ad clicks don’t seem to enter into writer payment. Writers are less essayists and content writers than they are reporters. In fact, many examiners say they obtain press passes and get to attend events as the media. It’s a different model, and would seem to better fulfill the developing a ready-made audience than does Suite 101. Nothing wrong with either, just different approaches.

For a number of posts, not necessarily consecutive, I’m going to publicly debate this site as an alternate to Suite101.com. Not in terms of abandoning Suite 101, but rather as a second venue to better work on the dual planks of platform development. I don’t know how long this debate will last, but I’m thinking a week or so. If I do this, I want to do it fairly quickly. If anyone wants to look at either site and give me some ideas via comments, please feel free to do so.

I’ll start the debate now.
Objection: I don’t have time for another activity! What am I thinking, considering a new writing activity when I can’t get to the ones I have now. As I feared, most of my time available for writing has been consumed with writing for Suite 101 or pursuing freelance writing in print media. I would be out of my mind to take on something else.
Answer: I can easily back off on the time I spend with Suite 101. I posted 30 articles in just over six weeks., or five a week per average. I only need to publish less than one per week. So the time is there, I would just need to prioritize.
Answer: I actually have found time to write on other things. I’m working on my Harmony of the gospels, on Bible studies, and a little on my novel. I even squeezed in some poetry writing and critiques during this time. So I suppose I can’t really say all my creative writing time has been tapped out.
Answer: Even if I have to spend more time on freelancing to be able to write for Examiner, wouldn’t the time be well spent if it leads to 1) revenue in the short-term and 2) enhanced book publishing prospects in the long-term?

More debate in other posts. Let me hear from you.

Engineering, Fifty Thousand Screaming People, goals, Good King-Bad King, Harmony of the gospels, Life On A YoYo, Suite 101

August Goals

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Well, I’ve had two fairly productive months, and hope to make it three in a row. Here’s what I have at present, subject to editing, of course.

  1. Write 10 articles for Suite101.com.
  2. Blog 12 to 15 times.
  3. Study: search engine optimization; sources for royalty free pictures; and picture types for digital photos.
  4. Finish chapter 7 in In Front of Fifty Thousand Screaming People; Begin chapter 8
  5. Finish one appendix in a Harmony of the gospels; also one passage notes section.
  6. Complete the engineering article on storm water detention that is due Sept. 1.
  7. More work on Good King, Bad King. Try to identify and outline at least four more lessons.
  8. Work on The Strongest of All study from the apocrypha. I have the five lessons prepared, but need to add some lead-in and conclusion discussions.
  9. And, based on my incomplete goals from July, get some more work done on Life on a Yo Yo, in an attempt to make it a publishable study.
flood studies, Suite 101, Writing

Progress in Tasks, but not Much in Learning

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Well, the Planning Commission meeting last night was not as long as was expected by the City. One or two items were pulled from the agenda, and I was up to the podium about 7:20 PM, done at 7:40 PM, home just after 8:00 PM. I now get to pull together the FEMA submittal. I’ll set a goal of one week from today for sending that in to the City. I can’t remember if the legal advertisement goes in the newspaper before or after the submittal to FEMA.

Last night I really didn’t feel like writing. Not sure what was going on. I had eaten before the meeting (half-price night at Sonic), so gathered up my financial records to enter in my budgeting/planning spreadsheet. But I didn’t feel like doing that task. Got on my user page at Suite101.com and had a pleasant surprise: I had a record revenue day: $0.72! Whoopee! That brings my average per 1000 page views up to work out to about $90 a year if I don’t post anything else. Two or three tanks of gas is nothing to sneeze at.

That should have spurred me on to writing. But instead I began climbing up the learning curve at Flickr. I think I understand that, and will begin using some of the photos there. I have two articles for Suite in the writing stage, and about six others somewhat planned. Hopefully I’ll get back to these tonight.

What I decided to do next was join Facebook. Everyone says you have to be on a social network. You have to promote yourself (but don’t abuse your friends on the network; be a friend first and a self-promoter second). So I went ahead and did it. I had a fair amount of difficulty registering. My screen partially locked up and I wound up putting in my high school and employer three times each. I managed to delete the two bogus ones, and began looking for friends. I published one short item, but did so before I had any friends. Hopefully it shows up on my “wall”.

One more learning curve to climb. I’m determined not to let this become a time sink. I’m not even going to try to log on to Facebook from the office; I imagine it’s blocked anyway. Tonight I’ll set a time limit, say 15 minutes to learn a little more about it, then I’ll need to write an article, wash it through an SEO tool, lace it with apt images, post it, and wait for the revenue to roll in.

Right.

Engineering, freelance writing, Genealogy, Suite 101

So Much To Learn

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Today I have two major tasks at work: prepare for Planning Commission meeting tonight, and prepare for the brown bag class I’ll teach tomorrow noon. The P.C. meeting is easy to prep for: ten copies of two figures and about three pages of text. The figures need some hand coloring, but that’s a throwback to childhood and not at all unpleasant.

The brown bag is tougher to prep for, because I want to include a PowerPoint presentation with it. This is my second PowerPoint to prepare. The last one was all text. For this one, I want to include photos and drawings. This increases the degree of difficulty (from about 1.0 to about 3.5, I’d say). Plus, the last one I did was back in March, and I’ve pretty well forgotten all I learned then. So it’s a learning day. When I get frustrated with building the slide show, I just pull out one of the figures to color. I have till 6:00 PM to complete them.

Then there’s the whole question of learning photographs for the Internet. I spent some time at Flickr, following a link to their Creative Commons, which is the area that’s supposed to have the copyright-free photos. I had a little time with this, then Internet Explorer locked up. So I exited and went back to Flickr, this time the home page. And on that page I could not find a link to the Creative Commons. Am I missing something? I’ll get back to that after this post.

I love learning, but this is almost too much today. PowerPoint alone would be fine, or maybe the photo study would be fine, but the two together are somewhat overwhelming.

On the other hand, the pleasant evening I wrote about yesterday came to be almost exactly as I hoped. The genealogy meeting was good. I actually knew the speaker, and met a few new people. Any time you are in a library, even if it’s just the meeting room, is a good time. At home I filed and wrote and read and talked on the phone for a long time with my son. I balanced the checkbook, which in two prior sittings had refused to be balanced. I didn’t get to my financial record spreadsheets, or paying a couple of bills, but I have tonight for that. Another pleasant evening coming.

American Colonial History, Engineering, Robert Frost, Suite 101

SEO: An Unfruitful Weekend Study

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Due to my low revenues from my Suite101.com posts to date, I had little motivation to write articles for that content site this weekend. It seemed to me that blackberry picking would be more profitable (got about a quart). I wanted to push through the discouragement to write a poetry article and a history article. I even brought home some references from the office to maybe write a civil engineering article. Alas, on Friday evening I decided I really should 1) clean-up the articles already written for linking and images, and 2) do some research in SEO: search engine optimization.

The clean-up was easy. I found some public domain photos residing on the Internet, with the site giving permission to copy and use. And I added a bunch of links, internal and external to Suite 101, to my existing articles. I’m probably not done with that, but I’m close. On to SEO.

I found, however, that I couldn’t deal effectively with SEO. I found plenty of references, but my mind was just not in it. I’d pull up a reference, and begin to read, but quickly said to myself, “Is this really necessary? How does this equate to advancing a career in creative writing? How will my ego, demeanor, and pocketbook be bettered by this? And how will this affect my creative writing? Will it diminish my other writing?” Not being able to answer, I kept shifting to mindless computer games–as if Minesweeper will better advance my second career.

By Sunday afternoon I had had enough. Since SEO wasn’t working, I knuckled down and wrote two articles and posted them. One is the last in my series about Robert Frost’s poem “Into My Own.” The other is in my continuing series on the lead-up to the American Revolution, this one on some writing of Samuel Adams. These are probably not any better optimized for SEO than ones I posted earlier. They do, however, have links and images. And today I’m getting some hits for them.

This morning before work I was able to concentrate a little on SEO. I found some good training sites and copied and pasted them into a Word document, and printed a few pages. I think part of my problem is I still have not learned to read stuff on the web for comprehension. I need to learn that to save a tree or two, but I’m not there yet. So my reading material for the evening is in hand. I’m off to plan the next two engineering articles I’ll write.

freelance writing, Harmony of the gospels, poetry, Robert Frost, Suite 101

Miscellaneous Musing on an Unexpectedly Free Lunch Hour

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I should probably be writing something that will someday lead to revenue, but I find myself drawn here instead. I had a lunch appointment today, but the other party cancelled unexpectedly. I’ll have to go out and buy something shortly, but until then I’ll enter a few miscellaneous musings here.

  • I’m up to 19 articles posted on Suite101.com, and have maybe four in the hopper that may jump out this weekend. The writing is enjoyable. Unlike at some Internet content sites I get to choose my own topics, the articles go life as soon as I post them, and I can edit them as needed. Unfortunately, so far I have earned only $0.03 (not a typo) based on ad clicks, on none for over a week.
  • This search engine optimization thing (SEO) is going to have a steep learning curve, I’m afraid. No doubt my failure to do this well is keeping my page views low, thus fewer viewers to click on the ads. But to learn SEO will take hours and hours of reading and experimentation. You have to know this because Google and other search engines are the main way readers find your articles. So titles, subtitles, meta tags (still not quite sure what they are or if they still hold importance or not-the SEO experts seem unsure of this), and image captions all need to be “key-word rich”. Yuck. I must now bow down to the Google altar.
  • Suite 101 now requires that each article include at least one image, preferably more. This is adding a lot of minutes to the time it takes to ready an article for posting. Yet, the SEO experts say this is part of SEO and I will benefit by doing it. I have to believe the experts, I suppose, but I’ll believe it when I see it.
  • As expected, writing for Suite101.com is taking pretty much all my creative writing time. I’ve not even thought about other freelance queries, or novels, or Bible studies. Well, except for the Bible study I’ll begin teaching in about three weeks. I have that pretty much completed as much as I need for teaching. And about a week ago I worked on an appendix to the Harmony of the Gospels. I have about an hour to do to finish that appendix, and hope to do it this weekend.
  • The good news is that poetry has returned and filled what little time I have for creative writing outside of the Suite stuff. It hasn’t returned in a big way, but at least it has returned. Possibly writing the Suite articles on Robert Frost was part of the catalyst for that.

Well, I’m off to either buy a lunch or forage. This weekend may be the height of blackberry season in these parts, and I hope to pick a bunch.