As some of you know, I am a blogger by night, but a journalist and sub editor by day. I spend all of my time writing, so I know that can string a sentence together. I don’t put in the same amount of work for a blog post as I would a hard-news story, but I know that I am able write with style.

I read a lot of blogs of people who say that they make thousands of dollars working as online freelance writers. I’ve written about Internet freelance writing before, and it’s not something I’m particularly keen on when writing for print media is more profitable and also a heck of a lot more fun.

Even so, if you want to become a freelance writer on the Internet, there is one simple way to go about it: author a blog that exhibits your skills. People notice how well a blog is written, and I get asked to write for people without advertising my services. Mostly, I have to turn the offers down because the money isn’t worth my time, but this shows the power of blogs.

For so many people to comment on writing style should be enough to convince you of its importance. Things that annoy me as a reader include excessive use of italics, exclamation points and patronizing ad copy – don’t treat your readers like children.

The editor of the newspaper I work for actually hired me partly because he had read one of the blogs I author. You can make money, both online and offline, writing articles about absolutely anything.

Most recently, I edited a press release for John Cow (ripped it up and put it back together). The thing that I am able to do best is write, so if that’s one way that I can reach out to other bloggers (popular bloggers in particular) then I should capitalize on it and see how much money can be made on side projects for other people.

The latest project I’ve been offered actually came from someone who I sold a link to on another blog. He read the blog he was buying on, found my other blogs and then asked me to write (actually rewrite) articles for him for $50 a week. Again, I’m unsure if it’s worth my time at face value, but by writing for the websites this guy owns, I have the opportunity to promote my own blogs on high PR sites.

If you need help with a writing project then you can contact me and maybe I will be able to do something for you.

Remember: clean copy will make your blog shine. If you need some guidance, you could always head over to my tips for writing better blog posts.

Tags: Tips and tricks by Angel
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By now, you have probably heard about Courtney Tuttle’s excellent D-List, which is an extensive list of blogs on which the bloggers have removed the “nofollow” attribute from their comments. What that means is that when you leave a comment, Google’s spiders will follow the link back to your blog, creating a genuine link back.

Andy Beard also has a Bumpzee group with the latest posts of bloggers who use “dofollow”. If you are spending any time leaving comments on other blogs, why not look through the list of dollowers so that you know that you are getting something back for your comments?

One area of concern is that no matter how vigilantly these lists are upheld, there is always the possibility that a blogger may return to using nofollow. In this case, you need a way to quickly and easily tell if comments are being followed or not.

Thanks to Stephen Cronin for the link to this Firefox addon. After you have it installed, you can right-click on the little “@” symbol in the bottom-right corner and select “Highlight nofollow links”. It saves you time and gives you some security to know whether a bloggger is really following or not.

Tags: Tips and tricks by Angel
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There are heaps of Wordpress plugins out there all for various purposes. I try and limit the amount of plugins I use to avoid excessive overhead in my databases and increased load times on my blogs. There are a few I have installed on this blog that I couldn’t live without. These Wordpress plugins will make your life easier and streamline your blog for making money online.

1. The first, and most obvious Wordpress plugin, is Akismet. You need this because it filters out comment spam from your blog. It comes ready to use with Wordpress these days because it’s so important. The more popular your blog gets, the more spam comments you have to deal with. All your spam comments will be kept in a separate place by Akismet, but you should bear in mind that sometimes genuine comments are filtered out accidentally.
2. The All in One SEO plugin for Wordpress (site down at time of writing) is another godsend. It optimizes your titles, meta tags and keywords for SEO purposes. It makes everything neat and tidy and search-engine friendly with minimal fine-tuning needed.
3. Anti Leech is a fun way to get one over on sploggers who steal content via RSS feeds. The idea behind it is that fake content is generated when sploggers try to steal your genuine stuff. Anti Leech doesn’t always work, but if it turns the tables on sploggers at least some of the time then it can’t be a bad thing.
4. Feedburner Feedsmith redirects the feed from your blog to Feedburner so that you can keep tracks of how many subscribers you have and also tweak your feed to make it as easy for people to access as possible.
5. Google Sitemaps generates an XML sitemap of your blog that will help you with indexing pages in Google. A sitemap points Google in the right direction to aid the bots when they crawl your site. The sitemaps are fully customizable and easy to generate and use.
6. I’m a sucker for blogs with Live Comment Preview. I think it’s a great feature to have because it gives readers a useful tool for reading back their comments. I’ve had readers of other blogs ask me for this feature when it’s not been installed.
7. Another great Wordpress plugin is the Related Posts plugin. It gives you the opportunity to add a list of related articles, based on keywords, to the end of all of your posts. It’s great for keeping readers on your blog because it gives them easy access to more material after they’ve finished reading an article. Keeping people on your blogs is a step in the right direction toward making money online.
8. Although you can do it manually by accessing phpMyAdmin, Wordpress Database Backup is a plugin that allows you to do it automatically, saving you the time and effort it takes to do it the old-fashioned way. You should be backing up your databases at least once a week in case something happens on your server and you lose data.
9. The Wordpress Contact Form plugin makes it easy for readers to email you without having to actually log in to their email accounts. It saves everybody time and avoids the need to give out your email address publicly. The latest version has spam protection as well.
10. If you want to reward your readers then use the Top/Recent Comments plugin. I don’t employ it on this blog because it doesn’t generate enough comments for the stats to benefit me in any way, but I have used it on others. If you’re getting a lot of comments then this plugin is a must.

Those are my essential plugins, but which ones not on the list do you use?

Tags: Tips and tricks by Angel
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