Writing for the Web - A Learning Experience

On Sunday afternoon Allan wrote...

Now, at the end of August, I've got some info to share on my "new job" as a freelance writer for various web properties. Back in July I began investigating various sites like TheNovicesGuide.com, Skyword.com and Yahoo's AssociatedContent.com. Since then I've written a couple dozen articles for them. I continue to find other sites that also look interesting, so I decided it would be worthwhile to build a simple web presence that provides samples of my writing. Just as Becky and I used Google's excellent "sites" service to build a house sitting and pet sitting web site, I've again used Google to build a site filled with writing samples.  I call it "Allan's Words."

I've posted links to articles, sales pages, press releases and documents in other formats--even including some samples (as PDF's) from the manuals and advertising brochures I wrote during my eleven years as a writer and editor for Picker International, and as a freelancer working with (now defunct) Dimension Studios in Cleveland, Ohio. Hopefully the site helps prospective clients decide whether I can help them create the written content they need.

I've learned that various web properties each have their own method of calculating how they value an article and, therefore, how much they pay the writer. For some, like Yahoo, it's a combination of a few dollars "up front" and the number of page views one's article receives. For TheNovicesGuide.com it's a flat $20 per approved 1000-1500 word article. At Skyword's Gather.com news site, pay is based entirely on page views: Once a threshold of 150 page views is reached, Skyword pays a couple dollars for that article.

What I find a bit disappointing regarding page views is also a commentary on our human nature.  Let me explain...

The number of people who view my articles is largely based on the popularity of my subject matter. So while I might have expertise in a particular area, or might find a topic that I can passionately write about, those often are not popular enough to garner a substantial number of viewers. The result?  Little or no revenue from those fun-to-write or otherwise informative articles.

To discover what is popular, the web offers some great tools. One is the Google Trends page that shows what's "hot" on any given day. Another is Yahoo's Buzz Log. Check either of them and you'll find that perhaps 17 or 18 of the top 20 search terms have to do with people in the entertainment industry. As testament to the popularity of entertainment industry topics, I found that the top writer for Yahoo has over 20 million page views. His topic: "Hollywood Gossip." Of the articles I've published, the top page view earnings came from a review of the American Idol tour show when it came to Atlanta. Climate change, political topics and news commentary came in very distant seconds.

What does that say about human nature?  To me it's a sad comment that a gigantic majority of Internet searches are about topics that have almost nothing to do with one's everyday life and the issues that are important to one's well being and that of our neighbors. I find it a bit disappointing that people are so focused on those "fluff" articles rather than meaningful topics. Of course, any critic could find many reasons to say "Hey Allan, that's just your opinion."  And of course they'd be right.

But personal observations aside, the heavy focus on those topics makes it a bit harder to find subjects that will reliably get page views. Skyword.com has some well-designed tools in its Gather News program that help identify popular topics, but the program manager advised me that those tools are "still new" and might not be as accurate as one would hope. So rather than spending a lot of time hunting for "popular" topics, as I did for about a month after getting started with Skyword and Yahoo, I'm going to focus more time on writing where pay is based on the quality and word count rather than page views.

I'll update this blog in the next month with a couple of sites that look extremely promising, after I've had some experience with them.

Until then, the next excitement Becky and I are anticipating is the upcoming house sit in Kalama, Washington. We've been fortunate to find that Becky's son will live in our house while we're gone. It won't be sitting empty as it was during our month in Ecuador, and that gives us both a sense of comfort and security.