To Blog or to FAQ?

Meet our guest blogger, Anne Wallingford, as she shares her musings on whether to launch a blog (She has at www.permissionsplease.today.com) or focus on frequently asked questions about the business of freelancing (She has done that, too, at www.aw-wrdsmth.com/faq.html). Anne is an experienced freelancer and an expert in permissions editing who integrates information from many sources into one viable marketing tool. She works with various publishers, development houses, and businesses to write and edit a wide range of material, including science articles, catalog copy, permissions, and journals.

My thanks to Bobbi for inviting me to write a guest blog. I’m fairly new to the blogging world; I’d put off undertaking this ‘new’ computer skill because, as I kept telling myself, I didn’t have the time. But once I caught up on my work and met my deadlines, I ran out of excuses for procrastinating. Except for one excuse that I think is still valid—my own web site.

I’ve had my own web site for several years now, and I’m proud of the fact that my site covers many different aspects of my life, from career through personal. There is one common thread though, that connects all the pages of my site, and that’s my love for writing. Which brings me back to my dilemma of blog or FAQ?

One section of my site is called Freelancer’s FAQ, and I’ve spent a lot of time and energy over the past few years in creating this page. My goal was to address many of the questions fellow freelancers have asked me, and topics include writing contracts & proposals, setting rates, and other issues related to the business side of freelancing.

Within the past year, though, I’ve had several colleagues say to me, “You should write a book” when I’ve told them stories about my work in permissions editing. Write a book? That sounds like too much work. Besides, would the people I wanted to reach ever buy the book? And this is when I started to think seriously about starting a blog.

With a blog, I could share my stories as well as important information about copyright and permissions. Since blogs are popular these days I could also tell colleagues about my blog and they would be more willing to browse to it for a look-see. My hope was that if I wrote something worthwhile about this topic, word would get around to others working in the copyright/permissions field and my blog would accomplish my goal of instructing while entertaining.

And that brings me to what I’ve found to be the biggest difference between writing my blog and writing FAQs for my web site. Writing a blog, for me, is like talking to someone, and offers a chance for immediate feedback. Writing a FAQ is definitely more ‘third person writing.’ So for now I’ll keep both my blog and my FAQ page. Hope to see you around at one of them!

A Writer's Challenge: Juggling Work & Family

I must begin this blog with a disclaimer: at this time in my life, I do not have to juggle my business and a live-at-home family. I am no longer married, and my daughters have their own homes. So, what I have to say about this particular balancing act obviously does not reflect my current situation. Nonetheless, for many, many years, my life revolved around work and family, each of which demanded 100 percent of my effort and energy. The memories are vivid.

The family came first; the writing didn’t make its appearance until almost a decade later. I had a husband and two very active young children. Writing, which began as a lark, turned into an adventure and ultimately became a consuming passion. In the meantime, I was a wife and a mother with all the myriad responsibilities that role demanded. It was still the era of “Father Knows Best” and “The Donna Reed Show,” which meant shirt-waist dresses, dinner on the table every night at six, and driving a station wagon full of little people to and from nursery school. I wrote in stolen moments, when the girls were in school or after they went to bed.

In the beginning, writing had to be squeezed in between all of the other stuff of life. I’m sure it was viewed by my family as a “hobby,” but all of that changed when I landed my first job as a full-time writer. That’s when the competition between the two halves of my life really intensified. By that time, I was a single parent, in addition to being a floundering new editor of a city magazine. My little girls were probably the original latchkey kids. They could let themselves in the house and make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but that didn’t stop them from calling me 100 times a day. There never seemed to be enough of me to go around. The hours at work were long and stressful; my salary was a joke; and my health zigzagged all over the place.

Each step in my career brought more responsibility, less flexibility, and longer commutes. Guilt became my constant companion. I was never a Brownie leader or a room mother. I didn’t go on field trips or take an active role in the PTA. I remember being 20 miles away, interviewing a college president, when my editor called to tell me my youngest daughter had broken her arm, falling off the top of the cheerleaders’ pyramid. The president was very gracious when I left suddenly.

On the bright side, I allowed gymnastics meets and disco practice in my living room; encouraged having friends sleep over; and subtly forced my daughters to learn to cook, the alternative being starving to death. I took some great pictures at real gymnastic meets and of the cheerleaders at football games, helped with many English papers, and learned to “edit on my eyelids” when the girls were in college. I tell you this because I now know this is how many writers live — employed, moonlighting, full-time, part-time, male or female. In today’s world, juggling roles is simply the way it is.

It was and is useless to haul around a bag of guilt and, obviously, beyond stressful to think you can do everything, be everywhere, and keep all those plates in the air without dropping one now and then. If I had it to do over again, I would do things differently.

• I would face reality and kick the guilt. “You gotta do what you gotta do,” as they say; and feeling that you are failing your family doesn’t help you, them, or your work.

• I would communicate more assertively and less defensively. If your family (husband, children, parents, whoever) understands the challenges you face, and you understand theirs, you can work together to help each other over the rough spots.

• I would make and enforce a simple agreement. When I’m working, please don’t disturb me unless it is a real emergency; when we are together as a family, I won’t let work interfere.

• I would strive for balance in my life. I would figure out what is truly important and what is extraneous. If you have your priorities straight, even if there are only two or three of them (work, family, yourself, not necessarily in that order), you won’t constantly pour your energy down the drain.

• I would put self-care high on that list of what is important. If you run yourself into the ground, stress out, or get sick, you will be of little good as a writer, mother or father, spouse, or caretaker of an aging parent.

• I would ease up on the perfectionism. If you can’t do it all, you certainly can’t begin to do it all perfectly. When you die, do you really want your epitaph to read “She died with a bottle of Windex in her hand”?

The who, what, when, where, and how of blogging

When I started my blog, I had no idea what I was doing. That would seem to imply that now I do, which is not quite accurate. But high on my list of marketing tactics for 2009 is learning everything I can about successful blogging and then applying those lessons to The Writing Life and PRISM. To that end, I have been diligently researching, reading, making lists, and trying out one lesson at a time. While there are dozens of blogs on blogging, I have tried to condense some of the best of the best tips into one list to share with those who may need a map for this strange new territory (I sure did!). Here are the basics.

Who (is your target audience?)
1. Readers who are interested in what you do
2. Potential customers or clients
3. People you can help in some way

Why (should you have a blog?)
4. To provide value to your readers
5. To inform, teach, guide, entertain, or all of these
6. To develop a following of loyal followers and raving fans
7. To create and reinforce your brand
8. To sell ideas, services, or products

What (should you do in your blog?)
9. Tell success stories — yours, your clients’, or your readers'.
10. Answer questions you have been asked in the past.
11. Write about what you know.
12. List useful tips on how to do things.
13. Recommend books and resources.
14. Tell great stories.
15. Do your best writing; don’t post until it’s perfect.
16. Interview colleagues and experts in your field.
17. Reprint other blog posts; always ask for permission or cite sources.
18. Reprint other articles; always include the author’s descriptive blurb.

How (should you go about it?)
19. Stick to your subject; be consistent.
20. Remember: delivery, packaging, and presentation count.
21. Feature others; write profiles.
22. Develop a survey, questionnaire, or online interview; post responses.
23. Solicit guest posts.
24. Ask your readers what they need; then, provide it.
25. Let yourself experiment; use some creativity.
26. Comment on other blogs.
27. Submit posts to other blogs.
28. Offer to be a guest blogger.
29. Link to other blogs; request links from them.
30. Read great blogs; subscribe to them.
31. Put a link to your blog in your e-mail signature, every page of your website, all outgoing correspondence, your newsletter, your author’s blurb, business cards, brochure, and flyers.
32. Include RSS feeds so people can subscribe to your blog.
33. Use trackback links when you quote from or refer to other blog posts.
34. Carry a little blog idea book around with you. Jot down ideas; create a backlog.
35. Write articles; include a link to your blog in your authors blurb.
36. Respond to comments readers make on your blog.
37. Create a “best posts page” category on your main page; link to your best posts.
38. Create tags for every blog post.
39. Let your personality shine through; find your “voice.”
40. Talk to your readers; have a conversation.
41. Remember, you’re a resource; always give your readers something.

Where (should you submit or post your blog?)
42. Submit your blog to blog directories: BlogCatlog, Masternewmedia.org
43. Recommend great blogs: copyblogger, remarkablogger, writetodone.
44. Check out biztipsblog.com, coachezines.com, JTPratt's Blogging Mistakes, and pingomatic.com.
45. Visit Marketing Strategy Thoughts for ideas.
46. Use TwitterFeed to link your blog posts to twitter.
47. Submit your blog to MyBlogLog, BlogCatalog, Bumpmee, EntreCard, weblogs.com, digg.com, myweb.yahoo.com, stumbleupon.com, blinklist.com.
48. Link to del.icio.us.com.
49. Sign up for an account on Technorati.

When (should you post?)
50. Regularly and often

Confessions of a Web 2.0 Addict

I’m trying to remember how it all began. I think it started innocently, as these things usually do. I went to a St. Louis Publishers Association meeting, and Bob Baker, the speaker, was doing a presentation on something called “social networking.” It was intriguing but confusing. Even with the handout, I had no idea what he was talking about. “This is Web 2.0,” he said, if one can actually speak in italics. “If you’re an author, you must have a presence on the Web.”

I got the idea that a website is not enough to create that presence. Apparently, one also needs a blog, podcasts, a newsletter, an identity on Amazon, and memberships in such things as Facebook, LinkedIn, Yahoo, and Gather. I’m not much of a joiner. I was overwhelmed.

I don’t remember when I attended that presentation, but I know it was pre-twitter. Since then, I’ve come a long way, baby. I have two blogs, a newsletter, and lots of memberships. I started a group on LinkedIn; I have a page on Facebook where my daughter’s friends write on my wall; and Amazon is #1 on next year's marketing plan (podcasting is #2). But what really blows my mind is the amount of time I spend micro-blogging on twitter. You’d be surprised at how much you can say with only 140 characters. Well, maybe you wouldn’t, but I was.

You can probably tell that I’ve jumped feet first into Web 2.0, astonishing young and old alike with my computer prowess — young being my daughters, who think I've lost my mind, and old being my contemporaries, who agree. What nobody told me about blogging and tweeting and joining is that they are seductive and addictive.

They are not just a part of marketing; they are a way of life. All day long and into the night I hear twitter making bird sounds as it informs me there is a new tweet on my TweetDeck. My e-mail is full of the latest blogs on blogging and tweets about twittering. I am constantly updating my e-mail list and planning my next newsletter or blog post. I have printed out so much advice on how to do it all better; I could start my own recycling plant. Only as I write this do I realize how far gone I am.

I am truly addicted, and I have no idea how Web 2.0 addicts recover. Everything I read tells me to blog and twitter more, not less. I guess I’m lucky because I don’t send and receive tweets on my iPhone or Blackberry, only because I don’t own them. But it’s only a matter of time.

It is almost midnight on New Years Eve of 2008. I’d love to say I’m resolving to cut down in 2009, but I'm not sure I can. This is bad, very bad.

Demystifying My Marketing Plan

Every year I make resolutions (who doesn’t?), and every year I break them before the ink is dry (who doesn’t?). This year, I have one super resolution, which I do not intend to break. It is market, market, MARKET. Not that I haven’t been marketing like crazy in 2008, but it has been a somewhat undisciplined activity. Whatever looked like fun, I tried it. So, if you’ve read any of my blog posts in the past, you will know I’ve been all over the place.

Since I met my friend, workout partner, and marketing guru, Bobette Kyle, my fitness and marketing have improved tremendously. My organization skills, unfortunately, have not. So, I’m not only writing a new marketing plan, I’m also creating a marketing calendar. I have the calendar all set up and ready to fill in, but as usual, I want to do everything, right now.

At this point, Bobette reminds me about the differences among goals, strategies, and tactics. (That’s why she’s the marketing guru, after all.)

So, I go back to the drawing board. I start with my big picture goal — the WHAT I want to achieve this year. Then, I figure out strategies — the three or four ways in which I plan to achieve my goal, the HOW. Finally, the tactics are the very detailed (small H) “how and when" I am actually going to take a specific action.

Most people would probably write an outline. They would be more linear than I seem to be. I am creating a mind map — actually several mind maps. The big one shows my goal, strategies, and tactics. Then, there is a separate mind map for each strategy. Believe or not, there was a lot of thinking involved; but the right side of my brain is so happy to be creating mind maps on the computer, that the left side hardly notices how hard it is working.

This isn’t about making my marketing plan beautiful as much as making it doable. I guess I think visually, because the little boxes on the mind maps and the marketing calendar bring order to what was just a chaotic list a few hours ago.

It's not fair!

This is a rant. Do not — I repeat — do not ever try to sue a client in small claims court. In my experience, it cannot be done. I have tried three times, and, as I sit here popping Excedrin, I am about to give up. But, before I do, let me keep you from making the same mistakes I’ve made.

Let's say you begin by going to your attorney for help in collecting money you have earned through hard work. After a few false starts, your attorney suggests that you to try small claims court. Of course, the very most you could be awarded is $3,000, no matter how much money your client owes you. But, you decide $3,000 is better than nothing.

Small claims court is supposed to work this way:
•You file a claim.
•The defendant is served.
•You both appear in court at the appointed day and time.
•Your case is heard.
•You win. and collect your money.

Now, here is reality:
•You go to the small claims court office in the county courthouse and file a claim. It takes a long time and requires a lot of information you probably don’t have, since you had no idea what was expected.
•You pay the filing fee. If you want the want the summons served by a human being (the sheriff) instead of the US mail, you pay an additional amount.
•On your court date, you show up as scheduled. Your defendant probably doesn’t.
•When your case is called, you are told the summons has not been served. The case is cancelled.
•You repeat the process, at least once, with the same results.

All the things that can go wrong:
•The sheriff does not find the defendant for any number of reasons. You track down his whereabouts and pay some more money to have him served again. The sheriff still doesn't find him.
•You are told you must go to court, even if the defendant has not been served. You do, wasting many hours.
•You are told you don’t have to show up if he is not served. You stop coming and get in trouble with the judge.
•You go to see the sheriff and are told by a switchboard operator, “Sorry. That’s the way we do things.”
•You ask for a supervisor, explain the whole matter again, and are told, “Sorry. That’s the way we do things.”
•You go back to the small claims administrator, who tells you to call the sheriff and ask about hiring a private process server.
•The sheriff’s office tells you that’s not their responsibility; you should call the small claims administrator.
•You finally hire a private process server. He does not find the defendant, either (often, after several attempts). The next day, the missing defendant is seen drinking in a neighborhood bar. But, by that time, you have fired the process server.

Alternative scenario:
•The defendant is served. He does show up in court. You win the case; and he disappears (there are several ways to do this), never to be seen again.

You have now poured quite a bit of money into a black hole called the legal system. Your client, who has decided not to pay you, is probably laughing his head off. You are tempted to jump up and down with your fists clenched, and yell (as you children did when they were going through the terrible twos), IT’S NOT FAIR!”

Remember what you used to say? "Life is not fair."

Knowing When to Say When

I never say no when someone asks me if I can take on a new project. After all, I’m marketing myself half to death so that clients will call or write or e-mail and ask me to ghostwrite, edit, or coach. Why would I say no? Well, one reason is that often, I simply don’t have time to tackle one more thing.

All of the above — ghostwriting, editing, or coaching — are time consuming; and time is finite. There are only so many productive hours in a day and, unfortunately, not all of them are spent doing things for which I will be paid. I can’t count how many times I’ve calculated the number of hours I have left for work after I sleep, eat, put myself together in the morning and take myself apart at night, work out, grocery shop, run errands, run my business, run my life, go to appointments (doctors and others), clean my house and do laundry, and read. Not many. I’ve tried to figure out what I could omit, and all I can think of is reading. But would life be worth living? I don’t think so.

Supposedly, we have 2,000 hours a year considered work time, but that’s a myth. Even people who work for a salary do not work 38 hours a week. They may be at some location for 38 hours, but they sure aren’t working all that time. They’re having coffee breaks and lunch, kibitzing with fellow workers at the proverbial water cooler, talking on the phone (not necessarily on business), reading the paper, staring into space, or just generally goofing off. I know this is true because I used to have such a job.

As I consider my workweek, I notice it includes nights and weekends and, even at that, I never seem caught up. As I flit from task to task, I am convinced I must be A.D.D. or just disorganized, but whichever it is, I frequently feel frenzied.

So, I have begun to rethink the never-say-no philosophy. For one thing, I can’t do everything; for another, I don’t even want to. There are subjects that turn me on and others for which I am totally unsuited. There are assignments that will pay for groceries and utilities for half a year, and some on which I will never come close to breaking even. There are people I fall in love with at hello and those who send up red flags that warn me to run, not walk, to the nearest exit.

The secret is what the secret always has been: when in doubt, tune in to the Jury of the Deep and heed the verdict. If there is really a good reason to accept the job, do it. Otherwise, politely refuse and get back to work. Could it be that simple? Well, yes. It could, and it is.