Blogging: essential for freelance writers

In 2008 and beyond, blogging is essential for freelance writers.

Firstly, let’s deal with the “a blog is an online journal” myth. A blog is a Web site – not an online journal.

As a freelance writer, your blog is a sales and promotional tool. The days of blogs as online journals are long gone for everyone who’s left high school.

So please think of a blog as just a Web site, a site you’re publishing.

Blogging makes you a Web publisher. You publish your words on your blog, and your blog achieves certain goals for you.

A blog can:

* Promote your freelance writing services so that buyers approach you to write for them;

* Make money writing for you – your blog is a publication, just like a magazine, and just like a magazine, you can make money from advertising on your blog;

* Develop a “platform” for your writing.

A “platform” is visibility. Celebrities don’t get onto the front pages of magazines and newspapers by accident. They have public relations staff whose sole purpose is to get their celebrity onto the front pages, by any stunt they can manage to concoct.

Writers are by nature shy, and want to keep out of the public eye. This is why we’re writers. However, especially if you hope to publish books, or are currently under contract, your platform is essential. In fact in 2008, if you don’t have a platform (readers, that is) you’ll find it almost impossible to get a book deal.

So think of your blog as a long term project of building a platform for your writing. Your blog will get you readers, and will win you respect, and you become a highly desirable commodity to mainstream publishers, because you bring your readers with you to projects.

Start blogging and build your writing career

I hope that this week’s issue will help you to become familiar with blogs, and that your blogs will become the most important tools in your writer’s bag of tricks. (I’ve lost count of the writers who’ve said and written to me “I wish I’d started my blog years ago!”)

Your blogging will help you to build your writing career, and will win you opportunities you could get no other way.

Your Blog: Your Vital Sales And Promotions Tool For 2008

Gotta blog? My ebook, Writing Success with Blogs by Angela Booth, helps you to take the first steps into the new world for writers: instant publishing on blogs.

Your writers’ blog is your must-have branding tool. It also has a very practical use – it’s a writing portfolio. From the ebook: “Before editors will pay you to write, they want to know that you can write. They want clips – copies of material you’ve published. This seems like a Catch-22: you can only get published if you’ve been published. Your writing on your blog can be in lieu of clips. Your blog lets editors gauge your abilities and style, before they put down the cash.”

The book helps you to create your own writer’s blog.