Advertise

Advertising is an obvious and easy choice when you want to drive traffic to your blog. There are hundreds of ways to advertise. Both Google and Yahoo offer context-sensitive advertising services that allow you to spread the word about your site. There are plenty of other online advertising services as well. A more time consuming, but possibly more rewarding system is to look for web sites (blogs and otherwise) that appeal to similar users and contact them directly with an offer to pay for advertising space on their site. Don’t limit your thinking to the web though. You may find you get more mileage out of a well-designed newspaper or magazine ad. If your blog is more about a locality, you may even consider radio advertising (television is probably out of your range).

Have your site redesigned by a professional

An attractive and professional looking web site lends authority to a blog. A quick check of a site such as elance.com reveals that there are many web designers willing to create attractive web sites and logos for under $1000. Just be sure to find a designer who has created sites that you consider to be attractive.

Give the money away

One of the best ways to drive traffic to your site is to hold a contest. Problogger.net has gotten a lot of mileage (and links) out of its Group Writing Projects. The latest project offered a prize of $1000 cash and resulted in 893 other bloggers writing for the project (and linking to problogger). Not only does a contest like that attract new visitors who want to join the contest, but the links generated by the contest will pay dividends for years to come.

Hire an assistant

For $1000 you can hire a virtual assistant to spend 20 hours a month for 5 months helping you with various blog related tasks such as research, basic web design, web marketing, webpage maintenance, optimizing web pages for search engines, accounting and taxes.

Release a book

Finally, for $1000 you can use a service such as Lulu to print and distribute a book. If you have been blogging steadily, you may find that you have enough material for a book already on hand. There are several advantages to publishing a book. It gives you something that you can sell through your blog, having a published book adds to your stature as a blogger, a book gives you an additional marketing and public relations tool, and a book gives you something you can show to your parents and friends to prove that you actually have been doing something worthwhile with your time.

Stop the Interruptions

It is very difficult to accomplish anything of value when your work environment is chaotic. Multitasking is not conducive to quality work, especially for writers. Find ways to work uninterrupted: modify your work hours, get out of the office, stand up to people who plan useless meetings, send your phone to voice mail, don’t be a slave to your email. The important point is to put a value on your time, and don’t let others take away that value.

Not Every Job is Worth Taking

One of the problems you can face, especially as a freelance writer, is bad clients. It is amazing how the worst paying clients generally turn out to be the hardest clients to please, but even a pain in the ass client who pays well may not be worth it. The best paying client I ever had was one that treated me badly and didn’t respect or even understand the work I did. I put up with it for several months, but in the end I had to say goodbye to the good money and move on. I missed the money (a little) but I didn’t miss the job.

Eliminate, Delegate, Automate

Ferris is a big believer in virtual assistants. Virtual assistants are people who work remotely, often from foreign countries where the pay scale is lower, to perform tasks and solve problems for you. These tasks may be professional or personal. A virtual assistant can do anything from perform research and create charts and graphs to schedule interviews or enter data. If you are out of work, they can even conduct a job search for you. While the thought of a virtual assistant may or may not appeal to you, it is important to take a look at the tasks that take the most time and generate the least progress toward your goals. Determine whether or not they can be eliminated, delegated or automated.

See the World

Writers, especially creative writers, need an occasional change of scenery. This starts with a day spent writing from the nearest coffee shop with a hot spot and can grow until you are spending weeks or months working from a foreign country, living in a place you’d only hoped to visit. The beauty of the Internet and cellular revolutions is that you can work from just about anywhere in the world and as far as your clients know, you’ve never left your office. Those of us who live in some of the richest countries in the world (citizens of the United States, Great Britain and Australia make up the bulk of my readers) will find that the money you make in your home country goes much farther in many other countries. While a permanent move may be more than you want, a few weeks spent on foreign soil (and not as part of some rushed tour group) may be just what you need to recharge your batteries.

Try the Impossible

Everyone says its impossible for an unknown writer to get an article in Esquire, Vanity Fair or Playboy. They also say that Fortune 500 companies never farm out high-paying contracts to individuals. They may or may not be right, but how many of them are actually trying to land these assignments? If you are making a fairly good living from your low-level or mid-level clients or job, maybe it is time to reach for something higher. If you are having trouble generating any work at all, then you truly have nothing to lose by chasing the biggest and the best. The beauty of reaching for the near impossible is that it forces you to step up and try harder, to put together the kind of presentation or cover letter or resume that you never bothered with before because it didn’t seem worth it. Take the big risks, at least once in a while.