22 August 2013

....And we're back

Well, as promised, the blog is back in the middle of August (well, okay, so it's the end of August).  During the hiatus, I finished moving in and setting up the apartment, I read a few books, and I wrote -- far less than I probably ought to have.

What does this mean for you, my valued readers?  It means I have resources for you, of course!  (And it's not even your birthday! - unless it is, in which case, happy birthday).  The first one is Amazon's Mechanical Turk (AKA MTurk), which posts a large number of small jobs and surveys for which you can make a little bit of money (and I do mean little, I've logged a few hours and pulled down about $1/hour), but apparently once you establish yourself a bit, there are higher paying jobs out there, just don't expect to quit your day job by this time next week.  To establish yourself, you'll need to have a high approval rating and a few thousand HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) entered.  Most of them are data entry, so if you really focus and have some mad typing skills, you ought to be able to do maybe 60 or 70 an hour depending on load times.  So invest a little under 20 hours to break a thousand hits.

Also, if you're looking for freelance jobs and you have the time to take the qualification tests, elance.com can be a source of additional income, but be aware that most jobs are highly competitive.  Unless you have some great references that will endorse your page, don't expect to start off making minimum wage for your work (still better than Mturk, likely).  You can make 40 free proposals on varying projects, then you'll have to pay to get more, but hopefully in 40 proposals, you'll land at least a couple jobs.  Regardless, it's good practice writing quickly and to the point.

A quick look around the Elance market will reveal that many people are looking for SEO-friendly copy - if your SEO isn't up to snuff , then there are several resources available - which is good news for all of us.  For the most up to date resources, I recommend a quick google or bing! search.  Like all writing skills, the best thing to do for SEO is to practice.  One way to practice is to start working on it with your own blog or website - with Google Analytics, you ought to be able to trend different articles and see if your SEO is drawing more hits.

So that's it for this installment, keep tuned for early next week, as I'll be addressing a common problem that us creative types face: Depression.

Thanks for reading.