David in Spain

A little bit of everything

Category Archives: Writing for Money

Doing the NaNoWriMo – Novel in 30 days

Writing a novel in Thirty Days with NaNoWriMo

National Novel Writing Month

NaNoWriMo – the contest which is the National novel writing month that takes place every November. This is what I’m taking part in this November and it is the first time that I have done so. I wanted to take part in NaNoWriMo last year, but I had too many things to do. In some ways this year, I am also in the situation where I have too many things to do, but I’m going to write 50,000 words for a novel anyway.

As I write this I am into the second day of the NaNoWriMo and enjoying it so far. I have written three scenes for the story which is called ‘A Geeks Day out’. My word count at present is just over 3000, so only another 47,000 to do. In terms of the number of words required per day it is only 1700 approximately. Of course that does assume that you are able to write every single day for 30 days. I think I would like to work in terms of having a target of 2000 words per day so that after a week or so, I will be slightly ahead of the curve. I know that there will be some days when it is going to be more difficult to crank out the words. This is not because of hitting writers block and not knowing what to write next for the story, but more to do with if my wife is at home. I tend to get a less work done. Funny that, isn’t it?

-Writing to make money

At the same time as I am writing for the NaNoWriMo novel, I still have to keep working on writing the articles for my websites. Last month was both a good month and a bad month. It was good in as much as, I earned €20 more than I did at the previous month, and the reason for that was hitting a particular good keyword towards the end of the month that brought me in thousands more visitors over a period of two days. More traffic to the site equals more money. It is good that it happened when it did because two days after that event, Google make changes to their search algorithms and my search traffic dropped to about a quarter or a third of what it was. Less traffic to the site equals less money. So that was the bad part of the good and bad statement about the month.

What does the future hold for writing for money?

For the moment the Amazing iPad website which was my moneymaking website before the Google change, I am quite disappointed. The website is full of great information and is a content driven super site, which is the type of site that Google is supposed to like. So on one hand I have to kind of wonder, what it is that I can do to bring this site back to life again, and on the other hand I can be hopeful that if I just keep working at it the way that I have, then it should come good again.

Rather than have all my eggs in one basket, I have two other websites that are already are indexed by Google and are doing okay for the amount of content that is on the site. One of those sites is doing quite nicely and the click through, that I get from it are usually nice earners. I tend to get a higher payment for the click through here, than I did from the other site. So it will make sense to write a lot of articles for this site, to have content there that people will keep coming back for.

The next thing that I have done is to start up a new site. I started this new site a couple of days after the Google changes, which was just over a week ago and today was the first day of getting some search traffic. I only have five articles on the site so far, but they are long and informative, content driven articles. With this new site I don’t intend to do any link building articles in any other places. I plan to only write articles for the site and to promote them using amplify.com and Scoop.it, alongside promoting in Facebook and Google plus. I have already created a Facebook page especially for this new site.

Creating graphics for my websites

Pixelmator 2.0 review

With me being a graphic designer & sign writer in my previous life, I find that I still enjoy doing that sort of work. For my new website I have been using a logo design tool called Art Text 2 which is great for doing designs which look like they are 3-D. I can easily give text a 3-D look, so that they have the pillow shape or the bevelled shape. I can add backgrounds to the design, or sometimes what I will do is to take the text and put it in as a layer into Pixelmator.

Pixelmator has just been upgraded to version 2 and I bought it because it was much much cheaper than if I was to buy Photoshop. Besides it is a particularly good application for working with bitmaps and now it also does some vectors. The Pixelmator application works really well and on top of that it looks very pretty while doing it.

Video and using my time best

Motion Logo

The writing has to take precedence at the moment, but I am also very keen to spend more time doing my digital artwork. That digital artwork includes making videos, learning how to use Motion and Final Cut Pro X. Doing any sort of work on video is very time-consuming, so I think I can expect not to do much video during November. So for the moment I will be pencilling in December as a month for doing video. The NaNoWriMo novel will be finished by then, at least the first draft of the novel at any rate will be completed, there will still be the editing and numerous rewrites to do, if I decide that it is worth taking the NaNoWriMo novel further to have a finished novel that could be published. I wish !!

Working on the Web sites to make some money

The efforts I have made with the SEO and the article wrting have been gaining traction in the nearly seven months I have been working at it. It can be hard word and I have had to learn a lot of things, such as the nitty gritty of getting links to my sites to have back links that bring in the traffic. I am pleased with the money I am spending on The Keyword Academy each month and I find the tools very useful. I have just also discovered Keyword Strategy which is another useful tool. The Keyword Strategy works mainly on the interlinking witin the site and other on site SEO things, but it can scan the whole web site over time.

The thing that you have to work as suggested by the Keyword Strategy works like a to do list also. It tells you things like a bunch of keyword that are not ranked at all on Google. You can make a new page for that keyword and then put a tick in the box to say it is done.  It als works the same with broken links. When it is scanning the web site it will assign web pages to keywords automatically and also you can do it manually. Then it will tell you that keywords in your list that are not on the web pages.

You have to put the keywords into the list first and it connects to the keyword tool at Google to get you some based on a seed keyword. Put in at least 3000 keywords and then start working with them. Making new posts, adding to posts already there, fixing broken links and checking the alerts on the Alerts tab.

Is it worth doing ?

I can tell you that in a few days of adjusting some of my pages to have more internal links within the web site and making new pages and also putting keywords in to the post where they are missing, there have been more visitors to my site. I will know more when I have been using the service for longer. So far I am pretty impressed and I will probably end up paying the money for the monthly subscription.

Using other free services and being social with it

I am still do the social networking thing with the sites where I will pick an article and push it out through Amplify. That sends it to a pile of places and I think it makes some sort of difference. I also use IMAutomator as another service that does something similar. I reckon what is needed is to have a plan for the week in which every day I write a certain number of words for articles, do a podcast on one day of the week, or a video, Another part of the day to work with the social part of the job. I have already started to time how long it takes me to write articles and I can do it very fast when using Dragon Dictate on the iPad. There is never any reason to be twiddling my thumbs and wondering what to do next. There is always something. I do wish I could have more time to do more video to put up on YouTube. Just because I like doing it.