March 2008

I’ve received a few emails this week with a common theme: “I’ve never had anything published. How do I get clips?” and “What’s your opinion on writing for free to get experience?”

I’m a big believer in writing for non-profits. Want to write for free to get clips? Write for a charity. Non-profit organizations are in desperate need of volunteers, and they can usually always use a good writer regardless of experience level. Whether it’s website or print copy, a blog, press release writing, grant writing, journalism or business writing, if you’re skilled, you could put your talents to good use for an organization that needs a hand.

Writing for charity looks good on your portfolio/resume, and doing this will keep you from being tempted to succumb to the temptation to write for unknown start-up sites only looking to take advantage of writers. So, how can you get non-profit writing jobs?

Ask around locally or search online. Kids’ schools and activities might be a good place to start. If you’re involved in religious organizations, ask around there. If you know of a good local charity, call them up, or go on their website and email them. Many charities have a volunteer coordinator, and that person can guide you. If you can’t find anything locally or want to branch out more, and you have something specific in mine, try googling around a bit. Search for the type of charity you want, scan the website for the volunteer section and get in touch.

VolunteerMatch.org is a good place to start your search if you don’t have a charity in mind to pitch your services to. Start at http://www.volunteermatch.org/results/ and in the “distance” dropdown list scroll to “virtual.” Or if you want to work on-site locally, there’s that option too. Play around with the keywords. I’ve found plenty of web writing and blogging gigs, although the majority of requests there do tend to be on the grant writing side.

If your searches fail, ask me. I do a good amount of charitable writing work, and I usually know people who are looking. If you’re new but talented, the American Foundation for Children with AIDS probably wouldn’t turn you away, especially if you’re a web writer or a blogger. Their executive director Tanya is one of the nicest people I’ve ever worked for. If you want other ideas, let me know (here in the comments, or by email).

For those of you who have written for non-profits, do you have any words of wisdom to share? Has writing for charity helped boost your freelance writing career?

If you’re an aspiring freelance blogger (i.e., you want to get paid to blog for other people), you might want to pay a visit to my new post at Performancing. Although some of this might be redundant if you’ve caught my bold moves and pitching posts, there are some added tips those new to the freelance blogging game might appreciate. (And there’s some new humor in there for those of you who only love me for my snark.)

See: Freelance Blogging Jobs Everybody Wants and How to Get Them

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The first time I saw the term link baiting I thought, “This stinks. Everyone’s already telling me I need higher Page Rank, better SEO, a flashier web design, better RSS feeds, and a Wordpress blog. Now I’ve got to buy waders?” But, being the kind of gal who likes to know what the trends are before I decide not to conform to them, I sought out posts on this whole link baiting thing. And I was a little disappointed.

All the posts said “Write posts people want to read.” Um (if I may bring back a word from the ’80’s) duh?

Some said make lists. Some said cause controversy. Some said study your stats to see when most people visit. All of this with a goal of getting stumbled, dugg, linked to across Blog World so we’ll rank higher, look better, bring in better ads. But for what? Our fickle friend Google can take it all away tomorrow. Does anyone who reads our blogs really care what Google says about us anymore?

Link bait, to me, seemed like a bigger deal than it was. Like the term problogger, it sounded important until I realized it wasn’t.

For bloggers whose ad sales are based on Page Rank, I say conform away. Grab your poles, bait those hooks, reel in the biggest fish you can get. My fisherman’s hat is off to you.

But for bloggers who blog for the sake of blogging? Let’s hope we’re already writing some posts people want to read. If others link to those posts, pass them through the social media highways, cut them up and serve them for supper, fabulous. If not, is it a loss worth losing sleep over?

I recently read a post by Mark Knowles at Blogging Tips on link baiting. Talking about a post that brought him a good amount of Stumble traffic, he said, “Apart from the fact that this is what I actually believe, I really wrote this to get it out of my system.”

As I commented to Mark, these are what I call “inspired rants.” These are the types of posts that draw in the most traffic on my blogs too. Maybe the best link bait, just like the best ranked web content, is best because it was constructed for success by accident?

I don’t know. I’ve never been a good fisherman. I’ve always enjoyed holding the pole and looking out onto the water more than I’ve enjoyed reeling in the fish. And on the rare occasion I catch something, I usually throw it back.

Have you had any success with linkbaiting? Was your success planned or accidental?

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“There is really only one
reason for doing anything:
To be born, and reborn,
and live in between
the deaths.”
(final stanza of Cin Salach’s poem “After Birth”)

I know it’s against the Cardinal Rules of Blogland for a writer to blog about poetry, but nothing except this poem really illustrates what I want to say. And I’ve never been very good at keeping commandments.

Writing is my life. It’s what I spent most of my waking hours doing. When I’m not writing, I’m thinking about writing. I dream about writing, and I steal ideas from my dreams to write about.

I’ve always fully believed there are only two real reasons we write: it’s your passion or it’s your job. Sometimes the two combine; I write for work and for pleasure.

Last night on the train ride home from the city, I sat next to a writer. I recognized her by the two pencils in her hair and the stack of library books she had to move for me to sit down. She broke the Unspoken Train Code by speaking to me (outside the allowed “excuse me” or “bless you”). For forty minutes, we talked about writing. In forty minutes, what she said to me is this:

“What all writers have in common is we write to communicate. Without communication, we can’t live. We write to save our own lives.”

And it makes sense. From e-commerce copy to poetry, outstanding writing communicates best because it reaches the reader. Whether it’s to obey the muse or to pay the rent, we write to save our own lives.

This might not sound as brilliant to you as it did to me, but I was really in awe of this idea. I jotted it down in my “things to blog about” notes. I took the notion to bed with me last night.

When I woke up, I had a stanza of poetry running through my head:

“This is not a clean place.
There are not drawers
to fit everything.
Sometimes the rubbish
piles up so high, it is
taller than me.
It could be a forest.”

I knew it wasn’t from one of my own poems, but I couldn’t place whose it was. On an OCD, BC (before coffee) mission, I had to dig through a stack of thirty or so poetry books to find it. When I finally did, I wasn’t surprised to find it was the opening stanza of the poem I quoted above.

The poem is about life, not writing. But I think for many of us the two are synonymous.

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