Jentrepreneur

My 14 Day E-book Writing Challenge

Back on January 18th, I launched a 14 day e-book writing challenge on my freelance writing blog. The idea was simple: to encourage people to really get moving with their e-book ideas while being able to support each other along the way.

Interestingly, I’ve seen people say 14 days is far too much time for this challenge, and just today I saw some comments on another blog about it saying that 14 days is too little time to write a quality e-book. What are your thoughts on that?

Personally, I think it’s more than adequate. I wrote my first e-book (albeit short), and had it online ready for sale, within just five hours.

I’m obviously writing an e-book during the challenge (although not the longer one I’ve been slowly working on about pre-launch book publicity). I’m not going to go into too much detail about it other than to say that it’s targeting freelance writers.

Although I’ll be detailing the process a little bit over at All Freelance Writing, I’ll likely be updated here at Jentrepreneur regarding sales and such after the fact. What I know for now is that I’m not going with a traditionally long-form e-book sales letter, I’m using e-junkie as my payment processor / delivery service, and I’ll be setting up an affiliate program (my first, so that’s bound to be an experience).

Wish me luck, and if you have any tips along the way (especially the post-publishing area or dealing with affiliate marketing), feel free to let me know.

Posted in Jenn's Work, e-books | 1 Comment »

SERP Challenge for Two Blogs

I don’t spend too much time generally worrying about SEO. I don’t believe in mass-link-building (prefer my links naturally as much as possible), and it’s worked well enough for me so far.

However, I’ve noticed that a specific blog of mine (my freelance writing blog) was doing decently in the SERPs for a few pretty basic terms, and so I’m challenging myself to get top ten rankings for them.

Here are the sites:

AllFreelanceWriting.com
AllFreelanceWritingJobs.com

Note: The second domain was just broken off of the main domain a day or two ago, so it will take a little while to get in the SERPs at all, and all placements listed below are for the first domain.

Here are the keyword phrases (and current rankings):

Freelance Writing - 16
Freelance Writing Jobs - 11 (this result should hopefully be replaced by the new domain)
Freelance Writing Gigs - 8 6 (I’d like to get this in the top 10 with the new domain; preferably the top 5)
Freelance Writers - 17

I also target “writing forums” and “freelance writing forums” for a subdomain - writingforums.AllFreelanceWriting.com. It’s currently ranked 4 and 5 respectively for those terms. I’ve used the second domain above in the past, and it always ranked extremely well for the targeted terms, so I have high hopes for it (it’s why I revived it and pulled the jobs off of the main domain again).

Wish me luck.

EDIT: Not even 24 hours after I just posted my positions in the SERPs for these keyword phrases, and my blog seems to be completely wiped from the results for those terms (not de-indexed though). Now why the hell would that happen? It doesn’t feel like coincidence, but who knows? Can you think of any reason it would happen right after I posted here? I know Google’s completely wonky at the moment anyway b/c of the apparent pagerank update that’s taking forever to finish, so I’m hoping it’s something that just passes in a few days. I suppose we’ll see. If nothing else, I was reminded why I don’t waste a ton of time on SEO, and instead focus on more reliable traffic generation (like publicity, networking, and building word-of-mouth exposure by building a reputation in my niches). For the record… I despise Google… pretty much always have… probably always will.

EDIT 2: Some interesting updates:

1. The rankings have pretty much corrected themselves (updated numbers above for any that changed). Hopefully they’ll stay that way. (The new domain isn’t ranking at all for the targeted keywords yet.)

2. If they don’t, I’m fine with that too. While I can’t explain it, my traffic increased significantly for the first two days after disappearing from the SERPs, and then went right back to normal ranges thereafter - so the Google traffic lost was more than made up for by some good old fashioned promotion and word-of-mouth.

3. I do still despise Google. I’m not a fair weather fan. I also don’t have many plans to do a ton of SEO work other than trying to improve rankings on these few keywords. Quality content will definitely stay the primary focus.

Posted in Case Studies, Jenn's Work, seo | No Comments »

Revisiting Magazine Style Wordpress Themes

A while back, I highlighted some of my favorite non-blog / magazine style Wordpress themes. There have been quite a few additions since that time, so I’d like to revisit it, showing you some of my favorite premium and free magazine style Wordpress themes.

Premium Magazine Style Wordpress Themes

Some of these premium magazine style Wordpress themes completely kick ass. They can be a bit more difficult to work with than a simple blog-style theme, but they’re more than worth their small cost if you want to run an online magazine, news site, or simply use Wordpress as a full-blown CMS.

Revolution Theme - From Brian Gardner (I’m using this on the re-designed version of my indie music webzine at AudioXposure.com.)

Revolution News Theme - Another from Brian Gardner

Revolution Sports Theme - From Brian Gardner

Revolution Magazine Theme - More Brian Gardner goodness

Revolution Tech Theme - Guess who made this one.

Simplicity 1.0 - From Michael Pollack at SoloStream.com. (I’m still using a slightly modified version of this theme over at NakedPR.com.)

Deadwood - From GraphPaperPress

Berlin - Also from GraphPaperPress

Gridline News - A nice news-based theme from GraphPaperPress

Gridline Magazine - More from GraphPaperPress

Visualization - One more from GraphPaperPress (for the record, the next time I need a premium magazine-style theme, I’ll more than likely give these guys a try).

WP-Remix - Looks like you could do just about anything with this theme.

Free Magazine Style Wordpress Themes

OK. Now let’s give you what you really want… the coolest FREE magazine style Wordpress themes currently out there (there are others out there, but these are by far the best I’ve seen yet):

The Morning After

Structure (I’m currently using a slightly modified version of this one to re-do a site for a musician I’m working with.)

Mimbo (I’m currently using this one on my free press release writing guide site.)

Visionary 

Posted in Blogging | 1 Comment »