10 Best Articles for Writers – September 2011

Lately, I’ve been talking to a lot of freelance writers who have great portfolios but low incomes. Which I guess is why I have sales and marketing on the brain in this edition of our monthly Top 10.
These are all pretty recent vintage…seems like the last 10 days or so were red-hot for interesting articles on the business of writing. Lots of new folks here to follow, too.
Enjoy!

1. 10 Ways to Get Your Affiliates to Sell the Crap Out of Your Product by Barrie Davenport on A-List Blog Marketing. This one makes a nice companion piece to my own recent post of affiliate marketing tips.
2. Action! Can Our Hollywood Experiment Help You Make Money Blogging? by Joke and Biagio, on Problogger. You think you’ve heard every way to monetize a blog…but this couple have a unique model. Check it out.
3. Cold Calling for Freelance Writers by Linda Stephens, on The WM Freelance Writers Connection. This one makes a nice complement to the recent guest post I had here about cold calling by volume cold-caller Sarah Maurer.
4. Create an About Page for Your Blog That’s a Secret Freelance Sales Weapon — by Michael Martine of Remarkablogger. Most writer website About pages truly suck. They start, “I’ve wanted to write ever since I was 5…” and go downhill from there. Here’s a guide to how to give your About page a radical rewrite and make it into a real client magnet. NOTE: This article is no longer up at Remarkablogger.
5. Does Your Networking Come Across as Stalking? by Jennifer Mattern on All Freelance Writing. Learn how to keep those boundaries healthy, people.
6. Sickly Sales Page? Try These 3 Copywriting Remedies by Amy Harrison on Copyblogger. I love the simple analogy here for how to make sales pages better. A great short course here on copywriting, all in one post.
7. Should You Unfollow Everyone on Twitter? — by Laura Click of Blue Kite Marketing, on Pushing Social. Radical action! But I’ve been thinking about doing it, since I don’t have time to scroll back through the 500 people I’m following to cull the list down. To me you want it to be just about 3-4 dozen terrific thought leaders, so you have an amazing tweetstream. But then I keep spotting new people I think I should check out…and the next thing you know, it’s a mess again.
8. Stop Selling and Start Telling — How Clarity Trumps Persuasion for Getting Sales by D Bnonn Tennant on KISSmetrics. This one makes a nice complement to Amy’s post above.
9. The Top 5 Things That Bother Me About This Headline by Alissa Walker on Good Technology. Finally, someone discusses how Google has crushed the creativity out of article headlines.
10. Word Count Limit Got You Down? Try These 6 Editing Tricks by Barbara Diggs on The Expat Freelancer. Here’s a great, short primer on how to write tight — which you should do whether your hitting your word limit or not.

Bonus news: For those who don’t already know, Copyblogger’s Jon Morrow has started a new site, Boost Blog Traffic. It’s not launched yet. But you want to register. If you have not yet experienced Jon’s genius, check out this awesome trailer on the home page for why you want to sign up .