Her secret? It’s all in the scheduling.

These days, Anastasia charts out her free time so that blocks of it can be devoted to various projects and bring them to completion within her deadlines. Sounds a lot like the time issues that freelancers in general, and writers in particular, need to deal with every day!

Do you find yourself pulling an all-nighter when your deadlines are looming? Wasting time at the front end of a project and then scrambling to get caught up? Juggling several projects poorly so that none of them gets your full attention?

Scheduling may be your problem, too.

So let’s talk about creating a schedule that works for you … and your clients, as well!

The first step is recognizing when you work best. One of the freedoms of freelance work is the ability to choose your hours … so choose them! I’ve found that I am the most focused and the most energetic in the mornings, so I’m up early and at my desk before most people have even hit the first snooze. I have an artist friend who is starting to wind down and go to bed at about the time I’m waking up. We all have internal clocks that tell us when we’re at our bast: take advantage of that and schedule your most difficult, most intense work for when you’re at your best and brightest.

Block time out for social media. I’m serious. Facebook may keep you in touch with your virtual water cooler, but checking it all day is a time sink. On the other hand, social media is about the best marketing tool that many of us have, and using it consistently and correctly is a strong path to success. So block out some time and be armed with a list for what you want to accomplish during your social media marketing periods.

Speaking of periods, many people find it easier to work in increments, rather than all at once. There are a lot of good reasons to do this. It keeps your mind fresh and your body rested. It keeps you from developing tunnel vision around a project so that you’re less effective at it. Working in pre-determined blocks of time will allow you to step away from your work, do some stretches, drink some juice, and clear your head before continuing.

While you’re blocking time out, remember to reserve some for client interactions. Again, this can take up your whole day if you let it, so resolve to check your email once an hour, and set aside the next ten minutes for responding to those emails that need instant input. Put your telephone calls together, too, and let your clients know when you’re available to them … and, perhaps more importantly, unavailable!

Scheduling your work will keep you in charge of it … and keep it from being in charge of you! Try it, and you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Note that I said “seen as an authority.” The sad reality is that the internet has changed the way we perceive others. The person who has invested years of her life to become an expert is easily supplanted by a Jane-come-lately who knows how to wrap Google around her little finger.

Authority is about perception. What people say about you is more important than what you say about yourself.

So whether you really are an expert, or you want people to think you are, here are some steps to getting there:

• Forget selling, it’s about teaching. The “hard sell” may still work when it’s a Jeep or a Honda you’re selling, but it doesn’t work in the internet world. What is valued online is content, knowledge, information. Use your website and your social media posts to teach people about your field of expertise. The more they see you teaching, the more authority you’ll be given.
• Content is king. Providing lots of foundational content that changes frequently will help you become the go-to authority in your field.
• Provide strong headlines. Most writers don’t think in terms of headlines, but they’re essential. Without a great headline, no one will even get as far as reading your content.
• Find your ambassadors. Every time you have a positive experience with a client, reader, or customer, use that person for a reference, referral, or testimonial. If you don’t ask, they won’t offer. Remind them to tell others about how great you are.
• Make them ask for you. In the heyday of direct-mail marketing, the power was in the list. Guess what——it’s still true! Whether you manage an opt-in email list (you can call it a newsletter if you’d feel more comfortable with that), have people subscribing
  to your blog, or accumulate followers on Twitter, the more people request contact from you, the higher your authority ranking will be.
• Don’t neglect SEO. Search engine optimization is still real. It needs to be integrated with social media, but it’s still one of the most important things you can do to boost the authority of your site.
• Take care of your people. Getting followers and subscribers is just the beginning. You need to be available to them, keep your updates current with them, and interact with them. The more you do, the more they’ll follow.

And that’s it. Not all that difficult, is it? The key to becoming (and staying!) an authority isn’t any kind of esoteric knowledge, but just going through these simple steps … and then doing them over and over again. Try it and see how it works for you! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

So. Content and optimization go hand-in-hand. Web content is ideally produced with search engine optimization principles in mind; going back in later and “editing for SEO” generally produces results with which no one is happy.

The first rule is to create good content, quality content, content that says something. Many websites contain contentless verbiage, which will not help either in terms of being user-friendly or in terms of being SEO-friendly. Good content attracts attention, inbound links, and other referrals. When the site is getting discussed on other sites, in blogs and in emails, the search engines notice the activity. More “buzz” brings more people to the site.

Some other SEO considerations to take into account when creating content:

Changing content: the more frequently you can add new content to a site, the better it is for your search engine ranking. A constant influx of new content keeps the web crawlers revising the weight they’re giving your site. One easy way to do this is to maintain a blog, or several blogs, on the site, and update them regularly (daily, if possible; weekly as a minimum). Blogs add additional weight when they’re equipped with RSS feeds and submitted to specialized blog directories. Other options for changing content are articles placed on the site, a rotating set of tips (that can include your targeted keywords), a letter from the CEO, etc.

Remember that search engines crawl every page, so the same attention should be paid to every page as is paid to your home page. Some visitors will deep-link in, meaning that they never even see the home page, so make sure that every page has a point. Great content always answers the question: so what? … and then adds a call to action to that answer.

Great content engages users, stays on-theme, provides users with a logical path for site navigation, and provides high conversion rates. This is obvious in making the site user-friendly, but it also makes the site SEO-friendly in giving each page a “theme” (through a natural use of keywords and other content) onto which the web crawlers can latch.

Make the visitor the focus of each page (in a sense, this goes back to the “so what?” question: what can this page do for me?). When people put keywords into the search field, they’re looking for something specific: make sure that the appropriate page tells them whether or not you can give them what they want, clearly and unequivocally.

Along the same lines, write about benefits for the visitor. This isn’t the place to say how great you are: if you meet a prospect’s needs, then you’re great from their point of view … and that’s all that matters.

One way to make sure that your site is doing what you want it to do is to make a list of all the pages on the site. Look at each one individually. Is each one action-oriented? Does it answer the “so what?” question and provide a clear call to action?

Put it up, try it out. The great thing about websites is their flexibility. If something isn’t working, take it down and try something else. Solicit input from current clients/customers. What other content would they like to see there? What’s helpful and what isn’t?

Forget marketspeak. Those of you accustomed to writing copy IN CAPITAL LETTERS with lots of exclamation marks—lose it. It’s not good SEO and, frankly, it’s not a great use of language either.

You may wish to use a content analyzer at some point in the process. Content analyzers can provide useful data for making your pages more effective. Content analyzers can alert you to broken links and analyze your pages for duplicate content. (The analyzer shows the similarity percentage among all the pages on your site, so you can see what pages are similar enough to trigger a flag in the major search engines. Your site will be penalized if it displays too much duplicate content. The higher the similarity, the more likely you will be penalized.)

Know your audience. Know the people who are likely to be searching for your site, and the phrases and ideas to which they will respond. Again, this makes your site user-friendly … and web crawler-friendly too.

You want to start with great keywords, but be sure not to overuse them. If the content doesn’t sound natural, then chances are you’ve leaned too hard on the same group of keywords. Derivations of your targeted keywords can enlarge your audience, or encourage visitors to dig deeper into the site.

It shouldn’t have to be said, but make sure that all of your content is grammatically correct and conforms to the rules of American English usage. Errors may drive potential customers or clients away. On the other hand, be sure to include common misspellings of terms used in your pages in your meta tags—because people enter all sorts of things into the search fields!

Usability is a design issue, a content issue, and a search optimization issue. On each page, ask yourself: what is the most important thing that you want visitors to do? Make that the easiest thing to do, explained with the most clear and vivid language available.

It’s not only the quality of content that matters; quantity is also very important. People search for a huge variety of words in all sorts of combinations. The more text you have, the more chance that some particular phrase will match the exact phrase being searched for. Moreover, some search engines also place importance on quantity: they assume that a large website has had more effort put into development and is more likely to be high quality. (This may or may not be true, of course; but in this case it’s what the search engines “believe” that matters.) So take care to look for both quality and quantity of website content.

Stay away from the “free content” sites that offer gadgets and miscellaneous information (word of the day, quote of the day, etc.) unless that gadget or that information is clearly relevant to your site. The same goes for newsfeeds. Make sure that all of your content is both relevant and of good quality, really useful to anyone who might be a customer or client.

What about if your site isn’t naturally content-rich? Business sites in particular (both B-to-B and B-to-C) may see their sites as not being content-based. Be creative! Whatever you sell, there’s something you can say about it. A florist can provide articles about flowers; a furniture store can do a series on cleaning or repair. You can write about semiconductors, at a pinch. Look for the movers and shakers in your industry and invite them to write for you. If you really think about it, there are very few sites whose raison d’etre cannot generate some content.

Will this bring visitors to your site? You’d be surprised. Being seen as an information and authority site gets you bookmarked in customers’ browsers, and they will buy from sites they have learned to trust. If you cannot find content out there, and don’t have the time/skills to write it yourself, hire a copywriter to help you out.

Conclusion? Google is clearly rewarding good content, and a lot of the best-ranked sites out there have one thing in common—good writing. Make sure that you make it a priority. Content-based search engine optimization is usually hard work in the initial stages and—here’s your warning!—slow to show results. It is likely, however, to give you the best and most stable long-term results; and, once established, is relatively easy to maintain.

Want more? Be sure to visit Customline Wordware and sign up for Content Central, a free newsletter filled with tips, examples, and articles about providing SEO-friendly content! Or contact me at info@customline.com for your own content consultation. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Here are my picks for this week:

• Mashable, an always-excellent resource, brings us seven sites that might help you smooth out your online presence. Are you known by your author name in one place and your book title in another? Is your business your main username, or do you sometimes just use your name? What part of your name? Check out the options at Mashable’s article and see if they can help you make sense of it all.
• A company that would like you to sign up for its services (you don’t have to) offers this helpful guide for lots of diffrent types of sites—from monitoring services to conversation tracking—on one page. Don’t underestimate the conversation tracking part of the equation: inbound marketing is becoming the expression du jour, and finding out what your clients want (based on conversations you “overhear” on social media sites) is very much the New Marketing paradigm. If you want, for example, to find out where your clients “hang out,” you can check out the servics offered at Rapleaf.

So there they are. Spend a few minutes on both of these pages and see if they don’t jump-start thoughts about and plans for your own social media strategy! And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!

Remember as you browse the first rule of social media: there’s no one-size-fits-all here. Some of these sites may interest you; many of them will not. And that’s as it should be, because you don’t want to spend all of your time online! Explore the sites at your leisure, see which ones seem to work for you, try them out. If you don’t like one site, move on.

And if you find more to add to the list, drop me an email at jcezanne@customline.com and let me know!

• Literature Map: Gnooks is a self-adapting community system based on the gnod engine. Discover new writers you will like, travel the map. of literature and discuss your favorite books and authors.
• Book Glutton: Read books online with other people—suggest books, discuss books, see who’s reading what. Sign on as a glutton and take the video tour!
• Library Thing: So if you feel a need to catalogue your personal library online, Library Thing is the place for you. You can do it here, and then connect with others whose libraries you like. Note that there’s a fee once you pass 200 books.
• Good Reads: Another book cataloguing site. Also offer some great lists and trivia. (As I write this, Twilight is simultaneously on the “best books ever” and “worst books ever” lists, so it’s even-handed!)
• Author’s Den: From the site: “While some of the other sites focus on readers, here’s one that focuses on authors as well. From the site: “The largest most vibrant free online literary community of authors and readers! Visited by 1,400,000+ readers/mo.” It claims that authors “willreach many readers” and that readers
  can “discover, interact, get personal, buy and read!”
• Red Room says that it’s “where the writers are,” and explains, “Red Room provides authors and members with free, easy-to-use, elegant online homes. It’s a place for the literary community to promote their work, express themselves, and connect with their favorite authors.”
• Swap Tree is a book- (and music-, DVD-, and video-game-) swapping community. Have a book you want to trade for another? This is the place for you!
• We Read: Ger personalized recommendations for books, share your recommendations with others. Includes discussion forums.
• Write Lit“aims to bring writers and readers together from all parts of the globe. It seeks to help the writer — technical, commercial, and literary — earn a living, and find audiences for his work. Furthermore, it aims to provide a venue for readers to share their passion for the written word.”
• Authonomy: This is a community sponsored by HarperCollins UK that “invites unpublished and self published authors to post their manuscripts for visitors to read online. Authors create their own personal page on the site to host their project – and must make at least 10,000 words available for the public to read. Visitors to authonomy can comment on these submissions – and can personally recommend their favourites to the community. authonomy counts the number of recommendations each book receives, and uses it to rank the books on the site. It also spots which visitors consistently recommend the best books – and uses that info to rank the most influential trend spotters.”
• Writers’ News/Writing Magazine: This is a singularly useful site, a clearinghouse for a number of different activities: competitions, classes, book discussions, forums, links … it’s all here.
• Bookworm: a blog that celebrates books and reading with lovely enthusiastic reviews by the author, Lubya Kably.
• Media Bistro: Though not strictly an author/reader sort of site, Media Bistro is a community that can be useful to writers looking to improve skills, get jobs, and connect with other media professionals. They have local chapters throughout the United States that offer get-togethers in person.
• Book Marketing Network, part of the whole Ning family of social networks, describes itself as being “for book authors, self-publishers, book publishers, publicists, marketers, and others involved in writing, publishing, and marketing books.” Includes, in true social media style, something for everyone—photos, videos, discussion boards, events, and blogs.
• The Book Place, also a Ning community, features a blog, podcasts, reviews, and discussion.
• Writers Digest: the online community associated with the grande dame of aspiring writers’ magazines, Writers Digest , the site offers some social networking but mostly supports the magazine. Online subscriptions are available.
• Gaia Community: once you join the community you’ll have access to the books section. Very useful if you’re interested in spirituality and healing topics.

In addition to the list above, there is a Facebook application called Visual Bookshelf that you can access from inside Facebook. It’s another community that shares reading lists and reviews.

So that’s it for now! I’ll update this list periodically, as community life on the Net is always changing, always growing … but this should get you started. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!