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!

One of the things I tell clients is that the best marketing doesn’t come from you, it comes from others. Whether you’re selling a novel you’ve written, your services as a writer or editor, or indeed just about anything else I can imagine, if someone has not yet heard of you (your book, your company, etc.), then it’s important to make sure they get the best possible picture of it.

I was reminded of this all over again recently, when I received a flurry of emails requesting my services, as well as an appreciable uptick in sales of one of my novels. What really stood out with this year-end activity was the stated reason for contacting me. In the case of the services, it was all about the testimonials from others that are posted on my website. In the case of the book, it appeared to correspond with a number of recent favortable reviews.

It’s all about word of mouth.

We’re fortunate to be living and working in an age where social media can help our marketing efforts. As marketers continue to puzzle out the precise return on investment they’re getting from their social media work, and fret about how to monetize Facebook, it’s refreshing to consider this newest use of the oldest form of marketing: word of mouth. We all ask our family and friends to tell us where to shop, what hairdresser to use, which book to read next. Participating in a forum where that pool of people offering suggestions is much, much larger can only be helpful to the marketer … as long as he or she is willing to put in the time and effort to ask past and current clients (or readers) for help.

The reality is that only those people who really loved or really hated something will speak up about it spontaneously. Most of the rest of us need to be prodded.

So for 2012, try something new. Ask your audience to help you. If you did a good job for them, then they undoubtedly will; if your novel was a great read, then they undoubtedly will. Make the effort to reach out and stay in touch: you’ll not only have a lot more marketing success, but you’ll also 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!

How does it work?

1. Write an article first. Make it a decent article, one that contains useful information for people interested in your subject. Make sure to include any keywords you’re targeting in the article, but don’t overdo it — some of the article directories won’t allow overuse of keywords.
2. If you’re an author, what you do want to do is submit fairly short articles highlighting something (an angle about your book perhaps) that it reads like a mini-infomercial. These are then copied by people looking for content for their websites, newsletters, blogs, etc. The trick is that when they copy the article they are required to keep the “resource box” or “author bio” intact. It is here that you list yourself, your book/website/blog, and put in the links (usually a maximum of three). You not only get links via the article directories that you submit to, but if anyone uses your article, you get more links.
3. Submit the article. At the end of the article, there’s usually a space for a signature line of sorts: this is where you can provide the link back to your website. Change the sig line you use so that you can point to specific pages within your website — search engines like that.
4. If you want the same article to be on your blog, go ahead — just be sure to post it to your blog first, before you put it on the article directory site. That will keep you from being penalized for duplicate content. Wait for a couple of weeks before re-posting to the articles sites, and change the title and some of the content.
5. Article directories are generally free, though some will charge for faster service or for more prominent placement. In my experience, it’s not useful to pay these extra charges; just keep a flow of articles going out and providing links back to your blog or website.
6. Remember that these directories aren’t like magazines or journals. There’s some editorial screening, but it’s mostly to be sure that the article is on topic and not over-using keywords. You may not be in great literary company on the sites, but that’s not the point: it’s to get the links to your site. HOWEVER … don’t think this means you can be messy or submit anything but your best work — that sort of thing will come back to haunt you. Besides, you may wish to give the article URL to potential clients, etc., to show your thought leadership in your vertical. Often, as I mentioend above, these articles will be copied by others looking for content, which is good — they’re required to maintain the link back to you and your name on the piece, and this increases both backlinks and your reputation — but it means that you really can’t make this a halfhearted attempt at writing. If you don’t have a writer on staff, contract with a freelance writer: you won’t regret it.

Where do you find these directories? Here as always, Google is your friend: in about thirty seconds I found this list.

Squidoo is its own little world. Here your article takes the form of what they call a “lens,” that’s like a mini-website. You can use photos, videos, all sorts of things in your lens; they’re fun to create and you can use the lens as a calling-card to potential clients or readers.

So there it is. Use article directories to boost your visibility on the web. And then you’ll be … beyond the elements of style!