About Paula Atwell

Paula Atwell (aka lakeerieartists), the owner of a small local gallery, Lake Erie Artists Gallery, in Cleveland, Ohio, is an artist, author, and a lover of all things vintage. You can follow Paula on Twitter.

Writing Content: Should You Hire Someone or Write It Yourself

May 18, 2012 By Paula Atwell 1 Comment

There comes a point in time for any online business owner where they have to decide how much of their business they can run themselves, and how much they need to delegate. I found myself in that position last year, and as an adjunct to that, with a limited supply of funds to pay another person to delegate tasks to.

When a writer comes to this point in their career, a decision must be made. Do they want to limit the amount of writing they do online, or do they want to hire other contract or freelance writers to do the writing that does not have to have their personal touch. Do they want to manage other writers’ work, and their own, or do they want full creative control of their business.

This is a very tough call, for several reasons. Most of us feel a connection with our own writing, and therefore do not want to give that up. We may not want to spend our hard earned money to buy another writer’s work. And we may not want to lose the creative flow of information that comes from our sites.

However, there are some good reasons to hire a freelance writer to do some of your content writing for you.

Hiring another writer to do the easier writing will free you up to take on new challenges.
You will be able to expand your online earnings with that many more articles, ebooks, and content online.
Over time, you will be able to provide another writer with a chance to earn money writing only.
You will have more time to put into new projects, larger projects, and in depth projects that take your concentration.

There is absolutely nothing immoral or illegal in hiring another writer to write your content for you. This is something that businesses do all the time, just like they hire accountants to do their accounting, and artists to do their murals. Writing is a skill, and you can find skillful writers in the marketplace with some searching. There are several freelance writer websites, and you may even already know someone that would be interested in making some extra money from you.

I have found that when hiring another person to write for you, you will find that some people do not have a style of writing that you like, while others may not understand what you are trying to do with your content. Find the right match to your concepts, ideas, and creative development of content, and work with them. Do not feel pressured to work with everyone who tries to get you to hire them.

If you want to expand, but feel that you need to clone yourself to do so, then you might be ready to hire another person to do some of what you do. This is just a step in growth of a business. If you do not want to hire someone, then it is time to examine what you are doing, and cut back on what is not important to you.

Filed Under: Writing for Web

Marketing and Advertising: Why Do People Pay for Services That They Can Get for Free?

April 6, 2012 By Paula Atwell 1 Comment

I have had many people say to me that they do not understand why people pay for services that they can do themselves. I thought that I would discuss this issue.

Let me give you an example:

I am an author, and an expert on writing online, however, sometimes I pay someone else to write articles for me. Why do I do this? It all comes down to taking a look at the bottom line, and what activities bring in the most money in income. Since I am one person, and there are only so many hours each day that I can effectively work, I need to decide which activities I need to do myself, which others can do, and if it is cost effective for me to pay someone else. The cost analysis is not always how much I can earn today, but how much I can earn in 6 to 12 months time from that work.

This is how I look at the tasks that I do each day, and figure out if I can delegate them to another person. I often delegate filing paperwork to an assistant because they can do a good job, and I can do a good job at a income generating task while they are filing.

Just because something is free, does not mean that it is truly free to you. If an artist can create an ad in an hour that would take me 10 hours to create for free, that is 9 wasted hours that I could have been doing something else. Unless the fee is extremely high, it is much more efficient for me to pay someone else to do that job.

The bigger your business gets, the more you have to delegate. Sometimes the person you delegate to, does not do the job the same way you do. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they do not do as good of a job. Even if they do not do the job as well as you do, did they do it well enough to allow you the freedom to do what you do best?

Filed Under: Marketing and Advertising Tagged With: advertising, delegating, marketing, paying for services, promotion, word of mouth

Why I am So Impressed With the Entire Wizzley Team

February 18, 2012 By Paula Atwell 7 Comments

Last year, in the wake of the Panda changes, a new website was born called Wizzley. Wizzley was created by three people that I knew from Squidoo, Achim “Chef Keem” Thiemermann, Anne Corcino, alias nightowl, and Ron Passfield, and two young German developers, Simon Steinberger and Hans Braxmeier, who I didn’t know, but who had previously created PageWizz, a German site.

The idea behind Wizzley was to take the best parts of other article sites like Squidoo and Hubpages, and create a new site that would be viable after Panda, and would be easy to use for publishers and readers, and have excellent technology behind it. I was lucky enough to get on Wizzley before the site went public, and when I was first making my way around Wizzley, there were plenty of bugs, and German phrases floating around. Right from the start, I was impressed by the priorities the Wizzley team had to keep the site highly functional, and fast, while taking care of problems literally in a wiz.

Wizzley is about 9 months old now, and has really taken off from its promising beginning. In their most recent development, Wizzley has implemented something that members of Squidoo and Hubpages have asked for years ago, which is access to other affiliate programs beyond Amazon and Ebay. Wizzley has done this by partnering with VigLink, an affiliate distributor that works with many of the large retailers that are familiar as household names.

Wizzley is still in its infancy. It is not even one year old. However, if they keep progressing at the rate they have been, there is no question that they will continue to be a leader in the online publishing field. One of the main reasons that Wizzley has been so successful is the fact that the Wizzley team actually listens to their membership. They want to retain a high quality publisher team, and to keep them, they are taking suggestions, keeping out the spammers, and working to keep the quality of the articles on the site high.

Simon and Hans have been extremely responsive to developmental issues and bugs. They do not do everything that is suggested, but they do tell people why if they don’t. ChefKeem is the public face of the staff, keeping an eye on the articles, and the forum. And Anne, is a serene moderating presence in the forums and in tutorials. At this time, Ron has not been taking an active role.

Because of the team behind Wizzley, the site is attracting experienced publishers, who do not have to taught how to write online. Many of the publishers are experienced authors from several other sites, which means that they jump on the news and changes so fast, it is incredible. If you have been waiting to see how Wizzley does, I would say, don’t wait any more. This site is here to stay, and it is a lot of fun. And not only that, members are already making money.

I do not think that I can say enough good things about the team behind Wizzley. I am just glad to have the opportunity to work with them each and every day, and to see where their agile minds are taking us.

Filed Under: Writing Online Editorial Tagged With: anne corcino, chefkeem, editorial, publishers, Wizzley, writing online

Marketing and Advertising: Word of Mouth

February 13, 2012 By Paula Atwell Leave a Comment

The old adage is that word of mouth is the best advertising. That is true when the word of mouth is coming from satisfied customers. Word of mouth is also the worst kind of advertising when it comes from angry customers. Therefore, we should all aim to satisfy, please, or astound our customers over and over again.

The new term for word of mouth is “horizontal advertising” which Seth Godin talks about in his latest post here. With the electronic ways of spreading the word, the word of mouth has turned into a very fast method of getting your message across, but only if people want to send it. While you may have lost some of the control of your advertising this way, you gain satisfaction. The bottom line is that the people who will spread your message are people who love your business.

It all comes back to pleasing the customer, and the power is in the hands of the customer. But isn’t that where it has always been anyway? Companies only fool themselves if they think that they are in control of their marketing and success. The customer is spending their hard earned money on your product or service. By making them happy, everyone wins. And then they will tell their friends about you.

Therefore, you need to be able to clearly delineate what you can or cannot do for a customer, then follow through and do it. When you think of how many times a vendor has disappointed you, you will realized how valuable those simple steps are.

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Filed Under: Marketing and Advertising Tagged With: advertising, marketing, promotion, seth godin, word of mouth

Marketing and Advertising: Cost of Doing Business

February 6, 2012 By Paula Atwell 3 Comments

Doing business does not come free. There is always a cost to do business. The trick is to weigh the cost against the benefit that you receive. One of the most difficult aspects of doing business to determine is how much to spend on marketing and advertising. Because of the nature of marketing and advertising, it is often difficult to know exactly how much return you get from each piece of advertising. And if you think that you are getting free advertising or marketing somewhere, think again. There is a cost that you are paying, not necessarily in dollars. Many times it is your time, your involvement, or the sacrifice of other business duties.

However, marketing is necessary to increase the scope of your business. We cannot do without it, because we always need new customers, new traffic, and new prospects. Customers leave us through attrition on a natural basis, (they may move away or lose interest), so we must at least replace our lost customers with new customers, and hopefully increase our customer base.

This is true with online business just as much as it is true for brick and mortar stores. For online businesses, we often spend our advertising dollars getting people to click on our ads, links, and pages to draw them into our website. Therefore, we need to examine the cost of our marketing in order to use the most efficient methods to drive business.

To give you a more concrete way of the cost of various methods of marketing and advertising, here are some ways that I market my business, and what the goal of each method is:

Writing articles on Squidoo, Wizzley: Cost–my time, Goal–drive traffic to my website, and earn extra money
Creating separate websites: Cost–time, minimal money, Goal–drive traffic to my pages, and earn extra money
Blogging: Cost–my time, Goal–drive traffic to my website
Email newsletter: Cost–$40 month, my time, Goal–drive traffic to my website and store
Print ad in local hotel magazine: Cost–$180 month, Goal–drive traffic to my store
Affiliate program on Shareasale: Cost–Initial investment of $550, then 10% of sales, Goal–drive traffic to my website

I have tried various forms of advertising and marketing, and part of the decision of using them is where I want to drive traffic, and is the cost worth the benefit. Sometimes you cannot determine that without a trial period. But no matter what you choose, there is always some type of cost to doing business.

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Filed Under: Marketing and Advertising Tagged With: advertising, cost of doing business, marketing

Plagiarism is an Ongoing Problem for All Writers and Publishers

January 28, 2012 By Paula Atwell 2 Comments

I just finished reading a very good article by Adam Penenberg on Fast Company about Amazon’s Plagiarism Problem. Penenberg makes excellent points in his article, exposing just a few blatant plagiarists that are earning money on Amazon through their so-called “published works” which are really out and out, copy and pasted books stolen from other authors.

The article focused on the erotica section, which has a very large internet audience. But those of us who have been writing online for a while can tell you that plagiarism is rampant in all topic areas, including the driest subjects. Plagiarism used to be much harder when books were published through the stringent auspices of large publishing houses, but now that there are so many self-published authors, it is difficult to control how much content is being published new, and how much is being stolen.

While even the best publishers and book sellers can miss some authors who fall through the cracks, with the easy self-publishing available to anyone online, the cracks have grown much, much larger, and plagiarism has become the new focus for spammers. People who are just out to make a quick buck have found an easy way to make money from Amazon and other online book sellers by selling other people’s work under their own name.

One of the interesting issues to come out of all this is the question of whose burden it is to look for and take down the plagiarists. Most authors do not have time or the resources to become plagiarism police, to guard their own work from being stolen. Filtering out every plagiarist is a costly, and labor intensive problem for publishers of self-published books. At this time, Amazon most likely only removes plagiarism that is pointed out by complaints from readers or authors.

What is the solution to all this? I really don’t know, but somehow the technology must be upgraded so that the author needs at minimum to prove their identity when they self-publish. That might not take care of all the plagiarists, but at least it would take care of the people with multiple accounts under different names.

Filed Under: Writing Online Editorial Tagged With: editorial, plagiarism

Marketing and Advertising: Why Do I Need To?

January 27, 2012 By Paula Atwell Leave a Comment

The terms marketing, advertising, and promotion are words that we hear daily as writers. We are told that we need to market or promote our writing in order to get people to read it. This concept can be hard for some people to understand. A writer that writes a new piece may think that once it is out in the public eye, people will find it automatically.

And while that is what many writers wish would happen, it is not reality. Because people’s lives are so full, and there is so much competition for their attention, even if they are primed to read your work, they may not know it even exists or how to find it.

This is why we must market and advertise our own work. Even famous authors, who have a very large following let their readers know when their next book is out. So how can we, who are just establishing our audiences, not do the same.

This article is just the beginning of a new series of posts related to marketing and advertising your own work. In each post, we will go into the whys and hows of going about spreading the word about your writing. And we will determine which methods will work best for you.

There are a lot of overlaps between marketing, advertising and promoting. All three are ways to spread the word about your writing, to invite people to read more, and to encourage people to follow you. As you build an audience, you can refine your methods of promotion, by determining which methods your audience responds to the most.

Some of your marketing will be chosen by your budget. Most authors start out with free marketing tools, and move on to paid tools later. There is a lot that you can do for free as long as you are willing to put in some sweat equity to get your campaign off the ground, but at some point, you will have to shell out some money in order to get past a certain point. There is only so much that one person can do. After that, you need to hire people to help you.

Feel free to ask for posts on specific topics, and for examples if you have questions. Let’s get some discussions started, so that all of us can have a very prosperous year.

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Filed Under: Marketing and Advertising Tagged With: advertising, marketing, promotion

Diversifying My Writing Platforms

January 24, 2012 By Paula Atwell 14 Comments

In the uncertain world that we live in, I have learned through experience to diversify my income sources. This way, when a company changes or goes out of business, I still have some income to rely on from other sources. This is especially true if you are working for yourself, and have numerous surprise costs that pop up unexpectedly.

Last year’s Panda changes on Google just drove that nail home a little more, when my Hubpages income was vastly affected, and continued to be throughout the year, as Hubpages made changes. While it may be true that a writing platform has not been adversely affected recently, the potential for that to happen again is always there.

Group writing platforms have the huge advantage on search engines because their overall platform usually performs higher than individual sites, however a knowledgeable person can also get their own site to rank well on search engines. I happen to like writing on large writing platforms when I just want to create fast simple pages to express an idea, write about a topic, or promote a product. Creating these types of pages is fun for me, and I find it much easier than blogging or creating an entire site.

As a business person, and an entrepreneur, I find it quite difficult when I am not in complete control of my work, so to ease my mind, and balance the issue of control and risk, I have found it best to diversify my writing platforms as much as I feel comfortable with.

I cut my baby teeth in online writing on Squidoo, which I still find profitable, and beneficial to write pages. My next venture was on Hubpages where I did very well for about 2 years, then not at all well since February 2011. As a matter of fact, I have done so poorly there since last February, that I am not writing there any more. Last year, I was thrilled with the introduction of Wizzley, a new site created by friends and colleagues after Panda, and Wizzley has shown itself to be a high quality, and profitable site almost from the getgo. Wizzley is actually set up so that the individual affiliates pay the writer directly which is my preferred set up. I will definitely be spending a lot of time on Wizzley this year. And now, a new site has opened up for writers called Zujava, which is much more similar to Squidoo, at least for now, and is also being run by a friend and colleague.

Each of these sites has their benefits, risks, and payoffs. Personally, I do not recommend Hubpages at this time. However, if you are looking for ways to expand and diversify, Squidoo, Wizzley, and Zujava are all places to consider. Zujava has yet to prove themselves, but if the site develops like I believe it will, it will be good to know that there is more than just one place to write and earn for all of us.

I also recommend that people develop their own websites and blogs to write on to diversify even more, and learn more of how these sites work. Most writers find one or two sites that work better for them than others, and focus more attention on them.

Find a way to diversify your writing platforms, and/or diversify your earning strategies. Do not become the person who is caught by surprise by your main financial income base failing without warning.

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Filed Under: Writing for Profit Tagged With: diversify, income, writing platform

Determining How to Spend My Time

January 20, 2012 By Paula Atwell Leave a Comment

At the beginning of every year, I take a look at how I am currently spending my time, and how I can be more efficient, and make more use of the limited time that I have.

This year, I have made the decision to spend much more time and effort on my main website, Lake Erie Artists Gallery. This website and the brick and mortar store I own, are still my best source of income, because I am selling products that I buy wholesale, or that I make myself, so that I can make a much higher percentage on each product.

In the last two years, I have successfully learned how to use my knowledge of SEO and online writing to help promote my site. And this year, I am going to expand that by creating an affiliate program for Lake Erie Artists Gallery, vastly increasing the amount of items that I sell there, and expanding the niches that have been doing well.

This means that the time that I have to spend on increasing my online writing on other sites will be restricted. That income is also significant to me, but secondary. I am also at a crossroads, businesswise, because I have reached a place that I really need to hire someone to do some of the tasks, so that I can continue to grow the business, but I am just not quite making enough to hire that person yet. So my time will be extremely limited until I can.

The result is that I will have to give up some of what I am doing now. I will not be able to write on as many sites, as often, nor create new sites until I finish the bulk of the site expansion that I have planned.

Making these choices can be difficult, but here and now, it is clear where my priorities must lie. And hopefully, by mid-year, I will be able to hire the help I need to further increase the growth of my business.

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Filed Under: Writing Online Editorial Tagged With: affiliate program, editorial, lake erie artists gallery, website

About Paula Atwell

Writing Content: Should You Hire Someone or Write It Yourself

Marketing and Advertising: Why Do People Pay for Services That They Can Get for Free?

Why I am So Impressed With the Entire Wizzley Team

Marketing and Advertising: Word of Mouth

Marketing and Advertising: Cost of Doing Business

Plagiarism is an Ongoing Problem for All Writers and Publishers

Marketing and Advertising: Why Do I Need To?

Diversifying My Writing Platforms

Determining How to Spend My Time

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