A totally different topic today. Top copywriter Clayton Makepeace is raising money for the American Breast Cancer Foundation. He’s pledged to match the money raised by the Ebay auction of his ’squeeze-a-boob-save-a-life’ t-shirt with up to $10,000 of his own money.

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I’ve just commented over at Freelance Writers Manifesto on what we can do, as freelance writers, to improve our situation in the coming year. I hope it inspires lots of writers everywhere.

My plans have been more-or-less finalized for some time though. I’ve been writing a course on SEO for a few months. It will include all my know-how of the SEO and online marketing world. I’m also planning to do a couple of ebooks for sale. They’re all in the pipes, and I’ll unveil them when the right time comes. And of course I’ll still be hard at work providing optimized content and marketing advice for clients all over the world.

Because I’m probably going away for the holidays, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish my readers and clients a wonderful holiday, and the best New Year ever! God Bless you all!

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I annoys the heck out of me when I keep seeing idiot know-it-alls announcing to the world that SEO is dead and you don’t need to write for the search engines.

All the time I prove it to myself. I just re-did the home page of my main business website: WellWrittenWords. I was #6 on Yahoo before: now I’ve dropped to who-know-where. It’s normal, and I’m not worried about it. I’ll just have to tweak my content by adding more of my chosen keywords. Google, by the way, is not so sensitive to keywords. The mix there is that backlinks are possibly even more important than your keywords. MSN is more like Yahoo, in that you have to be very careful about your Keyword enrichment.

You can try an experiment to see if what I’m saying is true. It’s easy. Simply remove a few of your keywords and see what happens to your Yahoo ranking. Don’t want to take that chance? Didn’t think so.

What makes me snigger up my sleeve is that the very people who are shouting from the rooftops that SEO is dead, are also the ones who have SEOd their websites to death. Just do a search for ‘SEO is dead’ and go see those websites, and you’ll see what I mean.

I despise hypocrisy, don’t you?

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As you can see, I’ve changed my theme yet again. After a period where I favored lots of white space, my soul is in revolt! I seem to be craving color in every area of my life, and how could I leave out my websites. Everything’s getting a new look. My main website, WellWrittenWords has got a new index pages so far. More to come!

The new Freelance Writers Manifesto Blog is nice and colorful too.

Ah, now I feel better!

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I’m really sad to have to report this: Spencer Passmore still hasn’t been forgiven for a little mistake. I thought this was supposed to be the age of forgiveness? Seems that Fascist George Bush is having more of an influence over the United States than we realized! (OK so maybe here we might have Tony Blair to blame).

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I had an interesting conversation about Laptops vs PCs yesterday. Personally, I’ve been using a Toshiba Satellite, which is one of the new PC-equivalents, for nearly five years now. I would never go back to using a PC; I’m still having a love affair with my laptop.

The conversation began when I was visiting my daughter, fumbling to fit the DSL cable into the back of my laptop. I rarely do that because I have Wi-Fi at home. I was trying to squeeze it into the wrong jack, and when I located the right one, I was wondering what the other one was for (slightly smaller). Someone suggested it was a slot for the keyboad. It wasn’t, but it made me think about all the people who can’t get along with a laptop keyboard. I suppose being a woman, I don’t have a problem with my hands being too big. I can imagine that some men might find things a bit cramped. I love the angle of typing on a laptop keyboard too. I never sit at a desk any more. I admit I get neck-ache if I’m forced to sit with the laptop balanced on my knees, but mainly I favor the recliner. But since I started using a laptop, i’ve never suffered repetitive strain injury pain, which I had experienced for years with the PC.
I try not to take the laptop to the bedroom with me, as even I have to call a halt to work sometime. But i really appreciate not being tied down to one spot in the house, as I was with my PC.

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Having threatened to leave WordPress, I am contradicting myself by picking out further WordPress themes this evening. I am fairly confident that they’re going to welcome Spence back any day now. For all I know, they already have.

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A few months back, when I was struggling to set up this blog, I found myself in a real mess. I’m a writer, not a developer, and while I’m pretty Internet-savvy, I can’t handle complicated issues. So I found myself in the WordPress forum, desperately seeking help.

It didn’t do me much good, reading all those posts. I basically I couldn’t follow the instructions. The more I tried, the more I began to panic. I was just getting to the point where I thought I’d give up and go and sign up with Moveable Type, when I came across Spencer Passmore. He’s a WordPress moderater–or he was until a day-or-two ago.

To say that Spence saved the day is a huge understatement. When he saw that I wasn’t going to make it on my own, he offered to go into my website and take care of it for me. A fleeting doubt crossed my mind. Could I trust someone I didn’t know with the interface for all my websites? What if he deleted the whole lot? But I was so desperate, I dismissed my doubts and went ahead and gave him my login info.

Within minutes, my blog was up and running. Perfectly. Without any problems whatsoever. And ya know what? It has been ever since. I talk to Spence online from time to time. He’s a nice guy.

This morning he was telling me that his WordPress moderator status has been taken away because he asked some woman for a link. She seems to have totally misunderstood his intentions. Reading the posts, I can’t see how on earth she did this. She must have a ‘me’ complex. You can read some of the discussion here.
I’m very upset for Spence. He may be a little rough round the edges, but he’s a nice person. I’m going to insist that WordPress reconsider their action, or I’ll have to consider transferring my blog to Moveable Type after all… That’s sad.

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There has been a lot of talk online recently about how much time some of us actually spend building our online businesses. To be sure it’s time-consuming. You may have wondered how we stay flexible when we’re glued to our laptops (or PCs for those of us who aren’t out of the Stone Age yet)? Wanna know?

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I’m still stuck on this autoresponder subject! For anyone out there contemplating using a free one: Don’t! Since my autoresponder went live, I’ve had a steady stream of people signing up for my SEO Tips for You newsletter, and the Freelance Writers Manifesto.

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