Writing Tips at GarySpeer.com

Insurance, especially health insurance, is a tough subject for most freelance writers (all types of freelancers, actually) to face.

I’ve searched and found free insurance quotes both online and off line myself. But I’ve never found health insurance I can actually afford. Part of that is my health and my age. I’m relatively healthy, but I’m also quite overweight and I’m just a few years from qualifying for Medicare.

What about you other writers out there — any good insurance solutions you’ve found for freelance writers? How do you handle the problem? Group insurance from a “day job”? Health insurance provided through your spouse?

I’m sure many who come here would be interested in some examples of how various freelancers take care of health insurance needs. Leave us a comment and share your solutions.

I posted an article recently about writing online content and how to utilize it on your website and others’ websites. This subject fascinates me and I think it’s an important way freelance writers can make money online if done well and done consistently.

I wanted to make myself clear on my personal preference: I prefer to try to “dominate” keywords on a specific subject I love and to do it by posting most of my content to my own website. I personally (as I said in the earlier article) do a little of both. (You can see some of the stuff I’ve written at EzineArticles.com and how I’ve tried to backlink to various websites.)

That’s not to say I’ve achieved anything close to “dominance” in any category of websites or online interests. But I focus most of my writing on one or two websites that I really enjoy and expect to make a lifetime “job” out of. I’ve been a longtime Western fan and Old West history buff, so I’ve got a site based on life in the Old West that I’m making my main writing effort this year.

And that’s the key to my whole approach to writing online — I try to do something about which I have some knowledge and passion. (I would be totally lost if I tried to make a major, authoritative site about Harley-Davidson motorcycles, Mopar parts, the history of fast food in America, or carpentry, for example.) I also mentioned in that earlier post that I know a guy who has one of these huge, well-written sites. He writes about something fairly academic, but he absolutely loves it and he does a good job of popularizing his academic subject matter.

Now all I need to do is research and write about 10,000 articles for my Old West site, and then …

One of the questions constantly debated by those who write for the Internet is this: Should you write content and put it on other websites, or should you focus your time on writing content for your own blog or website?

I’ve wrestled with this myself. I have noted that when I add an article to one of my websites, most of which are run by WordPress blogging software, people come to the website. When I write an article and submit it to another website, with links back to one of my websites, I don’t get as many immediate visitors to my website — but having a link from another site back to my website (backlinking is the term) is very important in the long run.

So, my approach is to try to do BOTH. For example, I might write an article for one of my affiliate marketing sites comparing playstation 3 with xbox 360. (I really know very little about gaming systems and may have that comparison totally wrong, but you get the idea.) Then I would writing a different article about playstation 3 and another article about xbox 360 — with links in both articles to the article on my site comparing the two gaming systems. I would then submit both of those to an article directory like EzineArticles.com.

That way, I would have the benefit of traffic to my site from 1) the original article, 2) the playstation 3 article link from EzineArticles.com, and, 3) the xbox 360 article link form EzineArticles.com.

So, from that point I merely repeat the process for my websites, and perhaps add articles (each different from the others) at Squidoo, HubPages, and some of the other online article sites.

The other approach, which I like in concept but find difficult in real life, is simply putting the same amount of effort into three, four, five, six, etc., original articles written on related “keywords” to post to my own website.

I personally know two individuals who make serious online money (as in $5,000+ per month, which is serious in my household), one by posting articles on his own site and following up with articles linking back to his site; the other posts almost exclusively on his own site only and over the years has turned it into a real authority site on his subject, with literally tens of thousands of articles.

So both ideas have their merits; both work. You decide how and what you wish to write. And may success, good fortune, and lots of writing income rain down upon you.