July 2006

0

I’m going to be terribly un-British today. In the UK, people don’t talk about what they earn. They mask the true picture behind phrases such as ‘could be worse’ (meaning, I’m not on the breadline yet) and ‘I do all right’ (meaning, I’m rolling in it). But today I’m going ...

Read the full article →
0

Some things in life should be easy – and reading a blog is one of them. I don’t know about anyone else, but when I see a huge chunk of text on the home page, I skate right past it. My eyes transmit the lockdown code to my brain. Too ...

Read the full article →
0

A long time ago, I worked for a small division of the Financial Times (yes, THE Financial Times). I edited stock exchange announcements for financial reports on UK and European companies. It wasn’t the most interesting job I’ve ever had, but I learned to read an annual report and became ...

Read the full article →
0

The other day someone asked me a question. It was: ‘How do you apply for a writing job when you have no writing credits?’. I knew the answer because when I relaunched my writing career last year all my writing credits were old. They proved that I used to be ...

Read the full article →
0

I was inspired to write this by a recent post from Trick Falls on writing inspirations. I haven’t always wanted to be a writer, though I have nearly always written. When I was a child, I used to mess around with drawing house plans and I thought I might want ...

Read the full article →
0

Blogging For Smarties is not the opposite of Blogging For Dummies, a book which tells us how to do what we already do here at WritingUp.If you want advice on smart blogging, try Performancing.com, Problogger.com or read Seven Essential Blogging Habits. This is about a conversation with my three year ...

Read the full article →
0

I’m falling in love with TodayBooks.com. This might be the honeymoon period, because I’ve just had my second book listed with them. And it’s one that’s grown out of this very blog. Remember when I did a series of posts on search engine optimization and website promotion? Well, that turned ...

Read the full article →
0

As a working writer you should always have a plan B for when technology lets you down. It’s my own fault. I should have known better. In fact, I usually do. When I first owned a computer in the early 1990s, I fell prey to a Word macro virus. I ...

Read the full article →
0

I recently did a post on website promotion strategies for writers and bloggers. Today I had more proof that it works. While I was browsing around my site stats, I noticed a few inbound links I didn’t recognise. One of them turned out to be from Worldwide Freelance Writer. They ...

Read the full article →
0

This morning I was wasting time when I should have been writing. I decided to go back over all my old posts and tag them and group them. Then I started playing around with the topic specific pages. This is what I found out. When I clicked on a topic, ...

Read the full article →
0

You can’t argue with these figures. This month I had 843 unique visitors to doublehdesign.com (200 more than when I wrote about this in January). I had 17,000+ hits (only a small increase) and I had nearly a 50% increase in page views (to more than 10,000). This month I’ve ...

Read the full article →