Hopefully I don’t need to tell you that you should be bookmarking your articles to social bookmarking sites to promote your writing or blog posts. Social bookmarking is a vital marketing tool for writers and web content providers.

Sometimes, you may run into problems where certain perfectly legitimate sites have been banned from social bookmarking sites because of a few bad applies. Writers for Hub Pages, Xomba and Bukisa have experienced the frustration of having link submissions denied by important sites like Reddit, Digg and Shoutwire. There was even a time when Helium (on of the most respected writing sites anywhere) was under threat of being banned by Reddit.

How to Get Around It

Luckily, there is a way to work around these social bookmarking bans. The trick is to use a service like ClipMarks or Amplify. ClipMarks is not the most famous social bookmarking site, but it is certainly one of the handiest. ClipMarks offers you a toolbar extension for Firefox (also for IE) that allows you to clip parts of a page. You can then write your own comments about the snippet and auto post the link and commends to Delicious. The site then offers you quick links to the following social bookmarking sites:

• Digg
• Facebook
• Twitter
• StumbleUpon
• Delicious
• Friendfeed
• Mixx
• Blinklist
• Magnolia
• Furl
• Diigo
• Reddit
• Slashdot
• Spurl
• Newsvine
• Fark
• Simpy
• Yahoo (not the same as Yahoo!Buzz)

Reddit, Digg and Shoutwire recognize the ClipMark, not the link you are promoting within the ClipMark. So, by using ClipMarks you can post your links from any page to these popular sites. Get your ClipMarks toolbar here. If you’re running Chrome (like me) try the Amplify extension.

Hand-screened opportunities for telecommuting and freelance writers:

Work from home… or from anywhere!

* * Some of these jobs are posted on Guru.com. Guru requires you register to view job listings (it’s free). Click here to register.

1. Financial Writer – $100 for 5 articles
2. Workplace Assessment Writer – $15-$25 per test question
3.  Freelance Writer Needed for Career Profiles
4. Technology Blogger – $30 per 200 word post
5. Writer needed for Eating Disorders
6. Content Writer for Law Firm Website
7. Assistant Managing Editor
8. ADARAS MAGAZINE®LOOKING FOR WRITERS (psychology) – Less than $250
9. SEO Articles – Open Budget
10. 10 Pregnancy Articles Needed – Less than $250

Volunteer Today!

Volunteer Writing Opportunity of the Day

Technical Writing – Micro-Enterprise Inventor’s Program of Oregon

Photo credit: mantasmagorical from morguefile.com

I’ve been pretty satisfied with my profile site, that is until I saw the site of accomplished designer Dina Kuhar and writer Lisa Evanson-Ohr at VisualContent.com. This simple, flash-driven site immediately wows the reader. Getting the reader’s attention is half the battle and this site does it with class!

You should be able to accomplish something similar without flash, using wordpress and a popup plug in. Start fooling around with this and show us what you come up with for a bold, no-nonsense profile site that grabs attention immediately.

If you are hosting a blog with limited resources (like most of us!) it’s a good idea to cache your site to make response times faster. This provides a better user experience for your readers.

The first thing you need to understand is how a Web page is displayed to a viewer. The user enters the URL and the browser starts grabbing parts of the page: the header, sidebar, footer, images, text, etc. All these items are pieces of the page that must be loaded to create the page. But if all of this information is already compiled in a cache, the user gets a much faster loading experience. The information comes from one location in the cache in a single group, instead of the server picking up the pieces one at a time and putting them on the page.

I have been using WP Super Cache for more than a year, but a recent upgrade caused some problems for me. Essentially, it broke my blog. Without advanced coding experience or the slightest understanding of the plug-in creator’s explanation for how to fix the problem, I manually uninstalled the plug-in and went on the hunt for another caching option.

It turns out that although WP Super Cache is a top-notch plug-in, it’s a little advanced for the average user (me!). My new solution is called Really Static. I chose this one simply because it has more stars than any other cache plug-in. Really Static has ALOT of options I don’t understand, so when I couldn’t get it working, and the returns of my search were unintelligible, I went hunting again and landed on this baby: W3 Total Cache. It’s up, it’s working, and that’s all I really care about! The options are easier to understand and the plug-in takes care of all that tech-jargon stuff that drivers writers of the English language mad.

If you do not have a cache yet, get one! If you are having problems with the WP Super Cache upgrade or Really Static, consider W3 Total Cache.

Analyzing website performance has a big learning curve. Most of us quickly grasp the importance of unique, frequently updated material, attractive headlines and interacting with users. One aspect of web performance that can be confusing is bounce rates. Let’s take a look at bounce rages and why they are important.

What is a Bounce Rate?

Any “rate” is by definition a percentage. “Bounce rate” represents the percentage of visitors who arrive at your landing page, then leave without interacting or clicking on another page within your site. You can find bounce rates through your analytics tool. Most web masters use Google Analytics for this.

The Google definition of a bounce rate is “the percentage of single-page visits (i.e. visits in which the person left your site from the entrance page). Bounce rate is a measure of visit quality and a high bounce rate generally indicates that site entrance (landing) pages aren’t relevant to your visitors. You can minimize Bounce Rates by tailoring landing pages to each keyword and ad that you run. Landing pages should provide the information and services that were promised in the ad copy.”

Why You Should Fix Bounce Rates

So a low bounce rate means you are attracting visitors who are looking for what you have to offer. Put yourself in the place of a visitor who finds what they were looking for on the first try. How much more likely is that person to recommend your site to others? It seems logical that a low bounce rate will help spread the word about your site and that you are doing a good job with inbound marketing. If your bounce rate is over 60%, something is wrong with the way you are attracting visitors.

How to Reduce Bounce Rates

The main aspects of your site that must be addressed to reduce bounce rates include page titles, engaging graphics, loading time and site navigation. In order to optimize these aspects you also need to understand testing.

Page Titles

The page title is the phrase shown in the tab of your browser when you visit a page. Because most of us are on WordPress, I’ll use this program as an example. Depending on the template you use, the page title may show the title of your blog and then list the name of the post, or it can list the post name first. You will want your carefully crafted post title to be used by the search engine, so edit your template to show the post title first.

To do this, you must edit the header.php file. For newbies, I recommend copying and pasting your header.php file to a text document before editing so you can always revert to the old file if you mess it up too badly. Here’s what it looks like:

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if 	
( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> 	
<?php wp_title(); ?></title>	

Just switch it around to look like this:

<title><?php wp_title(' '); ?><?php if	
(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo '--'; } ?><?	
php bloginfo('name'); ?></title>

Making Headlines

There’s no point to editing your page title unless your headline makes visitors want to click on the title and then continue reading your post. Copyblogger does a better job of educating about headlines than I ever will, so I’ll just refer you to the following articles:

How to Write Magnetic Headlines
13 Emotion-Based Headlines That Work
Writing Headlines That Get Results

Catching Attention

It may not seem obvious to you when you are browsing a website, but a good photo catches attention. Bounce rates drop significantly when photos, videos and screen shots are used. You can get images free at several sites. Read this post for more info.

Reduce Loading Time

If your page takes too long to load, few visitors will stick around to wait. You should also know that Google tests your page load time too when determining what to show in search results. If you are serious about your website, make sure you get a dedicated IP so that your page is not sharing resources with others, slowing it down. You should also examine the number of elements on the page that might be causing problems for you.

This site will really open your eyes as to how the graphics, widgets and other page elements are slowing down load times! Don’t give too much attention to the times listed, since it talks about every single element loaded on the page. Most users can get to where they are going before the page is fully loaded. According to the report, by reducing page elements, I could increase my time by 9.6 seconds. I’ll be working on that later today!

Improved Navigation

It is important to take a step back from your site navigation and put yourself in the position of a new user. For instance, it seemed obvious to me that the “job hunting” link would lead to links for new telecommute writing job listings: not so much to other visitors. That is why I am adding a link in a prominent spot for those coming to find job postings, since that is my number one visitor attraction.

Once you begin tweaking your site for bounce rates, you’ll find more visitors come, stay and enjoy. This may mean a dramatic improvement in subscribers, advertising revenue and many other little ways you monetize your site.

If you do not use images in your writing, you can ignore this. Being a writer, I miss some obvious SEO stuff sometimes. This one came across my desk today from Website Magazine. This is why I love the publication so much. They don’t assume you know anything. The mix of articles works for advanced administrators and beginners…but I digress.

The point is, I had no idea I could improve my SERP (Search Engine Results Placement) by using “alt” and “title” tags on images. This helps me at places like Xomba where I post twice a month and must add an image. Some other sites like Bukisa will let you do this as well. I guess what you don’t know can hurt you.

You should use only the “alt” tag if your photo does not link to any other page. When the photo links to another page, you can use “alt” and “title”. This way, you can get another search phrase or two into the article. This is great when you are unsure of the best keywords and want to use a few related keywords or long-tail keyword phrases.

Here is an example of how to do it:

When you add a photo, WordPress gives you the option of adding a title, caption and description. This is the code it produces when you fill out the Title and Caption fields (Caption field also adds alt text automatically):

[caption id="attachment_641" align="alignleft"
 width="225" caption="alt text"]
<img src="http://www.killfive.com/wp-content/
uploads/2009/09/example-photo-225x300.jpg"alt=
"alt text" title="title text" width="225" height="300" 
class="size-medium wp-image-641" />[/caption]

If you don’t want a caption, just delete

 [caption id="attachment_641" align="alignleft"
& width="225" caption="alt text"] and [/caption]

If you are adding a photo elsewhere, you only need to add two tags to get the same effect without the “add image” application to help you. In that case, here is the standard code that just adds an image, without changing its size or other attributes:

<img src="http://location of image.com">

To change the size, do a little math to be sure you are scaling each attribute by the same rate and add the size tags like so:

<img src="http://location of image.com" 
height="height in pixels" width="width in pixels">

You can add other attributes as well to change the position or horizontal and vertical space around the images as well. For now, let’s keep to the most common and get back to the reason I’m writing in the first place, alt & text tags. Simply add them to the end of the code, just before the last “>” symbol. You only need a single space between each tag/command.

<img src="http://location of image.com" 
height="height in pixels" width="width in pixels"
alt="alt text" title="title text">

I’ve written a ton of pieces about how to get comments on your blog. I knew I was doing all the right things. I knew I was getting plenty of readers because of my lijit stats. So what was the deal?

The ‘Duh’ Moment

It’s kind of like the first time I realized soft drinks were called “soft drinks” because they are the opposite of “hard drinks” containing liquor. That kind of brainstorm is deeply unsatsifying. It doesn’t make me feel smart. It makes me feel stupid!

Well here is another brain fart that came out of me today… I could not figure out why this blog in particular was not eliciting comments. I get them all the time elsewhere on the net. Where the hell are they?

Well, duh. If the comment box is not open and showing, no one is going to take the time to click on that tiny little “comments” link.

Here’s how to make sure you always have an open comments form under every one of your posts:

You need to tell WordPress to place an open comment form on every php file that contains posts. In my theme they were:

Archive Page Template (archivepage.php)
Archives (archive.php)
Main Index Template (index.php)
Page Template (page.php)

By default, wordpress only places an open comments form on single posts. Look for the following code:

<div>
<?php the_content(); ?>
</div>

</div>

<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

You want to insert the following codejust after </div> and before <?php endwhile; endif; ?>. Buy using the CTRL F feature with the word “endwhile,” you can find every instance and insert the code. It can sometimes be on more than one place in a php file. Don’t put it on your archives page if it only displays snippets of your posts. That’s u-g-l-y.

<?php
$withcomments = “1″;
comments_template();
?>

Not noticing this simple mistake on KillFive.com made me feel exceedingly stupid.

Showcase your work and have a point of contact for clients.

If you want to be a successful freelance writer, it is important to have your own webpage that explains who you are, what your specialties are and how potential clients can contact you. This ensures that people can find you, should they go looking. It also gives you an easy way to showcase your work to prospective employers.

Web Design for Beginners

As a writer, you may not know where to begin when it comes to website design. If this is you, blogger.com or another free web hosting service may be best for you. While it is generally considered more professional to buy your own domain, you might want to begin on a free hosting site until you gain confidence.

If you have a good idea of what you want your page to look like, I highly recommend WordPress Theme Generator. This simple site offers many layout designs that anyone with a modest understanding of HTML can customize. Whichever you choose, be sure to keep a simple, easy to read layout that is not crowded with information.

Grab Attention Quickly

When planning your website, remember that you have only seconds to capture a reader’s attention once they land on your page. The number one way to get the reader’s attention is to include an image. If you are not comfortable posting an image of yourself, post a compelling image that connects to the service you offer. For sites where you can get free images, see this post.

Once you have chosen an image, resize it for easy download, keeping it under 300 pixels wide or tall. Also be sure you coordinate your website colors with the image. The colors can be edited easily in your css file. Keeping a white background with dark-colored lettering is best. Avoid bright, overwhelming colors. You should also be careful not to get too crazy with the font so that more browsers can read your page. Georgia and Verdana are good font choices.

Do not forget to put your contact information in a plainly and clearly visible position for visitors. Do not overload the reader with samples of your work on the landing page. Simply state your mission, contact information and accomplishments. For beginning writers, you should stress affordability, since you will need to work that angle until you build a full portfolio. Once you become established and have some of your work in print (I mean paper, folks) you can begin to put your focus on quality.

Whichever angle you work, state your accomplishments so the reader will have a reason to want to know more about you. Don’t be bashful. Pretend you are talking about your child. Then it becomes easy to brag about your accomplishments. Be sure to add what you plan to deliver to your clients, whether it be well-researched web articles, articles for print publication, website reviews or news stories.

Post Your Positive Comments

Once you have stated your mission, make sure the reader can see positive comments from your clients easily. Put them directly below your contact information. Include the commenter’s name whenever possible.

Use Metatags and Metadescriptions

While going nuts on SEO does not make a lot of sense for a new writer, there are some basic things you should do to make sure people can find you. This includes having your name and any potential misspellings of your name in meta tags. This article will tell you how and why to use metatags on your website. Note it is important that your content keywords match your metatags to gain tracking in search engines. However, the primary purpose of these tags on a writer’s website is to direct users who might misspell your name when looking for you.

Once you have your landing page done, set up categories for your writing. Choose a few where you write the most content and include a miscellaneous section for random topics you write about. Posting links to your writing is the easiest way to show off your content.

You can see my page here as an example. In the first only three months, the site generated numerous inquiries and was well worth the time.

I can do it for you!

If you would like me to set up a writers profile site for you, just drop me an email at mail@killfive.com for a quote.

Welcome to the new KillFive. Why the change you may ask? Well, there are a few things motivating me. You may recall the EcomXpo a week or two back. I learned so much there that I came to realize the mix of techniques on this blog made little sense.

Those looking to establish writing or blogging skills are not really into PTC or Affiliate Marketing. Because writing is such a big part of what I do, I decided to keep writing topics here and transition the others to new sites.

The PTC Project

Those who like to follow PTC are welcome to join me at www.ReliablePTC.com where you can continue to follow our PTC work, get updates and read scam alerts. I’ll be posting payouts as usual and keeping you up-to-date on this constantly changing market.

Adventures in Affiliate Marketing

Those following Adventures in Affiliate Marketing can join me at www.bzguide.com where I will be continuing with the project. I have chosen a URL and an affiliate management service but I am still working on gathering content for the site. As before, I will post every detail of what actions were taken to set up the affiliate program and what the results were.

New Telecommute Writing Job Listings

The rest of you should benefit from the new daily job postings. These are personally inspected by me before they are posted and I try to limit the selection to the best-paying gigs. On the “Extra Buck or Two” sites, the pay is not as good but the sites provide regular, dependable work. They are especially good for those just starting out with writing.

Some have expressed concerns that some of the “Extra Buck or Two” sites may be scams. I’d like to state right here that I personally use Conjecture, Textbroker, eCopywriters, Helium and Associated Content. I can attest to these being legitimate sites.

I have done some research and cannot find anything to suggest that there is anything sketchy about Examiner, Demand Studios or Suite101. I believe all of these are good and legitimate ways to earn from your writing. If you have any information to the contrary, please share it!

Hopefully, you will learn enough about blogging, freelance writing, SEO, job hunting and code to turn your lay-off into a new career, just as I did. Good luck and please send in your comments or suggestions.

Below are some articles Killer published this week that might be of use to KillFive readers:

Writing Titles for Your Articles
Dealing with Online Plagiarism
Use Slide.com to wow your visitors
Article ReWriting Do’s and Don’ts
Is Google Losing Its Luster?
How to Get the Most from Your Online Writing
How to Make Money During TV Ads
How to Turn Lurkers into Commenters

We hope you find this information useful!