LinkedIn’s Companies directory best tool yet for freelancers

LinkedIn just unwrapped a new feature that may be the social network’s best tool yet for freelance writers - a comprehensive company directory.

The Companies feature is a database of LinkedIn’s 26 million members that can be searched by company, geography or industry. Freelancers can use it to look up editors at umpteen publishers of newspapers, magazines and Websites in the United States and around the world, just as long as some portion of the staff is on LinkedIn.

The company directory is a potential goldmine of information. Instead of relying on out-of-date editorial listings in Writer’s Market or other market guides, freelancers can use LinkedIn to see who’s who at publications they want to pitch. And unlike Writer’s Market it’s free.

How to use the feature: Once you log onto LinkedIn, you’ll see the Companies directory tab on the main toolbar. Clicking on it will bring you to the Companies main page, where you can search for companies by industry, name or Zip code.

But the best part: if you identify yourself as a writer in your LinkedIn profile, the directory will automatically show a list of industries related to writing and editing. Click on any of the industry links - book publishing, newspapers, magazines, education, marketing and advertising, public relations, software - and you’ll see lists of all the companies in those particular industries that LinkedIn has in its database. Clicking on the Newspaper listing, for example, brought up 931 newspapers. Like everything else on LinkedIn, they’re ranked according to your LinkedIn network connections, so newspapers where you have a 1st degree connection come up first.

That’s a handy feature when it comes to pitching stories. First, you’ve got a great list of who’s got what position at a paper or magazine - again, if they subscribe to LinkedIn - that you can use for pitches. Or, if you see someone at a paper or magazine you want to pitch but don’t know and there’s another editor you do know, you could use your LinkedIn connection with the second editor to ask for an introduction to the first. Of course, you could do that without LinkedIn too.

If you click on a company name, such as The San Francisco Chronicle, for example, you’ll see a brief profile of the company, listings for any employee who’s on LinkedIn, new hires (with job titles), recent promotions, popular profiles, job listings, info about the company, career paths of employees (where they worked before and after, based on information that LI members included in their profiles) and some other stats.

Other uses of the Companies directory:

* Researching publishing markets that are new to you

* Looking for a job, which is what I think they set up the Companies directory for in the first place.

* Searching for sources, which is potentially so huge I think I’ll save it for a different blog post.

To read the article on LinkedIn’s company blog announcing the new service, click here.

If you experiment with the Companies directory and think of other ways that freelancers could use it, please share.

How to fit blogging, social networks into your writing work day

A writer I know is thinking of starting a blog and asked me how I fit blogging into my regular work day. Good question, and one that’s relevant to anyone who writes full time but wants to improve how they’re marketing their business either by blogging or joining a social network like Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, which are worthwhile but take time. Here’s my answer, which I’ve edited slightly for clarity:

I’ve committed to posting on my blog Monday through Friday, an activity that takes 15 minutes to an hour a day depending on how ambitious I am about writing the post. Days like today I cobble together a post based on interesting posts I’d read on a topic elsewhere. Original writing takes longer, but sometimes I’m inspired and then the writing goes quickly.

I’m an early riser and I work on my blog first before starting the rest of what I have to do that day. I’m eight months into it and it’s become part of my work routine. But I’d have to say that some weeks I’m more into it than others. This week I have some major deadlines so the blog will get a minimum of my attention.

If you’re going to blog the most important thing is to pick a schedule and stick to it, whether that’s once a week, twice a week, etc. If people subscribe to the blog through a reader they’re going to expect posts on whatever schedule you’ve determined and if you don’t stick to it it’s easy to lose them. I know this because I subscribe to a couple blogs and when old posts sit in my reader after I expect to see new stuff I’m disappointed. It’s like seeing headlines from last week’s newspaper: boring.

As for social networks, I’m most active on Freelance Success, then LinkedIn, then Facebook, which I just joined and haven’t really spent much time on.

I’ve become a big fan of the LinkedIn’s status report, which is LinkedIn’s answer to Twitter. The status report is that little box on the Home page that lets you answer the question: What are you working on? The number of characters you can use is finite so you can’t ramble. But it is enough to say “I’ve just updated my profile, check it out!”

More about time spent blogging: In a 2006 study, the University of Massachusetts found that 65 percent of bloggers spent an hour or less while the rest spent up to four hours. Read more results from the study here.

For Tim Ferriss, less is more. The blogger and author of the best seller The 4-Hour Work Week, advocates in this post, The top 5 uncommon timesavers for bloggers for blogging only a couple times a week so your posts have time to percolate and get picked up around the blogosphere - definitely food for thought.

Time spent on this post: 30 minutes. How much time do you spend blogging?

Freelancers should just say no to assignments, gigs that aren’t a good fit

Can you tell when a freelance gig isn’t a good fit?

Susan Johnston’s got some great tips for determining whether you should take a freelance job on her blog, The Urban Muse, in a post called 5 signs that this isn’t the gig for you. My favorite: when an editor sends your story back with tons of questions and requests for additional details - but insists that you stick to the same miniscule word count. Not going to happen.

When your livelihood depends on saying “Yes” to assignments, it’s hard to say “No.” But that’s exactly what Mark Dugas, a freelance documentary film producer and editor, suggests fellow independent contractors do in a post called Learning when to say no on Freelance Switch.

There is a way to say no but still preserve your relationship with editors or publications you write for often, according to Jodee Redmond, who explains how in this post to Freelance Writing Jobs called Learn how to say no to a client the right way. If it’s a question of timing, say so, Redmond recommends. Be sure to scroll through the comments section for suggestions from other freelancers.

Sometimes it pays to say no, like when a freelance job turns out to be a scam. Here’s advice from Kathryn Vercillo, a freelance writer who blogs at Real Words, on the top 10 signs a freelance writing gig might be a scam. No. 1 - when a gig sounds too good to be true it usually is.

Use WordPress enhanced stats to improve your writing blog

The business reporter in me loves numbers, so I was pretty jazzed a couple weeks ago when I was deciding how to pre-write a bunch of blog posts to cover my vacation and noticed some statistics on WordPress.com I hadn’t seen before.

It wasn’t just me. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com and WordPress.org, the hosted version of the software, recently upgraded the stats charts its bloggers can see for their blogs.

Now, instead of showing a limited history of stats for the top keywords that bring people to my blog, posts that get the most traffic and links people click on, I can see numbers for all those categories and more for the entire history of my blog.

This is cool, and not just because I’m a numbers geek. Here’s why:

* I can use the stats to direct what I write and how I tag it. If I know what search terms people are using to find my blog, I can make sure to write more posts on those topics, and tag those posts with the same or similar keywords so search engines continue to pick them up.

* I can use the stats to generate new blog posts. When I was deciding what to post to cover for my vacation, I used the enhanced stats feature to discover what my top posts of all time had been. Then I grouped some of those posts according to subject matter and ran “best of” lists for five days straight.

* I can use the stats to see who’s reading me where. The stats let me see who’s clicking through to read my posts from comments, messages and links to my blog posts that I leave on public and private social networks. I get a lot of click throughs from comments and messages I leave on Freelance Success, a subscription message board and newsletter for freelancers, so you can be sure I’ll continue to be active on that board. That makes me think that I should be more active on the other social networks I belong to, LinkedIn and Facebook, to see if I can repeat the phenomena. In fact, I’ve already started answering more questions in LinkedIn’s Answers section and including my blog’s URL in my answers.

* I can be a better blogging community friend. I also get a lot of click throughs from certain other freelancers who mention my blog posts on their own blogs a lot, like Sue Poremba, who blogs at I Breathe, Therefore I Write, Susan Johnston, who blogs as The Urban Muse and Joan Stewart, a.k.a. The Publicity Hound. It’s good business, and good blogger etiquette, to return the favor by visiting and sending people to their blogs.

* I can use the stats to see which links in my posts people click on. If my readers are clicking through, it would be a good idea for me to visit those blogs on a regular basis too, if only to let them know how much traffic I’m sending their way.

You can read Automattic’s announcement about WordPress’ enhanced stats charts here.

If you’re a real WordPress geek, you’re probably getting ready for WordCamp San Francisco 2008, a day-long conference on all things WordPress that takes place tomorrow, Aug. 16, at the Mission Bay Conference Center. If you live in the Bay Area and haven’t heard about it, you can see all the details here. And if you go, let me know how it goes.

Online News Association job fair, grants, NFL player access

Here’s some interesting tidbits from the Online News Association, one of the biggest groups for journalists and freelance writers who work online.

* The finalists for this year’s Online Journalism Awards will be announced at the ONA’s annual conference on Sept. 13 at the Capital Hilton in Washington, D.C. Here is the complete list of this year’s nominees.

* In conjunction with its annual meeting, ONA will hold a job fair on Thursday, Sept. 11, at the Capital Hilton. According to the group, several large media organizations have already signed up to participate. Writers who are attending the conference can get into the job fair for free; other writers pay $50, and students are $25. Anyone who wants to attend has to register here.

* ONA received a $60,000 grant from the Challenge Fund for Journalism, a joint initiative of The Ford Foundation, John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, McCormick Foundation and Ethics and Excellence in Journalism Foundation. The grant will help the association update its Website and sponsor regional events. But there’s a hitch: in order to get the funds, ONA has to raise at least $90,000 in additional donations by August 2009 and will be tapping members for help.

* Thanks to work by the Associated Press Sports Editors committee, of which ONA is a member, print and online reporters will have better access to National Football League players and longer online audio/video feeds for the 2008 season. Online news organizations will be able to run up to 90 seconds of audio/video instead of 45 seconds, although reporters are still barred from getting audio and video from anywhere other than team facilities.

Keeping sources on the subject in short phone interviews

You’re on deadline and only have 15 minutes with a source before you need to hang up and move onto another previously scheduled phone interview. But your source wants to talk and talk and talk. And not necessarily about the matter at hand.

Sound familiar? If you’ve written for any length of time, you’ve run across the run-on interview subject, the CEO, scientist or professor who just won’t stop talking.

Sometimes letting an interviewee talk is great, especially when that idle chitchat leads to ideas for related stories. In fact, when I have the time, at the end of an interview I’ll encourage subjects to talk by asking them questions like “So, what else are you working on these days?” or “What else is happening at your company that’s interesting?”

But when you’re working on deadline, have multiple interviews scheduled one after the other or are otherwise operating under severe time constraints, you need to get in, get the info, then get off the phone.

In those cases, I use a few different tactics:

* Email ahead of time so the source knows you’ve got a short window.

* When contacting a source - or a source’s PR department - ahead of an interview, give them an idea of what ground you need to cover, either in a sentence or two or by sending questions in advance. That way they can bone up on the subject and will be less likely to ramble.

* When you call, remind them of your time limit by saying something like: “Hi, thanks for taking my call. As I mentioned in my email, I have 15 minutes before my next call. There are really 3 major points I’d like to cover in this interview…” and take it from there.

* Near the end of the interview, remind the source that you only have 5 minutes left or say something like “This will be my last question” so they get the hint.

Also, if you email ahead of time to set up an interview and you’ve never talked to the source before, you can send background about the publication you’re writing for or the specifics of the story in the message so you don’t need to spend time going over those details during your call. If you’re cold calling, keep intros to a minimum. If you’re talking to a regular source they’ll know you & you can cut to the chase.

If you’re looking for more help with interviews, here’s some suggestions for good questions to ask in an interview.

5 reasons why freelancers need to take vacations

Don’t underestimate the power of a good vacation. I just got back from one and the mental break was as beneficial as the extra physical activity I did while I was gone.

It’s hard for freelancers to get away. When we don’t work, money doesn’t come in. It’s especially hard to turn down projects in order to take a break at a time when magazines and newspapers are cutting back on freelance work and what they want to pay for the work they buy.

But it’s important to take a break, even if it’s to sit in a lounge chair in your backyard and flip through magazines and soak up the sun, or do those things around town that you’ve never gotten around to doing. Here’s why vacations are important:

1. You need to recharge your batteries. Weekends are wonderful, but every once in a while you need more than two days to rest up from the constant treadmill of pitching, interviews, writing and rewriting.

2. In the thick of work, it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees. This thought occurred to me as I was literally walking through a forest, staring up at the Douglas firs and cedars in the Mt. Baker-Snoqualmie National Forest in Washington. It’s easy to get caught up in the minutiae of a daily routine and ignore the big picture of where your writing business is headed. Stepping away from it all for a bit can give you time to examine how satisfied you are with where your writing business is headed, and brainstorm ideas for moving it in new directions.

3. Experiencing new places, meeting new people and trying new things can generate ideas for stories. I’m not talking about travel pieces here. Different surroundings can sometimes have that “aha” effect on your brain that helps you come up with new ideas or inspirations, like Jonah Lehrer wrote about in his recent article in The New Yorker, The Eureka Hunt.

4. The big project/phone call/email you’ve been waiting for will arrive the minute you leave town. Call it Murphy’s law of freelancing. Inevitably, the week you’re away is the week you’ll be most popular with the editors you’ve been hounding forever. This happened to me - despite all of the precautions I took ahead of time to alert everyone I write for I’d be gone. The editor on the story I handed in weeks ago will finally emailed to say he liked it and wanted to run it on his Website ASAP, was I available for a couple quick questions? In situations like this, you have to decide how out of touch you want to stay. Is it worth it to answer a couple emails, or can things wait until you’re back in the office.

5. The people in your life are pretty cool - they deserve your undivided attention. We working parents are jugglers, constantly balancing jobs with taking care of kids, the house, the pets, groceries, sports practices, etc. So for one week it’s great to forget the juggle and concentrate on what’s really important, the people who make everything else we do worthwhile.

Best of WordCount recap

In case you missed it, while I was on vacation last week, I ran some of the most popular posts from WordCount’s back issues. Take a look:

Online resources for writers - Help navigating the world of Web-based resources for writers, including top Web 2.0 tools, what writers should know about SEO and how to use LinkedIn.

Blogging basics for writers - Everything you need to know to start a writing blog, including what software to use, what to write, how often to post and how to build a following.

Tips for improving your writing - How to write short articles, conduct interviews, finish stories faster and lots more.

Best blogs for writers - Some of WordCount’s most popular posts include information about blogs for writers and writers who blog.

Career development for freelancers - Information on grants, scholarships, fellowships, plus real-life tips and suggestions from freelancers on how to successfully weather the bad economy.

Best of WordCount: Career development for freelancers

WordCount is taking a break this week while I’m on vacation, so I’m rerunning some of WordCount’s most popular posts ever on a variety of topics.

Today: Career development for freelancers

Freelancers’ strategies for prospering in bad times - Suggestions from established freelancers with a variety of backgrounds and business plans, including tips for maintaining old clients while cultivating new ones.

Guest post: Going freelance in a down economy - Susan Johnston, a.k.a. The Urban Muse, shares how she ditched her full-time job for freelancing in this guest post.

Freelancers need to pursue grants, scholarships, fellowships - It’s hard for self-employed writers to make time to take classes, but the payoff in more interesting, better paying assignments can make it worthwhile.

Grants for women in digital media - Information on institutions that run grant programs to support women in media, who are at greater risk of dropping out of the profession than men.

News U. offers online courses and Webinars - Take classes without leaving home.

Best of WordCount: Best blogs for writers

WordCount is taking a break this week while I’m on vacation, so I’m rerunning some popular posts on a variety of topics.

Today: Best blogs for writers

Best blogs for writers - WordCount’s most popular post ever - more than 1,000 page views - lists a variety of blogs written by and for freelance writers of all stripes, including journalists, magazine feature writers, copywriters and more.

Best blogs on the media business - With so much happening at newspapers and magazines these days, it pays to keep up with the Times, the New York Times, that is. Here’s how.

Writer’s Digest’s 2008 Best Sites for Writers - The annual listing of 101 best Websites for writers, many of which are blogs by and for freelancers.

Tomorrow: Career development for freelancers