Dear Alexis from Montana...

Alexis is a real estate agent who's looking for a social media consultant and/or blogger on  Freelancer.com. Alexis reasonably asked, of a site that employs people from all over the world and advertises jobs in all sorts of exotic languages, that Freelancer workers interested in this position be certified fluent in U.S. English, Level One. (So how did that posting get onto a list of jobs recommended to me? Freelancer's lists of recommendations are a joke. They recommend everything to everybody. The list in my daily e-mail usually contains at least one job posted as "Job for Tracy Doe, I want to work with Tracy Doe again," and at least one in a language I don't read.) Poor newbie Alexis...little did she know that...

1. Tests of U.S. English, Level One, at online writing sites tend to be literacy tests that may or may not ensure that the person knows how English plural forms, gender pronouns, or negative particles work. It really is level one. This is screening for a person who can read English on the sixth grade level, but not necessarily write English above the third grade level. Alexis will probably notice this in some of the bids she receives.

2. However, at some online writing or general online job sites, skills tests do at least offer all workers a fair chance to demonstrate that they can pass a very quick basic screening test on the skills employers want. At Freelancer that's not the case. At Freelancer all "certifications" prove that workers have paid money to that site. I believe this is unethical so I don't have, and will never have, any "certifications" of job skills at Freelancer.

I mean, I was born in the United States, to English-speaking parents; I was the child prodigy who learned to read at age three; I was the high school spelling champion; I made the Dean's List with an English major at a rinky-dink church college, which was easy, and with a psychology major at Berea, which was not easy; I started tutoring English at seventeen and publishing written work in English at eighteen. And I have a half-dozen documents, available directly from my Freelancer page as well as back in the archives of this web site, of how fluently I write English--academic documents, chatty blog-post-type documents, Bad Poetry, recipes, whatever. (Translations, I really ought to post a translation...there's a poem inspired by a classic of French Literature on my Live Journal, but that really is a separate bit of Bad Poetry, not a proper translation of the original poem.) But I don't have "certification in U.S. English, Level One" at Freelancer, as some people whose bids may read like "How are you Sir i will write you blog post" do have. And I never will.

That's a statement, Gentle Readers. Fwiw I've been "certified" in both U.S. and U.K. English by other writing sites that test all writers, free of charge, before linking them to writing clients. (Fwiw, although the spelling and punctuation rules differ, anyone who really has native fluency in one form of English can easily memorize the short list of rules for the other kind. And a few different lists of rules for formatting references, too.)

3. Facebook may seem as if it's read by everyone who uses the Internet at all, because it is read by a lot of people...but there is actually a substantial online community of people who don't use Facebook. That, also, is a choice. Many of those people don't use Linked In, either. Obviously you can't put a full-length blog on Twitter or Instagram...and I have to say that when I did use Linked In, I was always trying to read people's blogs on topics Linked In recommended, and that site never seemed to get the hang of making sure its own links to its own advertised public posts actually worked, so I never tried to put a blog there either.

If I were your paid social media consultant, Alexis, I would use Facebook, since you have gone to the trouble to set up a business page there, and lots of people do use Facebook. (That's not to say that I'd set up a business page there for myself, but that I'd post your content to your business page, and "friend" people who showed interest in real estate and/or home improvement and/or Montana and/or weekend classes and/or other things you might want to blog about.) I would not rely on Facebook as a blog platform. I'd definitely set up a blog the anti-Facebook crowd could read on a free platform like Word Press, Live Journal, Blogger/Blogspot, or Weebly. Or all of the above.

You can also buy your own business blog domain and set up an independent blog that's not hosted by anybody. If you post "adult content," blog to vent your emotions using lots of rude words and violent fantasies, or write the kind of alt-right or alt-left content that emphasizes your distrust of Google or Microsoft, an independent blog is mandatory. If you post a normal, businesslike blog about real estate, home improvement, and life in Bozeman, which is the kind of thing the hosting sites want, here I stand to testify that the hosting sites have behaved well even for this blog, which is not the kind of thing they want particularly.

In any case, if you're going to blog, you must have a blog that behaves well for the anti-Facebook crowd. A Facebook-only blog may pull in enough traffic from Facebook users to be worth maintaining, but it amounts to negative publicity among us anti-Facebookers. So I'd insist that you post duplicate or similar blog content off Facebook; no, that wouldn't take any significant amount of additional billable hours, and you advertised that you wanted to pay a steady retainer rather than try to track work hours online, which was what attracted me to your Freelancer posting anyway.

Instagram should be good for you, Alexis, because a real estate blog should be packed with pictures of beautifully maintained houses and adorable fixer-uppers you have for sale and the before-and-after home improvement projects you're sharing with readers. I don't do Instagram, but you should, and if you're paying a consultant to maintain a lively Instagram account, a lively Instagram account you'll have.

Linked In...I wish I could say that, too, should be good for you. Maybe it's a server problem in my corner of the world. Maybe it's actually been fixed by now. I found that site dysfunctional and annoying, but if you want a blog there I can maintain one.

And if I were writing a blog about houses for sale, real estate news, and home improvement, Alexis...no, it would not reflect my interests; it'd be your blog, reflecting such of your interests as you choose to share on it, the classes you're taking or teaching, the charities you endorse, etc. And the posts would be worth sharing on Twitter. Twitter can become a time sink, if you either use it for headline news, use it for socializing, or use it to relax and switch mental gears in between hack writing jobs, but it doesn't have to be one. Twitter does connect you to a lot of nice anti-Facebook people--people who are very social online and like sharing pretty pictures, and have vowed that they'll never pay to use a web site nor furnish real-world identifying information to a web site. I think you need to add Twitter to your list.

At an Amazon Associate site, every post needs an Amazon book link. 

Should you forget about Freelancer.com and hire me, Alexis? There are valid arguments both ways. I could use the money, and yes, I have written real estate news for places I've never been. (The post on this web site, "Beaches of Vietnam," in no way suggests that it was written by a person who'd ever been there. That client asked for a summary of the current information on travel review sites, and that's what that post is. As a ghostwriter for real estate sites, I have used what the site owners sent me in posts that sound as if they were written by someone living in Seattle or Calgary or wherever, because, after all, the original notes were.)

On the other hand, who knows whether Freelancer might connect you with a blogger who actually lives in Bozeman and might be able to do a much better job, much more efficiently, than someone hundreds of miles away. Things like that happen in cyberspace, occasionally.