1. The cheapest way to get advertised here is just
to make, sell, or do something that a member of this web site finds worth
advertising. In that case we may advertise your product or service free of
charge. But you must continue consistently to please us. If disappointed we may
feel especially obliged to warn
people so that they’ll not be disappointed too.
If you are an elected official to whom one of us
has sent an Internet petition or a real letter, your replies and further e-mail
will appear here free of charge, as received, as being part of the public
record. The cheapest advertising an elected official can get is a public record
of having represented constituents well.
Though all posts at this site are tagged “Posted
by Priscilla King,” because that’s how our hosted system works, at least
theoretically four other living people have the right to post their own writing
here under their own screen names.
2. If none of us has used your product or service,
you must pay to advertise it and the post that mentions it will mention that
it’s a paid advertisement. Paid ads may or may not relate directly to written
content. Products and services advertised in paid ads may be available in
countries other than the United States where this web site is read; Google
publishes the blog in many countries and may offer automatic translation into their
languages.
a. Paid ads may consist simply of links, with or
without pictures. You may post a paid ad as a comment, in which you may make
any legitimate statement you choose to make about your product or service, or
have a link and/or graphic appear in the original post. The price is $5 per
link.
b. Paid ads may appear in product-supportive posts
if your product or service is reasonably compatible with this web site. Topics
of these posts do not need to have appeared at this site before. Posts will not
claim that we use the product or service if we don’t. Posts may include
favorable comments on your web site’s design or content, your product’s or
service's Amazon ratings, the look of your product, any public statements of
support for any cause we may also support, etc., if those comments occur
sincerely to me or to someone who agrees to be quoted.
The price for product-supportive posts generally
reflects the length of the post and any research it may include. Since Fiverr
adopted an alarming policy of automatically accepting jobs before freelancers
actually see the offers, I’m no longer available there, so here is the rate
schedule I used to have or would have displayed at Fiverr:
(i) “One screen” posts are short (500 words or
fewer), simple posts that use up very little memory and are most likely to be
read by people using older laptop computers, tablet computers, or cell phones.
This is a large audience so don’t underestimate the reach of posts that are
accessible to them. Short simple posts cost $5. They are most likely to be read
during the week they appear. People who are employed in your business—your
employees, or your competitors’—will keep coming back to older posts in this
category. Prospective customers, not so much. You may want to consider paying
for fresh short posts each month. A short post may contain a small picture and typically contains one
or two links.
Short posts may be “search engine optimized” but
should not look obviously “keyword-stuffed.” Thus, if your product is “flower
arrangements for weddings,” it would include related phrases like “bride’s
bouquet,” “bridegroom’s lapel,” “bridesmaid,” “mother of the bride,” and
“souvenirs for guests,” but in a short post, trying to work in “flower
arrangements in bride’s bouquet” and “flower arrangements in souvenirs for
guests” would look repetitious and actually be down-rated by the more
sophisticated search engines.
(ii) Typical blog posts contain 500 to 1500 words
and may contain more links, pictures, and keyword phrases. Paid ad posts usually
include general information about a product or service—its history, how it’s
used, interviews with people who use it, how to maintain it in good condition, etc.
I don’t do fiction about alleged users whose livestock and even relatives were
all just collapsing with anemia from
mosquito bites until someone sprayed some Flit and they all instantly revived blah blah. I do posts
that summarize what customers post about a product on shopping sites; if you’re
getting full marks from a majority of customers, that’s worth posting about.
(Posts about products’ customer ratings do have to mention what people don’t
like, but in the case of good products this tends to be product-supportive
anyway, showing that people who don’t like your product are really looking for some
other kind of product and should save their time by buying that.)
Pictures in paid ad posts should be either your
original artwork, photos, or business logos, or the original work of artists
credited with by-lines and links to their web sites. Pictures can be what
Blogspot defines as medium-size (like the book jackets and Petfinder photos,
taking up about half the width of the blog column, which Blogspot keeps narrow
for viewing on small devices; up to 200x400 pixels). Pictures in a $10 paid
post must be simple JPG, no animation, no sound, no cookies.
Links to sites other than your own (shopping
sites, informational sites, books or news media that you quote or that mention
your product or service) are good in a paid ad post. I personally like “linkfest”
type posts, but some people hate them enough that generally one link to 200
words is considered the right ratio.
Different search engines use, and continually
update, different algorithms so there are different rules about how to do SEO.
You get analytics as well as keywords (how many people searched for a keyword,
what else they searched for, which countries they were in) by subscribing to
SEO services, which I recommend to . You get the same keyword, phrase, and
question lists by checking Bing, Google, and Yahoo yourself or paying me to do
that. A typical blog post usually has room for 15 to 20 keyword phrases and
questions. Often the questions organize themselves naturally into lists with
headings, which I think are overused on the Internet, but that’s because they
make documents easier for some adaptive devices to handle.
Some ambitious blogs pay for batches of blog
posts—often five per week, one posted each working day—on an ongoing basis.
There’s no extra charge for long-term contracts to write this kind of thing.
The more detailed your instructions, the better you’re likely to be satisfied
with the posts you get. I once wrote blog posts for a Quora-style forum where
the specifications were that each post had to get the discussion going with two
substantial “comments” adding information (and keywords) below the main post.
That level of fiction is not an ethical problem for me, as long as I have seen
or heard real people expressing the different opinions for which the fake
comments made room. I could not currently
write a post with a “comment” representing an honorable person defending
glyphosate, because anyone currently defending glyphosate is at best ignorant
and out of date, and would have to sound like it. I could not currently write a “comment” representing
a bigot as an intelligent, decent human being. I could easily write posts with
“comments” representing someone who admires Donald Trump and someone who hates
him, or someone who enjoys driving a car and someone who’s willing to drive
only after others have demonstrated that they’re unfit, because I know real
people who honestly express a full range of opinions and experiences on that
kind of topics.
(iii) Original offline research is appropriate for
some typical blog posts or full-length articles. I love doing original offline
research but it costs money—$50 per day plus travel expenses, and where I live,
travel expenses usually involve paying a driver $50 per day too. Interviews
with some types of people, such as artists, inventors, publicists, politicians,
park rangers, public safety experts, and evangelical religious people, are easy
to get at no charge. My whimsical “interviews with animals” are usually
suggested by observing animals’ behavior and/or animal-related issues in the
news, and cost nothing. Interviews with eyewitnesses, survivors, and scientists
doing independent research or teaching, cost money; I recommend $50 per
eyewitness or scientist, $100 per survivor. If you talked to survivors of
combat, personal tragedy, or controversial surgical procedures you’d probably want to offer them more than $100, but
there might be good budgetary reasons why they wouldn’t take more than that if
you offered more than that—or there may not. Original offline research is
recommended if you want to cite the latest scientific studies, which are often
available to university libraries and paying members of professional
associations only.
I offer original offline research in university
libraries on legal, medical, scientific, and technological topics. I’m
literate, if not fluent, in those dialects. Remarkably few people are willing
to pay what it costs, but I do it, happily, when paid.
(iv) Long blog posts or traditional magazine
articles contain 1500 to 5000 words and may contain even more links, pictures,
and keyword phrases while keeping the same proportion of those things to words.
In theory the basic fee is still about a penny per word for writing off the top
of my head, plus about $50 per day for research, but it’s harder to write a
worthwhile long post without some research. (Internet research only still costs
$50 per day, but typically takes less time, and is one of the few services I
offer for which it is feasible to
prorate charges for fractions of a day. Generally, if I leave the house or the
computer center and/or talk to people, that’s
a day.)
In the SEO for a long post it’s possible to
aggregate different unrelated keywords if the article presents information
linking, say, “glyphosate,” “cancer,” “autism,” “gastrointestinal diseases,”
and “obesity”—or perhaps “walking,” “cardiovascular health,” “weight control,”
and “mood boost,” or “honeybees,” “flowers,” “beans,” “vegetables,” and “global
food supply.”
(v) Long “reports” or “e-books” really are
mini-books of at least 25,000 words. Blog sites aren’t set up to handle them.
They’re formatted to look like and/or be printed as real books. They can
contain long quotes (with permission), graphics, and tables. They can contain a
lot of things, depending on who’s going to e-publish them. Traditional short
books can be e-published with the option to print on demand, free of charge, on
Amazon and other sites; often they serve as promotions for full-length books.
Amazon loves audio-books and will
accept live interviews (if people speak clearly) and live music to which you
have the copyright. If you’re paying for professional website management, you
can publish the same script as a book and a movie. Despite my well-known
abhorrence of unnecessary “updates” I do like exploring new useful applications of technology, and
some apps are so easy that people like you and I can use them to build
high-tech e-books. Generally I don’t consider myself a skilled professional
even with simple, printable graphic design; my simple, printable graphics work, but eye thinkers might think a
specialist’s graphic designs are better.
E-books are lovely tie-ins with products or
services. E-books about the Bible can be printed and offered to visitors in a
church’s vestibule. E-books that trace the history of food products and give recipes
make good gifts, can be developed into publishable books, and can be used to
promote food products you sell. A popular way to write a long novel, these
days, is to write a series of four or five related e-books, typically
introducing the characters in the first novelette free of charge at a web site
and offering their complete story as the printed book. This can also be done
with fun facts about different products you sell, with e-books on topics like
beads, pendants, headbands, bracelets, and combs, or coffee, cocoa, soup,
ramen, and mug cakes, or whatever. What’s an AirBnB without an up-to-date book,
or basket of mini-books, about your town and its attractions? If people visit
your town to celebrate an annual harvest festival, music festival, or sports
event, why not a book about the festival and what it celebrates? Even people
who won’t buy your products might buy your books, if they’re fun to read, and I
believe I’ve made mine fun to read.
Because e-books are usually designed for sale rather than being published free
for the world to see on the Internet, SEO is usually irrelevant—and since
clients often rewrite them, have them rewritten, or pull them down once the
full-length book becomes available, they don’t stay online and are hard for
people checking my writing credentials to find! That’s all right. Once you’ve
paid for an e-book, it’s yours. I keep only the right to mention that I sold
someone a book manuscript with a working title which is probably different from
the title of the client’s published book.
E-books start at $300. Different publishers
recommend different formats for e-book manuscripts. I offer three popular
formats: Microsoft Word .docx, PDF, or Google Docs. Amazon specializes in
converting your scripts to Kindle and will also convert your printed script to
an Audible audio file free of charge.
Should you or I read your e-book aloud as an audio
file? Some publishers like to work from their own studios and employ their own
professional readers. If you’re not working with one of them, and if you have
decent recording equipment and a reasonably clear voice, I tend to vote for
reading your own scripts. Intonation conveys meaning and most books contain
sentences that people other than the author are likely to read with the wrong
intonation for the intended meaning. It’s worth the effort to read sections and
practice until your audio documents sound “professional,” or at least easy to
understand. It’s also worth asking a few e-friends in different countries to
determine how accessible your version of English is to a global audience. For
maximum reach you may prefer to work with the publishers’ BBC- or
NBC-English-speaking readers.
A good e-book contains general information about a
topic with only a little product-specific content. A topic like “cell phone
etiquette” or “things people are doing with cell phones” suggests a book that
at least mentions the special quirks and features of most or all of the cell
phones that were on the market at the time of writing. You can include specific
instructions for using your own cell phone app, and some publishers will
include links to product sales pages in an e-book, but books gain credibility
by being independent of the product they support.
3. For me, writing is a window not a mirror. I
enjoy learning more about topics on which I’ve not considered myself expert
enough to write a lot of blog posts. I paid for psychology courses, not
entomology, at Berea College (although my faculty adviser did believe that much can be learned about neurology by studying
insects). I started writing about caterpillars because nobody else wanted to do
it that year, and kept on because it was a nice spacious friendly niche
market—there are more people who want to know what they should do about a
creature they find in the garden than there are people who want to be
entomologists and answer their questions. I’ve seriously considered pursuing a
degree in entomology for that reason. I’ve learned a lot about cars, solar
collectors, coffee, “Study Abroad” programs, online courses, furniture, and
whatnot from paid writing projects; I’m always interested in learning about the
topics that interest you. And yes, even when I personally have reservations
about a product or idea, I’m interested in knowing why other people may like
it.
By “reservations” I mean everything from “Printed
newspaper subscriptions are something I’d buy if I had more income, but I can’t
afford any” through “These baby supplies may be very nice for babies; I’m glad
I personally have never had a baby” to “I’m glad I don’t have to own any car and I wouldn’t have this
particular model as a gift, so it’s
interesting to observe how many people like it and why.” I write about cars I
wouldn’t keep, about places where I couldn’t be paid to live, about politicians
for whom I have no vote. That’s cool.
There are, however, some products and services I don’t
want this web site to touch, even if I’ve written about some of them
anonymously at writing sites, including though not necessarily limited to...
* Pornography
* Paid sex, dating, or phone chat services, even
if they try very hard to be legitimate
social sites for nice people who want friendship that could elad to
marriage
* Any kind of drugs, including alcohol as a
beverage
* Any birth control product. Even though this web
site doesn’t discuss the details, having a policy that people who can’t figure
out the details for themselves are either too young or too unimaginative to be
thinking about sex, this web site has a policy that if people choose a healthy
natural approach to sex they don’t
need to buy the products. (Even though some people enjoy playing with the
products, anyway...that’s the kind of personal quirk this web site does not
discuss.)
* Any dietary supplement, exercise product, safety
device, etc., that’s marketed as anything beyond what it is in objective fact. The
position of this web site is that it’s best to start by choosing healthy
ancestors and then make the choices that maintain your good health for the next
ninety years after birth; we don’t need to
spend a lot of money on health-supporting products and services. It can be hard
to draw a hard-and-fast line about things like noting that the right kind of
massage, at the right time, can promote healing from wounds, and a
phytochemical in a certain food may build resistance to a certain disease, and
shrieking that, e.g., kudzu roots are THE CURE to cardiovascular disease that
THEY don’t want YOU to know about. (Powdered kudzu root does in fact contain a
phytochemical that can help lower blood pressure. Don’t spray your kudzu—those
roots are worth money. Digging up kudzu roots promotes sweaty, aerobic
exercise, which can also help reverse cardiovascular disease.) Generally this
web site is open to publicizing facts about foods, exercises, nutrients,
massage, and protective or adaptive gadgets, but its tolerance for hype is low.
I like to see the warnings and contraindications for what you do recommend and a
realistically skeptical view of the hazards of what you don’t recommend. I don’t
like any effort to tell the general public, across the board, that anything is “good for you” or “bad for you”:
you don’t know the reader’s actual medical profile. Just the facts, please.
* Any encouragement to pay third parties just for
handling money
* Any encouragement to operate on borrowed money
or in debt
* Any encouragement to lend money at interest
* Any form of gambling, from lotteries to
insurance. Buying lottery tickets can be a nice public-spirited way to make a
donation to charity or fund a special government-promoted-but-not-tax-funded
project, and there can be benefits in taking out insurance, but this web site
is not going to market such things.
* Any chemical “pesticide” spray that’s
misrepresented as a way to “control” anything.
* Any product that’s advertised with pictures of
bare skin (or other body parts, including, for the sake of consistency, hair),
especially in a disease condition
* Any product that’s associated with censorship,
especially if that censorship has appealed to “junk science.” Junk science is
produced by either or both of two deviations from the scientific method: (1)
denying the limits of scientific knowledge and thus confusing theories with
facts, or (2) beginning with an attachment to a particular outcome and setting
up or reporting studies in a way that supports your bias. In recent years both
of these errors have led people to scream about “the science” when they meant
unscientific and counterfactual drivel, thus giving science a bad name.
* Any site that’s slanderous or hateful, with
specific reference to (1) Christian-phobic content, (2) content that denigrates
women, and (3) content that smears all Republicans as racists. I am not and
have never been a member of the Republican Party, and sometimes they annoy me
too, but be reasonable!
There probably is content Out There that will be
added to this list if it’s shown to me.
Generally I’m sympathetic to ads for things like
* books
* newspapers
* magazines
* web sites
* electronics
* non-perishable food
* dishes and kitchenware
* clothing
* shoes, hats, “fashion accessories”
* furniture
* handcrafts
* original arts and crafts
* toys, especially if they don’t plug into walls
and don’t make noise
* pet supplies
* household supplies
* farm supplies
* gardening supplies
* camping equipment
* sporting goods (other than weapons)
* stores where readers can buy perishable food,
weapons, and other things that aren’t suitable for selling online
* social events that are open to the public
* sale days at stores
* one-time ads you used to place at Craigslist
before that site got so messed up
* musical instruments
* music recordings
There are probably other categories I would have
added if I’d thought of them. If in doubt, ask.
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