We Made the Short List!

I'm thrilled to announce that CatalystBlogger has made the short list for Michael Stelzner's Top 10 Blogs for Writers awards! I've got some stiff competition, though. These are the nominated blogs:

Catalystblogger
Copyblogger
Copywriter Underground
Copywriting Maven
Freelance Parent
Freelance Writing Jobs
Get Paid to Write Online
Golden Pencil
Heather Strang, Writer
Ink in my Coffee
Renegade Writer Blog
The Urban Muse
Web Content Writer Tips
Web Writing Info
Write From Home
Writer Mama
Writer’s Resource Center
Writing for Writers
Writing the Cyber Highway

I feel pretty good to be up there with such great blogs. As I was setting this post up I took a peek at each of these, and here are some of my favorite posts:

Copyblogger has a post up on what improvisational acting can teach us about blogging. This is an appealing post to me because acting is my second love. I earned two majors in college; one in theatre arts and one in writing. Anyway, I love both business writing and acting, but rarely do I find a place where the two intersect. I give Copyblogger a lot of credit for such a creative (and useful) post.

Get Paid to Write Online writes about how to manage your workload so that you're not depending on just a few lucrative clients. I've definitely had points where most of my work has come from just a few clients, and once it was very bad news for me when a client left. We're all safer when we're getting our work from multiple sources.

Ink in my Coffee. This person is a powerhouse. Check out the word counts she's racked up on the two novels she's working on--they're up at the end of each post. She does all this in addition to running an extremely successful writing business. I think I have a new hero.

Web Content Writer Tips has a thoughtful piece up on the pros and cons of making your rates public. I wrote about this when I first decided to do it, and it was definitely not an easy decision. This post brings up a lot of good reasons both to avoid doing this and to try it--many of which I hadn't thought of before. I particularly like how James talks himself into putting his rates up by the end of the piece, even though he started off with the opposite view.

There's a great piece on Web Writing Info about the harm crappy content does to a business--even if it's just a keyword article. It's never made sense to me why businesses that would never dream of sending a marketing brochure or sales letter out less-than-perfect are completely happy to throw garbage content at the search engines. If anything, many more people will see those online articles than will ever see your sales brochure. Courtney's piece should be required reading for anyone starting an article marketing campaign.

Writer’s Resource Center has a lively discussion going on about the ProCopywriter debacle. Definitely worth a read. And while you're at it, check out ProCopywriters to see if they're using the content on your blog.

The winners will be decided in December. Best of luck to all my fellow bloggers!