Choosing carefully when to post to your Web site, whether you are a newspaper or a blogger, is supposed to be a boon to your traffic.
Insightful Web analytics, they tell me, are the golden ticket to blossoming attention. So what time should you be posting?
Continue reading When to forward post to meet your Web traffic: the busiest times on the Internet
How many e-mail addresses do you have in your address book?
Sources have been important to journalists of all shape and caliber for the profession’s entire history, perhaps even more so for freelancers, who are guiding a ship and finding their story pitches on their own. But in an age of social networks and e-mail clients, it’s important to reevaluate how you’re collecting, retaining and organizing your sources.
Continue reading How developed is your contact list: freelance journalists better become collectors
I have at least three fairly different resumes stored in my Google Documents, ready to e-mail to editors, mentors, advisers or welfare agents.
For Philadelphia’s newest admitted freelance journalist, it’s a must because I am never quite certain exactly how I am branding myself and for what sort of work I might be pursuing.
How many resumes do you have? Are you ready to bust them out the moment someone of even the vaguest professional merit comes within sniffing distance?
Continue reading How many resumes do you have?: paper promotion of the young and unemployed
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Google announced its hosting of 10 million Time-Life photographs last month.
The Google Life-magazine archive is a sign of more to come, but is pretty cool already. I’ve chosen five of the better images I found by checking “Philadelphia source: Life” in a Google image search. (hat tip to 10,000 words)
Right now, there are more than 200 items for Philadelphia, though the search seems to have some quirks. I couldn’t find items during one search, but if I used the same search terms ten minutes later, it might appear – other times, no Philadelphia images would register at all. Things that will be corrected I will imagine. Whether more items are to be added I don’t know, but for now, the oldest is a painting of a scene from the 1790s and the photos run to the 1980s.
See my ten favorites below, in chronological order.
Continue reading The 10 best Philadelphia images from new Life Magazine Google archive
There are many things in this world I cannot do.
One of those I am reminded of regularly is photography. I have the pleasure and curse of being surrounded by a host of genuinely talented young photogs.
But I have had some limited experience and even less training, so when compiling a collection of freelance services I could offer, as announced earlier this week, I listed photography.
At least one of my friends, among the more talented photographers of my talented contemporaries, took issue with this. For freelancers out there, it’s important to understand what and why you can and should offer potential clients.
Continue reading Can I offer services in photography, Web design without formal training
Last week I announced my intentions to give one of the hardest professional roads a try. I’m trying to be a freelance journalist – in Philadelphia, a city in a persistent media hiring freeze.
So if it’s always important to brand yourself, now is a particularly important juncture for this underemployed writer. For more than a year now though, leading up to and continuing beyond my college graduation, I have employed and developed a growing online community of methods to take control over my Web presence.
I am obsessively trying to find ways to market myself online like more and more multimedia journalists of all ages and experiences. So, what are you doing to promote your name?
Continue reading Marketing yourself online: your byline is your brand
Google Reader I am back.
Last month I returned from five weeks backpacking Europe and moved into a new home in Frankford, a neighborhood in lower Northeast Philadelphia.
Somehow, even though I was travel blogging and video podcasting at WeDontSpeaktheLanguage.com, my month-plus European tour was an Internet vacation (IV) for me.
It was a chance to look at what social networking devices are easiest to put on hold.
Continue reading Web presences, social networking that can be put on hold
With some business reporting background, I really should have a better, more fuller grasp on the complexities of what caused today’s growing financial meltdown. But lots of smart people are having trouble understanding.
For the Philadelphia Business Journal in April, I put together an interesting Q&A on the mortgage crisis with E. Robert Levy, the executive director of the Mortgage Bankers Association of New Jersey.
If only we knew then that that was just the beginning. Now those failing mortgages have collapsed other parts of the global economy, and everywhere – perhaps outside of North Dakota – is feeling the pinch.
A friend forwarded me a good video from American Public Media discussing collaterized debt obligations – the financial products that brought last spring’s mortgage foreclosure surge to the world.
It helps, seriously. See it below.