5 Writing Blogs You Should Be Reading

My Fav Five!

I haven’t done a “shout out” of blogs in some time, so let me do that today with a focus on those offered by freelance writers, bloggers, journalists, and others who write for a living. I’m not going to include the usual suspects because everyone knows the A-listers. Oftentimes, the best stuff is found elsewhere; besides if you want interaction from the blogger him/herself, the smaller sites are often the best for that.

My Blog Guest – I wrote about this site’s forum last week, but have since found Ann Smarty’s related and recently launched blog. As you might guess, Ann’s topic is about guest blogging which is something I know can help raise your visibility if you choose to go down that path.

Freelance Folder – I would not have known about this site if my writing friend, Laura Spencer, from Writing Thoughts hadn’t alerted me to it. Well, it turns out that Laura is a regularly and frequent to contributor to this site which has been picking up a ton of traffic in recent months. Laura always shares stuff of interest to writers including “Mastering the Art of Client Relations.”

Carson Brackney – Several years ago I crossed paths with Carson when he ran Content Done Better, enjoying his advice which always seemed to fly in the face of conventional wisdom. Carson sold his blog and disappeared for two years as he took on a regular job, but now he is back and as caustic as ever! Carson is an advocate of content mills (he runs one himself) and a slayer of elitist writers. Nuff said.

A Writer’s Word, An Editor’s Eye – I’ve referenced Lillie’s site before, but her site is worth a visit. Lillie is a writer, but she is also an editor and a darn good one at that. A couple years back I referred a friend to Lillie who needed some advice with a book. Lillie took the time to help my friend out, an invaluable and totally unexpected response from Mrs. Ammann.

4 Walls and a View – Dominique Small launched her newest site in January and has been doing very well. Instead of offering writing tips per se, Dominique uses her blog to advocate on behalf or chronicle illnesses, namely chronic fatigue syndrome and fibromyalgia. By sharing her personal battle with these diseases Dominique does a wonderful job in educating people on a very personal level. She demonstrates that good writing can come forth despite life’s challenges.

Thanks for stopping by; I’ll be featuring additional favorites in the near future, but covering a different topic.

Hanging In With Entrecard

I forget how long I have been using Entrecard, but I am still active with this traffic generating social networking site. I don’t drop cards every day and rarely do I come anywhere near the 300 card drop limit.

Funny, all those blurbs about dropping 300 cards in 5 to 15 minutes just doesn’t seem to work for me. It takes me at least 45 minutes, sometimes longer to get through 300.

Regular Visitors

What I do not do enough of is to acknowledge people who visit Matt’s Musings by way of Entrecard. I know a lot of you do and some of you are my top droppers.

January 2009 statistics are in and I would like to thank and recognize the Top 10 Entrecard droppers for the month. They are:

The Way I See It

Patsy’s Words of Wisdom

One World Realty

Cooking Japanese Style

Doocci.com

Cornymans Money-Blog, everything about financial independence

AsTheCrackerheadCrumbles

The One Minute Guide

WordJourney

Best travel pictures in the world

I have started to use Adgitize again and must say that I am disappointed in this service. Twice within the first ten days they were down, sometimes for two or three days at a time.  I understand that websites have problems but prolonged outages are annoying.

Using Adgitize

Entrecard, thankfully, seems to have moved past its growing pains so let’s hope that Adgitize will soon be able to do the same thing. In any case, these kinds of sites can be useful in helping bring in some extra traffic as well as comments to your blog. I have been leaving comments more often too so hopefully our combined efforts will benefit everyone.

I also appreciate my advertisers, many of whom are regulars too. That means I will need to keep track of who is advertising and thank them in a follow up Entrecard post.

Unrelated Business

Not related to Entrecard or Adgitize but still of importance are people who are leaving comments but are doing certain things that are definitely not kosher.

For example, when filling out the spot for your name please use only your real name. The name of your company or anything besides your real name should never be used. Granted, I will sometimes change your comment to reflect your real name (if known) or if your comment is still good, I’ll make up a name. All other comments I delete.

It is considerate when people fill out there comments correctly. You already get a nice link back to your site, but I don’t want to see links within comments unless they are related to the article. Still, use the line on the comment form to include that link.

I apologize for closing with this point, but I have seen a sharp uptick in the number of people who are spamming this blog.