One thing I have noticed lately is the increased demand for freelance writers. OK I specialise in writing website content and other forms of writing designed to be used on-line, so we can expect a growth in this industry as the internet is still booming. However, the increase in demand seems to be significant.

I can only attribute this to the growing awareness of the importance of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), and the fact that many SEO practices revolve around a requirement for quality website content.

This of course is good news for those people like me, who make their living as a freelance writing, focused upon producing high quality website content.

Let us hope the boom continues into the future.

My girlfriend pointed out to me the fact that most morning I spend at least a couple of hours sitting at my laptop, drinking coffee and dealing with the day to day tasks associated with running a business. When I add this up it comes to a staggering 14 hours a week. This is 14 hours that I am not writing, 14 hours I am not getting paid for and 14 hours that need to be budgeted for in my rates.

So I’m going to spend a week keeping track of exactly how long I spend on the purely administrative tasks associated with being a freelance writer. Then I will work out new rates which take this dead time into consideration. One of the great things about being a freelance writer is the fact I can adjust my fees as I see fit.

This huge market has massive amounts of room for other writers to jump in and get a slice of the pie, and I am sure there are many new writers out there who would love to take a crack at supplying the demanding needs of website owners and internet marketers.

SO I have decided to develop a freelance writer mentoring programme, where I will guide new writers through the subtly different aspect of writing for the on-line market. I will spend the next couple of months putting a strategy together, which will be designed to take a new freelance writer from the infant stages of securing their first website content project, through to advanced topics such as writing for an interactive audience.

Whenever we do something like this it is always hard to be productive, usually after riding our three wheel scooter come shopping trolley for a few hours in the blistering sun, I’m pretty tired. This time around I have planned my work schedule much better, and only have around three hours work per day on the books for the entire three weeks we are travelling.

Of course, I know what will happen, all of my regular clients will suddenly throw tons of urgent work at me and I’ll be forced to burn the midnight oil once again on the journey.

So I really must be doing something right I guess, although its been a long haul getting the ball rolling, it has taken me over a year to get to this stage, but I think it has all been worth it when I see where I am today. So a big thanks to all my clients who have helped me so much over the last few months, many of you have been extremely supportive and helpful.

Recently, following a spate of dealings with blatantly crooked customers, who had placed orders, accepted delivery and then promptly disappeared without a trace, I have begun to insist that all of my clients use an escrow service to handle project funding.

Escrow is a great way to protect both the buyer and the provider. By using an escrow service, the buyer is no longer required to make any advance payment, which could theoretically be lost. For me, the main advantage lays in the fact I know for sure the project funds are available and ready to be released to me once the project is completed. All in all a much safer situation for everyone involved.

I have discovered I really enjoy this aspect of working for blog sites, I am also really having fun with the fact I am expected to write opinionated copy, which is designed to solicit a response from the readers. Several of the blogs I am a guest poster at have actually asked me to be controversial bordering on antagonistic and this is great fun.

As the world wide web fills up with more and more blogs, I am looking forward to working on more of these fun projects.

The downside of an editing job is that it is very hard to price, at one end of the scale are the simple jobs which involve correcting grammatical mistakes and spelling errors, these types of projects are great. At the nasty end of the scale are the projects which require huge amounts of re-writing of the original copy, these can often be more time consuming than writing the pie\e from scratch would.

It can be really hard to gauge which type of editing is required from a project brief, it can really be an "open the can and take a look" kind of deal, sometimes the contents are tasty, at other times you wish you could put the lid back on.

As a UK native, this used to be a problem for me, there are many differences between UK English and American English, spelling and grammar are the two most obvious, but it goes deeper than this, tun of phrase, slang, sentence structure, all of these things are quite different.

I have gotten quite good at writing in the American style over the years, but recently I have been having the reverse problem. I am writing more and more for the American audience, so much so that when I am writing for my UK clients, I find myself using the American style. It is very odd to find this happening, and quite surprising in it’s own way.

I have experimented with many portable devices in the past, nothing really fits the bill perfectly, a laptop is just too cumbersome to carry around all day, a smartphone is just impossible to use for word processing, even if it has a QWERTY keyboard. As a freelance copy writer I need a decent keyboard, not necessarily full size, but comfortable and useable.

Recently I have been experimenting with an Asus EEE PC, and I have to say it’s pretty useful, the keyboard is ok, I can type quite quickly on it, although the layout is a little strange. The major problem is the screen size, I have the 7" model, which has a native resolution of 800 x 400 pixels, just a little too small to be comfortable. My only other gripe with it, is the fact it has no built-in Bluetooth connectivity, so I have to use a dongle.

Overall it’s been great so far, so much so that I am considering switching to the new model, which has a larger screen and runs at 1024 x 800 resolution.