Writer Terry Didcott

Terry Didcott is many things, but online he is a writer, internet marketer, website builder and helpful bloke who runs his own forum to help newcomers to the online rat race avoid falling by the wayside, or being caught by scams.

Offline, he is an actively gigging musician, gardener, almond farmer, dog lover and lives in southern Spain with his partner, Janice.

The freedom writer handle came about because of some keyword research I was doing on and around the word "writer" to see if there were any ways I could boost the search engine exposuer of my flagship website and blog.

Trying to rank for the keyword "writer" was a total waste of time, as the competition for that term is crazy. But I needed to find something that got some reasonable seraches so people woukld find my site via the search engines. This is important for me as the more people know about my site, the more people will know about me and the fact that I work online as a freelance writer.

So it makes perfect horse sense to be visible in searche engines, particularly Google, where most peole search these days. That's because there are plenty of website owners out there looking for good, professional content writers and where do they look? Yep, Google.

So you can see that for a professional freelance writer who writes prolifically for web content, being seen by potential clients is important.

Anyway, all that aside, I came across the term "Freedom Writer" in my researches into searched keywords and found that term gets a few hundred searches a week and there's not a huge number of competing sites, so it made sense to rank for that term to begin with.

It's all part of a master plan to eventually rank for the terms "writer" or "Freelance Writer" and by ranking first for several related long term keywords I'll eventually get up there for the main keywords.

Which will mean more exposure and more work.

So that's why I use the handle "Freedom Writer".

These days I write mostly on the ever growing menagerie of websites and blogs that I am acquiring over time. I think the last count it was somewhere over 100 in all, which is why I don't get to them all very often. That's not to say I only post once a month everywhere. In actuality I keep a core of well upkept blogs supplied with regular posts - maybe one or two a week is plenty to keep them fresh.

Many of the websites I own are static, so once I've set them up they don't need to change much over time - just a sprinkling of new content every so often keeps them current and the search engines don't thenik they're dead!

As for things like Hub pages and Squidoo lenses (of which I do have rather a lot) they need regular feeding with fresh content, so I try to make sure I get them all at least every week or so. Again, I have a main core of this type of webpage that I update regularly and others that get looked at less frequently as they are already full of most of the content they ever going to need.

That happens when you write ona certain subject that really doesn't have all that much you can say about it. By way of an example, one of my lenses is about hypnosis and I've said about as much about it as I'm going to in there. I also have a nypnosis website that has more information, but I don't want to be rehashing the same stuff twice.

Some of the websites make a bit of money, which on their own isn't much, but when you add them together there is quite a good income stream. That's why I'm constantly adding more sites to my portfolio. I work on the idea that if one site can make a dollar a day, then 100 sites... you get the picture.

That's why I do what I do and it keeps me busy writing as once one new website is finished, its time to start on the next!

But my own sites are not the only places I write, not by a long chalk. I'll talk about the other places in a future capsule.

Following on from the previous capsule, I think it might be a good idea to mention where else I write.

Well, there are several places online that I write, for various reasons. Apart from my own websites and blogs, I also guest write in other people's blogs. I don't do this all that often, but enough so that my name gets spread around the blogosphere a little better and at the same time I'm gaining some juice for one or more of my own sites.

How does that work?

Well, by guest writing on another blog, especially one that has acquired some page rank authority, I get to place my name and a link to my website at the end of the article I write. This often produces more link juice to the linked site than it would if I were to submit the article to an article directory.

It has worked very well for my flagship site, terrydidcott.com as it now has a PR3 purely from links gained from writing in other people's blogs.

Another place I write occasionally is in a JV blog I started with my partner in crime, Monika Mundell, who is another accomplished writer in Australia. That blog also enables me to send link juice to one or other of my websites and has the same effect, as the blog is hosted in a different place to my own slef-hosted sites.

By spreading your writing work around, you too can increrase the authority of some of your sites as well as increasing traffic to them a little, especially if the site you write for gets a lot of traffic itself and your articles are good.

In this module, I’d like to extol the virtues of a really fantastic additional source of income for any author who is interested in making some cash from writing.

That’s Constant Content.