estherrosieuk

As ever - Elance Blog comes up trumps

2009-07-24T07:45:00.000-07:00

I owe my current position as owner of my own online business to Elance.

I started out with them at http://www.elance.com/experts/estherrosie

Although the blogs don't come thick and fast when they do they are absolute gems.

http://www.elance.com/p/blog/2009/07/awesome_online_tools_and_resources_for_writers.html

Elance is great site for those starting out. There are loads of useful tutorials and articles you really should read before even considering embarking on this sort of 'job'.

Online Events Calendars

2009-07-23T08:10:00.000-07:00

Liverpool Events - August 2009 - What's On

Some of the work I did today.

Collecting events for Liverpool for the Directory of Liverpool blog. It is difficult to know really where to stop. I would really like to use some smart events calendar software like a lot of the websites do but they can be really expensive.

Also whilst I do my research into events it seems that many of the sites are left to be completely automated. You can see where they are only running of a couple of feeds because they have the same kind of events throughout the calendar and no one calendar of events has all the entertainment for the area.

This is why I am resigned to making my slightly less attractive hand-written calendar. I try to collect the Liverpool events from a number of different websites so that I have as much of the information as possible in one place.

So far this has proved very popular the http://directoryofchester.net/blog entertainment section so I can't be all wrong - can I?

I tried out Google Calendar a couple of days ago which essentially would work but omg it is ugly, ugly, ugly.

My partner investigated Trumba for me but they are now charging around $100 per month per website. Their solution looks the part but as with many of the calendars I get my information from if you do not set up the feeds properly it doesn't really do you any favours.

I am back to usual. I look for many ways to automate just some of my work online to take the pressure down a notch or too but mainly this is time wasted.

There is simply no genuine replacement for hand-written content .

Sigh.

Keep on writing...

Freelancer - estherrosieuk starting out on Blogger

2009-07-22T07:54:00.000-07:00

Just starting on Blogger today.

I have recently spent a lot of time learning about local search and social media marketing. When it came to setting up my Blogger account I thought about what I wanted to use it for.

Now there is now doubt that my ‘estherrosieuk’ is part of my work and will definitely be used to promote the sites I love and the sites I work on but I think it is also time that I started to share what I have discovered.

No affiliate link here – yet!

Don’t get me wrong. I have not got a degree in marketing or IT or anything else associated with the work that I am doing now. I am learning from scratch by experimentation – a lot of trial and even more error.

I love it though.

I wanted to work from home as so many people do. To be honest I did not really believe that I could do it. I was not a talented writer, and I am still not, starting on bid sites for peanuts.

Getting lucky and building the right relationships I am now self-employed, working full-time from home and have even got enough work for my partner to have recently joined me.

I love to write but much prefer to publish. Hence yet another place on the internet where I can see myself!

Today I just wanted to say hello really.

Check out some of my links and blogs – these will be added to, of course.

Come back soon as I start to try and put down in sensible parts what I have learnt about social networking, marketing, SEO, being freelance and working at home.