Smartlife

When you’re looking to outsource a writing project to a freelancer, it isn’t just a matter of posting a classified ad and browsing through a stack of resumes. It takes consideration to find a writer who can take on your project, in terms of skill, knowledge, and style — but when you put forth the effort, you can find a writer who can complete a project you’ll be proud of.

Bringing on another writer to help you keep your blog going is a practical way to outsource part of a project that you probably enjoy but just don’t have the time to really work on. There are many freelance writers willing to work on a variety of topics — it’s just a matter of finding a writer who writes on the topic your blog covers and whose writing you enjoy. To help get you started in finding a great blog writer, we’ve compiled a list of 50 freelancers for you.

Twitter is the service that asks “What are you doing?” and gives you 140 characters to answer. These mini-messages can be sent by web or SMS and act as high-tech haiku — if haiku was Japanese for “people who can’t spell tell you what they just ate, but not why you should care.” With endless uninteresting updates, it may seem to be an engine of anti-productivity, sent here by industrious aliens to weaken our social structure before invasion. But efficient people do use it. Barack Obama, for example, famously twittered throughout his campaign. And I think we can both agree that he has a lot more work to do than you and I combined.

About a month and a half ago, I told myself that I needed to drive some damn traffic to my new blog. I knew from reading Problogger.net and conducting mini-trials of my own that habitually commenting on other people’s blogs generates traffic. Readers see your “value-added” comments, visit your site, and become avid followers. Fellow bloggers appreciate your meaningful contributions, become fans themselves, and promote your site. Backlinks accumulate and help improve your site’s Google ranking.

Though a highly effective SEO and marketing tactic, let’s face it: commenting can be a little tedious.

A few months ago, I wrote a post on document reuse and explained how it can boost your document creation efficiency by 40%, on average. This post provides you a list of my top five document sharing sites where you can find reusable docs of all kinds — invoice templates, study cards, business plan samples, venture capital pitch templates, project management plan templates, graduation announcement templates, balance sheet spreadsheet templates, tournament bracket templates, and so on. There are a lot of so-called “document sharing” sites out there, but not all of them allow you to manipulate the elements (content, structure, style, and rendering) of existing documents fully. The sites that I have listed below do give you full document control, so you don’t have to waste your time re-creating what’s already been created.

Believe it or not, I wrote this post in about 20 minutes — from draft to final edit — using my newly installed voice recognition software program, Dragon NaturallySpeaking Standard 9. I must admit, I’m extremely impressed with how fast, intuitive, and accurate it is.

Initially, I balked at the idea of purchasing it. I’d read many reviews over the years about the immaturity of speech recognition technology, and I was certain Dragon 9 was like those $19.99 appliances that you purchase at three o’clock in the morning when you can’t sleep: seemingly crucial, but in the end, cheap and utterly useless.