For the last couple of years I was spending my hobby time on building a blog in a rather narrow niche - a particular aspect of software development. As many other hobby writers I found it difficult to write regularly and would happily receive some assistance. I keep my site open for the readers and sometimes site visitors posted own articles, but it was never enough.

Therefore since about a year ago I am permanently looking for the freelancers on the topic. I posted ads on Performacning job market, another blogger job board, even contacted authors of the other blogs in the niche. This way I was able to find several writers including the good ones, but never I managed to get as much regular writing as I wanted.

Your skills are wanted

The reason is simple - there are not many writers in any specialized niche. When a person is a professional in his area, he is likely to earn his living from the day job activities and is rarely really interested in freelance writing (unless he is professional in freelance writing). He might like the idea of earning few extra bucks and becoming a known authority in the niche, but chances are that his interests will erode over time.

Certainly, there are excellent writers in any niche, but to get those you got to pay a lot. As a result I believe there are many mid-to-low budget bloggers all the time willing to get more writers on the board. These authors can be novices in blogging, might not commit to the strict schedules and still be very valuable - it is their specialized experience that makes their work attractive. For instance, when I manage to get an experience software developer writing on my blog, I am more than eager to provide him with blogging related advices and even to do the whole editorial part of work.

Got profession - got blogging money

The bottom line is simple. If you have skills in pretty much any area, you can easily earn extra $5-20 an hour by freelance writing in a relevant niche blog - the writer's skills are not important. If you want to explore the opportunity:

• advertise your willingness to write on the Performancing job market or some other blogging related job boards
• contact the authors of the blogs in your niche. Looks for the blogs that do some advertising, but are not exactly big sites with real journalists
• if you are a software developer, contact me at artem.marchenko@agilesoftwaredevelopment.com

Picture cortesy of e-magic @ Flickr

I am not really a pro blogger and I am not earning my living from blogging. Nevertheless I use AdSense and Text-Link-Ads mainly in order to maintain the motivation level. Today something unusual happened. AdSense notifier told me that suddenly one of my clicks generated 3 times more clicks, than usually. Naturally I was interested to discover what happened: some post jumped to the first page of Google search results or maybe some A-blogger referred to some post of mine.

What puzzles me is that neither Google Analytics, nor SiteMeter, nor PMetrics don't have an easy solution for me. What I often want from the stat package is to discover where some particular change comes from. Unfortunately most if not all the packages are aimed at detailing the static picture, not the dynamic one.

What do you do when you need to solve similar problems? Do you download the stats data to Excel and examine the changes in it? Or is there some special report in the Google Analytics that could be helpful?

For those of us who don't like modifying templates, I created the PMetrics module. Copy it to your Drupal's modules directory, enable in admin/settings and enjoy. No tuning is needed.

Yes, this module supports the advanced metrics features and accurately tracks the post titles.