I’m an active and enthusiastic member of the Specialized Information Publishers Association, which represents about 3,000 publications ranging in size from Freelance Success up to some big guys like Harvard Health Publications and the Kiplinger Washington Editors. The final session at the end of the group’s three-day conference this week featured a group-wide opportunity to stand up and share information we learned and found most useful.

Here are my dozen favorite ideas:

1. Take a clue from the gaming world: Turn your story (or your blog post) into a game.
2. Pay attention to headlines. Online you get one second to grab a reader’s attention, so the headline has to be great.
3. Understand your market. So you can offer your reader the right information.
4. Monitor traffic. Recognize what works and what doesn’t. Keep repeating the stuff that does.
5. Use social media. Devote 10 minutes in the morning; 10 minutes at lunch; and 10 minutes in the evening.
6. Anybody can be a survey expert. Ask your readers what they want to read.
7. Find a good website developer. It’s worth the money to present your blog and/or website in a useful and attractive way.
8. Training, training, training. Keep yourself and your skills up to date. Learn how to use social media and video – these are what you need to know right now.
9. Recycle and repackage everything you do. Promote stories on Twitter. Retool stories into webinars. Combine and rewrite stories and posts into e-books. Slice, dice and resell.
10. Learn your regular readers’ Twitter handles. Reference them in your Tweets. It increases engagement..
11. Answer the so-what question. If you can’t, find some other approach.
12. Look at your business like an investor would. What can you do to make it more profitable?

The May issue of Folio magazine featured interviews with three editors that underscored the sea change over the last five years in what magazines publish and what skills are required to write and edit them.

The Folio piece asked three top editors to outline what they require in new hires. Here’s what they had to say:

Peter Moore, the editor of Men’s Health, said that a good candidate has to have a “blogging history, have done video work, as well as long-form print journalism. … What we’re looking for is people who are used to dancing on the edge of all the revolutions.”

Meg Major, editor-in-chief of Progressive Grocer, said she looks for people who can write well in a business voice and who have the ability to meet deadlines and keep up with a rapid-fire pace. But she emphasized that the single most “non-trainable attribute is flexibility.”

Charlene Finck, senior vice president for content development for Farm Journal Media, expects all the aforementioned skills, but adds another layer of expectations. “I look for a natural curiosity, a can-do attitude, a strong work ethic and unbending principles,” she said.

I see her standards as especially tough for new hires or those of us who are itinerants to get right in this environment where the rules and the expectations seem to change daily. Certainly, a can-do attitude has always been a hallmark of a successful freelancer, but meeting a demand for “unbending principals” is harder to get right as the wall between advertising and news becomes a thing of the past.

I was at the annual meeting of the Specialized Information Publishers Association earlier this week and heard speaker after speaker talk about ways to remix content for resale. I walked away thinking that opportunities for creative freelancers in this environment can only increase. But I’m not sure that you can embrace this approach without bending the traditional rules into pretzel-like shapes.

Getting that first assignment or two is a hurdle beginning freelancers have to get over. Sitting at your desk, staring at the computer screen won’t ramp up the business.

How do you pick a potential market when you don’t have a track record? There are many answers to this question, but here are a half dozen that seem to have worked for a lot of Freelance Success subscribers.

1. Introduce yourself to the local daily newspaper city editor or the managing editor of the weekly newspaper. Be willing to start by covering some routine assignments. While you’re doing these jobs, look for ideas that lend themselves to meatier assignments that you can sell to the newspaper or some other publication for a higher rate of pay
2. Send a query with a good idea to the editor of the local or even a national parenting magazine. If you’re a mom or a dad, these publications will be happy to hear from you. The pay rate probably won’t thrill you, but remember that parenting is universal and you can probably resell the piece — or at least the idea and some of the research — several times over if you are persistent.
3. Consider writing for a religious or inspirational publication. For instance, Guideposts magazine is almost completely written by readers and the pay is at least 50 cents per word. Send your inspirational idea to submissions@guidepostsmag.com.
4. Write for a hobby magazine. Whatever your hobby is, someone publishes a magazine about it. A good place to start is F&W Media, which publishes magazines on topics ranging from gun collecting, to antiques and collectibles, horticulture, coin and car collecting.  If you are an enthusiastic who can offer a good idea, they’ll work with you to help you write it the way they want it written. If you turn out to be the kind of writer they like to work with, chances are you’ll get a steady stream of assignments.  If you look on each of the magazine’s websites, you’ll find writers’ guidelines that will get you started. The pay here varies, but averages about 30 cents per word.
5. Submit an idea to your alumni magazine. Practically every college and university has at least one alumni publication and if you went to a large school like Ohio State, there are literally dozens of alumni publications. All of them love to run good stories written by alumni. In many cases, these magazines pay at least $1 per word.

This isn’t exactly about writing for a living, but I think it’s relevant because so many of us freelance word wranglers spend so much time online because that’s where the business is.

There’s no Emily Post of online etiquette, but maybe there should be. One Freelance Success subscriber asked other people what kind of online behavior annoyed them the most.

The floodgates opened. Here are some of the things that roused the ire of these Internet veterans:

• Calling people stupid because they disagree or sheep for agreeing with someone else.
• Stating something as fact with no substantiation
• Turning a post into a monologue
• Bashing everything and everybody
• Reposting without permission, links or attribution.
• The hundreds of “vote for my blog or my website” requests.
• Canned Twitter greetings with exhortations to follow or “like” them online.
• Emoticons – if you think someone might take it the wrong way without the smiley face, don’t write it at all.

I have my own list of online writer related nits. At the top are people take offense at small slights. It’s hard to convey tone and sometime really innocuous posts irritate readers who seem to make a habit of leaping to the most negative interpretation.

Do you remember Emily Litella? I always think of her when somebody goes off half cocked without reading and understanding the post they’re complaining about. It happens on my Bankrate.com retirement blog frequently.

It’s all I can do not to counter-post “NEVERMIND.”

Today’s the last day of the Wordcount Blogathon. Congrats to Michelle Rafter for running such a smooth event and providing so much help and wisdom.

If I sign up for this event again next year, I might try assigning the job of writing it to an intern. This is the season for interns. I hired one last year and paid her about $15 an hour to handle some routine blogging tasks on a money-saving website I previously experimented with. It was a good move and one I recommend to anyone who has a freelance business.

If you hire an intern, here are a couple of things to consider:

• Find an intern who has skills you don’t. An intern with design ability would be especially valuable to me.
• Expect to spend time teaching and answering questions. That’s what an internship is all about.
• Set the parameters early. If you expect the intern to do a specific list of tasks, outline those tasks and provide some guidance about when you need the job done and how long you expect this work to take.
• Provide feedback. Let the intern know when you think he has done a good job and when you think he could do better.
• Don’t pass along only the drudge jobs. Nobody wants a job where the work is always tedious.
• Give the intern tasks that result in work that will help her get her next job. In this business samples are everything. Giving the intern some creative work that he can show to the next potential employer is worth as much to many interns as money.
• Be flexible. Many students have lots of demands on their time. If they are facing a big test — or just want Memorial Day weekend off, give it to them.

In honor of Memorial Day – a day of reflection – and because it’s the next to last day of the Blogathon, we’ve been asked to make a Wordle – a word picture of our blogs. Here’s What Freelance Success Says looks like:

Click on the image above to increase its size. If you’re curious how to do this, go to Wordle.net. Follow the instructions. Save a screen capture to your computer. I had the most success using a free program called Jing. After I captured the image, I pulled it into my iPhoto program (I’m on a Mac), cleaned it up a little, then uploaded it like any other image. Pretty slick, huh?

I’m working on an interesting project for a business publication’s technology section. On the surface, the money isn’t very impressive, but I expect to be able to reslant the story, add some different research and resell various aspects of the piece at least a half-dozen times to different — and non-competing — markets.

That’s one of the reasons why having a couple of specialties makes it much easier to make a living as a freelancer. If you work in one or two clearly defined areas, you’ll spend less time researching assignments and be able to quickly identify other places that will be good targets for resales.

There are many possible specialties. Among the subscribers to freelance success, there are several registered nurses who write about health topics; there are lawyers who are very busy handling pieces about legal issue both from a consumer standpoint and a professional one. A former math teacher has more assignments from textbook editors than she could possibly handle. And a biologist with a Ph.D. is always in demand by both pharmaceutical companies and consumer scientific publications.

You don’t have to have significant training to specialize. Personal finance, investing and other business specialties are areas where many writers are self-taught experts. There is also a lot of opportunity (and not much competition) for people who can quickly and stylishly handle stories about marketing topics. the ability to sell something is always in demand.

Not that you can’t make a living as a generalist, but the field is exceptionally competitive right now with many former staffers hoping to leap in. There is also a trend toward turning the simplest work over to content management companies like Demand Media which hires freelancers at exceptionally low rates.

Conferences take on special importance when you work from your home office and don’t get much opportunity to interact with colleagues. All freelance organizations organize conferences and woo their members to three or four days of opportunities to learn and have fun with colleagues.

Next week, I’m speaking at the Specialized Information Publishers Association, an organization whose members include conventional newsletter and periodical publications as well as an increasing number of online publishers with no print component. I’m talking about managing freelancers and other contract employees.

One of the keynote speakers for the event will be Rafi Mohammed, author of “The 1% Windfall: How Successful Companies Use Price to Profit and Grow.” In advance of the conference, Mohammed offered some advice on pricing, something that most freelancers find challenging. Here are a few of his tips:

• Set prices that capture value. When it looks like rain, Manhattan street vendors raise their umbrella prices. They know that the right way to set prices is to reflect the value that customers place on a product by “thinking like a customer.”
• Implement differential pricing. For any product, some customers are willing to pay more than others. Differential pricing involves identifying and offering discounts to price-sensitive customers.
• Offer different product versions. One of the easiest ways to enhance profits and better serve customers is to offer more than one version. These options allow customers to choose how much to pay for a product.

Setting prices also requires sticking to your guns. In this market, some customers are looking for the lowest price — no matter what. If you can’t figure out how to make a profit from what a potential customer is willing to pay, don’t be afraid to walk away. There are always other jobs.

It’s Memorial Day weekend, the beginning of what can be the busiest season of the year for freelancers. While staffers take vacation, we non-staffers do the work.

Over the last few years, I’ve landed a variety of assignments from dozens of clients during the summer season. Some of this short-term work has turned into long-time relationships. If you’re interested in doing the same, here are a few ways to find seasonal assignments.

• Call the city editor of your local newspaper newspaper. Staffs are shrinking, but the demand for copy to fill the space hasn’t disappeared. If you can be available to cover events or you can fill in for vacationing staffers, your call may be welcome.
• Introduce yourself to the communications office of your local college or university. It’s probably quiet on campus, but it’s the calm before the storm and it’s likely the communications office is busy preparing materials for incoming students. Your services may be needed desperately.
• Let temporary agencies know you’re available. Writing and editing jobs aren’t the kind that most temp agencies are often asked to fill, but you ever know.
• Give some business cards to the local print and copy shops. Sometimes their clients need the talents you have.
• Cold call local ad and public relations agencies. Find out who in these shops hires writers, then send a resume and samples.
• Cold call the marketing departments of local businesses. With social media commanding an ever more important role in marketing, there are lots of ghosting jobs available that will never be advertised.

In every case, be prepared to quote a competitive rate and don’t shortchange yourself. You can always drop your rate, but once you’ve thrown out a number, it’s almost impossible to raise it.

The subscribers to Freelance Success, who are mostly full-time professional writers and editors, do an array of work to make a living.

I think this is particularly interesting considering the increasing number of online discussions about freelance opportunities being affected by Google’s changing algorithms, which have reduced the visibility of websites owned by Demand Media and other low-rent content providers.

In truth, most people who make a living in the freelance content-wrangling business don’t do it by writing the kind of things that Demand Media sells because even under the best of circumstances it doesn’t pay well enough. Demand pays somewhere in the neighborhood of $5 to $15 for a 500-word story, while most subscribers to Freelance Success are unwilling to make anything less than 50 cents/word or its equivalent – $50 per hour. And they don’t have any trouble finding assignments at those rates.

Periodically — just for fun — someone calls for a listing on the discussion list of who is working on what. Here’s a few items from this week’s list. It demonstrates the variety of ways that someone who freelances can pay the bills:

• Writing a textbook
• Materials for a brochure for those affected by an unusual disease
• A print and online story about a parenting topic
• An aftermarket automotive marketing story
• A story for veterinarians about dog and cat diseases
• Class materials for a communications class
• Fashion story for an association magazine aimed at readers with a physical disability
• Two essays assigned by editors of the Chicken Soup series
• A martial arts guide
• Monthly newsletter for a statewide association
• Personal bio for an expert

The greatest thing about freelancing is that the opportunities are endless and available everywhere.