Anyone have surplus work or client queries that they’d like to pass on to someone else?
I’m available. See http://www.sxa-porfolio.com

—Stephen

Hi Stephen,

I’m surprised you’re not drowning in work, the way your web site comes up on Google! Well done! :-)

Any tips for those of us who don’t even appear after 12 pages?!

Actually, having one’s site in the first search page isn’t much use if you’re a technical writer. The reality is that clients aren’t looking. I can tell from the hit counter search terms. There’s usually a couple of hits a day and 99% of them are irrelevant subjects. There’ll be a rare potential client out there searching for “Vancouver technical writer” only once every few months. I’ve gotten a few serious inquiries over the years, and a few actual short contracts, maybe at the rate of one a year or less.

As for tips on how to to reach this high level of inactivity, I can list a few things off the top of my head, but there were a huge number of things I tried out over the years and I was never sure what was really doing the trick:

- Include a sitemap.txt page and register in Google site manager.

- Use heading mark-up for your headings and make sure they match your page titles and descriptions in a coherent way (apparently Google considers the description, even though they don’t include it in search terms).

- Avoid any faux pas like hidden search terms.

- Update frequently with new samples or revised resumes.

- Maybe having a lot of pages (in my case from writing samples) and unrelated traffic due to subject-related search terms in the body of the sample documents.

- My old site is a non-index page on a high ranking site unrelated to tech writing, so I preserved it and linked to my new one five years ago.

- Wait five years. It seems sheer longevity will gradually take you from the 50th page (where mine started) to the top pages.

Hi Stephen,

Thanks for your reply and the helpful information. I appreciate the tips on “how to reach this high level of inactivity”! It sucks to hear that things are so slow in the industry. It’s been my experience as well lately, and with massive layoffs and shutdowns at some of the biggest local consumers of technical writers (Rockwell and Creo/Kodak), there is a surplus of us looking for work, I’m afraid.

My experience with the listing in the STC contractors’ directory is similar to what you describe for your web site. One or two calls a year, but so far nothing has actually panned out into a paying gig. A call in December prompted me to renew my membership at the exorbitant new fees, but after putting hours of work into an estimate and work proposal, the prospect bailed and decided to use an old project manager who originally wrote the documentation!

Warmly,
Karen

The level of slowness that I describe is for the previous four years before the recession, too.  I’ve been in a vigorous job search campaign full time for the whole last year and have had almost no work at all. The few small gigs I got did not even arise from my own efforts. One came from from my web site.

Your website is beautiful and very impressive, using a content managment system just like a big corporate site.  Congratulations on that. Mine is only basic html from way back.

Hi Stephen,

It’s been tough for me too, since 2007. 15 months off, then an 11-month contract, and now 7 months off again.

Thanks for your compliments on my web site! I appreciate the feedback from someone who knows! I use Wordpress’s free software to manage the content. I removed the “Comment” capacity, as I was just getting a bunch of spam that takes a while to process and delete.

Karen

Wow, I made some changes to my site and today it comes up on Google’s first page for Vancouver technical writers! Thanks for your help, Stephen. Maybe you should go into SEO instead of tech writing!

:-)