Christina Gleason, Author at ChristinaGleason.com

Bad Link Request That Tried to Fake the Personal Touch

December 12, 2011 By Christina Gleason 3 Comments

I know that link building is hard. That’s why I don’t do that sort of thing for a living. But if you’re going to do it, at least try to do it right. And by that, I mean: don’t spam people, and when trying to pitch bloggers in a personal manner, don’t try to automate “personal.”

Case in point: It’s great to actually check out someone’s blog, determine it’s a good fit for your client (or your own site), and let the blogger know you’ve done a little research by mentioning one of their posts that you found to be relevant to the site you want them to link to. Get this part wrong, and it’s obvious you’re just faking it – and that almost never goes well.

Here’s the bad link request that inspired this post. (And I’ll spare you the broken HTML that displayed in the body of the email when I received it.)
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How to Tell a Vendor You Don’t Have the Money to Pay Them

May 18, 2011 By Christina Gleason 2 Comments

The first tip for telling a vendor you don’t have money to pay them? Never get yourself in the situation in the first place. If you hire someone to do work for you, you need to pay them. If you don’t? They can sue you for nonpayment of services.

That being said, perhaps you don’t have the money to pay your vendor in a timely fashion, but you do intend to pay them when you get the money. Admittedly, I had this issue with paying some of my writers earlier this year when I was chasing down a client who owed me a sizable amount of money for a rather large writing project we did for them last year. The client hadn’t paid me yet, but since I’d had the money in my account at the time, I paid my writers for their work on that project anyway. The problem cropped up when more and more projects came in and I fell behind on getting paid by the clients who were giving us all that work.

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The Nigerian Government Apologizes for Scams?

May 16, 2011 By Christina Gleason 1 Comment

I just received this fantastic email:

Ministry of Foreign Affairs
Federal Republic of Nigeria

Ref: An Open Letter To All Scam Victims,

If you have sent money to Nigeria in the course of getting one fund or the other it means you have been scammed because those funds will surely not get to you, you are required to send your NAME and ADDRESS to us for verification and after verification if truly you have sent money to Nigeria in the course of getting one fund or the other that means you have been scammed and you will be reimbursed with the sum of twenty thousand dollars only.

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Do You Own the Blog Posts You Write for Other Sites?

May 4, 2011 By Christina Gleason 7 Comments

If you are a blogger and/or freelance writer, chances are that you write blog posts (or will at some point in the future) for websites owned by someone else. This includes guest posts, group blogs, and even magazines, newspapers, and other publications. When you write for someone else’s site, who owns the content – you or them?

Work for Hire Agreements

The first thing you need to understand is a Work for Hire (WFH) agreement. Unless you have signed one of these, you are the legal author and owner of the content you create. There’s a rather in-depth explanation of Work for Hire as it pertains to publishers – the people who would be using your content – that you may find helpful.

The short version is that a work for hire must be commissioned as new work, and both parties (blogger and publisher) “must expressly agree in a signed document that the work shall be considered a work made for hire” prior to commencement of work. The publisher cannot decide to make it a work for hire after you have already started writing a post for them.

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