BeccaB

Hi Miri, I've used a few different ones over the years, and they all seem to have their merits and weaknesses. The three that come to my mind right away are Vistaprint, wir-machen-druck and Saxoprint. Here's my take on the three: Vistaprint - fast delivery and you can see what your print will look like (it worked fine for me) right away. Drawback was the print quality. Acceptable but not brilliant. wir-machen-druck - average delivery time, low-cost, print result acceptable but also not brilliant. Drawback is that he site is hard to navigate (and it's still only in German), but they do have some cool paper types I haven't seen anywhere else. Only up to 250 or 300 g/m2 though. Too light for a business card, anyway. Saxoprint - average delivery time (but they do at least offer express options), prices are reasonable, which means higher than the other two above. The site has an add-on for InDesign, which is cool for those who don't want to dish out thousands for an Adobe Suite. Drawback is that you can't see how your print will look before you send in your files. Not a problem if you know what you're doing. That said, the print itself is gorgeous. Facit: My choice for the future would be Saxoprint. Costs a little more, but the result was worth it. I guess it's always a matter of your own priorities though, right?

Why? Getting something for nothing seems like a good business plan to me. My personal pride would prevent me from taking that route though. It would explain the concept of the starving artist though...

Absolutely true. You can work around this by making the text an image (I don't know how to describe it better), which might be fine for a short text that is planned to be left 'as is' for a long time. It's not great for text that is updated regularly, and not great for crawlers either. For printed media or logos, of course, none of that matters.

I used to freelance as a translator. We charge per normed line, so what you earn depends upon how good (and fast) you are. I averaged (some topics are tougher than others) € 50/ h. Figure that out for a 30 hour week (40 actual productive hours would have killed me): That's € 1500/ week; € 6000/month before taxes, insurance and other deductions. Deductions in the country I now live in run about 40 % at that level. Ergo clear € 3600/ month. Theoretically. The deductions are paid in advance, and 30 hours a week were rarely reality. I am completely inept at acquisition, so it dodn't take long for me to start looking for a salaried position. At less than half the pay (before deduction). And it's hard to live off of that. Ah, but that's not much more than you make either. If you are gifted at acquisition, great! If not, maybe you can take comfort in the fact that lots of us in this branch aren't any better off. BTW, Minimum wage where I live is € 8.50/ h. 6.25 BPS, which is even less than in the UK. Maybe I should move...

I agree that unless you are going to put in a LOT of time to your blog (and not form a co-op with other authors), it's probably best to leave it be. But there is absolutely no reason not to try submitting your article to (respected) blogs that allow guest contributions. Which ones are respected is somewhat subjective. You can probably decide for yourself about whether your articles fits in with their style and perceived audience. Check their index ratings for confirmation. That's easier than writing the article in the first place, right? Many blogs want you to commit to regular contributions before they publish your articles, but not all of them. And some of them even pay. Another idea is to check out other SEO agencies' blogs. They probably won't advertise willingness to publish guest articles, but they VERY often have trouble keeping up with new articles for their blogs, because staff writers are totally overloaded (the client comes first). Also good if you are thinking about a career in SEO. Not that you're likely to get rich from it... JMO

Well, I wish I could be a full-time musician (degrees are worth niente in that field). But, keeping it kind of close to home, I would be a sound technician. A great mix of geek and artist. (Yeah, pun intended.)

Yeah, no geeks here... This was mine, although my mom and dad could only afford the console and the cassette (!) drive. It was pretty useless, really. I remember two things about my next computer: It was a 486, and all of a sudden we had TONS of visitors, because the new games didn't run fast enough on the 386. Like the first on the block to have colour TV! The next thing was needing more memory - 1 MB cost me $150!