My husband showed me a headline written by CBS.com yesterday. It said something along the lines of “Osama bin Laden was Vane.” Were they trying to tell me that Osama bin Laden wanted to foretell the weather? No, they had made a spelling mistake. I can forgive this in someone’s personal blog; I don’t really mind it if someone posts something like this on Facebook (although I might roll my eyes), but CBS.com? Don’t they have people to proofread these things?

This isn’t the only time I’ve seen poor quality copy coming out of an organization that you would expect to be professional. The AP released an article about a week or two ago that my husband pointed out had spelled Endeavor five different times in one article. Are you kidding me? I’ve also seen mistakes in books that I’ve read, although that usually happens less frequently.

I don’t have a problem with people spelling the Middle East words differently. If Fox News wants to change the way they spell Osama to Usama, I don’t really care. Words like Al-Qaeda and Qadaffi are really just our interpretation of Arabic, and technically do not have an official spelling. When a professional organization can’t figure out how to use the right version of “vain”, that disturbs me.

If professional organizations want to retain credibility, they need to first learn how to spell correctly. CBS and AP should be able to publish error-free copy. In these days of scarce jobs, if whoever they have in their office can’t spell correctly and know how to use homophones correctly, perhaps they need to find someone that can.

I was planning on writing about earthquakes, but I’ve been writing way too many apocalyptic posts so far in this challenge, so I thought I’d change things a bit. Today I’ll write about Earning money from home.

I started working from home in December of 2008. Earlier that year, our house had caught on fire and we had to move. My husband was barely making enough money to make ends meet. I was homeschooling, and that was my top priority. The only jobs that I could think of in the evenings were working at McDonald’s, and most of those places think I’m overqualified (and I don’t believe in lying on the part where it says education).

I was listening to Dave Ramsey, and he was talking about how if you want to be rich, you do what rich people do, and if you want to be poor, you do what poor people do. We weren’t wasting our money, but to use his terminology, our shovel was just too small. You just can’t have stress-free finances when you’re making less than half the poverty level, which we were at the time.

I already knew what didn’t work for me. I can’t sell an Ethiopian ice cubes on a hot summer day. I’m too shy, and I have trouble talking to people. So that was out the window. I tried Half.com, and ended up spending more on shipping supplies (and spent hours walking back and forth to the post office with my daughter in a stroller) than I made. I couldn’t figure out what to sell on eBay. I did a search, and discovered that people could make money writing. I could do that!

So here I am, writing. I’ve been writing for Associated Content, Squidoo, List My 5, Hub Pages, and blogs. A couple of other places too. I’ve designed products for Zazzle. It’s been a lot of fun.

I’m very fortunate to have found this means of earning money while still spending time with my kids.

Yesterday CBS announced the cast members for Survivor Redemption Island. My Survivor season Squidoo pages have always been my most profitable. I was surprised at the lack of visitors to my web page in recent days. Normally, I’ll see a spike of visitors when they announce the cast.

I took a look at where this page appeared on Google, and I realized that it was on page 6 for the keywords “Survivor Redemption Island.” That’s not where I want to be if I want to get a lot of traffic to my site. So I realized that it was time to remember the basics.

Whether you’re writing about Survivor or about something else, ranking well on Google matters. Backlinks matter. Although my other Survivor lenses link to my Redemption Island lens, I didn’t have enough outside of Squidoo that talked about Survivor. So I figured that I needed to get back to the basics.

Past success doesn’t always guarantee future success, especially when you’re writing about a very popular topic like Survivor Redemption Island. So over the next few days, I’ll be doing some work to get off of page six and rise to a more respectable rank.

When I first started looking up my name on Google, Google would ask me “Did you mean Brooke Lauren?” No, I didn’t. Google tries to correct people when it doesn’t think that there’s a valid search for their name. Then, the wonder wheel for my name would not be anything nearly correct, unless I searched for my name in quotes. It had me confused with someone else. I guess that she’s and actress or something.

I suppose that it’s not a huge milestone, but I thought that it was pretty cool.

As I wrote about creating a hurricane emergency kit today, I realize that summer is about to come to a close. Most of the schools around here have already started (some start at the end of July). I’ve already purchased my back to school supplies. The summer camping articles and Squidoo lenses will start to drop in popularity, and fall and Christmas articles will start to gain steam.

I had a great time writing and updating camping articles. Summer is a lot of fun. I just uploaded all my summer pictures on the computer. While I didn’t get to go on a five-week summer adventure like I did last year, we still had some good times: going to the river, visiting the water park, barbecue on the Fourth of July, and Vacation Bible School. We also got to ride in a limo to dh’s college graduation, thanks to a limo company that dh’s business has as a client.

If you’re a writer, you might want to dust off some of that fall content. Especially if you write for Squidoo, which bases your lensrank partially on when you last updated your lens. At least Christmas is around the corner. Maybe, just maybe, if me and dh write enough, we’ll have the opportunity to visit my family for Christmas.

Anyway, I saw that other people were uploading things, so I figured something must be wrong on my computer. I had to log in and out, and it was working again.

So I finally was able to get my latest recap: Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains episode 12, uploaded.

This was a great episode. If you DVR’d it, you need to watch it.

They even offer a $50 bonus to the best new content producers of the month. If you want to make money on the internet, here is how you do it. Write a good article or two every day for the first month that you join, and you’ll get it. I received the award by doing just that, and I bet you can too, if you have a gift for writing.

So far, I’ve made $944 from Associated Content. I get money every month, even when I don’t write much. Check it out, make money, and maybe win an iPad!

I was about to send them an email, when I saw that they had a web site. I decided to take a look at it before I wrote to them. I didn’t really pay much attention to what the web site said, because the first thing that I noticed was ads for Ashley Madison… a web site that encourages affairs. Hmmm… I think I’ll pass on that guest blogger thing… at least from that one particular commenter.

While my Olympics web site/blog isn’t generally a political site, I do filter out certain adsense ads. You can filter out provocative ads, and I do. Perhaps more people would click on them, but that’s not what I want my name associated with.

If you are a writer like me, you might have heard that writing about “niche topics” is a good idea. At first, the idea sounds illogical. Why would you want to write about a topic that very few people are interested in? That doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. I write in three niche areas, and while I have received benefits of writing in all of them, I don’t consider these topics to be ones that nobody is interested in.

I have learned that as a writer, I benefit from writing about the same topic over and over. I sort of fell into my first niche, Survivor, without even trying. It has been my most profitable topic as a freelance writer so far. I write episode recaps on every episode, and I usually try to come up with a preview of the season to come before the season comes out (and if I can find a leak and write about the season before CBS makes its official announcement, even better). By consistently writing in that niche, I can link all my articles together, which allows people to surf among what I’ve written. People also know that I’ll always have a recap available (generally by the next morning) of the episode that aired the night before.

The second niche topic I write about is car reviews. I didn’t really choose that topic, I work for the company that owns Automobile.com, and they give me plenty of work. Since I get paid by the review, I get the most short-term gain, but it doesn’t give me a stream of continuous income like writing for myself does. It’s amazing what you can learn about a subject by researching the topic and writing about it for hours every week. While in the past, I never really paid too much attention about cars (except Mustangs, my dream automobile), I can now look at many cars and tell you something about them; how powerful that truck is, whether the car you bought is the base model or an upgrade, etc. While watching a 60 Minutes interview with Shawn White earlier today on Tivo, I noticed that Shawn had a Lamborghini Murcielago… they mentioned on the show that it was a Lamborghini, but I could just tell by looking at the car that it was a Murcielago: I could tell you the approximate price Shawn paid for the car, and how fast it goes, as well.

The third niche topic that I write about is the Olympics. I wrote my first Olympics web page, on the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, nearly a year ago. Tickets hadn’t gone on sale yet at that point. I’ve always been a fan of the Olympics, even though I don’t really care for traditional sports like football or baseball. After I wrote about Vancouver, I started writing about the other future Olympics. I then figured out that there were limitless things to say about the Olympics, considering that they’ve been around for 100 years now, and thousands of athletes compete in each Olympics. I launched my World Competes blog and web site last month; I figured that there never would be a lack of things to write about. Although I have watched the Olympics for about as long as I can remember, by writing about the Olympics every day, I learn a lot. This is a benefit about choosing a niche and writing about it.

Although I still write about topics that interest me outside of these niche topics, I know more than the average person about my niches. This helps me write about these topics better.

Photos liven up anything that you see on the internet. The problem is getting the photos to your site. I can often find a photo to use (although not for this post) using Wikimedia Commons or sxc.hu, or sometimes I have my own photos. Now you can use Creative Commons photos if you attribute the photo, and you can always use public domain photos, but you can’t steal their bandwidth. So you have to get it on your server. So I’ve always downloaded the picture, then manually uploaded it through cPanel. It can be a pain, especially because then you have to type in the location of the photo manually.

While working on The World Competes (which I’m really excited about), I noticed a little button on the top of my screen: Add media. All I have to do is click on a little button, and it will let me browse my hard drive for the photo I want, give it alt text (where I can easily put Creative Commons info), and save it on the server for me. Then it’s in my library to use later. Doh. It’s so much easier to do now.

So if you haven’t seen that little button up there, you can save yourself a lot of time by using it. Yay!