Ok, enough public wallowing about the sad, sad end of a really special relationship. (Private mourning is still allowed, you know.) Back to the business of writing about my writing business.

I have a very unusual relationship with a big client of mine. The woman is a very harried, very hard-working marketing department of one who is always overwhelmed. She passes a lot of review and original work to me, but we’ve figured out an even better way to work together. To help her really clear her to do list, we get on the phone together for HOURS to power through her projects. Yesterday we were on the phone once for 140 minutes straight,  then a brief break and another 60 minutes. 200 minutes on the phone! But we got through three major projects that she can now officially mark as done.

I have to say I really enjoy the collaboration. Most of my work is completely solitary after I understand the project. They email to say, “I need ‘this.’” And I open a blank document, turn off email and produce “this.” Then I send back an email that says, “Here is ‘this.’ Let me know if you need ‘that.’” And on we go.

But with this client, we open a web meeting, take over each other’s screens (which is always funny because both of us are control freaks who want to run the screen). We take breaks for coffee, and we share little stories about our lives.

It’s unusual in the world of the freelance copywriter, but, in this case, it makes us both very happy.

From another chapter of the “She’s Too Honest for Her Own Good” book, D.J. and I broke up on Sunday. I’m sad as hell and throwing myself into my work for a few days.

I’ve been thinking all day about what else I can post, but this is what’s happening and where I am.

So today I go back to a few old philosophies that I’ve written about:

I will change the word “lonely” for the word “ambitious.”

I will think of every day as Tuesday.

I will limit my worries to The Worry Minute.

I will focus on what’s important.

I’ll try to figure out that trust thing.

I will remind myself that I have the strength and energy to stand on my own.

I will remember that I’m having a really good time.

Dang, though. This really hurts. It’ll get better, right?

I spent the weekend not thinking about Avenue Z at all because I was prepping for the La Jolla Half Marathon, which I ran yesterday.

Whew. A tough race. Here’s the official description:

The La Jolla Half Marathon is one of America’s most picturesque and challenging runs. Starting adjacent to the Del Mar Fairgrounds main entrance, the course follows a scenic route along the coast before reaching the challenging climb to the summit of Torrey Pines State Park. After leaving the park, the course continues the beautiful residential district of La Jolla Shores, and finishes on the grass in the park at La Jolla Cove.

Challenging climb indeed! I decided to power walk up it, hoping I could make up the time on my way down. A few people around me were “running” it, but their tiny steps and labored breathing as they s-l-o-w-l-y passed me confirmed that I would be wasting energy to try to run it.

But I used the downhills as an advantage, and I ended up with my best time ever! It was so hot and the race was so challenging that at the beginning the announcer actually warned us not to go for a Personal Record (PR). I ended up a second or two faster than the course average for the day.

If you need something to click on today, view the results from the other half I did in January.

Back to the adventures of Life on Avenue Z tomorrow, I promise.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been debating about whether to write this post. “Don’t tell them,” my little voice kept saying. “They won’t respect you anymore.”

Ugh. But I promised I’d be honest about the ups and downs of my business, and I’ve hit a new low:

I’m trying to buy blog love.

There. I said it. It’s true. I’ve been trying to beef up my blog statistics a number of unscrupulous ways. My ultimate goal with this blog is to use it for a springboard for a book about starting a copywriting business, and I want to be able to walk into an agent’s office with incredible stats of how many hits I get a day and how many people subscribe to my feed. All that good stuff.

The truth is my traffic took a blow very early on that I’ve never recovered from. When I had a free blog on Wordpress, I was regularly featured on the front page of their site. That could drive hundreds of people (or at least dozens) an hour to my blog, and many of them stayed around in those days. But Wordpress kicked me off for being a commercial site, so I switched to TypePad. And they sucked, so I came back to Wordpress as a self-hosted site.

I don’t get any more love from Wordpress, so I’ve been trying to generate traffic different ways. The BEST way to generate quality traffic, in my humble opinion, is to visit quality blogs and comment on quality posts and earn your reputation the hard way — by working for it. But [excuses, excuses], I no longer make time to read blogs.

Here’s the shameful list of the dishonest methods I’ve tried.

1. Craigslist posts — occasionally I post a free link to a popular post on CL. I usually get 1-10-20 hits.
2. backpage.com posts — backpage is kind of like CL, but you can pay to be a sponsor and to automatically repost your ad. I’ve spent perhaps $200 since December playing around with this. Sometimes I get 7 or 8 hits a day, but they don’t seem to stick around.
3. Self-posting on StumbleUpon and Digg – UGH! StumbleUpon is on to me. I am mortified. I can no longer “nominate” one of my posts to be a Stumble. Which is such a shame because a couple of my posts on Stumble received HUGE traffic. I can put my post onto Digg, but I haven’t been able to get the wildfire started on that site.
4. Begging friends and family — This one has become a little more shameful than handing out religious literature at a mall. I keep sending notes to my sister and my boyfriend and my dad and others saying, “Please Stumble me! If you like something, please mark it!” But mostly I get silence from these entreaties. My sister tried it a couple of times. My dad grumbled that he lost the link. D.J. and I haven’t talked about it.
5. Hiring a company on Elance – Bottom of the barrel, this one. I found a company that helps you create incoming links to your site, and I hired them to create 200 links. I’m so embarrassed at my evil deception! They’d go to forums like this and post a false question then a false answer by someone else in a few days. Now when you do a search for the name of my blog, probably half a dozen of these hoaxes appear, and it’s obvious that I’ve seeded the web with my blatant advertisements. They were supposed to do this gradually over the course of a month, but I had to stop them half way through. I couldn’t look at myself in the morning.

It’s 6:42 p.m. I have to finish up a series of postcards for a client in NY so she can have them in the morning. I have to copyedit a website to the nth degree for a meeting tomorrow at 1 p.m.

And what am I doing?

I just spent 90 minutes reading fun websites like Passive-Aggressive Notes.

Sigh. But it really is funny.