Writing Blog

So now you’ve got your samples together, you need to go out there and apply for those jobs. There are many available – you just need to know where to go look for them. The first two places I would recommend are Getafreelancer and Guru.
http://www.getafreelancer.com
http://www.guru.com

There’s no need to become a paid member in either one – not till you’ve learned the ropes. So join up as a free member and then start bidding on the jobs, taking care to attach your samples when you bid. You can apply for projects where they ask for articles to be written or articles to be rewritten, Leave the SEO writing aside for the moment – more on that in another post.

Don’t get disheartened of you don’t get any replies. In the beginning, many find it difficult to get that first break but once it comes, the going is usually easy. On both the sites, you need to work hard and get feedback. Many people who post projects prefer to hire writers who have a ten-star rating on Getafreelancer or a five-star rating on Guru.

There are a number of other sites too – some ask that you pay a small amount for a trial period. You would do well to go register on all of them and keep checking them regularly for jobs that would suit your kind of writing.
http://www.elance.com
http://www.scriptlance.com
http://www.directfreelance.com
http://www.gofreelance.com

Once you know your way around these sites – and don’t be afraid to experiment – since you haven’t put any money down, you have nothing to lose – then you can think of becoming a paid member. Paid members usually get the better jobs and they don’t have to pay as much out of their earnings to the site. In most cases, you recover that money once you’ve done a few jobs.
In the next post, we’ll talk about how to post your samples up online – for free!

Stumble it!

There are so many people who call or email me saying, “I can write – my friends used to tell me I wrote the most amazing letters.” I always know what is coming. This is usually a precursor to telling me they know I write for clients in the virtual world and would I please recommend their name to some client too? No, I don’t blame them – far from it. However, I do tell them that they need to write something so that the client can get a feel of their writing style. I don’t hear from most of them after that. The few who do take the trouble to put something together are the ones who a year later, are so busy writing, they very often don’t have the time to say Hi. There was one young stay-at-home mother who asked me the same question around two years ago – today she earns a lot more than I do and I’ve yet to meet someone who works so hard and loves what she does!

Where you can apply and how to find online writing work will be dealt with in another post. This part needs to be addressed first because samples are so important. At the outset, let me warn you that there might be clients who ask you whether you really have written everything you sent in. This is not, I repeat not the time to get offended. If you knew the number of scams that go on in cyberspace you would pity some of these clients. People send in samples that are just copy-pasted from articles on the Internet and then, when they get a project to do, they either farm it out or they give in rubbish. Very often after having got an advance. So bear with the client. Many clients like to be able to be able to chat with you on any of the chat sites. This is one way for the client to see if you really do write the way you claimed to write.

Now for the samples. A good number when you are sending in articles is 5. They should be around 500 words each and preferably cover five different topics. This will show the client how versatile you are. You should put the topics you are most interested in right on top. Say you like travel – then a travel article has to head the list. In case you do not like doing certain articles like those on hardware or software or anything else, do let the client know well in advance so he can make alternate arrangements if he has to give out those topics.

This sample folder should be enough in the beginning. Later on, you might want to make one folder for article samples, one for SEO or search engine optimization samples, one for blog post samples, etc. We could take a look at that once we’ve talked about what SEO is and how to do blog posts for clients. These five are a good place to start so put those articles together and you’re ready to start a career of writing on the Internet.

Stumble it!

No matter how superior some article writers claim to be, most of the research for articles is probably done on the Internet. That seems to be the general rule as far as the regular article goes. You look for material on the subject, you gather enough, you put it into some kind of order, you give it a slant depending on the way you look at the subject and you write a brand new article. Like I said, that is what is usually done. For an article writer who writes hundreds of articles a month, this is usually the way to go.

However, you could just be writing an article on something new. Something that is your point of view, something that you feel is a totally different take on a particular subject. Then, the article needs more than just Internet research perhaps. You need to get your facts and figures absolutely right if you are quoting them. You need to get certain quotes right if you want an authentic feel. In short, you need to spend more time researching. The library, news items, reports, interviews, data…….you need to go the whole nine yards.

The result? An article that is unique. One that stands head and shoulders above the rest. One that is unique and makes you proud to put your name at the end of it. Sure you will probably keep churning out the other stuff, putting it through Copyscape to make sure there are no plagiarism issues. But the one you do with a lot of care and hard work is the one that you will put up as a sample of the kind of work you do. It’s the one that says ‘you’. You’ll always be proud of it.

Stumble it!

Once you’ve got your 5-point program going as a skeleton for your article, you’re on your way to becoming an article writer. It’s that easy. Fleshing out your points and extending it to fill a page means you’ve got your article. But you can do more. You can raise it from something functional to something that people will feel good reading. How do you do that? By putting a bit of style into your article. Just go sentence by sentence and see if you can say it better!

Here are a few tips to make your article rise above the purely functional. Don’t let every sentence be a statement. Spice it up with a question sometimes. For example, instead of “Choosing golf clubs can be a lengthy business”….you could say “Have you any idea how long it takes to choose a golf club when you don’t know how?” Somehow, from keeping a reader at arm’s length, a question used right can draw the reader in.

The other thing that draws readers in is when you invite them to look at something. For example, beginning a sentence with: Take a look at this….. or Look more closely at this and you will see that…… or perhaps, Just consider these figures/numbers/advantages…… Suddenly you add a personalized touch to the article and involve the reader rather than give him boring information.

More little tips in the next few blogs!

Stumble it!

If you don’t really know much about the topic you have to write about, then it takes a little more time to get an article done. You have to research it on the Internet. So Google your topic and get going. What you will need to do is to copy-paste at least 5 pieces of research about the topic. While you are looking for this research, you will obviously be reading everything about the product. So at the end of it, you know roughly what the topic is about.

Now think of 5 points and put them down, one below the other. Then arrange the bits of research that match these points and put them down in order of how they should appear. Then rewrite the whole thing so that you get a brand new article. That’s all it takes!

Try and work on topics about which you have some knowledge, even if it is sketchy. Then, when you read about it, you will only get clearer in your mind about what the topic is. If you get progressively confused, don’t do the article. It really is much better to stick to topics you understand than take up ones that you don’t and then struggle or worse, send in something that makes no sense at all! If it doesn’t make sense to you, it’s not going to make sense to the reader, you can be sure of that! If an article has to be convincing, you have to write about what you know, not what you don’t.

Stumble it!

Writing an article could really be as simple as that, you know. First off, decide what you want to write about. Say you have a web site on golf and one of the articles you want to write is about golf clubs. You want the article to tell people how to choose what golf clubs would be best for them. So the article would be quite basic, a kind of introduction to golf clubs. So, what you could do is to write down 5 points and expand them into 5 paragraphs, roughly 100 words a paragraph so that you get a 500-word article.

This is how you could do it – first the points – 1) going out and choosing a golf club set, 2) what a golf set contains, 3) adjustable golf clubs for beginners, 4) the difference between graphite and steel and 5) choosing one depending on your skill. You’ve got 5 points and it’s really quite easy to write a paragraph on each one and before you know it, you’ve got an article!

When you know the subject matter, it’s really quite simple to write the article once you have it organized like this. Always remember to put those points down. Once you’ve done that, it’s a breeze!

If you want to write an article when you don’t have a clue what the topic is all about, we have a few tips too so wait for the next post!

Stumble it!

The Internet is all about writing articles today. You need articles to fill up your website and as anyone familiar with the Internet will tell you, the more articles you have, the better it is for you. So how do you set about getting those articles done? You could of course go to any of those writing sites and get them and you probably will by paying a few dollars for an article. But pause a while and consider this: does anyone know your product/service or site better than yourself?

So, the point is, why not write your own articles? Maybe not every single one of them, but at least start off the process so your site gets some kind of character that says it’s yours. Once you’ve set the tenor of your site, you can go out and buy those articles.

Here are 5 simple steps to write your own article.

Decide what the article is about and write it down. For example, if your article is about mobile phones, write down the point that you wish covered in your article, say, the origin of mobile phones, their advantages, the problems that could occur and how they are doing in today’s world.

Put these points in the order they should appear, an order that would have a beginning, middle and an end.

Now flesh out the article, building around the points. If you have to do research at this point in order to stretch the point into a few sentences, do that.

Now run the article through a copy checker for plagiarism.

Check if you want it to be keyword-rich and put in your keywords into the article but take care to see that they do not stick out like a sore thumb.

This is a basic guideline. To make your article better, watch this spot!

Stumble it!

Writing can be a long and winding road as the old song goes. It’s so easy sometimes to stray away from the road and get off the beaten path. It’s great for the writer, it’s great for the reader, looking at things anew, looking at all things new. However, the danger of turning off could also mean getting lost. Because once you’re away from driving towards a goal, the temptation of going nowhere beckons. And when you go nowhere, when there’s no destination and you’re meandering, you tend to feel that you need to pretend. That’s when you could get trapped in the jargon jungle. Going round and round in circles, not really progressing and coming back to the same spot. Till finally, there is so much blocking your view of the horizon that you get caught in a quagmire of your own making. Jargonese for its own sake never gets you anywhere. All you end up in is nowhere land, with no one wanting to read what you’ve written. The open, straight, simple road might seem a trifle boring to you but it is infinitely better than being trapped in the jargon jungle. What you need to do is to drive on, carrying the reader with you, all the while trying to see what could make him a little more interested. Keep him awake and keep him listening without being loud or overbearing. Don’t stop to smell the roses if you’re going to get lost doing so.

Stumble it!

Well, all this stuff about keeping it simple probably gives you the idea somewhere that the outcome could be something that’s boring. Yes, that is a problem. So once you’ve got the hot focus of what you have to say, see if you can give the reader just a little bit of something that makes him sit up, opening his eyes a bit wider. Just a wee bit is enough to start with. It doesn’t have to scream, it doesn’t need to have ‘shock value’. It just needs to have him saying ‘Aha!’. It doesn’t have to be a great big ‘aha’ every time. Even a teeny-weeny one will mean that the chances of him reading through your writing increases tremendously.

The Aha factor does not mean that you don’t write unless you have something new and exciting to say. All it means is that whatever you say should not sound trite and with an ‘I’ve heard it before’ kind of feel to it. It just means that whatever you have to say is said a little bit differently, a little bit more creatively so that what you have to say gets the reader’s attention. It means your writing gets read and that is what ultimately matters. If your reader were to say, ‘Hey, I never quite thought of it like that before!’……..then your writing has done a real good job!

Stumble it!

A wonderful boss of mine from days gone by used to tell us that if a piece of writing didn’t have a hot focus to set the reader on fire, it wasn’t worth a thing! Well, maybe that is absolutely essential for a piece of writing that is done with selling in mind. When it comes to information and entertainment, it might just be okay to tone that down a bit. However, writing that has a focus is better at achieving what it wants achieved than writing that doesn’t.

What is this hot focus anyway? It’s the central thought in any piece of writing you are doing. Here, too, keep it simple. If you have too many ideas vying for pride of place, you’ll end up with a crazy mess. Try and tackle one thought in each piece of writing you do and suddenly you find that everything works its way around it and towards it. Once that happens, you’re on a good wicket! When you cut out all the fizz and the fluff and stick to what is really important, that’s what is going to be visible to the reader too.
How do you judge if your writing has a focus? Here’s a little test you can do. After you’ve written your article or chapter or report, try and see if you can sum up everything you’ve written in one single sentence. Then see if that sentence makes sense to the reader and is compelling enough to hold his attention. If it is, you’re bang on! Of course, you can stand this on its head and work the other way around too. Decide on what it is you want to say and then go on to how you are going to it. So you get the hot focus first and then build your body of words around it. Does that sound too terribly simplistic? But it works, you know. Very often, it’s the simple ideas that do!

Stumble it!