Freelance Online Writing: The 3 Absolute Must Do’s You Need To Succeed
The fact that the Internet is a medium that relies on fresh and relevant content to keep people coming back has seen the creation of a secondary market which is solely about the creation of new content. The explosive growth of the Internet and the attendant growth of Internet related commerce have created an unprecedented demand for written content. It is rare for webmasters to go about each day creating this content themselves; they simply don’t have the time. What you will find is that they source the content from elsewhere and are happy to pay for it.
Like the stock exchange which facilitates transaction between buyers and sellers of shares, similar types of exchanges are now coming into vogue for the online content market. Webmasters know that they can go to a central resource, create a job description, and then have freelance writers bid to do that work. It works like a dutch auction with the lowest bidder usually, though not always, winning the bid and securing the job.
The two major outsourcing online auction sites are:
elance.com and
guru.com
The buyers at these auction sites aren’t really after top quality writing (except in the case of copy for web sales pages). They want fast content and they want to procure it as cheaply as possible. This can sometimes make for a low priced and unpredictable market.
There are therefore a few rules that you need to observe to ensure that you can consistently profit from your writing:
1. Keep it simple
To be self sufficient as an online freelance writer you need to develop a system of getting buyers in your virtual door and out as fast as possible. This means belonging to one auction bidding site (either Elance or Guru) to keep life streamlined and simple. The great thing about doing this is all your accounts, job records, customers emails and work history are stored in a central location. This removes a lot of administrative overhead from your operation and allows you to concentrate on bidding and creating content.
2. Be consistent and relatively fast
You need to process books and articles as fast as you can and keep your practices to a single standard that your customers can recognise and come back for again and again.
3. Always raise your prices a little bit over time
NEVER give return customers discounts. You also need to be able to ask them for more money than they are willing to pay you if they ask for a second draft.
The writing market is slanted in favour of the buyer so you need to give yourself every edge at your disposal.
Scott is a successful freelance writer who makes the bulk of his income by writing online. To learn how you can create a secondary income through online freelance writing go to http://www.writingforincome.com
Get Ready, Get Set, Get Writing!
While article marketing is truly an inexpensive and effective way to market your business, you know that time is money. An article marketing campaign quickly loses its tremendous value if you spend too much time toiling over every single word you write. Learning how to write effective articles quickly will help you expand your marketing efforts. These quick tips will help.
Identifying Your Target Market
The first step is to identify your target customers. Research your audience. In general, try to identify their ages, occupations, financial statuses, and educational backgrounds. This will help you establish a specific tone and set of language in which to speak to your customers.
How does this help? Once you have a voice and style for your articles, you’ll be able to just let the ideas flow and speak to your customers in a friendly, natural style.
An article about a new kind of retirement fund could be pertinent to old and young readers alike. The language used in the article signals which group the company is attempting to reach. Consumers want to be spoken to directly, to help them understand that certain products and services are meant for them. Since the same article may be perceived differently by two different groups you’ll want to know who will be reading it.
Doing this has a second advantage. Take that article about retirement planning, for example. Write it first for one target market, your older readers who will be retiring in the next few years. Then, you can quickly write another version of this article targeted at a younger crowd who are just starting to plan for their golden years. Much of the facts will stay the same; how you communicate those ideas will vary based on what they need to hear.
Coming Up With A Plan
Once you’ve identified your audience, map out a general plan for your articles. What do you want to write about? How many articles do you want to write? When do you want to submit them? By determining a plan, you will be able to more easily focus on the individual articles as you write them.
You will probably come up with new article ideas as you begin writing your articles. Jot these down as you go along and put them in your schedule wherever you think they fit best.
Whether you plan on writing ten articles or ten thousand, organization is the key to article marketing success. An organized article marketing plan will help your ideas remain clear and focused, and let you concentrate on giving good, clear information as you write. Mapping out future articles can also make the task seem less stressful, which means you will be in a better frame of mind to write.
Once you’ve established a plan, along with a tone of voice and type of language to use in your writing, just start writing! You will be surprised by how quickly the information will flow onto the page. Remember, you are the expert. You have an endless source of information when it comes to your business and the industry that surrounds it.
Frustrated by those first few articles? Like anything, the writing will get easier the more you do it. As you gain a rhythm, you’ll find yourself creating articles in a fraction of the time. You will also find motivation in results.
And with the increase in traffic from your first few articles, your incentive for creative compelling articles will continue to grow. Write with confidence and purpose and you will hit the mark every time.
Nancy Amada helps small businesses find success. Read more at www.nancyamada.blogspot.com.
For more great tips for article writers, visit www.articlemarketer.com, a highly popular article distribution service.
http://www.articlemarketer.com
Article Writing: Keeping Your Article On Track
Whilst article writing is a recognised means of promoting a product or service, your article must remain on target or you are just wasting your time. This article gives a few pointers to make sure this staying on target happens!
As an article directory editor (amongst other things!) I find it interesting to watch the ‘ebb and flow’ of article content, usually dependent on what the likes of Clickbank have on their books as a ‘hot property’. Not too long ago it was acne, then online dating became the rage. I await developments on the next Big Thing! This ‘following the hot leads’ type of reaction isn’t a problem in itself but can lead to big problems indeed.
There are four main failings that I have observed when viewing the hundreds of submissions I have received. The first is trying to cover too wide a subject; the second is writing an article that has little or no relevance to the contents of the ‘resource box’, where the author can put their links for readers; the third is physical article length and the fourth is relevance to the resource box. Let’s look at these issues one at a time:
I regularly get articles that try to cover far, far too much ground than is possible in a 4,000 word magazine article, let alone a 700-word web article. Examples (fictitious) are things like ‘A History Of The USA’ or ‘Everything You Need To Know About AdSense’. Promising titles, if they delivered! However, the reality is that any article could only scratch the surface of such huge subjects. The effect is that the reader is left disappointed and exasperated – ‘another shallow bit of writing!’ is the usual response.
An article written for the web should be informative and hold the reader’s attention. To do this it should be relevant to the title, well written and contain at least some information not readily available to the reader, or some personal insights into the subject being written about. To suggest that you can give a complete history of the USA in 700 words is ludicrous – you couldn’t give a complete history of anything in that space!
The result is the thinnest type of writing possible, a ‘skimming’ of a subject that should either be examined in more depth, possibly over a number of articles, or abandoned entirely in favour of something more easily encompassed.
Another trend is towards shorter and shorter articles, the object of which is painfully obvious: churning out as many ‘resource boxes’ with ‘articles’ attached as possible. Less wordage equals more speed equals more articles but content suffers to the point where it is of little or no interest to anyone, with articles re-hashing the same (thin) subject matter time after time. No-one wants to read them because they have little to say so their purpose is nullified – that of promoting the product or website the ‘resource box’ contains.
This seems to go hand-in-hand with a peculiar phenomenon – that of article content having no connection to the links in the ‘resource box’. If anything is a waste of time, this is surely it! Given that the whole point of writing the article is to pique the readers’ curiosity to the extent that they will investigate the matter further (vis the resource box), this approach fails utterly. There is faint hope of anyone reading an article about gardening clicking-through to links about AdSense passive income (and yes I have seen this!). I don’t know if this is being done by authors new to article writing or simply by people who couldn’t care less what they write about as long as it means another resource box in a directory somewhere.
The result of all this has led me to a decision. If any article submitted to my directories in the future contains any of the above faults it will simply be deleted. I’m upping my minimum wordage from 400 (always far too low anyway) to 600. This may sound harsh but I honestly feel it is the only way to put a stop to the downward spiral in terms of general quality of web articles in general.
And if I don’t get any articles submitted? That would be a blow but somehow I don’t think it will happen. What I do think will happen is that submitters will polish up their writing skills and come to realise that quality is preferable to quantity anytime. I truly believe that this is the only way forward for article writing if it is to remain a significant tool in the internet marketer’s armoury.
Steve Dempster would love to see your quality articles in his article directory http://www.articlemetropolis.com
To Write Or Not To Write
She was sitting inside a public transportation; then, all of the sudden, thoughts suddenly seem to swirl inside her head and she ached to be with a notepad and pen so she could write them all down. She finds a notepad and a pen, she is lucky and the thoughts became words. She does not find them, she gets upset as the thoughts she was nursing so tenderly like a baby dissipated like dust into the winds.
That is how writers go about in their daily lives. There are moments when they could think of nothing to write at all and times when they are bombarded with so many ideas that their hands could not keep up or the inks of their pens would run out, whatever comes first.
But there is always a question that bugs every writer, and that is, To write or not to write? When they are faced with the opportunity of writing about something that is not their forte, would they or would they rather not write about it?
Writers who desperately need to earn a living will have no other choice but to go on and write anything that will get in the bucks. But, comes the mental block, how will they go about writing about something that they are not even passionate about? How could a poet write about the technical aspects of a car? How could a literary writer do a news article on something as horrid as a vehicular accident?
Here are tips on how to be a flexible writer:
Research, research, research.
If a writer, especially one who is just starting out and still trying to learn the ropes of being flexible, gets assigned to write a topic that he or she knows nothing about, he or she will not go amiss with lots and lots of research. There are a lot of sites on the net that offers sample articles on just about any topic under the sun. Through research, the writer will be able to get an idea on where she or he has to do and what she or he still needs to look up to be able to come up with the facts needed in her or his article.
Read.
Aside from getting facts from the net for a story or an article, a writer will also do well by reading a lot of materials like newspapers, magazines, manuals or books that will help in constructing the pieces that she or he needs to come up with.
Use the radio and TV as your eyes and ears.
A writer’s ears and eyes are also very important in coming up with a piece that she or he does not know much about. If she or he is told to write about current events, then she could use radio and television as sources of information as to what is happening around. From news reports or documentaries, she or he could get a lot of information for the piece she or he is working on.
Be always ready.
So as not to miss out on any tidbit of information, a writer must have a pen and notepad with her or him wherever she or he goes. A writer never knows when an occasion or happening presents itself that she or he could produce into an article that is worth a reader’s while.
Nothing is a waste for a writer.
When an idea presents itself to a writer, whether it be for money or for no reason at all, she or he jots it down. Writers never waste something that could get her or him writing. An idea, no matter how bad or juvenile, is an idea that could be worked on when the tough gets going.
So to write or not to write? If one is a real writer, one writes no matter what. Because when we get down to it, a writer is not just born but also made. With a lot of hard work and perseverance, a writer becomes outstanding when she or he could take on any topic and write something about it that will not only be just readable but a success.
Talkinmince article directory, to find more articles and resources on To Write or Not to Write go to http://www.talkinmince.com/Top10/ and our weblog http://www.talkinmince.com/tmblog/ for more information.
How To Write A Feature
She was sixteen when she met handsome Romeo, who is ten years older than she was and a seafarer. They fell in love and became lovers. Two years later, she found out that she had AIDS in its early stage and Romeo was dying from the disease himself.
Romeo died after two months. She lived to be fifty-five and even had a kid, who she also lost to the disease. She was the only one who lived to tell the tale because of a miracle cure.
If this had any truth in it, this would have made a wonderful feature article because a feature story delves behind what goes on behind the news and having AIDS and still living because of a cure is news. A feature story also gets into peoples lives.
It tells of the story behind their triumphs and aims to inspire those who are less fortunate. It tries to explain how a trend took on, it gives out information to people in a way that is lighter to read than the news. It makes you aware of how an event came to be and who were really responsible for it happening.
There are really no restrictions when it comes to making feature articles because unlike news stories, you have no length requirement to think about. It basically is a journalists equivalent to an essay. When writing a feature, you just have to base your story on some simple guidelines.
You choose a theme and start with it, then present information and insights to validate the point that you want to get across, and last, draw a conclusion that would bring your reader to a level of realization that is most imperative at the end of the story.
Here some of the type of feature stories that one could write:
The Story Behind the News Story
While the news story tells the people about what transpired, the feature story will tell of how it happened. It will explain why it happened the way it did and tell of the reactions and the feelings of the people involved.
It will try to elucidate the various decisions that people made because of what happened and what impact these decisions have on the other people around them. The feature behind the news story will give the readers an in-depth look of what really happened behind the goriest of murders or an atomic blast and should get them thinking about their own mortality.
Profile of a Personality
There always exists a person in your community or even elsewhere who is bound to pique the curiosity of everyone. Satisfy their curiosity by giving out a story on how this personality became to be. Though you could also write about somebody who is a virtual unknown but who has done something so remarkable that he will surely impress if not inspire readers.
Give the readers facts about the persons life at the same time infusing color and details that make this person stand out from all the rest, making him worthy of a story. It is also a plus factor to be able to interview the person himself so you could get some piece of information that only he could provide, making the story even more interesting to read.
Feature Writing Tips
Guidelines to writing a feature story is basically the same as that of any other story but if you really want to capture the readers attention even after a thousand words, then your writing must be lively and engaging with specific and clear details.
First, you have to start out with a strong lead that would immediately make the reader want to read the rest of your story. It could be an anecdote that came up during an interview of what transpired or a principle that your subject lives by. It could be a description of the person that you are writing about that you are sure would hold a readers attention.
Move on with your story by telling them of descriptions of the persons involved or how they came to be. You might want to put in direct quotes from an interview that you had with your subject.
Explain and present everything in the main part of the story in such a way that the reader will want to go through it until the very end, where you also finish with an explosive closing line.
Your conclusion should make an impact on your readers. It could either be a powerful quote or an encapsulation of what the subject could inspire the community or even the nation into doing after knowing of what he has done.
Always make a reader put down what he is reading with a sigh of contentment or a smile of pure delight.
Talkinmince article directory submission, to find more articles and resources on How to Write a Feature from Experiences go to http://www.talkinmince.com and our blog http://www.talkinmince.com/tmblog/ for more information.