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Tuesday, May 31, 2005

Starting your online writing career - You must draw blood first

Writers, write just like painters, paint on canvases. This is one of the reasons why it is important that you launch your writing career by getting some freelance writing work that you can get paid for.

It does not matter how little you are paid for it, the important thing is to “draw blood” and get paid for your writing. Everything else you do towards being a $100,000 writer will have to start from there.

You cannot do any serious online writing without coming across the phrase “keyword rich articles”.

What are keyword articles? Keyword articles are articles that repeat a certain key word or key words. Keywords have the valuable power of attracting search engines. This is a complex subject but simply put, keywords are selected carefully in an effort to attract as much search engine traffic as possible to a site.

With the growing popularity of Google Adsense pay per click ads widely posted at web sites and blogs, keywords also have the important function of attracting the right Google ads to a site or blog that will earn the publisher the highest amount of cash when visitors to the site click on them.

You must begin by aggressively looking for freelance writing assignments for keywords. In the second part of this article we will suggest a few buyers of keyword articles that you can start off with. But they will only purchase quality articles that you have simply not copied or lifted from somewhere else. So it is very important that before you seek keyword articles, that you actually write a couple first and post them at leading article directories and article announcement sites. Visit sites to see how keyword articles are written and also visit my blog and read this article that uses the keywords (debt copnsolidation). Here is the link to the article.

http://marketingurhomebiz.blogspot.com/2005/05/before-you-can-effectively-market-your.html


Observe firstly how the article on a totally different subject from what the blog covers is made relevant. Then take a look at how the keywords are repeatedly used.

So now you are ready to write your first keyword article.

I can hear you ask the question.

“What on earth am I going to write about?”

Why not write about your keywords article business. You intend to supply keyword rich articles don’t you? Read the articles at my other blog (http://big-online-story.blogspot.com) carefully. Are there any of the articles that you can re-write in your own words without telling any lies about your past achievements as a writer so far? Please do not copy whole paragraphs from my blog. I have not given you permission to reproduce my articles. I have simply asked you to do what you can do with any site or blog online. Read and digest the central ideas and then write an article using the ideas as if there were your own. Select any simple keyword that you want to use that will be the central or key point in your article. (We will deal about the subject of selecting keywords for your articles later on in this blog).

Remember that you will really have to be convincing so select topics that you care about enough and believe in from my blog, to be convincing. A writer who is not convincing in their writing will never be successful at any type of writing, so this is a very critical skill you will need to acquire if you are to succeed.

Next you will have to compile your resource box. This is a skill on it’s own and I have an extremely useful article on the subject at this link

http://marketingurhomebiz.blogspot.com/2005/05/your-article-resource-box-will-kill-or.html

Read it and carefully use the valuable points gained from years of experience and trial and error to create your best resource box to launch off your career as a writer.

Part II
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Always seek to maximize on your profits from your resource box as much as possible even from people who do not contact you to give you writing work.

I have an idea of how you can do that at this early stage. If you took my advice and registered at the site that sells your writing on your behalf for a commission, it may be a good idea to put your very own affiliate link in your resource box so that the writers who come across the article can register at the site. You will get paid a 5% commission on all the writing they do.

You will get your affiliate link after registering at the site and then going to “affiliate info” on the right hand side of the www.constant-content.com site. If you have not already registered, you can use this link to register now. It will only take a few minutes and I will be giving you tips later on how to increase your earnings at this site.

Here is the link:
http://www.constant-content.com/?aref=1363

But for now we are focusing on getting your online freelance writing career off the ground.

I recommend that you post your articles at the following two sites which have very high traffic and therefore should give your articles maximum exposure. You will have to register first. Go to the sites and do that now.

www.ideamarketers.com
www.goarticles.com

After you start posting your articles, both these two sites have counters that will show you how many people have read those articles. You will observe that some article headlines will do better than others and pick up readers much quicker than others. Learn something from this and always go for article headlines that are as attractive and effective as possible.

Now you can start sending off emails to prospective buyers of your online keyword articles.

Here is a useful contact of a person that buys keyword articles. You can write to them immediately and express your interest in writing keyword articles.

caseypendelton at yahoo.com

Do not waste any time in implementing what you have read here today because in the next few days we will move on to an even more exciting topic of how you can greatly increase the exposure that your articles get thus dramatically multiplying on the chances of a client who requires keyword articles, finding you.

Why most writers find it difficult to sell their writing

In one brief sentence, many writers fail to sell their work online because a writer is a very stubborn animal.

Which other “animal” would undertake the back-breaking-emotionally-draining task of writing a 50,000 word novel and then face dozens of rejections but still keep on moving from publisher to publisher? Finally some small obscure publisher wants to publish the novel but requests for numerous changes, which the writer sits down to do. Finally the novel is published and somehow is not selling. So the same writer starts some sort of promotion exercise to get sales going.

The question on your mind now is the very same question that is always on my mine. What does the poor guy eat when all this is going on?

That nature in a writer is the reason why so many of them find it extremely hard to sell online. You see what quite often keeps the writer going through all the nightmare of a process that leads to publishing, is the passion they have for their work. Most novels are written for the writer first and they then hope against all hope to find an audience out there.

This is the first thing you must get rid of if you want to get your work published. Do not write for yourself, unless you’re going to pay for the damned piece. Look for a market, find out what that market needs, and then provide it.

It will help a great deal if you have some interest in the subject that you are writing about. However that is the ideal situation and the truth is that finding yourself in the ideal situation is always a very rare thing these days. Many times you will find that it pays to look for the most profitable situation rather than the most ideal. The most profitable situation is where you have found a well paying market that demands writing that you can do. As you write and your first payment comes through, you gain strength and motivation, no matter how little that first payment was. After a while writing on the subject, you develop a liking for it and you even start getting better and better writing on the subject.

The next step will be to look for more markets on the same subject. Maybe a web site that pays better or even an offline magazine.

So you want to sell your writing? Stop. Put aside everything you have written in the past, find somebody somewhere who has requested for some article (this blog will be able to give you plenty of tips and leads to give you plenty of requested articles to work on) go ahead and write the piece and within a very short time, you may just find that the work is flowing in and you are getting paid something for your writing.

Do writers really make $100,000 a year online?

With all the hype doing the rounds on the net these days, it really gets difficult separating the truth from the lies and the hype from the facts.

I have seen this figure of $100,000 being used by people trying to sell some writing course online. This is reason enough for anybody to doubt its’ authenticity. Folks will say anything to sell stuff.

But take it from me, there are writers who are making even more than $100,000 annually from their writing.

For starters, it is important to realize that computers and the internet have made life much more easier for writers. High incomes have now come within the reach of many more ordinary writers than was the case before. For example in the old days you would have to send off a query in the mail and then wait for weeks for a response. If you wanted writer’s guidelines, it was the same.

Now you can get instant writer’s guidelines online. You can send off queries and receive a response within a much shorter duration. You can receive an assignment, write your article and send it off via email on the same day. And maybe even get paid the same day through your email using a service like Paypal.

There has never been a time in the history of mankind when it has been so easy for a freelance writer, of average ability, situated anywhere in the world to make a very good living. Never has it been easier for a writer who has never published a novel to make $100,000 a year.

Another recent development that has greatly benefitted writers is the rapid expansion of the world wide web. Every web site and blog out there is a potential market for a writer. Actually these are times when no writer should starve. Sadly the reality is that there are lots of writers out there who can hardly make a living. That is one of the things that this blog will be striving to change by giving useful timely tips pointing writers to lucrative online and offline markets and by getting writers to share the information they have on various markets.

But there is more to the developments on the world wide web for writers. Maybe the most discouraging fact is that most markets appear to be paying very low rates. $5 or even less for written web site content is common.

This should not discourage any writer for four very important reasons.

Firstly the fact that there are hundreds of thousands of writing opportunities (probably many more) paying $5 online means that it is easier for a writer to break into the market. In the offline and print publication days, it would usually take years for writers to break into print.

Secondly it means that you can start earning an income almost immediately that will help you finance your future efforts. Believe me even $2.50 (what I started off with myself) has a way of quickly building up to thousands of dollars, if your are consistent and disciplined and you ensure that you write every day without fail.

Thirdly it does the important thing of exposing your writing, complete with your by-line, out there where somebody looking for a writer just like you is bound to find you much more easily than if you were just waiting for an assignement that pays more. And even if your articles do not carry your name, you are building contacts in the markets. You never know who will come asking for a writer tomorrow.

Fourthly markets that pay $5 or less are not the only markets available online. There are other markets that pay a lot more. After my initial $2.50 per article assignments, the next freelance writing assignment I landed, paid me a cool $500 for an article that took me less than an hour to research and write.

But let’s keep things in perspective here. To make a really huge income from your writing, you will have to start with the $5 articles and build yourself up from there. My apologies to those readers who are so familiar with hype where somebody assures you that you will be making $100,000 tomorrow as long as you do something that will put money in their pocket. I am also very much aware of the fact that most folks online are in a terrible hurry to make money. My apologies, I am not that sort.

I make a living from my online writing, but I started off with a day job and it took time before I could give it up to concentrate full time on my writing. Naturally you will do it a lot faster than I did because you have all this useful information at your disposal. Still you will need some element of patience. Only patience will enable you to take the various steps that will lead to your earning a good living online and then finally to you earning $100,000 or more from your writing. From now to the point where you start earning a good living can be as little as one week to two months. Two months is a very short time when you really think about it. To reach $100,000 or more a year can take you anything from 3 months to 9 months. All of it depends a lot on you. Your skill at learning and following instructions more than your writing talent. Yep, you heard me right, most of the folks making those high incomes are average writers.

Within the two months that it will take a slow-to-understand-and-follow-instructions-writer reading this blog regularly to start making a living, another hype convert will have spent a bundle both in terms of cash and time trying out many get-rich-quick-in-my-sleep schemes. The choice will always be yours.

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