8 Reasons Why A Freelance Writer Should Use the Internet

What a wonderful resource the Internet is!

Students find information to help them with their studies; business people keep in touch with important clients and stay up to date with important business developments; stay-at-home-parents can find ideas for children’s activities and feel less isolated by forging friendships with other online parents; and even small children have the opportunity to learn how to use the technology that will take them into the future.

It seems everybody has a reason to use the Internet and writers are no exception. In fact, the Internet is a resource that once explored, most writers couldn’t do without.

Let’s take a look at why.

1. Research

This one’s almost too obvious to mention but nevertheless, it’s the number one reason why a freelancer would use the Net.

While most writers still build up their own library of reference books, without the Internet we’d still be scurrying off to the public library in the hope that they’d have a book about “coinage in ancient Egypt” or “the architect who designed the fountains at Trafalgar Square”. Pretty obscure subjects and the likelihood of the library having anything on their shelves was pretty remote. They could probably order something that might help but that could take anything up to a month to arrive.

Does Your Book Cover Pass the ?Ignore? Test?

Your book cover is the first impression a potential client has with your book. The book cover design and message will determine if your book will be ignored or bought.

Go to your website and have a look at your current cover. Ovi Dogar has put together the ultimate book cover test. Learn if your book cover will pass or be ignored.

Color Test: Colorful covers can add to your professional image. Too much color can be detracting. Trash your cover if it has more than 3 colors unless it’s a photograph.

Message: Your book cover should clearly tell people what the book is about and offer a meaningful benefit. Your book cover should include: title, author’s name, main benefit and your website’s URL.

Image Match: Your book cover should match your book’s message. If your book is about marketing than the cover should be designed with that thing in mind. If your book cover is out of synch with your message, it’s time to get a new cover.

Working With a Freelance Editor

If you are interested in creating information products, you will very likely deal with editors throughout your career. You may need someone to edit a book, review a special report, or tighten up a magazine article. Even if you are a brilliant writer, it always helps to have someone else look at the work with fresh eyes.

Most of these editors will be people you hire on a freelance or project basis. To get the most out of such a relationship, it helps to be clear about what you need and what you can expect.

To start, you should know what kind of editing you are looking for. There are many different levels and varieties of editing. Probably the three you will encounter the most are substantive editing, copyediting and proofreading.

Substantive editing

Sometimes called developmental editing, substantive editing looks at both the content and structure of a manuscript as a cohesive whole. Does the story or argument flow logically? Are there obvious gaps in a certain area? Too much information someplace else? Substantive editing can involve re-ordering large chunks of text, removing text, adding text, and even rewriting.

Copyediting

Writers Block - Melting the Ice

What does one do as a writer who loves writing and feels empty of creativity?

When the writing process stops, there is the experience of fear. There is a sense that something precious has been lost. Out of this fear comes a sense of clinging. There is a clinging to all my beautiful words. It feels as if all my beautiful creativity is melting.

I guess all writers live with this fear. That is until they remember that this flow of creation does not belong to ‘me’ or ‘mine.’ I find a wondrous freedom in such recognition. If the writing is not mine then it is a gift given to ‘little me.’ The ‘I’ in ‘little me’ has only to learn how to receive it.

I remember that the fear of not being able to write creatively is the very thing that gets in the way.

This writer waits and watches. He waits as anyone with a little bit of wisdom waits. He waits as anyone who has been graced this day on this beautiful earth waits. He waits at the centre which is always empty but is always full.

Get Traffic to Your Web Site with Articles

It is not my intention to give you a 5 or 10 step plan to get traffic to your web site. But I do want to talk to you about one of the best traffic generating systems that exists.

Posting your Articles to Article Directories.

And it’s really a surprisingly efficient way to bring in traffic.

Hopefully you’re not saying “But I don’t have any articles”. If you don’t, and are serious about wanting traffic, then get some. Either write them yourself, or have them ‘ghostwritten’ for you. It is amazingly inexpensive to do this, and the benefit is priceless, and non-stop.

The most well-known place to have articles written ‘on the cheap’ is http://www.elance.com

You must believe me when I say that the benefits are endless. Most of us start out reluctant to spend a lot of time posting articles, but when we finally become convinced of the value of the extra traffic, we become believers. Then we kick ourselves for not doing it sooner.

Here’s How it Works:

Let’s say that your web site is about Affiliate Marketing, as mine is. You need to become known as an expert in your field. The best way to do this is by having articles on your content-based web site telling all you can about affiliate marketing techniques.

Cheap Therapy

I call it cheap therapy. That gushing, near-religious, poured-from-the-body stress release that comes after writing my heart out for hours each day, delivers more balm to my soul than years of psychoanalysis.

There were eight of them. Eight family members and friends died in five short years. I was a neophyte in this death thing. This clamping-down-on-your-heart, ripping-a-hole-in-your-soul, death thing. It stunk. Badly. I was forty-three when my grandmother died. It floored me. The shock that it could really happen, that they could actually leave me, was overwhelming.

The guilt that had ridden hard on my back for the past twenty years came at me with a rush. I should have visited more. Called more. Written more. But the three baby daughters that we’d had in two years had consumed every ounce of our energy. We’d fallen into bed each night exhausted, and had awakened tired, but happy, each morning. The thought of a ten-hour trip home had seemed insurmountable with three little ones in car seats and diapers. So we put off the visits home for a long, long time.

Extreme Research: 10 Snappy Rules For Success

So you want to learn to research well, and not waste any time. Let’s do it. Here are a few NECESSARY preliminary points.

First, adopt an aggressive I-am-taking-over-this-place mindset.

2. Develop a system for executing the research process. By creating your own rules to follow systematically, you really speed things up. Don’t have one? No worries. You can use mine. I happen to have “research animal” stamped on my forehead.

3. Follow the rules. You can tweek them to suit your own style after a couple of runs with this method. But these make for great training wheels.

4. Before going into battle, always ready your weapons.

Do not go near a library or desk to start research unless and until everything you will need sits neatly arranged all about you for quick access. This one is your call. I use 2 or 3 pens and a pad of paper to scratch out notes and thoughts, and a pack of index cards for especially important notes. Then come the highlighters. In college, I used to work the highlighters until they overheated.

A Mode of Transportation

Great writing transports one vicariously to realms that the reader would not otherwise experience.

One of these areas is physical: ancient, modern, or futuristic. A great writer can bring the past into the present and make the reader experience the culture, the locale, the people of the time. Jean Auel’s great novels come to mind.

Another region is the pschological realm: Again great writing conveys us into the minds of characters giving us a better understanding of our motives, our passions, our wants, and our needs. Crime and Punishment is a good example.

Then there is the sociological realm where great writing gets the reader involved in the world of crime, or romance, or poverty, or wealth, and many other social situations, problems and solutions. Charles Dickens was such a writer.

The cultural region is another area where great writing has an impact, particularly authors from other ethnicities that help us to understand the mores and viewpoints that are different.

Finally we enter the political sphere. Here again, great writing points out the good and bad of different ideologies, political parties, governments. It introduces us to the search for power and influence, the good and the bad, the acceptable and the unacceptable.

Sowing the Seeds of Opportunity: How to Multiply Your Freelance (Writing) Work

You can turn your $200 fee to write a press release into $2,000 to carry out an entire PR campaign simply by convincing clients to invest in campaigns, instead of individual assignments. Campaigns achieve better results and cost less in the long-term for clients, compared to individual assignments. And, of course, as the freelancer, you get paid much more for turning out a succession of assignments that assimilate a successful campaign.

Here’s how to multiply your writing sales by convincing clients to invest in long-term campaigns, instead of short-term individual assignments.

? Know the short-term and long-term view results. A client approaches you to write a brochure. He may or may not know that his product can also benefit from other types of promotional pieces, such as ads, direct mail, news releases, websites, and so on, to sell his product or service. Your job is to educate the client. The brochure may be the first promotional piece in a consortium of promotional pieces. Here, you must know the short-term and long-term view results of the brochure.

Article Writing: SEO, Expert Authors and the Dumbification of the Internet

Article authors who use SEO (Search Engine Optimization) keywords to attract attention and falsely position themselves as experts, are like impurities in the water, clogging up the pipes. This is indeed a sorry situation. Unlike the days when the internet was young, if you want to find good information, you have to filter out the dirt first.

When you do web research using keywords, do you generally have to read anywhere from 4-7 articles on one particular topic before finding one written by an intelligent human being? SEO abuse is making it more and more difficult to locate the people with real expertise and valuable insights. It’s a growing problem, to say the least. But in terms of information-gathering, how do we pick through the chaff and get to the gold?

Use Specialized Terms in Your Keyword Search

When I’m in research mode, in addition to keywords, I use specific and/or specialized terms in my web searches. This helps me scope out authors with real knowledge as opposed to the BS artist looking to make a quick buck. It works for me, and it can work for you as well.

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