This is a guest post by Krisca Te. Details about Krisca Te at the end of the article.
Blogging is one of the hottest and most profitable online enterprises you can do on your own. You can start working and earning money right away without being caught up in the usual problems of running a business solo. Very little capital and equipment are necessary for you to become a reputable blogger.
A web master’s dilemma
If you want to start your own money-making blog, you have to pick a topic or niche that you feel confident about and interested in. Running a blog means constantly producing fresh, useful, relevant and updated content about the things that interest your reader. You have to know what to write about before you even set up the site’s domain.
Once you know what your blog will be about, you have to tweak the content so it will rank well on search engine listings. No one will find your site unless they know the URL, so you have to make sure that your content is search engine optimized for better site traffic.
But your job as a webmaster doesn’t begin and end with generating search engine friendly articles. After all, you are writing for a human audience, not an algorithm. Search engines can only do so much to promote your website, and at the end of the day you have to put in extra effort to attract human readers and make them stay with you, post after post.
Looking for something else?
Being a blogger means balancing your content so that it is both search engine and user friendly. Search engines like Google will stop recommending your blog if readers don’t appreciate the content that you have on your site, and that will spell the end of your site traffic heydays.
Moreover, you should also be able to convince your reader that you have other interesting and useful stuff elsewhere on your site. When a user clicks through to your blog from Google or Bing and views one page, that’s one cookie point for your site traffic. However, that same reader may also bounce off your blog to another site if he doesn’t like what he sees on your post. He clicks through to the other websites that turned up in his search listing instead.
Leaving your site after viewing just one page thus gives you a high bounce rate, which can be an important indicator that there is something lacking in your content. In a nutshell, a blog’s bounce rate is equivalent to the number of one-page-view visits over the total number of visits. High site traffic doesn’t necessarily mean that you blog is doing well overall-if you also have high bounce rate, that means that your readers don’t find your blog useful enough for their purposes.
Reduce your bounce rate today
You can’t control how your readers behave once they are in your website, but you can tweak your content so that they will want to spend more time viewing your other pages or even signing up for your RSS feeds or email newsletter. In short, you have to convince them to stick around for more of what you have to offer, be it more information or products or services.
The secret is in spicing up your content so that each and every article is informative, relevant, accurate and helpful. Apart from this, there are also a couple of other ways you can try to make sure that every visit to your website decreases the overall bounce rate and ensures that you get maximum exposure and readership for all your posts:
1. Create internal links. Ensuring that all your pages are sufficiently and properly interlinked can play a big role in how readers use your website. Include a list of relevant posts to every page so that they can explore other pages and topics further.
2. Have a clear and easy-to-use navigation scheme. An intuitive navigation allows your users to feel like they are following a well-organized train of thought. Make sure that all your buttons and tabs are working fine so that readers won’t be frustrated by not being able to view pages they’ve previously loaded.
3. Provide ample content on every page. Two sentences for every page is not enough to convince your reader that you actually have more to say about anything. On the flip side, large amounts of text on every page don’t automatically mean that you are an expert. Try having 300-500 words on every page so that your reader will not be discouraged by the length (or lack thereof) of the content.
4. Update your blog regularly. Readers don’t want to read stale, outdated content. They want fresh information and timely news. Get them to stay with you longer by offering new content on a regular basis, but don’t forget to link back to previous posts that may be relevant to the topic.
When not out building relationships with other bloggers, Krisca Te can be found reading blogs that tackle personal development. She is also a personal finance freak who is currently working with ACC, a personal finance blog. You can follow ACC on Twitter if you like to stay updated on their latest contents.
This is a guest post by Nancy Farrell. Learn more about her from the bio below.
According to the National Association of Social Workers, “social workers aim to open the doors of access and opportunity for everyone, particularly those in greatest need.” As a result of this goal, social workers and those interested in improving social justice for all work under a variety of conditions, especially those perhaps less than ideal, in order to reach out to those in need. For example, the director of an inner city shelter might face budget restrictions every fiscal year while a shipping manager at a volunteer organization that sends aid overseas must deal with the rising cost of gasoline and how it affects shipment fees.
In other words, careers in social justice can be extremely difficult and yet extremely rewarding. The rewards, naturally, arise out of the effects such work on behalf of social justice has on other people. Social workers thrive on the connections they make with people of all sorts, and at the end of the day, these connections make the job worthwhile.
Because of this emphasis on personal connection, social workers must have excellent communications skills if they hope to do their jobs well. They must be comfortable speaking to rooms of people, sending out emails and newsletters updating the community on their services, and soliciting funds from donors via personalized letters. At its foundation, the kind of writing social workers generally do is persuasive in nature, whether they are writing a speech for a keynote speaker at a fundraising dinner or urging mothers to take their babies to a free clinic for seasonal flu shots.
So what abilities do you have to have if you want to be a good persuasive writer in a social justice career path?
Develop Great People Skills
First of all, you should have excellent people skills. Being able to relate to people means that you have an awareness of how other people’s wants and needs and expectations interact with your own. By understanding how this works, you can better sympathize with them and tailor your message, whatever it is, into persuasive writing that appeals to your audience’s value systems, ideas, and emotions.
Create a Coherent Argument
Secondly, you should understand how to put together a coherent argument that appeals to your target audience while also getting your message across. An argument is classically made up of a claim plus reasons to bolster that claim; these reasons are supported by evidence.
Research and Organize Well
Finally, as a persuasive writer, you have to be able to research well in order to find evidence relevant to your argument. Furthermore, you have to be able to organize that information within an essay to produce the best effect on your readers and help support your claims. In many cases, choosing the right evidence and framing it in certain ways is more important that coming up with a persuasive argument in the first place!
Of course, the above three abilities are in addition to the standard set of good writing skills that all writers must possess. Certainly, if you can think of others, feel free to leave them in the comments section!
Author Bio:
Nancy Farrell is a freelance writer and blogger. She regularly contributes to criminal justice schools, which discusses about child abuse, human rights, divorce, and crime related articles. Questions or comments can be sent to: nancy.farrell13@gmail.com.
This is a guest post by Donna Reish. Learn more about her from the author bio at the end of the post.
For anyone looking to improve their skills as a writer, simply attending college is a great step. English major or not, you will be writing so many papers that your skills will have nothing to do but improve. Of course, depending on your goals, you have quite a few decisions that will definitely impact your experience and your skills as a writer.
Of course, taking English courses will help. Especially if you are looking to improve your skills in creative writing, English courses are a must. Studying the greats who crafted language into canonical works of art is an invaluable experience. You will learn new and interesting techniques with language, and you will better understand which stylistic choices work best for a given situation.
Most colleges also have creative writing concentrations for undergraduates, giving young writers the opportunity to implement a variety of techniques and literary styles. Many creative writing concentrations also have workshop components, in which you and your peers edit each other’s work provide feedback. This group editing experience could be invaluable for young aspiring writers.
If you are interested in blogging, a lot of courses in many colleges require starting up or continuing a class blog. While most blogs will probably be course-related, it is still a very good experience and a way to at least get your feet wet in the blogosphere. Many communications courses study or practice blogging, so the communications department is a good place to start looking for blogging-related courses.
Many communications or English departments also offer courses in specialized types of writing, like magazine writing, newspaper writing, screenplay writing, poetry writing, or fiction writing. Some schools, like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also offer technical or scientific writing courses, which can be very useful when looking for a job right out of college. If you are still choosing a college, it is really beneficial to ask departments (most departments have contact information online) if they offer courses on any specialization writing.
In addition to studying different genres and fields of writing, college is also a good opportunity for a writer to simply study anything that interests them. While this sounds simple and obvious, many writers tend to study only their craft, which in some ways limits their ideas and even verbal flexibility. Studying a variety of topics will give writers a ton of ideas and writing material. It can add degrees of complexity and insight to a story or essay and allows the writer to make interesting connections and unexpected metaphors.
Author Bio:
Donna Reish, a freelancer who blogs about best universities, contributed this guest post. She loves to write education, career, frugal living, finance, health, parenting relating articles. She can be reached via email at: donna.reish13@gmail.com.
An awesome site for writers called Creative Writing Now honored me by asking me for an interview. In the interview I discuss how I became a freelance blogger and I provide my tips for experiencing success with blogging.
You can read it here.
This is a guest post by Alexis Bonari. Learn more about her by checking out the bio at the bottom of the post.
The online community moves fast. In order to capture the fickle attention spans of mouse-clicking generations, we online freelance writers must be on top of trends across the board. No one outside of niche blogs wants to read anything by a stilted writer who sounds like she’s from 2010.
Trendy writers come up with and reuse popular words or phrases like foodie, quick fix, and green. Everyone does it—and that’s fine—but I’m going to let my inner mom come out for a second to illustrate a point: If everyone was jumping off a bridge, would you?
Admittedly, inserting the word vacay isn’t going to bring down your writing career (probably). This might be a good time, however, to remember a few basic do’s and don’ts of freelance writing.
Use latecomers sparingly
The English language morphs to suit modern purposes. Although Shakespeare’s work wasn’t looked upon kindly by the contemporary upper classes, the now-acclaimed playwright added 1,700 words to the English language, including bedroom, dishearten, and majestic. Shakespeare’s experience demonstrates that some trends catch on for a reason.
If you know what you’re doing and the audience you’re writing for, go ahead and use gorgie or fab. If, however, you’re using trendy words simply because you’ve seen them before and you haven’t checked up its etymology, you may want to pass. Many media-generated words are redundant and classless, but because no one bothers to say so, they catch on. More importantly, they can suck the creativity from your own key-stroking fingers. Stop mimicking the cool kids and use your own words.
Don’t be afraid to pick up a dictionary
Since I often write about eco-friendly (there it is again) topics and skincare, I come across this one frequently: skincare regime orregiment.
Regime, regimen, and regiment have for some reason been lumped into one vague but militaristic definition. Many writers think the three words are interchangeable.
Typos and misunderstandings may be to blame, but let’s make it clear: a regime is a form of government, a regimen is a procedure or system, and a regiment is a military unit of ground troops.
Avoid redundancy
Are you going to send a few manuscripts out later this week? What are your future plans? Are you in the process of deciding whether or not to go to the party this weekend?
Of course you’re sending the assignments later this week. Your sentence is already referring to the future (as in, you’re going to send the manuscripts), so it has to be later. Future plans? A plan is already for the future. And why not nix the excess baggage and simply say, “Are you deciding whether to go to the party this weekend?”
If you look at good poetry, you’ll see that much is conveyed in as few words as possible. That’s a good principle in freelance writing, too, especially if you’re constricted by a word or letter count.
Take, for example, the word reiterate, which I heard on PBS the other day. Sticklers for the English language know that iterate suits the purpose just fine, sans two letters. Because we hear these words and phrases all the time, however, they’re surprisingly difficult to expunge from our vernacular.
Bio: Alexis Bonari is currently a resident blogger at College Scholarships, where recently she’s been researching art scholarships as well as business scholarships. Whenever this WAHM gets some free time she enjoys doing yoga, cooking with the freshest organic in-season fare, and practicing the art of coupon clipping.
If you’re a blogger whose page is suffering from low readership, repetitive posts, or a general lack of innovation, chances are that it also lacks collaborative strategies. Some bloggers may be hesitant to even explore the idea of collaboration, foreseeing a loss of readership if they point out a better blog. However, experience shows the opposite: readers enjoy being introduced to new bloggers, so they’ll keep coming back for more.
There are many ways to start adding more collaborative writing and sharing to your blog, and most of them are painless – maybe even fun. The following are some of the strategies of successful blogs that can be translated to your writing for increased readership and rave reviews.
Set Collaborative Readership Goals
Communicate with other bloggers about your collaborative writing and let them hold you accountable for reaching a specific readership goal. When you know that someone expects something of you, it’s easier to actually do it.
A group of personal finance bloggers, inspired by a single challenge posted on Financial Samurai, agreed to increase their Alexa readership ratings within six months. Some aimed to join the ranks of the top 200,000; others challenged themselves to reach the top 50,000. But all 49 personal finance bloggers who answered the challenge observed significant increases in readership due to the collaborative nature of the goals they had set for themselves. One blog even managed to increase its rating from #1,432,262 to #215,606.
How did they manage this?
1. They started right away without procrastinating. They didn’t make excuses about needing to think it over or question the feasibility of the task. They just joined up.
2. They tracked something tangible. Whether it’s page rankings, readership, number of Tweets, or any other popularity indicator, this is an important factor in goal-oriented blogger collaboration.
3. A concrete and desirable goal was set. Without focus, collaboration loses some of its efficacy.
4. Keeping it casual enabled these bloggers to just “let the magic happen” as members of the challenge group created blog badges and set up tracking pages for collaborative commentary.
5. They promoted each other. Small increases in readership added up for everyone and created a more synergistic partnership among bloggers.
Start Blogging Collaboratively
There are many ways to incorporate collaborative writing into your blog, and there are also many reasons for doing so. It can help you realize something about your niche that inspires you to expand the scope of your blog; it can help you get past writer’s block; it can increase readership; it can diversify your content; and it can do so much more. Examples of collaborative blogging include guest blogging, blog swaps, joint posts, interviews, joint blogs, joining a blog network, chatting on IM or e-mail, and participating in discussion forums. Trying a blog swap (switching blogs for a day with another blogger) or joining up with another blogger to write interview posts about each other can liven up a boring blog.
There’s no way to lose with these helpful strategies, so show your savvy by making some immediate improvements to your blog with win-win collaboration.
This is a guest post by Lisa Shoreland. Lisa is currently a resident blogger at Go College, where recently she’s been researching merit based college grants as well as how to apply for scholarships. In her spare time, she enjoys creative writing, practicing martial arts, and taking weekend trips.
All writers are familiar with the term “flow.” In fact, most artists can be said to create their most relevant and authentic work while in an almost trance-like state. When the words just seem to come effortlessly, we completely lose all sense of time, and we feel energized, excited and refreshed, we are experiencing flow. After writing in a state of flow, we often feel as though we have had a cathartic experience, and, looking back on our work, can even surprise ourselves by the quality and content.
So, how do we, as writers, attempt to re-create this type of experience?
There is no one way to make an experience of flow happen. All writers work differently, and because our work comes from a place within ourselves, the only thing we can do to encourage flow in our writing is to encourage those parts of ourselves to come alive.
Susan K. Perry, a writer and social psychologist who contributes to Psychology Today, became interested in how the best writers accomplish seemingly incomprehensible feats of creativity. She paired with flow researcher Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi and interviewed over 75 modern best-selling and award-winning novelists and poets. She published her analysis in a book titled Writing in Flow: Keys to Enhanced Creativity.
If unsure about how to find a state of flow, writers oftentimes attempt good writing techniques until they have found what works for them. Doing this ad nauseum, however, can lead to burn out. The same can be said for listening to writing advice that could potentially do more harm than good.
Perry published a recent article detailing 11 types of bad writing advice. Perry’s tips may be highly useful to all writers, not only as a blueprint of writing techniques to avoid, but also as further direction toward finding your own style and flow.
Here are the top five lessons from what Perry claims to be the worst types of writing advice.
DO NOT follow any advice that:
1. Limits your own potential
Perry mentions a student who once asked her about advice he had read from a famous novelist. The novelist stated that if you’ve left a novel unfinished for years, it is a lost cause. According to Perry, this is nothing further from the truth. The key is not how long a project has been sitting, but whether or not you as a writer feel a revived passion for it. Our writing is up to us, and no matter how old or young a project may be, we must continue to feel passionate about the subject matter in order to write anything worthwhile.
2. Cramps your imagination
Perry states that writers often receive advice claiming that they must only write what they know, from their own perspective, or about a group to which they belong. According to Perry, this type of rigidity can really cramp imagination. She mentions that writing is about pretending, and many credible works of fiction have been written from a point of view other than the author’s own.
3. Insists there is only one way to schedule your creativity
Avoid any advice that starts with “you must.” Writers are constantly advised to force themselves to work everyday, at particular times of the day, or on a full-time work schedule. These techniques work for writers who work well this way, but there is no reason to force yourself into a work pattern that limits your own creative tendencies. Allow yourself, instead, to follow your own artistic urges and, for personal projects, write when you want to write.
4. Makes you feel bad about yourself
Perry mentions a young poet who had felt horrible after receiving the advice that, after finishing a poem, she must put it away for at least ten years until she would know whether or not it was worthwhile. This type of advice is an example of a hindering perfectionism that can make writers feel like they have no grasp on the state or quality of their own work. Loosen up, give yourself a week or so, and you should be able to see your work with fresh eyes.
5. Tells you more about your advisor than your own work
This one, although it seems obvious, can be one of the most difficult types of bad advice to spot, especially when working with a respected advisor. However, if you receive critiques that point more toward what an advisor would personally like you to write about than to what you are actually drawn to, it may be possible that your advisor’s own issues have seeped in. Take what they have to say with a grain of salt.
These example make it clear that, although all writers should attempt different techniques and take on new perspectives until they find their own flow, trying to mold oneself to writing advice and techniques that may or may not hold water can do more harm than good to the artistic process. Ultimately, the best way to reach a state of flow is to tune in to your own process.
You can find more interesting articles on writing and creating in many different forms on Susan Kerry’s blog at Psychology Today.
This guest post is contributed by Lauren Bailey, who writes on the topics of online colleges. She welcomes your comments at her email Id: blauren99 @gmail.com.
This is a guest post by Modi.
- How many times have we all come across a browser that isn’t responding no matter how long we’ve been patiently waiting?
- How many times how most of us lost our precious work, whether a great post to be published in a blog or just an ordinary pretty long email?
- How many times have we all felt helpless, looking at our screen after all those tabs and browsers were gone and all those hours of research have been wiped away?
There’s nothing more frustrating than coping with your work being lost just because of your browser’s malfunction.
Having tried several browsers during the past 15 years, from Mosaic and Lynx to IE9 and Chrome I decided to write a post on an issue that has been annoying me since I started browsing the web. And the questions always remained the same: Why isn’t there a browser that can deal with all (or at least) most of these issues?
Efficiency
An efficient browser isn’t the one that offers hundreds of configuration options so you can go back in your history and retrieve any page you’ve lost. This is pointless for people like me who browse hundreds of pages daily. But the worst aspect is when you actually lose what you’ve been so patiently writing in a web editor and boom… it’s all gone! Sometimes, if the crash is really fatal it can lead to the whole operating system hang, making a reboot mandatory which means that you can lose unsaved data in other open applications…And what is in the clipboard too. Microsoft definitely has some merit of responsibility in this case but this is not a topic to be discussed right now.
Speed
When it comes down to speed the real issue isn’t how long it takes a browser to run or get terminated. The real issue is: How Quickly Can You Recover if things go terribly wrong. I’ve read numerous tests with benchmarks comparing browsers’ response times in nanoseconds but what of a difference is that going to make in my life if I lose that piece of text which I have been typing for hours during some moment of great inspiration?
The Source of the Problem
The main reason why we all lose our data, tabs and pages from time to time has to do with the way the O/S treats our browser application. Traditionally, browser applications run as one process, no matter how many tabs or windows are open at the same time. So, if something goes wrong in one tab or page then usually the whole process needs to be terminated and this is why we end up losing everything – including our faith to technology.
Crash Protection
Obviously, the solution to the problem was in the browser’s architecture. Allowing for more than one process for each browser page or tab would offer crash protection. Apparently, this is a very simple idea but for some reason most browsers still don’t offer! If something goes wrong in Chrome we can terminate only the process responsible for the non-responding tab. Internet Explorer and Firefox only run as one process so terminating the process will result in all the tabs disappearing.
However, if you want to change the default behaviour you are free do to so. A popular choice is to set one process-per-site so all open tabs that belong to the same site will be treated by one process only. So, if you have 10 different Amazon product pages open, they will run as one process, rather than 10, saving resources especially if your system is not very powerful. Nevertheless, if you want all your tabs to be dealt by a single process (e.g. like Firefox and IE) this is another possibility.
Google Chrome Protection
Using the built-in task manager we can view and manage any process. By pressing ‘SHIFT+Esc’ and the browser’s task manager will appear. It contains useful information such as memory and CPU usage as well as the network bandwidth of each tab and page.
Modi is an SEO and web design consultant who works for a cruises company which specialise in oceania cruises and silversea cruises. If you’d like to connect with him, follow him on Twitter at @macmodi.
Note: This is a guest post by James Adams. His contact information is at the end of the article.
You are a good writer. Why then do options to self publish dominate your professional landscape when you could join the ranks of mainstream authors who actually get paid to write for publishers?
Many writers want to see their work in print; the stacks of manuscripts that swamp editors and agents testify to that. The challenge is how to get your writing noticed by publishers. The 9 tips listed here can help.
- Formulate a compelling proposal. When you submit your work to an editor, formulate an attention-grabbing appeal that illustrates why your work deserves attention more so than the work of othres. Explain what you think your work will accomplish for readers and for the publisher and how you are willing to help make the product a success.
- Get your spelling and grammar right. Most editors can probably understand one slipup or two when it comes to correct grammar and spelling, but if you submit a manuscript with an error on every page your editor will probably not be impressed. If you are ready for the big time show it by submitting perfect work.
- Find some help. Experienced authors out there will help you navigate your way around the publishing industry. Some may advise you for free if you establish a good relationship, but many will charge a fee for their services. Before paying, however, check references to avoid a scam and to make sure the person has the credentials and experience to be worth your while.
- Don’t give up. Every time a publisher rejects your work you have one more reason to quit: don’t. Read the rest of this entry…
Bringing you a fresh guest post about making your writing more persuasive …
Writers face a daily challenge in persuading people to change their mind about a product or debate. A simple description of a product or an assertion of the correctness of a point of view will usually not be enough to persuade someone to make a decision favorable to you. You need to actively further your cause through your writing in ways that will close sales and garner support.
Use these 10 clever techniques that make your writing more persuasive:
1. Repetition: Express your argument in several different ways to improve the chances of communicating it effectively. Reinforce your direct statements with quotes, stories, facts and examples. The more ways you can communicate to your readers what you want them to do or believe, the more persuasive your writing will be.
2. Reasons: People seem to like to know why they should act or believe the way you want them too. “Just because” rarely will provide that incentive. Take the time to explain why you believe the way you do and then give your readers reasons why they should believe the same way.
3. Rapport: Communicate with your audience with familiar style and terms. People will more readily receive your message if it comes in a format that they find natural and easy to understand. You want to treat every audience with respect, so try to use words and arguments that each one will understand.
4. Credibility: Establish yourself as a reliable source. Refer to your personal experiences, your training, and education as sources for your expertise. If you write a lot, refer back to all the times you were right about a product and an issue. Just give your audience reasons for why they should listen to you. Once you have done that, build credibility in your writing style by avoiding contradictions and inconsistencies in your thoughts. Also, make your writing grammatically and mechanically sound.
5. Create or Expose Pain: Help your readers understand how painful their lives are now and how that nothing will change unless they act. Show them how your products or views will help them turn their lives around or reach a new level of personal satisfaction. Most people do not like pain and will gladly buy a product if they believe it will give them relief.
6. Counter Arguments: As you write, you should acknowledge opposing viewpoints up front rather than relying solely on your ability to sell your idea or product on its own merit. Showing your awareness of arguments against your position builds your credibility and helps you win over people who already have their minds made up. This also gives you the opportunity to change your mind should you learn that other arguments make more sense than your own.
7. Make Emotional Appeals: Have you ever noticed that politicians will surround themselves with victims when they want to score political points for their agenda? You can do the same. Offer sob stories that illustrate why people should donate to your cause, purchase your product, or agree with your philosophy.
8. Use Testimonials: Let other people tell the story about how their beliefs were challenged by the arguments you present and how they were persuaded to join your point of view. This also helps the people in your audience understand that they can change their mind without being ashamed.
9. Join the Club: People seem to have a natural desire to be part of a group to the exclusion of others. By selling your product, service, or viewpoint as a vehicle that will get your readers into the groups of which they want to be a part, you can be more persuasive.
10. Find Common Ground: By finding a comparison or an argument that your readers agree with, you lay the foundation you need to build further agreement. As your readers get comfortable with feeling that you and they are on the same side, you build your power to persuade them in areas where you do not agree.
Your only chance to persuade people to buy your products or join your side of a debate comes with what you write, so now is a great time to use these clever techniques to make your writing more persuasive.
This is a guest post by James, a writer for a one of the leading online print cartridge suppliers where he reviews of products like the HP 300XL ink cartridge. In his spare time, James posts about design and media on their blog.
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