Most writers can’t market. That used to be very important and it was probably the main reason many adept and passionate writers were unable to pursue careers as writers.
Today it is crucial. In fact, a writer who can market his or her own work today has unprecedented opportunities. But a writer who cannot or refuses [...]
Writing, particularly online writing, is one of many enterprises not particularly troubled by etiquette. While I don’t wish to supplant Miss Manners here, I think that our global undervaluing of etiquette leads to a great deal of confusion.
The purpose of etiquette has been expressed as never insulting another individual accidentally. That’s terribly profound, in [...]
I don’t actually have anything against Bill Gates, but it seems to me that he and his company have done a lot to ruin writing, design, art work, illustration, photography, and public speaking. Mr. Gates did this by helping to put PCs in every household and then providing tools that he assured them would allow [...]
There is a tendency among certain people to regard typos as a sign of Armageddon.
These people often become indignant upon sight of any sort of typographical error or other error that causes letters on a page or screen to appear in a way they deem improper. Even a gnat smushed on a monitor that might [...]
Even in a small town in South Texas, you see them. People who walk through the grocery store, narrating the products on the shelf to some guiding force who will help them select the appropriate box of cereal from amid a sea of carbohydrate choices. People who text when they are bored, like in church [...]
Is your writing on life support? It happens to the best of us. It usually occurs when you’ve written too much, too fast. But don’t worry, you can get your writing and your writing career back into the pink quickly.
Here are 10 tips to get your writing back on track.
1. Take a day off, if [...]
This is a bit of a how-to article. Let’s say you have a website or blog and you have some keywords. And you are kind of interested in finding out where the people who use this keyword most happen to reside.
You can find that out at trends.Google.com. You type in the keyword and you get [...]
Perry Belcher has something on his Success blog right now (click here) about a fast, easy, systematic way to write a book. Perry proposed this step-by-step process and solicited comments. One of the common comments that came back was the key to writing a book is being passionate.
All of the people who recommended passion were [...]
Revisions are part and parcel of the writer’s life, particularly if said writer works for clients. The very same client who is so woefully unable to put a sentence together that he hires an outside writer suddenly emerges, once text is written, to be so skilled at the art and practice of writing clearly that [...]
I am at my most popular when I go to Internet marketing meetings or conferences and let it drop that I’m a writer. The eyes of site owners get that shiny hopeful look as they inquire whether or not I’d like to write their next book on male pattern baldness or how to live on [...]
The number one question I’m asked by non-writers is always about copyrights. For some reason, most people who do not write well are exceedingly concerned that somebody will steal something they have written. I think that’s extremely amusing, considering that most of the dreadful copy produced by non-writers is highly undesirable. But most non-writers fear [...]
How do you get customers for your writing business? I’m not talking here about how to get people to sign up for your email list or how to get people to buy an ebook. I’m talking about attracting customers for whom you can write. These are people you will actually interact with, often over [...]
I own more computers than I have hands. I like it that way. I spend a great deal of my time engaged on the computer, and it has definitely made the writer’s life much easier. There was a time when every revision to an article meant that you had to retype the whole thing. And [...]
Writing is not really about words. Writing is certainly not about grammar or spelling. Writing isn’t really even about communication. Writing is about structure.
A writer is somebody who packages thought.
To do that, writers use words. And the objective of packaged thought is communication.
But the act of writing is about packaging thought. I think it’s a [...]
OPT stands for “other people’s traffic.” One way to get traffic is to use other people’s traffic. So how do you do that?
First, you have to know what traffic you want. If I have a pitiful website and a mailing list of 22 people, you don’t want my traffic. You want to find leading websites [...]
I was recently part of a protracted and painful online discussion on a writers’ board on the topic of online writing. To be more specific, the writers were addressing the question as to whether or not online activity was good or bad for writing.
The subject of pay for online writing was discussed only briefly and [...]
You build a website and then … fizzle. Nothing happens. The fact is what you built is a little tiny island in the great big sea called the Internet. The only way people can get to your island–or even find out that it exists–if if you (a) take them there (that’s advertising, covered earlier) or [...]
 One tried and true way to get traffic to your site is advertising. Ask any web denizen about advertising and they talk PPC (covered last session). But there are lots of other ways to advertise.
You can advertise your site in print. For instance, if you run a landscaping business you can build a site and [...]
If you are an American or think like an American, you are probably going to have a hard time thinking about traffic the right way. The reason is that Americans are always looking for the “next big thing” or the “silver bullet” or the “one secret” behind things. Americans don’t diet–they cut carbs (identifying carbohydrates [...]
I’m not talking about how to avoid rude, crude, lewd, or unfair comments by people on the Internet. For some reason, the Internet brings out extreme qualities in people and people who are naturally rude and contentious in real life can get pretty obnoxious online. That’s not what I’m talking about today (although it’s a [...]
Every day, all over the world, editors and publishers and website owners are paying good money to people to write stuff for them.
Everything you see with words on it–from your cereal box to the label on your T-shirt–has probably been written by a writer.
So how do you get them to pick you? The answer is [...]
The short answer is yes. Of course you can. Amazon does it everyday. So does Zappos. Google makes billions.
But the operative word in that sentence is “you.” Can people like you (and me) make money online? Even if you’re not the world’s next great entrepreneur, is there a way for a writer to make money [...]
I love FAQs. They’re popular these days thanks to the Internet and they represent a good training vehicle if you have a complicated topic or comprehensive subject and you need to make sure people get a whole lot of material in a fairly painless package.
Plus the question-and-answer format goes back to the old Socratic method. Many [...]
The answer is probably not newspapers, although I regularly hear from writer friends and newspaper denizens that the traditional newspaper is on its way out.
I have written for newspapers. I got my start writing for an entertainment paper and I recently wrapped up a multi-year stint doing a medical column for a local paper. In-between, [...]
Every now and then I get to write a script for a DVD. I’m not writing a big screen motion picture–we’re talking about the type of production known as an “industrial.” It’s a DVD prepared by a business for a specifically business purpose, usually for training but sometimes for promotion.
Hey, it’s still a script.
The big [...]
Here is a guy who looks like he’s got his keywords straight. Now he has to use them the right way to get the right results.
One way to use keywords is in building the website. Websites with URLs that use keywords do better in search engines than those that don’t. For instance, if your keyword [...]
How on earth can you do real research to see how your potential customer will ask for your website? You can. It involves data.
Remember, you have a “target” website visitor in mind and you want that target to do something when he or she arrives at the website (be impressed, order your free report, get [...]
It occurs to me periodically that most writers do not understand keywords, and that most of the people who understand keywords can’t write. The result is that keywords are not always used as well as they ought to be.
In an effort to help you understand keywords, I’m going to start a short series of articles [...]
It’s near to Memorial Day weekend, which in Texas is generally celebrated by barbecues, parties, and fleeting encounters with people who look like this guy.
However, people like me tend to work through at least a portion of the holidays in order to (a) avoid holiday belching and (b) get more stuff done.
I want to share [...]
I recently priced a pair of fuzzy dice like the ones in the picture. I’m not normally the sort of person who goes in for decorating my car, but I was killing time in the Las Vegas Airport. For those of you who have never been to the Las Vegas Airport, it’s a lot like [...]
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