Creating a Good Business Blog
Blogs are a great tool for building communities, interacting through them and even marketing the services you provide - they often produce both good and bad results. If you want to gain readership from your blog, you'll have to be a bit more adventurous in the content you produce, have an easy design and market your blog.
What kills a good blog writer is their inability to address their target audience, this means that you have to be clear about the content. If you are not focused, you’ll confuse and lose readers. Grammar is the key in making your blog look professional and typos are another concern for bloggers. Even the most cautious writers have a slip here and there, and this really murders the entire blog. What separates the professional from the amateur is the length of blog post, which should be ideally not too long, but just right. The attention span of most people won't be for long, so keeping the posts short gets you a greater reader base. You also have to keep in mind that you are not just writing for a search engine, so emphasize those keywords, but keep the writing interesting as well. The mantra of getting results from your blog is to keep posting new content. Where most people fail is that they lose interest because it takes time and energy to keep a good blog going. So, keep posting and you will eventually get readers commenting the information you post.
That Was the Week That Was
The last few days seem to have gone by in something of a whirl as new projects have come in and many of them from existing clients looking for more writing from me. Adding this layer of repeat business to the work won from bidding on new projects and I find myself needing some help to take the pressure off.
One of the reasons I started writing was I wanted something to do that I could fit my life around. I spend time in the US but cannot work over there due to visa restrictions and writing is exempt from the neccessity of gaining a work permit from our American cousins. I also have a young family and since I sold my old business back in 2003 I wanted something that would allow me to spend more time with them. I'd done the workaholic impression in my 30's and now they deserved more time with dad.
I'm finding it increasingly difficult to maintain a work balance that gives the freedom to spend the time with my family that I originally thought. Work keeps coming through and I just have not learned to say no to the money yet. It goes against my grain!
Moving Off The Web
Looking for Writing Work in Traditional Publications
I have a Hollywood friend, Dawn Willson, over from California this weekend. Dawn has worked in television for fifteen years as a researcher, writer, production assistant and now acts as a producer for a private indie outfit in LA (Hub Media).
As we downed a few pints of Guinness we drifted onto the subject of writing. Dawn has ghosted a couple of books and has several TV and movie credits to her name but being a producer means she doesn't get to touch the keyboard very often these days. Nevertheless, in my eyes Dawn is a real writer.
Dawn pointed out that actually I'm the one writing and getting paid for it and we started talking about money. I'm quite pleased that I'm getting $25 for 1,000 words at the moment. That makes a huge difference to my income as well as my confidence levels and I know I can make more than that. It came as quite a shock to hear from Dawn that she doesn't think that's very much but what can I expect as it's writing for the web.
Stay Healthy, Write Better
Wondering what I am talking about?
Okay, let me start off with an incident that took place last week. A friend of mine had to submit a manuscript the day after a heavy session the night before. Drink after drink, lots of food, partying late into the night; in short - the typical weekend party. The after-effect was a sad manuscript, and an even sadder rejection! The point is - always write when you are healthy and fit, both mentally as well as physically - and yes that includes when you're sober(ish). There are few tips I would like to give you on the basis of my personal experiences:
Write healthy - I never think that just because you are high on drugs, creativity comes naturally. Actually, I feel quite the contrary. If you think that after a drink or two, you might write better, then think twice. You might just crash and burn, or worse still, you might just write something that is destined to be rejected. The same goes for too much sugar, excessive caffeine or even too much food!
How Much Am I Worth?
Don't Be Backwards in Asking for a Higher Rate of Pay
Starting out as a novice writer holds enough obstacles, so much so that I was happy to accept almost any writing project no matter what the pay. That soon changed as the compliments started coming in and I realised that actually clients were being sincere. Initially my clients were Americans and you can never be quite sure that they are being wholly honest with you or are they just saying nice things because they think it will "motivate" you?
I understand that actually they were very sincere, they meant the compliments not because they wanted to motivate me but because they wanted to keep me sweet so they could use my writing services in the future. I couldn't understand why that would be as I'm no writer. A greater understanding of the worldwide writing market soon started to put things into perspective.
There are two great advantages I have over the bulk of my competition, the first is I write and speak English as a native and the second is that I am organised and stick to deadlines. Note I have said nothing about delivering great work, in my experience it helps, but you don't need to deliver great work just delivering a reasonable standard of English and on time will put you ahead of 95% of the competition.
Proofraeding is essential!
The caption above is enough to indicate why proofreading is indispensable! Let me share an interesting piece of information with you. You will notice that though a paragraph is full of errors, you catch the essence of the paragraph, and can still understand it. In order to understand what I am saying more clearly, have a look at the following sentence - “Proofraeding is extreemly essnetial.” Well, I am sure you understood what the sentence said, despite the order of the letters being wrong. This is possible as the first and last letters are in the right place, and that’s all our brain needs to process the letters correctly!
Humans do not necessarily read every letter separately, but process the word as a whole. This produces quite astounding results! For the sentence above, we processed it correctly because we noted the first and last letter of each word. Had we taken an effort and read each word out aloud, we might have been able to catch the errors more obviously. Proofreading accurately requires you to concentrate on each word that you are reading, and in the case of longer words, you have to look more intently. The motto is – to look at each word and not just glide over it!
Having Fun in Your Life? Bring it Out in Your Writing!
Just a few days ago, I was watching a standup comedy show and I couldn’t stop laughing for a long time. It made me wonder what was so exceptionally funny with the show. While the standup comedian was mostly cracking one-liner jokes, his strength laid in the real life comic stories that he narrated and enacted. He narrated many funny stories about his family, friends, people on the street, and even his neighbor’s dog! If real life stories sound funny in comedy shows, they sound even funnier when written, especially if they’re written with a sense of humor.
Taking a cue from this, I would like to remind you that comedy writing is not an easy task. It demands an amazing sense of humor, and the ability to write concisely to make your readers laugh. Wondering where you can find such funny stories? You don’t need to go overseas and sit around all day to find funny characters and humorous situations. If you write about personal incidents, which you have found funny, others are bound to find it hilarious as well! Some people may help you to find humor in your real life.