Writing Blog

So now you’ve got your samples together, you need to go out there and apply for those jobs. There are many available – you just need to know where to go look for them. The first two places I would recommend are Getafreelancer and Guru.

www.getafreelancer.com
www.guru.com

There’s no need to become a paid member in either one – not till you’ve learned the ropes. So join up as a free member and then start bidding on the jobs, taking care to attach your samples when you bid. You can apply for projects where they ask for articles to be written or articles to be rewritten, Leave the SEO writing aside for the moment – more on that in another post.

Don’t get disheartened of you don’t get any replies. In the beginning, many find it difficult to get that first break but once it comes, the going is usually easy. On both the sites, you need to work hard and get feedback. Many people who post projects prefer to hire writers who have a ten-star rating on Getafreelancer or a five-star rating on Guru.

There are a number of other sites too – some ask that you pay a small amount for a trial period. You would do well to go register on all of them and keep checking them regularly for jobs that would suit your kind of writing.

www.elance.com
www.scriptlance.com
www.directfreelance.com
www.gofreelance.com

Once you know your way around these sites – and don’t be afraid to experiment – since you haven’t put any money down, you have nothing to lose – then you can think of becoming a paid member. Paid members usually get the better jobs and they don’t have to pay as much out of their earnings to the site. In most cases, you recover that money once you’ve done a few jobs.
In the next post, we’ll talk about how to post your samples up online – for free!

Stumble it!

Writing can be a long and winding road as the old song goes. It’s so easy sometimes to stray away from the road and get off the beaten path. It’s great for the writer, it’s great for the reader, looking at things anew, looking at all things new. However, the danger of turning off could also mean getting lost. Because once you’re away from driving towards a goal, the temptation of going nowhere beckons. And when you go nowhere, when there’s no destination and you’re meandering, you tend to feel that you need to pretend. That’s when you could get trapped in the jargon jungle. Going round and round in circles, not really progressing and coming back to the same spot. Till finally, there is so much blocking your view of the horizon that you get caught in a quagmire of your own making. Jargonese for its own sake never gets you anywhere. All you end up in is nowhere land, with no one wanting to read what you’ve written. The open, straight, simple road might seem a trifle boring to you but it is infinitely better than being trapped in the jargon jungle. What you need to do is to drive on, carrying the reader with you, all the while trying to see what could make him a little more interested. Keep him awake and keep him listening without being loud or overbearing. Don’t stop to smell the roses if you’re going to get lost doing so.

Stumble it!

Well, all this stuff about keeping it simple probably gives you the idea somewhere that the outcome could be something that’s boring. Yes, that is a problem. So once you’ve got the hot focus of what you have to say, see if you can give the reader just a little bit of something that makes him sit up, opening his eyes a bit wider. Just a wee bit is enough to start with. It doesn’t have to scream, it doesn’t need to have ‘shock value’. It just needs to have him saying ‘Aha!’. It doesn’t have to be a great big ‘aha’ every time. Even a teeny-weeny one will mean that the chances of him reading through your writing increases tremendously.

The Aha factor does not mean that you don’t write unless you have something new and exciting to say. All it means is that whatever you say should not sound trite and with an ‘I’ve heard it before’ kind of feel to it. It just means that whatever you have to say is said a little bit differently, a little bit more creatively so that what you have to say gets the reader’s attention. It means your writing gets read and that is what ultimately matters. If your reader were to say, ‘Hey, I never quite thought of it like that before!’……..then your writing has done a real good job!

Stumble it!

A wonderful boss of mine from days gone by used to tell us that if a piece of writing didn’t have a hot focus to set the reader on fire, it wasn’t worth a thing! Well, maybe that is absolutely essential for a piece of writing that is done with selling in mind. When it comes to information and entertainment, it might just be okay to tone that down a bit. However, writing that has a focus is better at achieving what it wants achieved than writing that doesn’t.

What is this hot focus anyway? It’s the central thought in any piece of writing you are doing. Here, too, keep it simple. If you have too many ideas vying for pride of place, you’ll end up with a crazy mess. Try and tackle one thought in each piece of writing you do and suddenly you find that everything works its way around it and towards it. Once that happens, you’re on a good wicket! When you cut out all the fizz and the fluff and stick to what is really important, that’s what is going to be visible to the reader too.
How do you judge if your writing has a focus? Here’s a little test you can do. After you’ve written your article or chapter or report, try and see if you can sum up everything you’ve written in one single sentence. Then see if that sentence makes sense to the reader and is compelling enough to hold his attention. If it is, you’re bang on! Of course, you can stand this on its head and work the other way around too. Decide on what it is you want to say and then go on to how you are going to it. So you get the hot focus first and then build your body of words around it. Does that sound too terribly simplistic? But it works, you know. Very often, it’s the simple ideas that do!

Stumble it!

What do you want your writing to do? Unless it’s a spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings or expressions that are purely in the artistic plane, in most cases, writing is the means to an end. The end usually being to inform, to entertain and to persuade. To this end, writing is the vehicle that carries your message to the reader. It is a vehicle with a very definite purpose. So it has to get you there quickly, efficiently and well. There are a few things you have to keep in mind if you want your writing to be effective.

First of all, don’t go on and on and on and on. Keep whatever you write as brief as possible. Try and understand that most people today have very little time and if you don’t give them what they want in small potent doses, you’ve lost them. So master the art of saying what you want to say in the fewest words.

It isn’t enough to just say things as briefly as possible, you have to get to the point quickly too. If you don’t do that, you’ve lost your reader. Catching his interest is key. Once you’ve done that, make sure you keep it till you’ve made him read everything you’ve written. This will only happen if you quickly get him hooked.

And most important of all, keep it simple. Simplicity is what makes your message stand out. It makes sure your message isn’t cluttered up with convoluted obscurity. It helps the reader grasp what you have to say quickly. The quicker he grasps it, the better your chances of making him read on if what you are writing about is of interest to him. Remember that a lot of readers get turned off or are confused by long-windedness. The simpler writing wins hands down every time. Provided of course it’s got what it takes!

Stumble it!