Blogging
How Can You Turn Your Writing Skills into Successful Business
There are plenty of ways how one can acquire various writing skills. You write different papers in college or university, learn about business communication, use social networks on a daily basis. Today, writing is much more than just a good addition to your professional skills. It can become a foundation for a really well-paid job if you manage to turn it into a business. Here are only a few of the ways how you can make money by writing. 1. Become a Freelance Writer Becoming a freelance writer is one of the simplest ways to earn one’s living with writing from the point of view of social responsibility. You are to work as hard as if you would work in the office. You are to pay even more attention to your time-management. You are to get rid of any thoughts about the household while you are working at home, which is really difficult. But! You don’t have to invest in such a business. You don’t have to lead others, to team-build, to dress up for work, to think about smiles and handshakes, etc. The rule is simple here – the more work you are able to complete – the more money you’ll get. 2. Join SEO Company It can be a part-time or full-time job. It also can be remote work. The time it requires may vary a lot. Besides general writing skills, SEO writer has to develop a target-oriented approach, analytical thinking, and at least some knowledge about web content. After some time working in this sphere, you can start an SEO company yourself. Your responsibility will increase with time, so will your income. 3. Start a Blog Blogging today has a variety of forms: from ‘how my day went’ to international politics surveys. The way of presenting information can be narrative, analytical (one of the best from the reader’s point of view), even mocking. Blogs can teach readers how to cook, how to write a term paper, and even how to spend your day. And the money a blogger earns can come from different sources. You can use various Internet tools, such as Google Adsense and similar. Sponsored blogs are not quite trusted after all, but there is a great alternative – affiliate marketing! You are not bound by the salary, so you may promote only the products you trust. It’ll allow you to be as ethical as you want + still tell about different products + earn money. It can really be a formula for your success. On the other hand, you may prefer private advertising. In this case, you can tell about anything you like, without thinking about advertised products. The ads will be seen on your blog by your readers. 4. Write a Book Do your personal experience and E. L. James’ incomes keep you up at night? Or do you have a great imagination and have plenty of material to match up to J. K. Rowling? Please, mind that becoming a professional fiction writer requires more than writing skills. Alongside with talent (in the majority of cases), it takes years of persistent work. And it actually never guarantees that a book you’ll write will be sold out. On the other hand, you can write any kind of non-fictional book. One of the best ways to make writing books business is to create a self-help work. People of different professions do it, and a lot of them succeed Gretchen Rubin with her ‘Project Happiness,’ Marla Silly with ‘Sink Reflections,’ etc. A lot of researchers publish great self-help books, too. Just think of Daniel Goleman’s ‘Focus’ and ‘Emotional Intelligence’ that have become real best-sellers. If you decide to make writing your business, here are the skill areas you have to boost: Style and Type of Writing It is vital for any text to be written in a particular style. Yes, it really matters if you apply your writing skills to writing a book or researching academic papers. For blogging, it’s not exactly the issue. Besides, linguists claim that today’s language shows a great number of stylistic shifts. What is really important for non-academic writing is the type of writing. It can be as follows: – Expository writing, which doesn’t presuppose any opinions, only facts. It is one of the types you can employ if you are a freelance writer; – Persuasive writing has fewer facts. Using this type, you don’t just share your opinion, but try to persuade readers to follow it. It is perfect for blogs touching upon social and political topics; – Descriptive writing is ideal for travel blogs and beauty or self-help blogs that don’t deal with associate marketing. It creates pictures in the reader’s mind, but has no persuasive purpose; – Narrative writing is a form of storytelling. Such type of writing can be used for any commercial purpose as long as you follow the general rule of creating the plot. Language The language you use really matters. It’s not even about stylistics or lexicology, it is about your target audience. You really should think about the people you address. The simplest phrase may confuse the reader. For example, you may use ‘I strongly recommend’ in blogs aimed at general readers, but not at teenagers (too much pathos, might not like it) and not in scientific articles (if you don’t belong to the level of researchers, who are allowed to write ‘I’). The word choice is real art. The cliches used in many texts on the Web are good to know and can be helpful from time to time. But the more precise your language is, the more interesting are your texts. It will make readers come back to your blog over and over again. As for ‘strong’ words, using them in some kinds of posts is acceptable. Some people even like it. But note that ‘some’ really differs from ‘everybody.’ Again, mind your audience. Technology Writing on paper will always be relevant. Today, we can observe an enormous popularity of fancy stationery, the interest to which is being boosted
How to Create Awesome Blog Posts When You have less time
How to Create Awesome Blog Posts When You have less time Artificial intelligence has already automated a lot of tasks. In future, it will change the way we do almost everything. However, it will never be capable of doing one thing – expanding the time. That means despite all technological revolutions, you will only have 24 hours in days, seven days in a week and 365 days in a year. Thus, we need to learn to work faster and do more in less time. Blogging is something that takes a lot of time. Thus, many business owners or internet marketers find it difficult to write excellent blog posts consistently. As an Internet marketer, you know that content is going to stay. And only high-quality content delivers the desired results. Here are some tips that can improve your blogging speed and skills dramatically in short period: Get Started Many times you need to force yourself to get started. Otherwise, you may keep planning without doing anything significant. Thus, create an editorial calendar and push yourself hard to stick to it. Sometimes, you may also feel that you are losing on business because of writing content as it doesn’t bring immediate revenue. However, don’t let your mind trick you. You only need to adjust your routine in the short-term to gain an advantage in the long run. Many writers stuck in the beginning. They don’t know how to get started. I will suggest that do a brief research on the topic and start writing everything that comes to your mind. The key is to get started without worrying about the quality, time, or anything else. Work on Your Speed: Blogging is not just about writing. It has several other components which consume a significant time. Publishing a regular blog involves activities such as gathering topic ideas, research, writing, editing, creating images, optimizing the article for the search engines, publishing the content, and promoting it on the web, etc. Here is a bifurcation of time spent on blogging by some bloggers at Buffer. That means just 33% of the blogging time goes into writing whereas research, editing, and other activities consume around 23%, 15% and 29% of the total time respectively. If you want to write more in less time, you need to work on all four areas to boost your speed. Here is how you can do it: Idea Generation – Keep a small pocket-sized notepad with you. When you are not working – may be traveling, waiting at the airport, etc. – think about the titles and note down the title ideas. You can also use a smartphone for this purpose. It is useful when you sit down and finalize the topic on which you are going to write the blog. Writing five ideas a day is more than sufficient to help you get going. Research Persuasive arguments have to be backed by relevant facts and statistics. Thus, research is a must for writing excellent blogs. That is why research takes around 23% of entire blogging time. You can significantly reduce the research time by using Google Search tools. For instance, you can find relevant results by limiting the search results to a particular period. Similarly, you can search statistics on popular websites by typing queries such as “site:abc.com keyword.” You can also use Google Advanced Search tools to find relevant information quickly. In the beginning, you may feel uncomfortable. However, inculcating the habit of specific searches on Google will save a lot of your time in future. Writing Content This is the area where most of the new bloggers struggle, partly because they are not confident about the outcome. To reduce time in writing content, you have to stop distractions and increase typing speed that improves with practice. According to research by TimeDoctor, people waste around 40% of their productive time in casual browsing. I have felt it myself. I recommend that you stop all tabs, mobile phones and everything else for at least an hour a day. That hour will be a work-hour when you will not scroll down Facebook or Twitter timelines or will not be opening a news site or YouTube. Devote that time entirely in writing content. Write whatever comes to your mind. Don’t open the internet even if you need some help in research. You simply need to write the content based on prior research and your thoughts. You will see a dramatic jump in speed of writing. Editing Editing is as important as writing the content. That is why it takes around 15% of the entire blogging time. Since you have written content at a stretch, you might have written a lot of things that are unpolished, vague, or unrelated. At the time of editing, you have to read everything again, polish the content and make the necessary amendments. Grammarly is an excellent tool that can save 20-30% of your editing time. If your editing is good, writing will automatically take less time as you will know that errors will be fixed when you will make edits. Content Publishing and Promotion While preparing editorial calendar, many bloggers overlook the time required to publish and promote the content. It demotivates them later when they don’t meet the deadlines. Use the following tools to accelerate and automate the content publishing and promotion: Use Pablo, Canva, etc. for Image Creation & Editing. You can also use free stock sites to search for relevant images. Wordable is an excellent tool to copy content from Microsoft Word or Google Doc to WordPress without losing the formatting. Draft Scheduler Plugin is a useful plugin to schedule your blog posts. It works well with Wordable. Note that when you are using Wordable, you can schedule only one post at a time. Therefore, you can’t use default WordPress scheduler to schedule your posts, and that is why Draft Scheduler Plugin is needed. Use Buffer to schedule and post your blog posts across various social media platforms. Bottom Line If you take around 1-2 hours to write
7 Ways to Avoid Plagiarism and Make a Google-Friendly Website
As you might know, Google Search doesn’t like duplicate content. Even though it will not get you banished, it will harm your ranking in a way that you can’t predict. Plus, your target audience is looking for fresh and original content, not something they have found before. So doing it won’t help you in anyway. But, there are many types of plagiarism, and you might commit it without noticing it. Especially if you are pressured by the time, you might make unconscious mistakes such as “writing blind” – when you quote someone’s words as if they were yours unintentionally. So to avoid it, you should try these seven ways to avoid plagiarism. They will make your website more Google-friendly and boost your SEO results. 1 – Do research one day, write another day Sometimes, it is hard not to copy what you just read. It looks great as it is, so your brain will automatically consider the easy way out as the best one, and you won’t even notice that you are repeating someone else’s words. So best thing here is to do research in one day and leave to write your content a few days later. It will give you time to process what you’ve learned and to come up with your own original ideas, which will lead to brand new content. 2 – When you finish it, re-write it After you get to write your content, then you should re-write it. Yes, it sounds like extra work, but it will pay off. Just consider it as part of your editing process so that you won’t feel as bad. But the point here is that re-organising your ideas and perfecting your sentences will help you to make them even more unique. You will be able, for example, to check a thesaurus and look for better words to say what you meant. You can add some idiomatic expressions or interesting collocations as well. In any case, it will be a reliable way to get your content to look not only more original but also more engaging. 3 – Go back to your phone and books Once upon a time, we didn’t have the Internet. And we would do just fine without it. So you can always time-travel, go back to your phone and books, and still find reliable and original ideas to your website’s content. The trick here is that it will force you to write things down and then re-write them into your CMS system. Especially if it is a long text, you will think is much easier to write it with own words and ideas then type everything again. And by doing it, you are less likely to plagiarise anything unintentionally. 4 – Find primary sources Using primary sources, such as research papers, case studies, and thesis,as a starting point to create new content will help you to have a much broader understanding of what you are writing. Interviews are also a great source of fresh ideas, and they will provide you with unexpected points of view. So you should make the most of theprimary sources as often as you can. Even if you think that they are too dense to your audience, they will be happy to get something well-researched in a format easier to consume. 5 – Use plagiarism-check tools Still, you want to be on the safe side here. And to achieve it, you should use plagiarism-check tools to verify if something passed without being noticed. Thankfully, there are many reliable tools available, some of them ready to stop those that spend hours trickingTurnitin, one of the universities’ and Google’s favourites in this field. But if you are looking exactly for the opposite, you can try some of the online tools available, such as Grammarly, Copyscape, PlagiarismSearch or Unplag. They are all paid services, butthey worth every cent of it, especially because plagiarism-check is just one of the features of most of them. 6 – Write your quotes down (immediately) Another tip to avoid plagiarism is to keep an inventory of everything that you want to use on your website as soon as you come across it. You can create a spreadsheet, for example, and save there every single piece of content that you found valuable along with their author and link to the source. This way, in the future, when you want to use it, it won’t be a vague idea in your mind. You will know for sure that is someone’s else idea and will be able to quote it accordingly. 7 – Create an outline Last but not least, there is something that you should do before anything else. After doing your research, you should step back and create an outline of your content. And this is because it will not only save you time but also give you a chance to organise your ideas in your mind. While you do it, you will automatically activate your critical thinking skills in your brain and come up with your own point of view in the end. And as a consequence, it will help you to discover original ideas and to prevent plagiarism. Originality Ai Unlock the full potential of your writing with Originality.ai – the premier plagiarism detection and originality checking tool. Ensure the integrity and authenticity of your work with our advanced technology and expert analysis. The bottom line Avoiding plagiarism has a lot to do with giving yourself time enough to analyse what you are going to write and to perfect it. It is usually when you are in anautomatic mode that you end up copying someone’s words so you should ensure that it won’t happen. So follow the tips above to prevent plagiarism from damaging your website’s results. As you notice, they are very simple to put into practice. Your SEO strategy will thank you for it. About the Author: Steven Mehler is an experienced writer, SEO specialist and social psychologist that works as an editor at a local newspaper and a freelance writer. Steven also runs his own content agency and is
Three Important Factors to Consider when Creating a Business Blog
Creating a business blog is an important process for any business who wants to expand their online presence and be seen by the masses of online users. Having a digital presence is imperative in this day and age, as information is so easily attainable through an internet connection and mobile devices. But what do businesses need to take into consideration when creating a blog for their business? We have put together a short guide of three important factors to take note of through every step of your process: 1) Choosing the Right Platform Choosing the right platform to host your blog is vital, as each blogging platform brings something different to the table. Your choice of blogging platforms will depend on a number of aspects, some of which include: What kind of business you own? What kind of content you will be publishing? How much it will cost your business Its storage capacity (important if you intend on using a lot of imagery) How much customization can be achieved? The level of SEO friendliness. These aspects will help you narrow down the long list of platforms available and ensure that you choose the right one for your business. To compare two very popular options – WordPress and Tumblr – WordPress offers users the option to create text heavy posts with the option to add images. Additionally, it offers a high level of customisation when you have purchased your own domain name (swapping from .com to .org). Whereas Tumblr is a short-form blog that allows users to post multimedia and other content and is not very customisation friendly. 2) Content is King The saying “Content is King” couldn’t be more accurate, as there are a number of ways, creating new, interesting and informative content will benefit your business through its blog. Creating good quality content is important because: It will improve SEO: your website will rank organically if you post content regularly that is 300 – 500 words in length, include internal links to relevant content, and contains keywords (which you or a SEO agency in Dubai has researched). Increases engagement: great content encourages engagement with your brand, as they will stop to consume the information, ask questions, leave comments, and share it with their network of friends, family and colleagues. Generation of leads and sales: the generation of leads and sales is increasingly important today, as there is a wealth of competition out there trying to do it better. Quality content will drive those leads and sales because it creates brand awareness without coming across as pushy. Your product or services will have more value: if your content is well written and includes all of the points that answers your consumers’ questions, this builds a solid relationship between you and your customers, while teaching them something valuable they need to know. Increases traffic: your customers will return to your website if you provide them with great quality content that is original and helpful, as the engaging content will encourage them to look around and interact with your website.· 3) Social Metrics Social metrics should not be an afterthought, as they make sharing your content easier and should be part of your strategic measures from the very start. By adding something as simple as sharing buttons that link to all of your social media platforms on each post, your consumers will be able to share important information with those who need it, while promoting your company on a number of different social media platforms at the same time. Setting up your company’s blog is going to take time and patience, as there are a lot of hurdles to overcome and steps to put into place to make it successful. However, doing it right the first time and applying the above three important factors will make your life much easier later down the line and contribute to the success of your company.
5 Ways to Rock Your Blog
5 Ways to Rock Your Blog You are probably tired of people telling you that you need to have a business blog. That’s just so easy to say. And then comes the next piece of advice. You have to make it amazing because, if you don’t, it will just sit out there in cyberspace with no readers/followers. No pressure, right? Especially when you have a business to run, adding this big task to your already overloaded schedule is not your idea of leisure time fun. Unfortunately, you do need a business blog, and, yes, you do need to make it amazing. But there is some help out there, including great tools to make it easier. This short guide will help provide the key things to consider as you develop your blog and where to go for help. 1. Purpose The first thing you need to wrap your head around is that a blog is not your advertising platform. Business owners who use their blogs for advertising will have no followers. Today’s consumer is a different breed. He wants good information; he wants to be educated; he wants to be inspired; and he wants to be entertained. Your purpose for a blog should be to give your target audience what it wants. When you do that, you begin to build followers and relationships. And relationships translate to sales. 2. Topics – Determined by Your Target Customers To find topics for your blog, you can do some easy research: Go to your competitors’ blog and social media pages. What content topics are getting the most conversation? Can you take those topics and write something better, adding something new? Use topic-generator tools – you can type in keywords that relate to your niche and find blog and article topics that are the most popular right now. Ask your current customers what topics interest them? Use your customer profile to study that demographic and learn what is important to them. For example, millennials (the largest buying group right now) prefer doing business with companies that are environmentally responsible and that support important causes; their family and social lives are as important as their work lives; they enjoy a good joke, and they want to be inspired. All of these things should provide ideas for topics. 3. Turning Topics into Engaging Content – the Delivery Once you have topic ideas, you have to think about delivery. Even the most interesting or exciting topic will fall flat if not presented in an engaging way. Here are tips and tools that will make your content engaging. Titles for your blog posts will be what initially engages the reader. Think about this for a minute. When you come upon a news article, what makes you want to read the article? Of course, it’s the title. Your blog is like a news article in many ways, too. To engage the reader right away – get a great catchy title. And if you are not creative yourself, use some title generation tools to help. Open your post with an engaging sentence or few. Provide a shocking statistic; tell a short story; garner some real interest. Again, sort of like a news article. No matter how great your topic and points may be, you have to present it well – it’s a matter of style. Break your content up into short chunks – headings in bold, bullet points. This is knows as making your post “snackable.” People want to scan a post and settle in on pieces that really interest them. When you make it easy for them to do this, they are happier. You must have visuals – some of the most popular content has photos, charts, infographics and videos. The research has been done – content that has colored visuals is 80% more likely to be read. There are lots of free sources for photographs and plenty of tools to create great visuals, even videos. Be creative with text, and ensure that your style and grammar is perfect. Here’s the point. If your text is boring; if there are grammatical errors; if there is difficult vocabulary or complex sentence structures, you will irritate, frustrate, and lose your readers. Again, if you are unsure about your skills and ability, get some help. Here are some tools to assist you: Hemingway Editor: If you need to simplify your writing, and posts should be simple in style and language, this editing tool will help you do just that. It will identify complexities and give suggestions for simplification. Grammarly: this tool will find all grammar, spelling and punctuation errors and make suggestions for correction. Read-Able: You can paste in your content and get a reading level. This is important, because blog posts should be at around the 7th grade reading level. Targeting that reading level will make you content easily digestible. Smart Paper Help: This is a great writing service with an entire department of creative copywriters. They can do most everything from identify topics for your niche to write creative posts and add the visuals to make content compelling. 4. Sharing and Conversations Good, popular blogs get shared by readers, and they stimulate a lot of conversation. You need to make it easy for readers to do this. You should have buttons, so that automatic sharing can be is accomplished with a single click, and have them throughout the post. You should also have a conversation thread at the end of each post, so that readers can comment and converse with one another and so that you can respond. The more conversation, the more likely readers will come back and recommend your blog to their friends. 5. Get Personal Today’s consumers want to know who they are doing business with. They want to trust business owners; they want to see them as humans who care; they want to see a sense of humor and a concern for larger social issues. When you can show your personal side, people feel they have a relationship with you. Some posts should be humorous and entertain; some