This site used to be a website. I was pretty happy with it, until I started interacting with other writers online (mainly bloggers).

They were frustrated with our site. Here is the greatest criticism. So I made the decision to move over from an ordinary site to a blog.

I am not talking about starting a new blog. No, this is the content of the old site with the links of the old site. We just moved it over to a different platform for better future performance.

Today I checked the old sitemap to make sure that we had all the right links in place. There are a few missing, but overall, we’ve done pretty well.

Index

Index.html is one of these links that was essential on the old site. Now it has change to index.php.

So what to do? I just decided to title this post Index. That way, I am hoping that we have index.html available again.

Virtual moving

So if you ever need any support in moving a site from one platform to another, let me know and I’ll help out.

Alexander

I have just initiated the transfer of the freelance writing career site from an ordinary html based site to a wordpress blog site.

If all goes well, all the pages will still exist and all the links should still work. But you never know…

So if you read this, post a short comment that you are reading it. And I’ll shout a big hooray.

Alexander

PS: And then I’ll tell you a bit more about why we decided to do this.

We want to help you become familiar with writing for the Internet. Especially if you are serious about establishing a freelance writing career.

There probably is no better opportunity for freelance writers in the world than the Internet. In fact there are those who suggest that e-newspapers and e-zines will someday, perhaps very soon, replace printed materials.

That may be so, but the Internet still has a long way to go before it reaches what can truly be called a professional calibre of writing.

The more writers are interested in truly bringing value to the information that can be found on the Internet the better. That means that my focus is on those writing for the Internet with commitment and skill. I want to make sure they know how to apply it.

Right now a quick look around the Internet will demonstrate that there are a lot (and I do mean a LOT) of snake oil salesmen. In fact I think the Internet is the true Final Frontier; people can create a whole new reputation and then use that to manipulate others to their advantage in all areas, and that includes writing.

Many sites out there claim the ability to help you start a freelance writing career, but how many actually succeed? Most of the sites I have been to are really no more than arenas for aspiring writers to posture and judge; as far as practical information that leads to cash in your hand, they are pretty much useless.

With that in mind, I have made a list of some things to look for when it comes to a site that claims to help one write for the Internet.

1. Are there facts and figures?
   The problem with the Internet is that anyone can claim to be someone they are not, and it can be pretty hard to tell if a site’s claims are legitimate or not.
   One thing I look for in a site that claims to have first-hand knowledge about making a living writing are facts and figures. What kind of money does the developer make a month? Where does he or she find jobs? Writers are an elusive bunch, and that isn’t just online; there are plenty of books out there that claim to be great writing resources, but just don’t offer any solid information.
2. Are there obvious mistakes?
   One website I really enjoy is www.stevepavlina.com. He is straightforward and I have referred people to him a couple of times on this website.
   I do take what he says with a grain of salt though, and here’s why: in an article on blogging for money, he claims to make $1000 a day off of his website. He then goes on to say that he only ever does the website as a part time job; in other words, he still retains a job outside of the Internet. Now it could be that Steve loves his land job so much that he does it for the fun, but I do tend to question anyone who makes $30,000 a month but still works another job. Crazy or embellishing, take your pick.
3. Grammar and spelling.
   Every writer knows that there are going to be some mistakes when it comes to grammar and spelling in any piece, no matter how hard you check. All of us have tunnel vision when it comes to our own work, so a few mistakes here and there shouldn’t turn you off totally when it comes to a site.
   If there are constant mistakes throughout all the pages on the site, though, ones that go way beyond simple typos, the odds are pretty good that the site is not a very good resource when it comes to writing for the Internet.

Those are just a few of the things I recommend looking at when you find a potential resource about writing for the Internet. Even on sites where you find some of the flaws I listed above, you will probably be able to glean some useful bits of information. Just make sure to be careful about taking everything they say as Gospel truth!

At the very foundation of an Internet writing business lies an understanding of keyword writing. It is one of the very first terms that I ever came across in relation to writing for the Internet; in fact I heard the word keyword long before I had heard of SEO.

Of course, just because I heard something doesn’t mean that I understood it. I did understand that it was important and that obviously these were words that were to be used in the articles I was to write, but beyond that I didn’t really have a clue as to what keyword writing was. Thanks to a couple years in the business and with the help of resource materials such as my trusty SEO for Dummies book and websites such as www.selfseo.com, I have come a long way in my understanding of keyword writing and how to go about using it effectively. While those references I mentioned will prove helpful, like many of the resources I have consulted while growing my business I found them lacking in some areas, areas that I ended up filling in myself.

Besides the obvious, what are keywords?

If you have ever gone to a search engine to look for information, you will have typed a phrase or a keyword into the query box and then received a couple thousand pages which contain those keywords. Those results are the pages that are indexed by the search engines as being relevant to the keyword or phrase. They are ranked according to secret algorithms that try to show the most relevant and useful sites first.

Here’s a pretty relevant example. Let’s say you want to make money writing online, or you are interested in starting a freelance writing career. Well, you will probably type those exact phrases into the query section of a search engine (or just click the links), and hopefully this site will appear somewhere within the top results. The reason is, my partner Alexander Kohl has carefully researched several dozen keywords that people use most often when it comes to freelance writing, and has told me I have to use them if we want to get visitors.

In fact, if you look closely at the articles on this site, you will probably notice an awful lot of keyword writing taking place. Placing the right key words or phrases within pages is very important for attracting traffic.

The trick with keywords

One of the temptations with keywords is to overuse them within an article in order to get a high ranking. This trick has been tried before, and in various forms, and it appears as though search engines have caught on. Keyword stuffing is considered black hat SEO technique, and placing keywords all over a site may even result that site being banned from the search engine index.

Of course, every time word of something like that gets out, there tends to be an overreaction. When I first started writing for a living on the Internet, many clients were calling for keyword densities of 15-20%. In other words, for every 100 words I used in a piece, the key phrase had to be used between 15 and 20 times. Obviously, this made for some ridiculously written pieces, and I hated writing them. Thankfully, when Google and the other search engines changed their algorithms, they had obviously caught on. While this kind of “stuffing” wasn’t considered to be as bad as other forms, it was bad enough to get sites ranked lower after a query was performed.

The upshot of this is that keyword writing is now much less focused on the keyword and more on the end user, the human web surfer. Web site developers are looking for writers who can fit keywords naturally into an article, press release, and so on without making it look forced, and with a reasonable density (2-5%). Again, this reinforces my golden rule of SEO and writing for the Internet: don’t write for the engines, write for people!

Keyword writing today

If you want to know the honest truth, I hate keyword writing. I don’t like having to fit a word into any article at all, particularly when I feel as though the word itself shouldn’t matter, it’s the idea of the piece that counts. If you need to use the word a certain amount of times, then you should be able to do so, and if you don’t, then you shouldn’t force it.

Still, a writing career on the Internet means that you have to be able to walk that fine line between human consumption and what the spiders can read and understand. Keyword writing will probably always be around in one form or another, and I do feel glad that it has at least progressed beyond the crazy stuffing frenzies of two years ago. Until search engines begin using human editors again (which Yahoo! still does, incidentally) it’s likely that Internet writers will have to perform at least minor word gymnastics from time to time in order to make sure clients remain satisfied.

With this site, we are trying to fill the gap I have found in different online writing resources, namely how to go about making a living writing online.

The Internet offers thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of different ways for freelance writers to make money, most of them neglected by print materials and even online freelance writing resources.

How does online writing differ from writing offline?

One huge area where a lot of work can be found is in article writing for Internet sites. If you want to get a piece of this big pie, it’s important to understand how online writing differs from writing offline for newspapers and magazines.

In this section, we will deal with the technicalities of writing online. The tips in these pages will help you to evaluate where your writing skill is at in the context of the online market, and we can help you to hone your writing skill where it might lack the sharp edge you’ll need if you want to do well.

As you start your online writing business, you’ll find that website writing differs in almost every area from writing for a magazine or a newspaper. We will highlight the differences in areas from basic writing principles such as paragraph writing (yes, you will need to know how to write a paragraph all over again!) to more technically involved concepts, such as SEO copy writing and using keyword writing to create great website content.

Various ways to make money writing online

Freelance writing on the Internet means that you will have the opportunity to write a very wide range of materials you can make money with blog writing, earn it through website content writing or newsletter article writing, and in some cases you might even find that you can use your creative online writing skills to make a buck or two.

It’s all part of the vast arena of printed material that is on the Internet, and a good understanding of how to bring words together to make up what website developers are looking for will take you a long way, financially speaking.

Traps and Tips

Our plan in this section is twofold. First, as we mention above we want to take your through the basic foundation on which you can build your success, through tips such as how to write an article that developers, audiences, and search engines will love.

When you are engaged in website content writing, though, there are also traps that you need to avoid. We are going to cover some common mistakes in the articles on these pages, including bad SEO copy writing, bad keyword writing, and above all, the importance of avoiding plagiarism.

Lots of people assume that since it’s the Internet, it doesn’t really matter, but using bad practices can cost you a lot of money, particularly if the word gets out!

It is my goal that having read the online writing tips found in this section, you can apply them in your business and have a lot more success when it comes to landing jobs both on bidding sites and beyond. Remember that one of the keys to success is not being afraid to show what you know, so once you synthesize the information in these pages don’t be afraid to throw the terms around!

Having been on the other side, I just want to add one thing: When I ask for samples on spec or why a price is higher than someone else’s, I mainly do that to get a feel for the writer’s attitude.

If the answer is defensive or angry, I will not work with them. If it is honest, open and full of certainty, I know I have found someone worth working with.

If you use a bidding site or really any other method of finding an online writing job, sooner or later you are going to get a message from a potential client that says something to the effect “Congratulations, you have made it onto our short list!”.

This is kind of exciting, but you don’t have that job yet. What should you do in order to secure it? And more importantly, what shouldn’t you do? Here are some of my thoughts on some of the common proposals that a prospective client will sometimes make when it comes to negotiating the terms.

Writing a few samples

This is a very, very tricky situation, particularly for the new writer. If you look around at some other writing blogs and websites, you will probably see that the vast majority of writers discourage writing anything free of charge, particularly to land a job (Sharon Hurley Hall is particularly against this idea and has been ever since I started reading what she had to say about the business two years ago).

As usual, though, I find my practical ideas of business at odds with the ideal proposed by other writers.

While I haven’t written a sample article on spec in a long time, I am sure that doing so helped me land my first few online writing jobs. Again, I would go against the common advice in order to grow a business). Still, this won’t work for everyone, here are some quick points to consider before writing on spec:

• Don’t do it if they are asking for too many words. A spec article should only be around 350 words.
• Keep the article even if you don’t hear from the prospect ever again. Chances are you can use it as a sample and may even sell it on another project.
• Make sure that the spec article will count towards the total article number if you do land the job.

Negotiating Price

Another common theme for prospective clients who have you on a short list is the prices that you charge. I absolutely hate this, because I feel like for the most part all writers are underpaid anyway and no one should be asking them to work any cheaper.

Still, one of the problems of the business is stiff competition, and if a potential client sees your prices are higher than another bidder he or she will try and work you down a bit.

Again, your decision here will depend on where you are at with your career. If you have steady work lined up, there’s no need to dicker on your price and you can afford to be firm.

This doesn’t mean that you have to lose the job though; I have had several clients accept my price after I assure them of and proved, the quality of my work and my generally reliable timelines (unfortunately that has changed a bit since the third child, we are always sick or the computer is breaking or something).

The bottom line

As with so many decisions you will make in your attempt to find an online writing job, the decision about negotiating for that job will depend on where you are at as far as income and experience. New writers looking to break in often cannot afford the same lofty principles as those who have been doing it for a while, but taking some lumps in the beginning will mean that you can be more firm later on.

A big part of my success as a freelance writer can be attributed to the concept of SEO copy writing. In this article, we are going to take a look at what SEO copy writing is and how it has changed over the years. We are also going to take a look into our crystal ball to see what the future of SEO is, based of course on fairly educated guesses.

What is SEO copy writing?

When you are looking for information on the Internet, where’s the first place you go? It’s pretty likely that you go to one of the big search engines (Google.com, Yahoo.com, MSN.com, AskJeeves.com, and so on) and type in your query, then check out the results until you find something useful. Statistics say that at least 51% of new visitors to Internet sites find their way to the site in this way.

In fact, you probably found your way to this site that way, if Alex and I are doing our jobs properly! That job, as far as marketing goes, is making sure that the web pages we have on the site rank, and rank well, on the search engines. The process is called Search Engine Optimization, and involves a lot of processes which for me are very boring, save one, SEO copy writing.

SEO copy writing is an important concept for anyone who wants to make a living writing on the Internet. You might never set a page or site up yourself, but some basic knowledge in the area will help you to sell yourself when you are bidding on a job or proposing that a potential new client should use your services.

When it comes to web sites, content is king. Search engines crawl the Internet with “spiders” on a regular basis, and these spiders (or “bots”) index pages according to their content. When a person types in a search query (such as “How can I make money writing”, for example) pages are ranked according to the relevance of the content the spiders found. If a site has a lot of content in the form of text.

SEO copy writing, then and now

No one can really claim a full knowledge as to how search engine optimization really works. This is because the search engine companies keep their formulae for ranking pretty close to their chests; they don’t want people abusing the system. Most of the techniques you will see as far as SEO practices are arrived at through experimentation, albeit a lot of experimentation that seems to work all the time.

What we do know is that sites with good content tend to rank fairly high for queries, and that content comes about through good SEO copy writing. This process has come a long way since search engines started up. Good rankings used to be dependent on links, until that system was abused. Then it became about keywords, another method which was abused (see our article on keyword writing, which details that a little bit more). Today, the search engine algorithms have been adapted to exclude a lot of the useless content that used to be found in a search.

What this means for SEO copy writing

You don’t have to take my word for all this, there is another great articles on search engine copywriting. What these articles and everything else in the evolution of SEO and SEO writing points to is that search engines are becoming more and more concerned with meeting the needs of the people that use them; they want to provide highly relevant, useful information every time someone makes a query.

I, for one, am delighted with this direction, and if you are a good writer you will be too. What it means is that poor writers, those who can’t seem to string a sentence together or form an argument in logical sequence, won’t be a huge worry as far as competition anymore. Why? Because even on the Internet, people do expect a certain quality in the pieces they read. They don’t want a bunch of information that is difficult to read or downright useless, they want meaty articles that they can rely on and sink their teeth into (this doesn’t mean that you will be allowed to bring all your skills to bear because the average Internet reader will still prefer an article written at the grade 7 level). Writers who take pride in their work will once again be able to command the prices that they deserve.

The golden rule of SEO copy writing

Because of the nature of the search engine business, I have long maintained that the golden rule when it comes to writing for search engine optimization purposes, the key is not to follow the rules that seem to work for the engines, but to follow rules that you KNOW work for human readers. After all, humans are who the search engines have been set up for, not the spiders and the bots. If you keep that in mind when you are looking for, and once you land, SEO copy writing jobs, your pieces will do fine and your customers will be happy.

It seems that a lot of advice encourages writers to pass up writing opportunities. Writers, and particularly those that like to give advice on building a freelance writing career, love to use the word “niche”.

To me, this word is blasphemy and I don’t think following the usual advice about it works very well. In this article I will talk about why I think that niches should be avoided like the plague, particularly for writers just starting out.

The Gospel of Niche

If you think I am exaggerating, pick up any book on freelance writing or go to an advice website; I will bet that one of the most repeated words in the print will be niche. The line is that in order to be successful, you need to find one area that you are really knowledgeable in or you really like writing about, and concentrate just on that.

This was the theory upon which I started out my freelance writing career, but I quickly realized that there was not a lot of opportunities out there for the niches I was interested in, or that the competition was just too crowded. And usually, it was crowded with seasoned freelancers who had starved themselves carving out their own niche.

The Heretic

I had a couple of options. I could indulge in artistic snobbery and decide only to focus on one area like everyone said to, and pad the monthly earnings with money earned at a mill or in a kitchen, or I could go against the niche gospel and take advantage of any writing opportunities I found. I went for door number two.

Instead of bidding on jobs that I felt I had a sound knowledge base about, I would bid on any and all jobs that I could find, as long as they weren’t too boring.

I was honest about my experience, but I found that as long as I bid a bit lower than the experts I could still get jobs. Moreover, I could parlay those jobs into experience, for as I wrote articles on a specific topic my portfolio started to carry a lot more weight, and I had a lot more samples to show to potential clients.

Weddings, real estate, fishing, and Internet marketing

I also found that when it comes to writing on the Internet, there seems to be a few cycles. All of a sudden web site developers will realize there is a dearth of information in an area and will all try to create a killer site on that area.

That’s another reason why you can’t be too narrow and have to take advantage of any writing opportunities that you can if you plan on making a career out of writing for the web; what’s big today won’t be in three months.

My first few jobs were all about weddings, something which was surprising given that I am a very inartistic male whose only wedding experience comes from the fact that I had my own wedding. And yes I did help with that.

Still, what I found was that as long as you can do good research, be it in the form of interviews or even just poking around on the web, great ideas for articles will come to you. I’ve ended up writing dozens of articles on weddings, and never once has a client been dissatisfied.

When wedding season is over and article are in less demand, other seasonal work has presented itself, on areas about as far removed from each other as you can imagine.

By far the most article I have written have been on real estate and Internet marketing, with fishing and other outdoor activities (in which I actually am something of an expert) coming in third; weddings are fourth and there are about 20 other topics I have some experience in.

The big picture: embrace all writing opportunities!

The point here is that if I had taken the advice of many others and only focused on my niche area, I would probably not be making a living freelance writing today. By taking advantage of every opportunity, I was not only able to make money writing, but I was also able to hone my skills and create a very diverse portfolio.

To be sure, there is something to be said for the theory “jack of all trades, master of none”. But we are living in a new age, one where the traditional ideas of the offline magazine and newspaper are going to be supplanted by the free for all that is the Internet.

It’s best that as writers, we also learn to adapt in order to make a living, and that means leaving the Gospel of Niche behind and taking advantage of any writing opportunities!