I make my living as a professional freelance writer. For the most part, that means that I go out, find clients, get them to hire me, do some freelance writing for them, and then repeat the process. This is a great way to make a living as a writer without starving to death while you [...]
I’ve gotten some questions recently about setting up a home office for a freelance writer. Truthfully, there isn’t much different about a freelance writer’s home office than most other home offices. Basically, you’ll need a computer, Internet access, a phone, and a printer. Those are common to just about any home office. There are a [...]
If you are going to earn money writing online, you are going to need a website. If you are going to have a website that attracts enough attention from Google, Yahoo, Bing, Altavista, and others to actually drive any traffic to your website, you are going to need a blog or other section of your [...]
As we mentioned earlier, Yahoo has taken on the task of producing a “style guide” for the Internet. Those of you who are already in the professional writing business know about the different writing styles out there. There is AP Style, which is based upon a book by AP called The Associated Press Stylebook. Then [...]
I’ve written a handful of posts lately about my new netbook for writing that I have been using. That has led some readers to query about whether or not I had abandoned by my other computers in favor of the writer’s netbook. Far from it, my desktop computer remains my primary writing computer and a [...]
As professional writers, we know all to well the frustration of copyright infringement and people stealing professional content to fill up junk websites filled with advertisements and affiliate links. When it comes time for freelance writers to find and use stock photography to go along with our writing efforts we play by the rules. If [...]
I had a chance to get some hands on time with an iPad the other day. Like everyone else, I thought it was really cool at first. I mean, imagine the possibilities. But, then as reality sat in, I could only actually imagine two possibilities (games and reading), neither of which justifies a $100 device, [...]
As a freelance writer, I need a way to create, organize, and keep notes, sources, and even snippets of text or dialog, as well as article ideas. Around my home office, I have literally a hundred or more notebooks jammed with scribbles, ideas, magazine clippings, and newspaper articles. While opening up one of those notebooks [...]
As a professional freelance writer I focus on the words, the copy, the text. Sure, we do some newsletter work and we have built some very nice layouts. It is not like writers don’t care what their writing looks like, it is just that design is its own skill set, with its own techniques, tricks, [...]
Somewhere along the line I started reading the website Coding Horror, which is kind of ironic considering that I am a basic level programmer at best. Sure, I understand the structure of a For-Next Loop and I can work through an If-Then-Else statement, but I’m typically much better at sorting through someone else’s code than [...]
When it comes to writing, there are numerous kinds of people who do it. There are professional freelance writers, there are both published novelists and unpublished novelists (more nicely referred to as aspiring novelists), journalists, copywriters, hobbyists, poets, experienced writers, novice writers, work from home Moms, work from home Dads, online writers, offline writers, screenwriters, [...]
