Taking Down Bright Hub Links
I’ve been slowly but surely deleting the links to my content ever since Bright Hub shut down for all intents and purposes. Unlike writing for Demand Studios, one of the things that made Bright Hub worth writing for after awhile was the revenue sharing. Now, as most of my readers know, I’m not a big fan of revenue sharing. The main reason is that there are just too many factors out of my control. No matter how great my freelance writing is, for instance, there will never be any traffic to speak of if the site it is published on [...]
Finally Tagged by Panda
For those of you who are professional writers that don’t run your own websites online, you may not have heard of the Google Panda update. Essentially, Panda is an algorithm run by Google against its search index that it uses in the wake of stinging criticism about its search result being cluttered with low quality content, especially that associated with content farms like Demand Studios and Seed.com. There have been several versions released in the months since the original version embarrassingly missed eHow.com, the biggest content mill of all. With each version, website owners, online writers, and others have complained [...]
Tricky Words: Allusion vs Illusion
A quick post today on the difference between allusion and illusion. In truth, few people are confused by the terms, it’s just that many people don’t understand the word allusion at all and assume it has something to do with illusion because it sounds so similar. Let’s start with illusion. An illusion is a false idea or appearance. Specifically, most people use it to mean something that you think you see or know but really don’t. “He car contributed to the illusion he was wealthy,” says the he appears wealthy, but is not. (If he really was wealthy, it would [...]
Demand Studios Title Drought
The number of articles available to claim at Demand Studios has dropped drastically. On the heels of the Seed.com shutdown, writers are asking what this might mean for Demand Studios a.k.a. Demand Media. Low Number of Articles at Demand Studios The official explanation from Demand Studios is always the same, that different clients have different needs that fluctuate over time. The party line makes sense when the company is talking about third-party websites, but much of the content generated by writers for Demand Studios ends up on Demand Media’s own websites such as eHow.com. Even if the demand from the company for [...]
One Month to NaNoWriMo
One Month until National Novel Writing Month. Although the concept of NaNoWriMo involves writing a novel “from scratch” beginning on the first of November, there is nothing wrong with considering what I will be writing about. I’m sure many other writers may take to the winds and follow their muse, but I do have a lot of ideas stacked up in my head. Every time I find an old notebook, it seems to have a half-dozen ideas lurking in the pages. Of course, some of my ideas are better than others. More to the point, some of my ideas have [...]
National Novel Writing Month Sign Up
I just signed up for National Novel Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo. In case you are not familiar with NaNoWriMo, which I will shorten to NaNo from here on out in order to save my Shift case from undo abuse, let me explain. NaNo is one month (November 2011, this year) during which writers write an entire novel in one month. More specifically, a writer commits to writing a complete 50,000 word (minimum) novel from scratch during the period that begins at midnight on November 1st and ends at midnight on November 30th. There is no prize, there is [...]
Writing and Hubris
The mere act of writing involves a certain amount of hubris.Writing something, and particularly publishing something, assumes that what you have written is worthy of being preserved and subsequently read. In other words, your thoughts are valuable enough for others to read about them. It is not arrogance or folly, per se. After all, writing invokes no more requirement that others take in your thoughts than speaking them aloud does. However, there is something to be said for how one assumes it is worth taking both the additional time and effort to commit ones thoughts to a more permanent form. [...]
Write Every Day
In a recent exchange with a budding freelance writer, I said something to the effect of if you aren’t writing every day then you aren’t maximizing your potential as a professional freelance writer. We were discussing the lack of updates on his writing website and my point was that by posting something every single day, you get a lot of advantages. First, writing every day builds your writing portfolio faster. Just do the math. If you post an article on your blog every day for a month, you will have 30 articles published. If you post every other day, you’ll [...]
How To Get Started as a Freelance Writer
I’ve started getting more and more requests for information on how to get started in freelance writing. So, I thought it might be time for me to write a guide to getting started as a freelance writer. How To Become a Freelance Writer Get a piece of paper to take notes, because this is going to blow your mind. First, to become a professional freelance writer you need to write. Got it? Great. We’re all done. Seriously, that’s it. O.K., that’s not it. Publish what you write. Now, that’s it. Really. Getting Published as a New Freelance Writer Right about [...]
Affect vs Effect – AP Style
Recently a reader asked me what the AP Stylebook says about the difference between affect and effect. My first inclination was to tell them that this is one of those cases where the issue is not one of AP Style, but rather grammar and definitions, which the Associate Press Stylebook leaves up to other authorities. However, one of the things that separates professional freelance writers from amateur writers is that professional writers check their facts first. So, I looked up “affect” in my AP Stylebook and lo, and behold, there was an entry. In all fairness, the AP Stylebook entry [...]
