Advice on Writing – 5 SEO Writing Mistakes

Your writing is a product, and the better you make that product the more money you can make from it, and the better your chances of getting a good job writing. Here are 5 common writing mistakes that you need to know about. Focusing on avoiding these mistakes is essential if you want to improve skill. Writing all will-nilly won’t get you anywhere.

1. Don’t Write Articles in One big paragraph

In academic writing you write in long paragraphs. For online writing gigs, nobody cares – write short paragraphs that take less than 10 seconds to read! The average internet user gets bored of what they are looking at after 10 seconds and moves on.

2. Avoid Excessive Formatting

Don’t, just don’t, use bold, italicized and underlined text in the same article. Use simple subheadings in bold or a font size larger, but don’t let the text itself draw attention! It’s the words that are important.

3. Keep Your Writing Business like

If you are writing a blog, you can write with slang. For website writing gigs you need to keep your spelling, grammar and word choice perfect.

4. Clarity, Clarity, Clarity!

If there is one thing Ron Irwin (my writing teacher at varsity) taught me, it was to write clearly. Use short sentences and the simples words you can find. Don’t use big synonyms if a more widely-understood word will do.

5. Try Not to Sound Like a Salesman

Your readers can smell a sales pitch a mile away, and so can clients. The ideal SEO writing strikes a balance between conversational writing and business writing, a mixture of information and praise.

If you have any writing tricks or tips on how to improve your writing skill, post them as a comment!

In the mean time, here are some related posts to keep you going:

- Write Without Sounding Like a Salesman

- Easy eBook Writing System

- Get Well Paid Writing Gigs

- How to Get Into Internet Copywriting

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Review - DayJobNuker

I stumbled across DayJobNuker when I was looking for help. I can't remember what it was for, but I'm pretty sure it has something to do with why my feed sometimes looks funny. Anyway I discovered at DayJobNuker some excellent ways to make money online, and a whole lot besides. Here's what I've learnt from DayJobNuker:

1. Bruce Alan hates his job and he wants to Nuke It
2. The nuking will happen in July 2010, exactly 3 years after he started his blog
3. In order to nuke his day job, he needs to figure out ways to replace his income with his online endeavors

The world of internet marketing is complex, abstract and confusing to pretty much everybody, but Bruce invites us all along to figure it out together. His site is based on readership involvement, and he always answers comments and questions if you have them. He tries all the wacky ideas he puts up himself, so you don't end up getting fooled by scams and unworkable schemes. A lot of his master plots you don't even need to have a website for!

What are you waiting for? Click the button to Nuke Your Day Job

Technorati Tag: Make Money Online

Any Nut can Write a Lucrative eBook!

We all see eBooks all over the place. So what makes eBooks different from regular books that you can buy from Amazon.com? Well, from a reader's point of view an eBook usually offers you some advice or practical knowledge. A lot of them promise to teach you how to "make millions exploiting this crazy loophole" - but they don't work. It takes effort to make money online - but the effort is well worth it.

One of the most sure-fire ways to make money online is: write your own eBook! From an author's point of view eBooks require a little work and research, but once they're done they make money forever. If you write an eBook and sell it for $45, let's look at the numbers.

You will probably want to set up your own site. You don't have to know ANYTHING about web design - simply hire someone. Do what I'm doing: offer them a portion of the profits (say 10-15%). A lot of beginners will do it for a case of beer and the prospect of earning a few hundred dollars a month for nothing. Then you have hosting (say $30 per month). So you basically need to sell only one copy to get your money back each month.

Angela Booth says most ebooks will sell 120 copies, even with minimum internet marketing efforts, within a year. At $45 per book, that's $5,400 turn over, less $360 for hosting, THEN less your webmaster's cut. Your're left with over $4,500 a year, at least! There are no other costs, besides perhaps your credit card processing costs. However, these can be negated if you allow your customers to pay via PayPal. or Moneybookers

But most eBooks that are any good sell a lot more than this, and it is not uncommon for eBooks to sell hundreds of copies a month. I'm expecting my Philosophy eBook to sell at least 2,000 copies.

What most people don't know is that writing eBooks is easy and formulaic, and can be done if you have a week to spare. It requires disciplined time management, but finding an idea and writing a book is ridiculously easy. However, you can't just go out on your own and do it - you need expert advice. That's why I most definitely recommend Jim Edwards & Joe Vitale's book:

"How to Write and Publish Your Own eBook in as little as 7 Days".

It'll probably take you more than a week to write an eBook, but the time is well worth it! Take a few days off work, or spend a bit of your summer vacation doing it and you could be making huge profits from your eBook, long after you've stopped working on it!

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How to Get Well Paid Writing Jobs

We all know they're out there: writing jobs that pay in excess of $50 per article. But how do you find article writing jobs like this? Well, the first thing you need to know is that $50 articles are not exactly all over the place. There is little chance of finding a regular supply of several of these articles a day, at least at first.

The best-paid articles are usually for magazines. These don't have to be famous magazines - I did one the other day on an auctioneer for a lesbian lifestyle magazine. And the best part is, you don't even have to go to the magazines to find the work.

All you have to do is find a client who can get this type of writing work. I found one at GetaFreelancer, but you could look on any of the other good writing jobs sites like WriterLance.

Of course, to get well paid writing jobs you have to prove you're worth the money. Find a client who says they are interested in doing magazine and high profile work, and then try to help them find it. Chances are they have a much better chance of getting the gig than you do as a beginner, and you get the experience and most of the money for your articles in the end.

If you want to try find the jobs yourself, have a look at Deborah Ng's writing jobs board - this is where I scout for high-priced jobs for my clients if I want more of this type of work.

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Remember to sign up with Agloco before the first quarter payout to get paid for your surfing hours in cash and shares of a large cap dot.com company!

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Make Money Online, Without Writing!

I have recently joined the Agloco network. Allow me to explain how this internet money-making network works:

You sign up for free and they give you a little toolbar which goes at the bottom of your browser. This has a Google search bar (but you can change this to another search engine if you like) and a small advertising space.

AGLOCO put ads in this space, and so long as you use it while browsing for 5 hours a month they stay happy. You don't have to do anything on it, just tolerate it being there while you browse. So how do you make money from browsing like this?

Well, they essentially give you a share of the advertising revenue. The company is new, and they say they will pay out at a set date (you can check out all the AGLOCO payment information here) You can then choose whether you want to be paid for your browsing in cash or SHARES in AGLOCO. AGLOCO plan to list on the London Stock Exchange in the near future.

As a business model, their concept is very sound. The company is run by a large staff (over 40 people), 8 of whom have MBAs. These people wouldn't want to risk their reputation on a scam, so there's no real risk of nothing happening. When the company goes public they will pay out people who want cash, but a lot of your share of the advertising revenue will be awarded as AGLOCO shares.

I'm big into investing, and I see this as a great long-term way to secure residual income and exposure to foreign investments if you don't live in the UK. The shares might not be worth much now because the company is not publicly traded yet, but give it a year and a few million users and you will definitely be able to buy something nice once you sell those shares!

Why You Really Make Money Writing For Helium

I've noticed a lot of people asking "how much can you make writing articles for Helium". A lot of you probably signed up, wrote some articles and checked every fourteen seconds to see how much they had made. A few days and $0.32 later you gave up, deciding that Helium wasn't worth the money.

The thing is, you do make money writing for Helium, but you have to look at it differently. Consider it an investment of your time that turns into money.

For example, if you are a we writer and you wrote for an hour, you could probably make around $30 including fidgeting, browsing, researching etc. I know some writers make a lot more, but most of us don't.

Say your average Helium article takes you 20 minutes to write. You know what you're talking about so it shouldn't take that long. Consider that 20 minutes to be $10 worth of your time that you invested in Helium.

So write 5 or 10 articles and forget about them. Don't write in news or current events, because people stop reading these. Write well-optimized articles and Digg them, and write in "how-to" fields or "about" topics.

Most of my articles make me around 1c per day, but some don't make any money and some make a little more. If there are 365 days in a year (and there I'm informed that there are) that means $3.65 per year. Ok, so that's optimistic - say they have a few bad weeks, and it ends up at around $2.50 for the year. That's a 25% return on your investment!

Real estate doesn't normally give you that, and neither do savings accounts or bonds come even close. Stocks might, but you have a chance to lose your money whereas at Helium the worst that can happen is you don't make any money at all. If the site runs for four years you'll get 100% return on your investment in that time.

I just think this is a better way to think about it.

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How to Get Into Internet Copywriting

There are a lot of ways to get into internet copywriting, but I'm going to tell you how I did it. It worked out pretty well if I don't say so myself.

Step 1 - Join GetAFreelancer

Once you have a bit of confidence, sign up to this site. If you have the chance, try to work for a local company or a friend first, so you can do as few or as many articles as you like to get practice.

I know there are a lot of other writing jobs boards out there, but this is pretty much the biggest. You have to sift through a lot of low-paid writing gigs, but there are some really good article writing jobs in there all the time.

Step 2 - Find a Client

Look for a job post that looks like the buyer is wanting a long-term relationship. Send them private messages, see if they sound like the kind of person you'd like to work for. Bid on their projects (how to bid) and charm the pants off them. Try to find 2 or 3 such people, but don't just accept any projects that come along.

Step 3 - Build a Relationship with your Client

Work hard for your clients, take on any projects they need you to, and sooner or later they will reward you with more highly paid writing jobs. I find that this is a sure fire way to get the best price for your articles without the resources to market yourself, and with little writing experience.

I guarantee that if you follow these steps within 2-3 months you will be commanding at least $5 per article, and from there's not much limit. There are articles out there waiting to be written that people will pay $50-$100, but you have to prove that your articles are worth that much first.

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Write Articles and Make Money on Helium

If you haven't heard of Helium by now, you should definitely go check it out. It's not a get rich quick scheme, and it doesn't beat writing SEO articles and web content for clients in terms of how much you can make, but damn it's just so much fun.

Here's how it works: You write articles on Helium on any topic you choose. You can write on a new topic, or one that already has articles written about it. All of the articles on one topic get lumped together, and users rate them. The higher up yours goes in its little group, the more of a share it earns from advertising revenue. Obviously the groups with 20 or so articles pay more if you get yours to the top, but this is harder to do in bigger article groups.

There are two other ways you can make money writing articles for Helium. The one is the competitions: first prize is $75, but to do this you will probably need to write 15 or so articles on various topics in the competition. This isn't really worth it money wise, but write about 5 articles and these articles will earn you money slowly anyway. You might even get a few bucks from winning!

The other way is to write articles for Helium publishers. Companies post article projects, and then anyone can have a go. The publisher picks the article they want, and pays that person. You get paid anywhere between around $20-$200 per article so if you're good, you can make BIG money writing articles for Helium.

Remember it pays to pick your topics well. Choose topics you think a lot of people will want to read about, and this way you'll make more money from your articles on Helium. The only drawback is that you can only be paid by Helium via your PayPal account - they don't offer other options.

Other Stuff About Helium (and a lot about gas)

SEO Copywriting - What is this stuff?

SEO Copywriting involves quite a few different things. People who offer SEO copywriting services offer more than just SEO articles that are written to feature certain keywords prominently. It can involve heading formatting, small descriptions etc. Large pages of text are simply not suitable for certain pages. So where do our SEO articles end up?

A lot of websites use SEO copywriting services to flesh out their pages, because text written with SEO guidelines in mind guarantees better search engine rankings. If a novice website owner wrote their own text without being aware of SEO writing techniques, they would end up without any rankings. Whereas many SEO techniques gain and lose effectiveness as search engines like Google change their algorithms, large pages of keyword optimized text always gets the same results.

Other times our articles wind up in an article directory. People pay good money for quality articles written with keywords in mind that link back to their site. These articles get a lot of traffic, and then so does their site. Writing these articles can sometimes be more difficult, but this kind of writing work will pay you well.

For those of us who make money writing SEO articles, it is important to find writing jobs that pay well. You can find good SEO writing work on GetAFreelancer or at RentACoder. At RentACoder you can find a LOT more writing jobs that pay well. Another good place to bid on writing jobs is WriterLance, which works similarly to GetAFreelancer.

If you want tips on how to get writing work that you will be well paid for, read my posts on how to find writing work on GetAFreelancer, and on how you can get paid for your writing online.

Make money from online surveys in South Africa

I didn't expect it, but I've had a lot of responses to my post on Online Surveys and whether or not they are a viable way of making money. To recap, I came up with 3 conclusions:

1.Free online surveys are a waste of time
2.If you live in the states, you won't get rich
3.If you live in South Africa, it's easy to make money taking surveys.

That is, if you're prepared to spend the time taking surveys online. You also have to be prepared to take the leap of faith and cough up $30 or whatever to get started. There's no such thing as a free lunch, and this is definitely true if you want to make money taking online surveys.

Personally, I use the original and best Paid Surveys Online. I make between $30-$50 a day and spend about an hour and a half taking surveys online. I generally do it in my down time, when I don't feel like working. It's not a princely sum, but you could make a lot more if you feel like sitting and taking surveys all day.

The nice thing about Paid Surveys Online is that you can do 3 of their other projects as well. If you live in the states you can get paid to drive, or get paid to hand out promotional products. Anywhere else you can do the "get paid to read emails" thing. I did this for a while, and it made me a few bucks but I try to focus on writing articles as much as I can.

My final verdict: If you live in South Africa or any other country with a weak currency, you'd be CRAZY not to sign up for the online surveys from Paid Surveys Online. It's an hour a day and you can make good money doing it.