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Freelance Writer Tip #4 — Web Content Most of the work available for the freelance writer is web content, and it is normally expected of the writer, to know enough HTML for SEO purposes. Luckily this isn’t a major obstacle. The HTML tags used for SEO purposes, are the basic ones. H1, H2, H3, bold, italic, paragraph, and hyper-link. You don’t need to know more than this simple set. Continue reading >> Web Content as a Freelance Writer Freelance Writer Tip #7 — Don’t Be Deceived by the DregsNever fails: Low Bid Writer = Plagiarism I ran across a posting by a guy named Brian Perdue, who writes:
If you are getting great writing for $3.75 an article, then you are getting block-and-copied material… no one can live writing 600 word articles for $3.75 each. I don’t care who you are. So, … just to back this up, I run a Copyscape.com check on the front page of this blog … and guess what? — yep.. doesn’t take brain surgery does it… or even a very good detective. Don’t be deceived, as a Freelance Writer, by guys like this; they are either flat out lying, or being ripped off themselves, and just don’t know it yet. If you are writing 600 word articles for less than $10.00 each, you aren’t even making minimum wage... not if you are writing original, well written, effective web content. Give value for your work, but it is a two way street. Freelance Writer Tip : # 6 — OpenOffice Writer and Google DocFreelance writing requires some basic skills to insure that you are able to qualify for most of the project requests. One of these is the ability to submit your finished articles in HTML formating, because most of the job requests are going to be for web content. There are only a few basic tags you need to know and understand or web content, which I have outlined and described in a previous post. There is also simple way to by-pass the learning curve for this skill however, and that is using OpenOffice of Google Docs as your writer program. Why these two ?: What you really might be asking is “why not MS Word?“, which is a valid question, and one we should answer right away. First off, it is not because OpenOffice or Google Docs are any better than MS Word, or because MS Word sucks, or anything like this… it is because of the simple HTML these other to provide, whereas, MS Word, creates a very unclear, convoluted mess of the HTML formating it creates, and most Blog and CMS editor programs don’t like it at all. The editor programs of Blog and CMS programs are called WYSIWYG editors (what you see is what you get). When you copy and paste from your writing editor, into the current WYSIWYG editors used by most Blog and CMS programs, your browser will likely send with the copy, the formating which created the text. So, if it was bold in your document, it will be bold in the WYSIWYG editor window as well. Which would be great, if the BOLD tag that was used was <strong> this is my bold text</strong> and not the convoluted mess that MS Word makes out of this simple formating request. However, with OpenOffice Web/Writer, and with Google Docs pages, if you block-and-copy from those screens and paste into the WYSIWYG editor window, the formating is simple, clean and won’t give your client a heart attack from what the strange and convoluted code MS Word does to the rest of his web site pages. In OpenOffice you will want to edit and write in the Writer/Web program, not the normal Writer window. Go under File->New and choose Writer/Web for the document type. This will save you time, energy and a great deal of frustration if you are just starting out to write web content as a freelance writer. Freelance Writer Tip : # 5 — Skill Wages In the description area, of the bid you are looking at, the prospective client has written — “This should be very easy for someone who knows what they are doing.”– which of course means that this prospective client doesn’t know what he is doing, and doesn’t want to pay anyone the skill wage who does know what they are doing. Don’t give away your Skill-Wage because someone isn’t willing to cope with the fact that it is — in fact — a Skill Wage. There are skill levels to web content and freelance writing. Skills which take time and effort to learn, understand and master. Just because you are able to do something “simply” doesn’t mean that you don’t get paid for the ability to do so. These skills which you will spend many hours, weeks and years learning, honing, and enhancing, are skills which translate into profit for your client. Your client may not know what it takes to do something, but I assure you — he is asking for it because it is valuable to him. If the client is calling for HTML formating, or to be able to post articles into WordPress, or some other CMS, or to have the articles formated into PDF copies as well, then make sure your bid takes into account the effort, time and kill which is required to perform these tasks. Granted, these are not difficult to do, if you know how — so what? If you know how, then you are more valuable than someone who doesn’t know how. The list above, really isn’t a major jump in skill level, but it is time — time you are spending on your clients work, which you can not spend writing up another article. Time, like money, can not be spent twice.
Freelance Writer Tip #3 – Avoid Work at Home ScamsThere is plenty on this topic to discover on the Web … read the articles! Pay attention! … seriously. When times get tough, like they are right now, people tend to be more “believing“; why this is I don’t know, but it is one of those proven facts that stressed out people will believe things which a year ago, they would have boldly laughed at. Work-At-Home cams proliferate in poor economy The recession’s top work-at-home scams Watch Out for Work-At-Home Scams Freelance writing is a good way to earn extra money and work at home. It isn’t a scam. You bid on jobs, you sell your butt off getting the work, and you work the rest of your butt off doing the work, and then you get paid. You will not get rich, but you will make a living and feel good about yourself at the end of the day – Instead of feeling like you might have just helped some people pull an identity theft scam on your mom. |
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