Get Paid to Write Online » web content writing

How To Write A Travel Piece And Stay At Home

Sharon — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 10:21:58 +0000

I’ve just completed a travel piece about a place I’ve never visited. It may seem a strange thing to do, but this was the commission that my writing client gave me. Usually a travel piece is full of local color, but how do you add that if you’ve never set eyes on the place?

Researching The Venue

Thanks to internet research, anything is possible. Wikipedia may be much maligned, but it’s a good starting point for an overview of many cities and countries. Don’t get me wrong, this does not replace researching your topic on other sites, but it does give a guide to the other information that might be out there. It often has good information on the weather, climate and geology, too.

City Information

Many cities and towns have websites, especially in the US. These sites are great places to find out about history, attractions and major events. There are usually links to offsite pages for the attractions, where you can get more information, and if you’re looking for a comprehensive listing of festivals and exhibitions, then you can’t do much better than Eventguide.com. To round it out, check out TripAdvisor or the Lonely Planet site for guides to most places.

Nightlife Reviews

That takes care of most of the daytime entertainment, but if you’re profiling an area, then you’ll need to know about places to eat and nightlife. Again, TripAdvisor can help you, but Yahoo, AOL and others also provide listings of restaurants with type of cuisine and brief reviews. If you are lucky, you’ll also find a user review that tells you what it’s like to be there. There are also similar sites which list bars and clubs. You can find out if there’s a DJ or live music, which night ladies are free and much more.

Putting It Together

Let me give you an example of how you can put this all together to create a decent travel piece. I recently had to write a piece on Jacksonville, Florida. Although I have been to many other parts of Florida, I have never been there. However, I used my knowledge of the climate to set the scene, evoking hot summer days and balmy tropical nights.

Using Your Experience

I checked into the history of the town, including the earliest settlers, and found out a bit about its evolution over the years. After a bit of info on the climate, I was ready to move on to the attractions. You can actually use your own experience to write realistically about places you have never seen.

For example, if you have ever been to a zoo with lots of exotic animals, or gone down a water slide, or ridden a big roller coaster, you can talk about the feelings people will experience while doing those things in another city.

Similarly, if you like searching for antiques, or attending events with live stage shows, it only takes a little imagination to evoke those for your readers. When it comes to rating meals and nights out, I blend my own experience of similar venues with the reviews I find on TripAdvisor and similar sites.

So that’s how you can write a decent travel piece about a place that you’ve never seen. It’s true that it won’t have quite the same feel as if you had been there, but if you’re a competent writer, you can still make the article come to life. Have you ever had to write about somewhere you’ve never seen? What techniques helped you?

Technorati Tags: web content writing,freelance writing,writing,get paid to write

Buried By Keywords? Here’s How To Cope

Sharon — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:30:28 +0000

Writing keyword fodder isn’t always easy, especially when you’ve written 70 article of a batch of 140 and are losing the will to live. Yet this is one of the tasks that many freelancers face, because clients know that content is king and want plenty of it for their sites. So what do you do when the creative well has run dry? Here are some of the strategies I have used.

Turn It On Its Head

We have to take our clients and our work seriously, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use humor from time to time. Instead of writing about how to raise the perfect child, write about how NOT to do it. Trying to reverse the normal order will help to boost your creativity, and I’ve found that clients don’t mind the occasional humorous piece in a large batch.

Do Some Research

Even if you’re not setting a client’s site up, it doesn’t hurt to use a keyword research tool to find keywords similar to the ones you’re writing about. Even better is looking at related searches, because that might give you a few new ideas for ways to tackle a subject. For example, when writing about credit cards, I was able to extrapolate and write about some of the issues that students faced in getting credit cards.

Talk To Friends

It’s amazing what talking to others will do. Whether they are online or offline, you can get a lot of inspiration from chatting with people about their experiences. Real life anecdotes can help make a keyword article more interesting. For example, if you’re writing about home decorating, you could use a real example of a decorating nightmare as a starting point for your article.

Use Your Archives
If you’re writing on a familiar subject, then you’ve probably got a lot of articles on your computer. Have a look at what you’ve done for other people and see whether any of the ideas apply to your current job. It’s a great way to reuse ideas without straining your brain.

Gut It Out
In the end, you still have to meet your deadline. Sometimes the only way to do it is to do it. I usually divide up my work across the week so that I can do some difficult tasks and some easy tasks each day. I do the hard ones in the morning, which is my best writing time, and the easy ones later on.

So those are some of my tips. What are yours?

Web Writing Info Review

Sharon — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 13:38:05 +0000

I found Web Writing Info when owner Courtney Ramirez dropped by to leave a comment on my blog. Being the curious soul that I am, I immediately popped over to have a look - and I liked what I saw. The blog design is clean and crisp, making it easy to focus on the posts, and there are some great ones there.

For example, there’s How To Gain Experience Without Getting Paid Peanuts, a post that offers some useful tips for newbies. Then there’s How To Get Google To Do Your Research For You, which talks you through setting up Google Alerts. I’d also like to highlight What’s Your Specialty, Courtney’s entry into the issue of whether to specialise or generalise.

This seems to be a relatively new blog, as all the posts date from September onwards. It focuses on online writing, which is where Courtney earns her crust. The post titles get your attention and I like her writing style, so it’s one to watch. I’ve added it to my growing list of writing blog RSS subscriptions. Check it out - you won’t be disappointed.

All posts in the Writing Blog Reviews series

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Web Writing Tip: Paragraphs

Sharon — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 11:09:11 +0000

When you visit some sites, they are really hard to read. Sometimes that’s because of the lack of images, an area which I’m trying to improve. At others it’s because the text is served up in indigestible pieces. That’s the reason for my latest post on Daily Writing Tips. It’s called: Why We Need Paragraphs.

Reading a blog post or a web article should be easy. Some web pages have large blocks of text with very few breaks between them. When I see those, my brain does the TMI (too much information) dance and my eyes move on until they find something easier to look at.

Have a read and be sure to drop me a comment on the site. While you’re there, check out last week’s post, The Art Of Writing News.

The Many Uses for your Squidoo Lens

Sharon — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 12:00:43 +0000

On the surface, Squidoo.com may look like a free way to create a minisite and share information with others. In its simplest form, that is exactly what it is. But there are a lot of other ways you can benefit from having a Squidoo lens.

First Page on Google

One of the big perks is that Squidoo lenses tend to do well on Google, especially if you optimize for a certain keyword. For example, I have a lens that is optimized for the keyword “make money writing”. It spends a lot of time on the first page now and the rest of the time is spent on the second page.

In order to get your lens on the first page you need to do several things. Here is a short list:

Do some keyword research and make sure they are in the URL.
Put the keyword in the main page title and then scatter it throughout the page.
Make sure you have 4 modules at the minimum. The more modules you have, the better.
Update it often. In the beginning, you will need to update it every day. Small changes count, such as deleting a sentence.
Promote your lens whenever you can.

Newsletter Subscribers

You can use your lens to get newsletter subscribers. You can put your subscriber box in one of the text modules. This requires that you use an “iframe” command. You can find some information online on how to do that. Or, click on my link at the end of this post and I’ll send you some information.

Affiliate Marketing

I promote affiliate programs on my lenses. In the month of June, I made around $40. Yes, you can make money through the modules on Squidoo, but you can make a lot more if you sign up for the affiliate programs yourself and add them to your lens.

Show That you are an Expert

Another thing that a lens does is that it shows you are an expert at a particular subject. If you want to develop a reputation that you know a lot about something, you can research it and create a lens. This is a tool that you can use for self promotion.

*****
Katherine Huether is a freelance writer who loves creating Squidoo lenses. To view a list of her lenses visit http://www.squidoo.com/kathography

Web Writing Skill Building

Sharon — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 14:16:00 +0000

When you’re starting out as a freelance writer, or even thinking about freelancing, it can be difficult to find places where you can get paid to write. However, there is one way you can build your web content writing skills and earn a bit of money too.

That’s what I cover in my new article on freelance writing on Garden and Hearth. It includes tips on how to write for your readers.