Writing Inrochester

One of the first things you should establish is when is the right time to write. This will be peculiar to you as everyone is different. Many people find that they are more productive, more imaginative or more motivated at certain times of the day or week.

Make sure you look at your day and be aware of when these times are for you. It could be the morning, or it could be late at night. Whichever it is, you will need to harness your preference and make use of the most productive times if you are to succeed. This is particularly important for creative writing, but less so for technical writing, for example.

Although you will want to harness your productivity and creativity, it is important that you set achievable goals for yourself. You should understand your own writing output potential. Expecting to write huge amounts of text and then only succeeding in lesser amounts will serve only to demotivate you. Understand your own capacity to write and you will be able to control your output. Remember, for many people, output and quality may be dependent upon each other. Increasing quantity can sometimes come at the expense of the quality of your writing.

Of equal importance for many people, is where to do your writing. The environment you are in may significantly affect the amount of, and quality of, your writing. Ensure that the environment you choose allows you to concentrate and free your mind. If you are heavily distracted or in the wrong atmosphere, you will find writing more difficult and less enjoyable.

The environment you prefer may differ depending upon the type of writing. For example you may need somewhere quiet and inspiring for creative writing, whereas technical writing generally requires an office environment with space to lay out documentation and drawings; less conducive to relaxation.
Make sure you set yourself up somewhere comfortable, with as few distractions as possible. Don’t get too comfortable though: you still want to work, not sleep!

Paul Docherty has over 13 years experience of technical and business related writing, as well project managing complex technical writing projects. More free practical tips for writing can be seen at freewritingadvice.com freewritingadvice.com

Following are three ways to increase your freelance income during the holidays.

1. Holiday Cards: Because it’s the holidays, most people open mail that seems like a holiday card. This alone gives you a leg up, eg, the potential client OPENED your mail.

Inside include a holiday greeting, of course, and an invitiation for them to try your services. Including a holiday discount or coupon is a nice incentive.

To increase your chances of having them call you, pile on the amenities – eg, last minute service, late hours, discounts for future orders, etc.

2. Be Generous: As the holidays are all about giving, take this chance to show your business’ generous side. Eg, let clients know that you donate a certain part of your proceeds from projects to a local charity.

Or, even better, tell them that you will donate a percentage of any order they place with you to a charity of their choice in THEIR name. Be sure to spell out the benefits of this kind of PR long-term. You could even tell them that you’ll throw in a free press release and post in on one of the free PR sites like PRWeb.com for them.

Helping a business get FREE PR – alll for just giving your services a try? Ingenious!

3. Be Proactive: What I mean by this is, let businesses know that you are thinking about their needs beyond the holiday.

Lay out a marketing campaign that shows how you can increase their business by X% in the next year.

This will involve a little research, but, BECAUSE of the effort you put into it, you will stand out to clients, and they will be much more likely to remember you.

For example, I target realtors and mortgage brokers with my freelance writing services. An idea that occurred to me (I simply don’t have time to implement it though) is to do a “State of the Market” report.

Pulling together a 10-12 page report would be very easy. This kind of research would be very valuable to realtors because in it, I would outline specifics like interest rates, foreclosures, what sold the most, what sold the least, future “hot” markets, etc. That way, they would know where to target their marketing dollars.

I guarantee you, if you spent a solid week pulling together a report like this for a niche market and distributed it as a free e-book, you will knock the competition out of the water.

Why? Because most are not willing to spend time putting together a report like this for “no pay.” The reason no pay is in quotation marks is because the payoff long-term for your business could be HUGE.

As a matter of fact, in the 1980s Barbara Corcoran of the powerful real estate agency, The Corcoran Group, built her company using just this method.

In short, she wrote and published a report on the real estate market in New York. She dubbed it “The Corcoran Report.” Once she wrote it, she sent it to reporters at The New York Times. When they needed a quote about real estate in New York, who do you think they called? Her, of course.

This report got mentioned in the coveted real estate section one week. That began her meteoric rise to the top of the NYC real estate market. She had, in fact, branded herself with this published report. It is published annually and is a “bible” of the NYC real estate market – and also a couple of other places like Miami.

FYI, she went on to sell her company for upwards of 70 miillion dollars to Cendant in 2001 – and she’s only in her mid-50s (plenty of time to enjoy the dough!).

The holidays are an excellent time to bring in new business – if you’re willing to think creatively and work when the competition is sipping eggnogg! By the time the competition is thinking about marketing again, you’ll be busy reaping the benefits of the marketing you did DURING the season, not after it.

May be reprinted with the following, in full: Yuwanda Black is the publisher of InkwellEditorial.com: THE business portal for and about the editorial and creative industries. First-hand freelance success stories, e-courses, job postings, resume tips, advice on the business of freelancing, and more! Launch a Profitable Freelance Writing Career in 30 Days or Less — Guaranteed! Log on to InkwellEditorial.com to learn how.

CLIENTS

I’m thankful for clients.

I’m thankful for clients – who pay.

I’m thankful for clients – who pay on time.

I’m thankful for clients – who pay what I’m worth.

I’m thankful for clients – who pay their thanks to me.

I’m thankful for clients – who realize my value.

I’m thankful for clients – who have ideas.

I’m thankful for clients – who have no idea.

I’m thankful for clients – who know when to give up their ideas.

I’m thankful for clients – who know what they want.

I’m thankful for clients – who know when they don’t know what they want.

I’m thankful for clients – who let me do my job.

I’m thankful for clients – who realize writing IS a job.

I’m thankful for clients – who realize writing is MY job.

ME

I’m thankful for the gift of writing.

I’m thankful for the gift of writing – for a living.

I’m thankful for the gift of writing – words that matter.

I’m thankful for the gift of writing – just for me.

I’m thankful for the gift of writing – love notes to those who matter.

I’m thankful for the gift of writing – editorials that change people’s minds.

I’m thankful for the gift of writing – to help others.

I’m thankful for the gift of writing – down what I’m thankful for.

FRIENDS

I’m thankful for friends – who realize I write for a living.

I’m thankful for friends – who don’t ask me to work for free.

I’m thankful for friends – who don’t tell me to “get a real job.”

I’m thankful for friends – who pick up the tab during dry spells.

FAMILY

I’m thankful for family – who respect my working hours.

I’m thankful for family – who encouraged me to purse my dream.

I’m thankful for family – who ignore me when I’m on deadline.

I’m thankful for family – who know I love them, even when I’m on deadline.

I’m thankful for family – who realize that my computer really is a person to me.

I’m thankful for family – who know I’m a professional, even in my fuzzy slippers.

DEADLINES

I’m thankful for deadlines – that pass.

I’m thankful for deadlines – that pass with pay.

MONEY WISH LIST

I’m thankful for checks;

I’m thankful for checks – that come in the mail,

I’m thankful for checks – that come in the mail on time;

I’m thankful for checks – that come in the mail on time in my name;

I’m thankful for “notification of payment received” emails from PayPal;

I’m thankful for bank lines of credit;

I’m thankful for bank lines of credit – in my name

I’m thankful for bills that don’t come;

I’m thankful for bills that don’t come – in my name;

I’m thankful for bills that are paid;

I’m thankful for bills that are paid – on time;

I’m thankful for bills that are paid on time – in my name.

WISH LIST FOR CLIENTS

I wish for vodka shots before talking to unreasonable clients;

bottles of tequila to share with good clients;

a moonshine hangover to nonpaying clients; and

a three-martini introduction to new clients.

WORK

I’m thankful for work.

I’m thankful for work – that matters.

I’m thankful for work – that I love.

I’m thankful for work – that I love that pays.

May be reprinted with the following, in full: Yuwanda Black is the publisher of InkwellEditorial.com/ InkwellEditorial.com: THE business portal for and about the editorial and creative industries. First-hand freelance success stories, e-courses, job postings, resume tips, advice on the business of freelancing, and more! Launch a Profitable Freelance Writing Career in 30 Days or Less — Guaranteed! Log on to InkwellEditorial.com to learn how.

Copywriting for the web is a very interesting and challenging job. The copy you write can be read by millions of people. This adds to the over all thrill of creating some piece of art. If you want to be a copy writer for the web, you should follow a step by step approach. First of all, you need to know your self. Do you have this talent? If you feel that you can be good at writing for the web, you move to the next step. Judge your self critically.

You must know your strengths and weaknesses as a writer. Some of the people are good at creating fantasies while others are better explaining scientific theories to others. Find the dimensions in which you think you can excell. Having done that you need to find the options to write. There are many ways of doing it. Search the web for paid copywriting jobs. There are literally thousands of those. You can find few platforms which can offer you such jobs. Find the plat forms and choose those which you think are the most authentic ones.

These platforms will help you in finding some copywriting assignments for your self. After this, once you have the assignments, you actually start off with creative writing. Be sure that you know the requirements of the assignments. Some of the copywriting for the web is SEO oriented. Other options are of writing articles or blogs. Discuss the specifications in detail with your client. Note the word count. Start planning your copy. List down the points you want to discuss in your copy. Jolt them down. The final step is to expand those points into paragraphs while using a reasonably good selection of words.

Do you want to learn more about how I do it? I have just completed my brand new guide to article marketing success, ‘Your Article Writing and Promotion Guide‘

Download it free here:

Writing articles is an excellent way for you to get free publicity. The techniques for writing articles are numerous and beyond the scope of this article. That is why writing articles are one of the most utilized Internet marketing media today. Many marketers know that writing articles are great and powerful methods to marketing online. Although writing articles are very easy to do once you know how, getting someone to show you the tricks can be the hard part. Both the press release and writing articles are two important steps on the road to internet marketing success. I think speaking and writing articles are effective ways to keep your name out there. Writing articles are one of the oldest forms of advertising on the internet.

A quality web site should contain at least some original content. Articles make great keyword-rich content for your site. Duplicate content is penalized in the Google search engine results and many other search engines are following. Creating effective web content is a skill that is built over time and experience. Good articles are content rich. The best kept secret of traffic is still the secret of good content. Because content is still superior on the internet, writing articles provides you with a major piece of leverage online. Providing the content the search engines need is a virtual gold mine for entrepreneurs. Content is superior, this will never change on the internet. Writing web content is much like writing articles. Many people don’t realize that a website needs good content to work. Try to focus most of your time getting good content for your web site.

Here are some article writing tips. Article containing guidelines and tips for writing articles, online magazines, white papers, tutorials, educational and corporate are excellent articles to write. Here are some other writing tips to increase traffic to your site. If you don’t like writing paragraphs, you could make it a ‘Tips’ article, here is an example, 5 ways to improve your golf swing, then list the 5 good ways. The following are some good tips to master the technique of writing articles. Create a list of keywords your target audience would use to find information on your topic.

Many successful Internet marketers have found out that one of the best ways to drive traffic to their websites is by writing articles. One of the best ways to get traffic to your site is by writing articles and placing the link to your site in the author’s bio-box at the end. Nevertheless, there are ways to promote your website and increase your web traffic without spending anything. The second best way to bring free traffic to your website is writing articles. The simple answer is that it takes time to write articles, submit them and get targeted traffic to their websites. Turn words into traffic is something everyone can do to grow and expand their online business by writing articles. You can get reasonable amount of traffic by writing articles. Ever wonder how some people seem to generate traffic at the click of a button. Don’t forget about all those back links to your website, this is very important when building link popularity. Online articles may be the single best way to get traffic to your web site.

Writing articles are a great way of positioning your online business. One key point to remember, one article will not do it you need to continually submit articles to all of article sites. One strategy to use is to submit one article per week. By the end of the year you would have submitted 52 articles.

David Marc Fishman is the owner of myarticlezine.com myarticlezine.com. myarticlezine.com Submit articles for Free.

Selling Ideas

Where some people find selling impossible, others could sell balloon-modelling kits to porcupines. Don’t worry if you fit into the first group, because that’s where most people are. It’s normal to find yourself to be a little shaky when it comes down to standing up in front of your boss and the shareholder committee. Whether you’re delivering a financial report, new marketing scheme, or a brilliant new idea, you should strategize using the ‘Five P Rule’.

Ppppp…peas in a Pod

An effective presentation should encompass the “Five P’s.”

Product - Objective

You must be clear of your objectives from the start. Whatever the topic, you should always remember that you are selling an idea. What do they need to know? List all the questions your audience will have. Endeavour to answer them over the course of the presentation.

Be clear, concise and don’t waffle. Don’t repeat material, reinforce it with slides instead. Bullet point a summary of each section you cover.

Preparation

Prepare with plenty of time to spare. Research anything you need to know and ensure everything is correct. If you do it in a rush, you won’t be confident in your material. Nagging doubts take their toll and you will not be a convincing speaker.

When it comes to the performance itself, make sure you’re awake and fully-charged. Don’t drink too much caffeine (you’ll speak too quickly) and eat a good breakfast! If you’re not on the ball you’re likely to put them to sleep.

Practise

Practise so that you can speak with confidence. Don’t read from your notes. By all means, use bullet points on postcards, but if you start reading your audience will fall asleep!

If you’re practised you will be polished! Your auto-pilot will kick in, and you won’t have to think too hard – and you can focus on remaining clear and concise.

Presentation

Compose yourself. Make sure you’re smartly dressed. If you look professional half the battle is over. Keep slide-shows and PowerPoint simple. Images and illustrations are powerful – so only use them when necessary. They also allow you to keep track of yourself. It’s easy to skip points - if you have a slide show you will remain focused and structured.

Perform

Use eye-contact and smiles. It’s by far the best way to connect with you audience. You don’t need to be an entertainer, but you do need to work the audience! Open body language and eye contact make you seem honest, open and you will hold audience interest. Remember; it is all about confidence. Work through the Five P’s and you will be well prepared.

If you believe it, they’ll believe it.

George Chilton is an experienced Advertising and SEO copywriter at Herds of Words. He has fourteen years experience as a magician and public speaker and can be contacted at ezinearticles@herdsofwords.co.uk george@herdsofwords.co.uk.

Or come join the herd at herdsofwords.co.uk Herds of Words - Freelance Copywriters.

Ask an article marketer why they write articles, and they might say they do it to grow their business. But they would be wrong.

That’s the reason they engage in article marketing, but it’s not the reason they write articles — or at least, it shouldn’t be.

Article Marketing vs. Article Writing

The purpose of article marketing is to help you grow your business (by improving your search engine ranking, website traffic and overall web presence). The purpose of article writing is to inform, enlighten or educate your readers. Don’t confuse the two.

Article Marketing Thought-Process

When planning your article marketing program, think strategically. What are your overall marketing goals, and how do articles support them? How many articles will you write each week? How will you integrate your articles with your website or blog? What will your call-to-action be?

Article Writing Thought-Process

When writing your articles, think only of how you can help the reader. What valuable information do you have to share with them? How can you engage them, teach them, delight them or educate them?

What Not to Do

Don’t crank out articles just for the sake of attaching your website link at the end. This is often the path of the short-sighted article marketer. But in the long run, this will do you more harm than good. Weak articles will dilute your brand, erode your image, and lower your response rates.

Educate your readers with quality articles … that’s the path to article marketing success. Help your readers accomplish their goals, and you’ll be more likely to accomplish yours.

* Copyright 2006, Brandon Cornett. Reprint Rights: You may reprint this article as long as you leave all of the links active, do not edit the article in any way, and include the author’s note and byline.

Additional Resources
Brandon Cornett is the author of the “Agent’s Guide to Search Engine Visibility,” a comprehensive guide to armingyourfarming.com/search.html real estate SEO. You can view an interactive version of the SEO wagon wheel by visiting: armingyourfarming.com/knowledge/article43.php armingyourfarming.com/knowledge/article43.php

The 188 stage Hero’s Journey (Monomyth) is the template upon which the vast majority of successful stories and Hollywood blockbusters are based upon. In fact, ALL of the hundreds of Hollywood movies we have deconstructed (see URL below) are based on this 188 stage template.

Understanding this template is a priority for story or screenwriters. This is the template you must master if you are to succeed in the craft.

THERE IS ONLY ONE STORY

THE 188 STAGE HERO′S JOURNEY:

a) Attempts to tap into unconscious expectations the audience has regarding what a story is and how it should be told.

b) Gives the writer more structural elements than simply three or four acts, plot points, mid point and so on.

c) Gives you a tangible process for building and releasing dissonance (establishing and achieving catharses, of which there are usually four).

*****Using Magical Gifts*****

With the giving of Magical Gifts (that will aid the Hero’s Journey and help overcome obstacles) comes instruction in their use. In Straw Dogs (1971), Norman tells David to break the gun.

*****First Trial Inner Cave - Polarization*****

A number of things happen in the Inner Cave of the First Trial. One element is Polarization. In Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Bonnie and Blanche argue.

d) Tells you what to write. For example, at a certain stage of the story, the focus should be on the Call to Adventure and the micro elements within.

ABRIDGED TIPS, EXCERPTS AND EXAMPLES:

(simply go to www.clickok.co.uk for full details)

*****Crossing the Return Threshold*****

In The Godfather (1972), Tessio pulls Michael back to the Greater Antagonism (to settle all family business).

*****Master of the Two Worlds*****

In The Godfather (1972), Michael is both good and evil: he “settles all business” while accepting that he will be Godfather to Connie’s baby the baptism in the church; Carlo is taken care off / Sonny is revenged.

Learn more…

WRITE THAT SCREENPLAY!

The Complete 188 stage Hero’s Journey and other story structure templates can be found at clickok.co.uk/ clickok.co.uk/

The Managing Creativity and Innovation MBA dissertation, DIY creativity Audit, Powerpoint presentation and Good Idea generator software can be found at managing-creativity.com/ managing-creativity.com/

You can also receive a regular, free newsletter by entering your email address at this site.

Kal Bishop, MBA

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You are free to reproduce this article as long as no changes are made, the author’s name is retained and the link to our site URL remains active.

If you have ever in the past — or think you ever will in the future — angered your customers in some way, shape or form (whether your fault or not), and want to make things right with just a simple sales letter, then listen to this:

One of the most useful pieces of advice I ever heard when it comes to soothing angry customers, came from Dan Kennedy in one of his newsletters a few years back when he said,”it’s hard to be mad at someone who gives you ice cream.”

He was talking about how some airline had dropped the ball on the passengers, and to make up for it, they gave everyone free ice cream.

I’ve seen this in other areas, too. I know a person who saved her job after a terrible mistake simply by getting everyone at the office a pizza and donuts the next day.

The point?

It’s hard to be angry or mad at someone who does nice things for you. It’s actually how abusive people — even the ones who do truly evil things to other people — get away with their shenanigans for years.

And you know what?

It’s also how smart businesses soothe their customers anger when they mess up, too.

And one of the best ways to utilize this principal is with a simple “sales” letter.

All you have to do if you make a mistake — no matter what it is — is immediately send out a letter apologizing profusely. And…in addition to all your apologizing…you also give them a gigantic deal so unbelievably generous they can’t help but like you again.

Like for example, let’s say you sell a line of information products on making money.

If you want to get back on your list’s “good side” simply tell them they can pick any one of your products for 90% off and get another one free. Something to that effect. The idea is to offer them something they can’t refuse and will feel good about getting.

They win because they are getting a tremendous deal. You win because you keep the customer and maybe even make a little profit out of it.

If you’ve never had to put a customer “fire” out before, keep this article for future reference. If you ever do mess up, it can not only save you a lot of money — but it can possibly even make you money, too.

Ben Settle is a direct response copywriter and author of “The Copywriter’s Cheat Sheet” — which contains over 300 pages of advanced copywriting secrets and rare swipe file ads not easily found anywhere else. You can

The short story market often demands tight word counts from the writer. Here are some tips on how to keep that word count under control!

Short stories written specifically for inclusion in weekly or monthly magazines are a lucrative source of income for any writer. The pay rate per word is often high and the returns are good for the length of time devoted to any one story.

Yet this market has its own disciplines and one cardinal rule that aspiring writers must obey is the word count. This is the required number of words demanded by magazine editors for any story submitted and, whilst there may be some leeway, it generally isn’t great. For ‘five minute fiction’ type stories it may be as little as fifty words.

This discipline is often found by new writers to be one of the hardest to master. They write a story - and it may be a very good story - then find it is two or three hundred words ‘heavy’. I’ve done this myself many times when I started writing fiction and articles. It can be very disheartening to complete a story, sit back in satisfaction and hit the word count button only to see it ring up several hundred words ‘over the limit.’

How, I asked myself at the time, can I possibly reduce my story by that sort of length? Let’s face it, a ‘five minute fiction’ type story may only have a word length requirement of 1,000 words - to try and cut 1,300 down to 1,000 seemed to me, at that time in my writing career, a stark impossibility. How to do it?

That’s when I began to learn about things like wasted words. Although in this article I certainly don’t have space to discuss every aspect of this subject, at least I can list some of the worst culprits that new writers seem to use time and time again - like I did!

Many words and phrases rarely add anything to a sentence. Avoid these whenever you can. A very short list of some of these offenders:

Quite, very, extremely, as it were, moreover, it can be seen that, it has been indicated that, basically, essentially, totally, completely, therefore, it should be remembered that, it should be noted that, thus, it is imperative that, at the present moment in time.

These are fine in their place, but they often find their way into your writing with the sinister purpose of tempting you into the sin of padding your sentences.

I am convinced that the habit of padding sentences has at its root academic and, in particular, bureaucratic writing. Never have I seen one of these types of prose without the most outlandish and rambling sentences included - you probably know the sort of thing I mean. Such horrors as ‘It should continuously be remembered that’ and ‘Morover and not withstanding anything to the contrary, it has been previously indicated’ abound.

Since such letters are read by people in our ever-freer reading society, the tendency is to think that they are not only correct but also desirable within any sort of writing. Rubbish. Unless for effect, they should be excluded. Short stories are lean and fit, not bloated and slow.

S0 - how to ‘lean-off’ your story? Firstly check for any of the phrases above in the ‘list of offenders’. Strike them out. Next read through your story and ruthlessly delete any and every word that you can whilst still preserving grammatical sense. I guarantee that you’ll be amazed at the number that go.

Check in particular for adverbs and adjectives. I’m talking about sentences like ‘How would I know?’ he asked angrily. Much better is ‘How the hell should I know?’ The second sentence (without the adverb) implies anger in its use or words and is much stronger anyway - and shorter. In the same vein, ‘a very light wind′ should be ‘a breeze’. Not only are you saving wordage by adopting this correcting tactic, you are strengthening your writing.

When you have finished these tasks read your story again. If my own experience is anything to go by, not only will you have dumped those excess words to bring your story into its wordage ‘window’ but also you will almost find that it reads a lot better. Congratulations - you have just mastered a basic facet of self-editing!

In conclusion, just remember these few points:

The adjective is the enemy of the noun. (choose a stronger noun instead of using an adjective.)
The adverb is enemy of the verb. (Try to convey meaning via word usage instead of using an adverb.)
Do not use any of the list of ‘wasted words′ above.
Never use a long word, or two words, when a single short word fits the bill.

Keep these four points in mind and watch your short story writing improve!

Steve Dempster writes fiction and informative articles for the web. howtobeawriter.co.uk Learn more about how to kickstart your writing career howtobeawriter.co.uk here!