I am a writer.

My voice is my fingertips, when I type out my poetry, prose, books, blogs and articles. Without my voice, I am a body without a soul.

Without writing, I am nothing.

Everything that I am or every will be stems from those simple words: I am a writer.

Being a writer, I’ve had occasion to write things that might not be popular, true things that might not be flattering.

Hypothetical Scenario: You are a writer, and you write something. You are contacted by someone with an offer of payment to remove the thing you wrote, because that thing, though true, puts something in a very negative light.

The amount of money is, to say the least, considerable, and by far much, much more than you could get selling that piece of writing.

Do you do it?

Can your silence be bought?

Several years ago, before I decided to lose my sanity and do for a living that which I already was inside: writing/er, I worked for about four weeks at a Christian broadcasting station, as a bookkeeping manager. This station was, well, odd. I try not to judge religions, and while I live with the Tao philosophy, I’m most closely resembling a Christian in ‘faith’.

And these Christians weren’t anything like Christians I’d ever known.

No judgement here, nope, none: they were weird.

First, they didn’t celebrate Christmas. I was told this before I was hired. They said I would not get Christmas Day off work and I had to be okay with that before they hired me. They said you didn’t have to be Christian to work there, and in fact, there was a Jewish lady who worked in the main office. Even if you were Christian, you didn’t have to be their faith.

There were a few other things they said too, but there is one thing that really stood out to me. Well, two actually, but they were so similar.

On my third day there, I said something, and one of the other ladies working in the office asked me, “How’d you manage to make that happen?”

I shrugged, and said, “I dunno. Just lucky, I guess.”

Now, this is a comment that is more of a colloquialism. When one says it, I’m not sure one truly has taken the time to sit down and analyze and determine if they truly believe in luck and if luck was what resulted in the occurrence. Still, I nonchalantly said it.

My supervisor, the office managing director, came up behind me and said, “We don’t do luck here.”

Real snotty like.

Another time, I said something about Murphy’s Law. Now come on, do you know anyone who practices Murphy’s Law as a religion?

Same supervisor said, “We don’t DO Murphy’s Law here.”

Okay, to be fair to me now, I’d had it up to here with this lady, and her oh so holier than though attitude and her no one can do anything right snottiness, and her… well, you get the idea.

So what did I do?

I responded by saying, “Well, you may not do Murphy’s Law, but he damn sure will do you.”

I should have held my tongue. I should have stayed silent.

This was a long time ago. I was younger, cockier, stupider, braver… and that job paid 14 bucks per hour and I was a single mom.

(shaking head) I got fired. Well, not really fired. See, they had hired me through a temp agency, and they simply didn’t ‘extend’ my contract.

Yeah.

So, what is the price you will accept for your silence?

Well, for me, I know it’s not 14 bucks per hour with benefits.

But that’s not the real silence. When I was ‘not extended’, they called me into the office and asked me to sign a non-disclosure agreement. The agreement stated that I would not reveal anything I had learned or seen while I worked there.

I think the big thing they wanted me to keep quiet about what how much money those ‘donate now to keep us on the air because we’re so poor’ church shows REALLY make on an average day.

Let’s put it this way – they made more in donations on an average day than I used to make in a corporate job in a month, by almost double.

Uh huh. Poor church my tooting behind.

So do you think I signed the agreement?

I did. But not before I asked, “And if I break the agreement, what, you’ll send some thugs to my house to break my legs?”

I think she was glad they didn’t extend my contract.

So the question: what is the value of your silence?

If you’ll excuse me, I have to go hide in the bathtub now until I’m sure the Christian thugs from the television station think I’m not home and go back to… wherever Christian leg breaking thugs go.

Love and stuff,
Michy

Popularity: 1%

So last night, a friend and colleague and fellow freelance writers, Jennifer Walker, apologized to me for something that happened a few months ago. I laughed, but appreciated her apology, even though she didn’t need to do it. See, what happened is, Jennifer is a copy editor, and she’s moving up into the world of developmental editing, and I personally think she’s quite good at it. She has a keen eye and seems adept at keeping a storyline together and seeing those holes and where things unravel.

So one day, I asked her to read part of a novel in progress I was writing. She did, and she gave me some feedback on it. Her feedback was dead on, spot on, right on target.

Unfortunately, it stalled me in the writing process for a time. Once I finally got back on track, I learned a very valuable lesson from this experience.

Every year, when I do the NaNoWriMo challenge, I think the #1 piece of advice they send out to us crazy writers is: Just Write!

This is what I learned. I used to think I did not take criticism on my writing well. I have since learned that once I have finished writing, there’s an emotional detachment that comes back between me and the piece.

Once I’ve distanced myself from a completed piece of work, I take criticism and suggestion great! It’s when I’m still emotionally married to a piece that I can’t handle it, because then I start second guessing what has been churning in my head and heart to put down on paper (or in my case, the computer screen) and then I stall in the story.

So, if you’re going to let your friends and family or your colleagues or writing peers read your stories while you’re writing them, especially if you’re writing longer works such as novels, if you need to get friends to help you through the writing process, tell them not to critique it, unless they are saying, “It’s great, keep writing!”

A well-intentioned comment, even a positive one that goes in depth, “I liked when she did such and such and it was so out of character for her!” could end up making you second guess, “Hey, did I really make her do something out of character?” and then the stalling starts.

The main thing here is: write first. Write. Write. Write. Leave your editor in the closet, buy some chains and lock that editor up. JUST WRITE. Then, when it’s all finished being written, walk away from it. Wait. Wait. Wait. How ya feeling? Wait. NOW let the editor out of the closet!

On another note, my announced Helium challenge starts tomorrow, Sunday, February 1st. The good news is, I just made payout the other day, so sometime today before I go to bed tonight, I will payout and we will get to start my Helium challenge with $0.00. That’ll make it much easier for me to keep up with the challenge!

I hope you guys will be checking in. I will do my best, if I post nothing else, to post my daily stats at the end of every day or the next morning.

Here’s what I will be telling you guys:

Starting Balance: $0.00
Ending Balance: $x.xx

Number of regular title articles written:
Number of empty title articles written:
Number of marketplace articles written (if any):

Number of marketplace articles purchased (if any):

Number of rates complete (and how long I spent rating):

Total time spent working on Helium:

And of course, the Helium stats that I will cut and paste:

Like I said, I’ll try my best to update this daily… as we go along, if you have any questions, let me know!

Wish me luck! Let’s see what you can get out of going full steam on Helium.com!

Keep writing!

Love and stuff,
Michy
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Popularity: 1%

Okay, so AC finally gave the official word on the top 100 winners, stating that it required a minimum of 12 articles published in 2008 and that the winners were figured on the total of page views for articles published in 2008.

Okay, fair enough, because my page views from the articles I published in just 2008 would not have been enough to include me in the top 100. I do hope I make the top 1000 this year, and think I might have enough to do that, but no, I did not belong in the top 100. I haven’t written nearly as much for AC this year as I have in the past, and a lot of the articles I did write for them were partner calls, and would not have received page views.

Now, that said, I can truly say that those who received the top 100 should be very proud and I’m very proud of them and excited for them. It’s a great thing to be recognized for being at the top of such a very large site. Kudos to you all!

Now, to AC I say – I truly wish you would have told us this BEFORE handing the award out. EVEN YOUR OWN EMPLOYEES did not know what the criteria was AFTER the award had ALREADY been handed out!

That’s not right.

That’s piss-poor communication for the company, for the CPs. Had I known that this was the criteria, I would have spent more time writing NEW holiday articles for Christmas, Halloween, and New Years instead of spending that time promoting the articles I wrote last year and refreshing them to get my page views up. One of those articles hit over 30,000 page views after I started promoting it (My new year’s article).

When was it published? December 30th, 2007. It had about 7k page views when I started promoting it, and in less than a month 1/2, it had earned over 20,000 page views.

Had I known this article would be just two days short of being included in the ‘top 100′ contest, I would have written a new article and put my 20,000 page views worth of effort into one that would be eligible.

So, to AC, I say – get your crap together and communciate to your CPs so these things don’t happen. If you guys were a traditional job, I would have quit already.

Fortunately, you’re not a traditional job, and when I get miffed, I can blow off on my blogs and walk away and come back when I feel like it. That is one thing I do like about AC. It waits for you. In fact, there’s a lot of things I do like about AC.

I just wish they respected the CPs enough to communicate the things they need to so CPs can be successful on the site. But I think that’s asking a lot when their own employees don’t even know.

Okay, enough of that… I am not upset about not winning the award, since I know I didn’t meet the criteria. What I’m upset about is the fact that I easily could have met the criteria, had I or anyone else known what the criteria was in the first place.

Now, that said, onward and upward… keep writing!

Love and stuff,
Michy

PS: I can’t wait to see the shiny gold stars on the top 100’s profiles! I’ll have to go on a scavenger hunt to congratulate everyone who made it!

Popularity: 1%

I’m in the middle of finishing up the concept cover for the first anthology and trying to get author packets out, so I don’t have a lot of time to blog about this, so just a quick post.

The short story contest for January has been extended two weeks!

The new deadline is Valentine’s Day, February 14th, by noon, Central time!

I hope this gives everyone a chance to finish up or work on a special story, or maybe even write another one!

Best of luck to everyone, and if you have any questions, visit the forum.

Keep writing!

Love and stuff,
Michy
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Popularity: unranked

Well, yesterday, a lot of folks popped up on both my forum and AC’s forum saying they were emailed that they were in the top 100 content producers for 2008.

That is pretty stinking cool!

I thought, after seeing several of those CPs with TOTAL page views around 100-200k, that surely my 700k plus page views in 2008 would garner me a spot.

I waited for my email, but it never came.

(pout)

I checked my spam box, and other email accounts. Nothing.

(double pout)

There’s speculation, though, that perhaps it only includes articles that were published in 2008.

I can’t say I’m not a little bit disappointed. Aren’t my efforts to promote my content and keep page views coming back to older articles as important to AC as publishing new content?

You see, instead of writing new Christmas articles this year, I spent a considerable amount of time promoting and sharing the ones I wrote last year. Instead of writing a new New Year’s article this year, I spent time promoting and refreshing the one I wrote last year.

AC makes more money overall when they get articles that continue to perform, year after year, because they get a return on their investment.

My articles from two years ago are still performing and I can refresh them, promote them, drive them back up on the front page of google and bring more page views in. When that happens, AC makes more money from revenue on those articles, and then then recover their upfront payment and move into pure profit.

Whereas new articles are going to take a little time to make a profit for AC, my older articles are keeping up in page views and exceeding the revenue expended for AC.

So why aren’t my page views this year as important as someone who is new to AC’s page views this year?

If I had known the criteria beforehand, I could have made the choice to write new articles for the holidays rather than to promote older ones and make more money for AC.

It seems counterproductive to me to reward quantity of articles over quantity of page views and quality of writing and promoting.

Then again, maybe my ego is a little bruised or my feelings a little hurt here.

I have given a lot of myself and my time to AC, and it hurts to be ‘forgotten’ in something where it seems I should have been included.

Maybe I’ll buy them a fancy schamncy calculator for a gag gift.

I’m sure I’ll get over it…. but it still upsets me as of this morning.

Ah, ego and pride – ugly combinations. But then again, if they overlooked me unintentionally, can’t that mean others were overlooked too?

Still, I am so totally stoked for those who did win… and so this morning I will meditate on that and try to get myself into a place of gratitude so I can properly be excited for my colleagues on friends on AC who are being recognized.

Congrats to all!

Good luck to everyone for the Top 1000 and the final PMAs. I wish everyone could receive an award!

Love and stuff,
Michy

ETA: So they are now saying on their blog and in the forum that it’s total page views for 2008, not just published articles from 2008. That means I was excluded when I should have been included, by my calculations.

I wish I knew why this was bothering me so much. (shrug)

ETA-again: I forgot about the change in the upfront payment amount, so my actual page views for 2008 were around 600k instead of 730k. That is still much higher than the 100-250k total page views of some of the folks who did get the email. I’m not by any means knocking those who worked hard and did such a fantastic job – they most definitely should be rewarded and acknowledged. I’m just saying – I should be too, because I earned it and worked hard for it as well.

Popularity: 3%

Have you guys seen these ads for ‘ambulance chasing’ attorneys on television? They’re the ones that say if you’ve been a VICTIM of something, they MIGHT be able to help you get LOTS AND LOTS of money.

Recently, the ads have changed, and now they all are starting with: “I am a non-attorney spokesperson.”

As a writer, I tend to laugh at terminology, particularly legalese, because, well, at one time I was on the path to be an attorney myself. I find it all so amusing.

Non-attorney.

Hey, I’m a non-attorney.

I love when people tell us what they are not.

I personally think all ambulance chasing attorneys should have to start their commercials with, “I am a slimeball and am looking to take your money from you…. now that that’s out of the way, If you’ve been a victim of….”

But I’m digressing. The point of the blog was to bitch about the way some commercials play on emotions like fear.

Someone on one of my blogs once said to me that commercials usually do play on fear – our fears. They try to sell us a product to make us look better, because we fear we don’t look good enough. They sell us a product to make our breath fresher, because we’re afraid of having bad breath.

So they take the commercials to the ‘worst and best’ case scenarios, and the message is: we have this problem, and they have the solution, and if we use their solution, we’ll be like this person.

I guess that’s why I prefer commercials that are funny.

Anyway, that’s what I’m changing this blog to: commercials I love, commercials I hate, commercials that I hate that I love and commercials I love to hate.

Stick around and come back for more!

Love and stuff,
Michy

Popularity: 1%

Quick word of Kudos going out today to a great change Helium.com made in the ratings. The site was down this morning for quite some time, and when it finally came back live, I was once again impressed with a positive move in the right direction.

I know I complain about Helium some and the ratings issues, but today, Helium responded to the issues I and others have expressed about the ratings. While it’s not a perfect solution, it is clear evidence that the powers that be at Helium.com are absolutely listening to what the site members are saying and are doing their best to accommodate us while keeping the vision they have for the future of that site.

So you’re wondering what they did?

Here it is. When you log into Helium and go to your member account area, you will now see this:

Rating stars represent the higher of your two rating scores, either 30-day or 90-day.

In other words, if you lose a star, drop down due to some change that JUST happened or if you did poorly awhile back but are getting better, you aren’t going to be penalized as much as you would have with the old system.

Also, for new folks, and even those who have to take a break, there is now this:

To gain you first Rating star, you need only complete 10 quality rates in the past 30 days. (A quality rate is defined as a score of 75% or more.)

(read more about it here)

Not only that, but they are now also showing competitive and noncompetitive percentages and other useful information.

This is definitely a step in the right direction.

If you haven’t been to Helium in awhile, go check it out. There’s been a lot of changes, and you might feel more favorable to the site. If you have never signed up at Helium, what are you waiting for? Ask me or someone you know for an invitation and go and sign up!

Remember, in February, I’m doing an entire month of working Helium.com full time to see what the earning potential on the site when you work it really is and reporting that back here to you guys. Be sure to join me for the ride beginning February 1!

For now, ya’ll have a great day, and keep writing!

Love and stuff,
Michy
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Popularity: 2%

I get asked this time and time again, and I cry inside every time I see struggling and new CPs mention in the forums that they are ‘promoting their hearts out’ and it’s not doing any good.

I’m going to break a long-standing myth about writing on Associated Content: you don’t need to actively promote your content to get exceptional page views and performance bonuses.

Really.

Let me explain.

If you are promoting every single article you write the exact same way, you are POLLUTING the internet with USELESS links that mean nothing to anyone, and will do more harm to your articles than good.

Promoting yourself on social networks is great, and promoting your content on appropriate social networks is also great – but there’s two caveats here: 1) I said APPROPRIATE and 2) this only works if you are active on those social networks for what those networks are.

For example, I’m on Myspace here (feel free to add me as a friend if you haven’t already). I have been on Myspace for many years. I have over 4000 friends and until I started deleting some of them, I had over 1500 blog posts. I also post bulletins, respond to comments, leave comments, and have a few ‘regulars’ whose blogs I read and comment on.

I don’t do a bulletin for every article I write. People on Myspace probably don’t care about the article I wrote about how to save money on heating bills by using your fireplace, but I’ll bet you money that on a blogging social network, they are might interested in my article about Who Owns Blog Comments?

But if I had posted the fireplace article and then the next day posted the blog comments article, it’s likely someone from the day before remembered my name or picture and blew me off. If I posted new links every single day, or even every other day, or to every article every time, eventually I’d end up ignored, and I’d totally be wasting my time.

On the other hand, in a dicussion on MyLot, someone was asking how to lower their heating bills because natural gas was so gosh darned expensive, and that was the perfect place to post my fireplace energy bill article… but I sure wouldn’t put my FinallyFast.com article in that discussion, now would I?

However, my FinallyFast.com article the perfect type of article to put on a site, like, let’s say, DIGG or Slashdot, because these sites have specific interest in and categories for tech stuff.

Do you get what I’m getting at here?

Plus, if you put a link to every article on every social networking site, every time you write an article, and that’s ALL you do on that site, guess what? YOU’RE A SPAMMER!

If you’re not going to actively participate in the environment of that particular social networking you have no right to spam your link to your content there, and not only are you spamming, BUT you’re giving yourself and AC a bad name by doing so.

So am I saying not to promote your content at all?

Not at all! But what I am saying is to be selective and intuitive about it. If you belong to forums, use your articles in your signature (if it’s within the site’s rules to do so) and also use your article links to answer a question someone has pertaining to the topic. Never just drop the link, but a brief explanation and then a comment like, “I wrote an article about it if you want to learn more…’ will go a lot farther than putting up a DIGG that only 4 people actually DIGG!

And quite frankly, here’s the honest truth about web content and promotion… if you’re a website owner and you sell a product or service, you need to promote and market your website. If you are a content writer, you do not.

Content, informational articles like we write on Associated Content, should be well written, properly optimized with good LSI, and written about things people are searching for. If you do this right, the articles will organically and virally gain readers over time, and as the readership grows on your older content, so will the readers on your newer stuff, and it becomes exponential.

100 articles is the first ’sweet spot’, and I’m finding once I crossed the 1 million page view mark, I couldn’t slow down my page views now if I tried, and I haven’t put up anything new in over a month and a half now, and I only have 340 some-odd articles total!

The key to astronomical page views is not promoting your content though. It’s promoting YOU first, promoting YOUR AC PROFILE second, and then writing quality content people are searching for in a way that they can find it, and at the very end of that list is promoting the content on appropriate sites in appropriate venues for the appropriate situation.

How can I say this so positively? Because I write on many sites, not just on AC, as well as on many blogs and multiple websites of my own and I know beyond any doubt that you can’t force page views and readership by promoting. I have articles that have 20-50,000 page views EACH that I never promoted anywhere, and then I have articles I promoted my ass off on that won’t even break 500 total views.

It’s the writing, the topic, the public interest, the SEO and LSI, the timeliness… the whatever… but it’s most definitely NOT the promoting.

Spend MORE TIME learning how to write well, how to proofread well, how to pick topics well to align with internet user’s interests and make them searchable and findable, and spend less time promoting.

and… write more. The more you write, the more people will stumble upon you too. That’s advice I could take myself, right now, since I haven’t been writing all that much.

Lastly, don’t underestimate the power of feeds. RSS feeds are a super easy way for people who spend a lot of time on the web (like I do) to put all the things they like together in one easy to access place in an interface that’s like your familiar email inbox, and can click on what they want and discard what’s not of interest to them, without having to go to a website, wait for it to load, click off, go somewhere else, etc.

Submit your AC RSS feed to every RSS feed submission site that you can. You only have to do this ONE TIME and you’re in there for as long as the site exists or you comply with their TOS. Just google ‘rss submission sites’ or ‘free rss directories’. It will take a little time to do this, but once you do, you’ll never have to do it again, and ever article you publish will get automatic backlinks from the published and/or syndicated feeds on this directories/sites.

Any other questions?

Keep writing!

Love and stuff,
Michy

PPS: One last thing to toss in. You see those links in this blog post? Do you have a blog, personal or professional or both? When you make related words in your blog post linkable to the things you are writing about, you are adding off-page optimization to your articles, and giving a different readership a chance to see your articles, as well as catching new readers who stumble upon your blogs who might not have found your content otherwise!

ALWAYS get a link to your article up on an indexed blog site (blogger/blogspot, wordpress, typepad, etc.) as soon as you have a link to do so, because that cause Google to index you faster and index you higher too!

Read more about off-page optimization here: http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/194164/optimize_your_search_engine_rankings.html?cat=15

Popularity: 1%

Making Waves by Cassandra King

As Reviewed By Joy Cagil

Making Waves is a novel that focuses on the themes of disappointment and repressed desires. The childlike Donnette, a beautician, and her husband Tim live in a small town in Zion County, Alabama. After Tim’s recent accident that has left him crippled, Donnette becomes the only breadwinner in the family, since her aunt has left her an old house and a beauty shop, which Donnette names Making Waves. Tim used to be the town’s football hero and its pride and joy, but the accident has disappointed the townsfolk and has done away with Tim’s dreams of becoming a national football star.

Taylor Dupree, who had been Tim’s best friend until the accident and ran away from town after it, returns to Zion County. Taylor wants to make amends for leaving the site of the accident that left Tim crippled. Taylor’s road to redemption and Tim’s efforts to regain his confidence and self-respect clash with the misunderstandings of the town’s people. Tim, who once gave up art for football, paints a sign for Donnette’s beauty shop, and from then on, he starts recovering emotionally. Donnette, already bewildered in the middle of all the gossip and commotion, finds out a shocking truth between these two men at the end.

The idea that what is broken can be repaired and even a funeral can serve to bring people together is quite refreshing, and the characters in this book shine, even the scheming, gossiping, and manipulative small-town women like Taylor’s aunt Della, and Ellis, Taylor’s cousin Sonny’s girlfriend. The plot is woven with sometimes tragic and sometimes amusing twists and turns, with humor aptly understated, and the four different viewpoints that tell the story enhance the enjoyment of its reading by granting insight into the thinking processes of different characters. The revelation at the end can be surprising and even shocking for many readers, and the ending feels a bit rushed. Still, the pace of the book is interesting, and the story is entertaining.

Making Waves is 304 pages with ISBN-10: 0786887931 and ISBN-13: 978-0786887934.

Cassandra King is from Alabama, and she is a former English and creative writing teacher with essays and stories in various publications. At this date, she has four novels in print: Same Sweet Girls, The Sunday Wife, Making Waves, and Queen of Broken Hearts. She lives in South Carolina with her husband Pat Conroy who is also a highly successful author.

This book is humorous, tragic, and easily readable. It is well worth the time of any reader for its eccentric characters and colorful dialogue.

About the Reviewer:

Joy Cagil is an author http://www.Writing.Com which is a site for Creative Writing

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Joy_Cagil
http://EzineArticles.com/?Making-Waves-by-Cassandra-King&id=1751390

Popularity: unranked

In a previous blog, I talked about some ways to proof and check your writing before you submit it for publication, either online or for print, but today, I want to talk a little bit about easy and fast ways to proofread, particularly for those of you who are submitting web content.

I know that web content doesn’t pay as much as print content, and as such, you have to increase your volume of articles written in order to bring in the same amount of money, or sometimes even less money. Now, I cannot stress the importance of branching out and trying to break into bigger markets enough, whenever you can spare the time. However, if you’re needing to speed up your submission and writing time, one of the most time-consuming activities is proofing your copy.

Unfortunately, a lot of the time, writers who do web copy will take the time to do the research and the time to write, but they fizzle out once it’s written and forget that properly proofing your copy and editing it is what is going to make the writer look good. It won’t matter how well you write, how good your copy is, how important the information is, if the reader can’t make it past the first few sentences or paragraphs because a typo that should have been caught gets their attention.

Most readers expect a few mistakes now and then from web copy writers. In fact, it’s common knowledge that the very nature of the internet itself lends to a acceptance of ‘reduced quality’ over print in anything from articles to ebooks. However, if you plan to grow as a writer, remember the internet also lends itself to a state of permanency of everything you put out there.

Ten years from now, in your writing career, how will you feel if this quick turnover for a buck articles still are associated with you?

Let’s look at five super easy steps to take to proofread your copy without taking too much additional time.

1. Learn to Write Better

I know, seems counterproductive to proofreading, right? Not really. Taking a few minutes every day to read about writing, learn some grammar rules, visit THIS BLOG and learn something knew and commit it to memory every day will actually speed up your writing eventually. The better you know the rules or writing, spelling, grammar and sentence construction, not only will you write faster, but you will also write better, requiring less time to correct errors.

The few minutes you spend every day to learn something new about writing will make a difference in your writing over time, and you’ll find yourself retaining more, writing better, and finding fewer things to correct after you’ve written, making proofing your articles much faster!

2. Wait a Day, or Two

After you write an article, wait a day or two before you submit it for publication or payment to your content site.

“What?” you ask. “I’m having to churn out dozens of articles per day just to make ends meet, and you’re telling me to wait? You’re crazy!”

No, I’m not. The first day you do this, it will be hard for you, because you will have one day where you don’t submit anything. It’s ONE day; that’s all. And on that day, you can actually write double what you’re used to writing, because you’re not submitting anything or proofing anything!

Here’s how it works. Set aside, let’s say, Monday of next week to start this process. On Monday, you are not going to proofread or submit any articles to content sites, period, at all. None. Zero. you are, however, going to write. You will write, and write and write, but you will not proofread or edit those articles.

Then, save the articles on your computer desktop (you are writing all your articles in a word processor, not in the online text editor at the content website, right? You should always write your articles in a word processor and save a copy on your computer. This will save you from time outs, internet interruptions, errors, etc, and it will give you a backup copy of all your work to prove you created it too. Plus, if the content site ever goes down permanently, you have copies of things you can post on other sites or your own blog!)

Where was I? Oh, yes, save all the articles on your computer desktop and ignore them until Tuesday.

Tuesday morning, you wake up, shuffle to the computer with your coffee or caffeine of choice, and the first thing you do is check email from the night before, learn your new writing or grammar rule for the day, and then you will open up your first article from the day before and proof it.

You will be AMAZED by how many things you will catch on the second day that you would not have caught if you proofed it right after you wrote it. Also, proofreading and editing are different mind skills than researching and creating/writing. When you force the brain to switch back and forth between the two, you are slowing down the process of both things.

So, Monday, you write, write, write, write. Tuesday, you proof, proof, proof, proof. Then when you finish proofing them all, you will upload them, copy and paste, fill in the forms, attach photos as necessary, and proof it one last time once it’s in the content website’s editor.

Remember, your brain works best when it can ‘repeat’ patterns instead of changing from one thing to the next. Try ‘processing’ your articles in ‘batches’ of ‘write-write ‘proof-proof’ ’submit-submit’, and you’ll likely find you are processing a lot more articles in the same amount of time.

3. Print it out and read it.

If you have a printer, print it out on paper and read it with a ruler or another piece of paper covering everything except the one sentence you are reading. One line at a time. Your brain likes to ‘fill in the blanks’ with things on its own if it has a ‘big picture’. If you feed your brain only one line at a time, it is more likely to find the errors and missing words. (I’m the queen of missing words.)

If you cannot afford to print it out or if you don’t have a printer, try changing the font to larger or changing the font and background colors in your word processor. The ‘change’ of look and the larger font can do a similar thing as reading it on paper. If you can, cover the screen with a piece of paper so you can only read one line at a time, or set it so you have to scroll up to see each new line.

4. Read it out loud to someone or to your computer.

We read different when we must speak what we’re reading then when our brain reads it and we speak it inside our heads. When we speak it out loud, we have to read each word. When we read to ourselves, the brain ‘connects’ meaning without reading each individual word.

If you feel silly reading out loud to yourself, read it to family members or call and friend and read it to them. Not only will you be able to proof it, but you get the boost of a ‘good job’ encouragement from the friend or family member. If you read to your dog, he might be the smartest dog on the block!

If you have Windows Vista, you can buy a microphone and turn on the voice recognition program and read your content to the computer without looking and then read it back to see what the computer came up with! BTW, you can use voice recognition to write your articles if you can speak faster than you can type and for many people, this really speeds up the writing process! (In Vista, you find this by going to Start >>> Settings >>> Control Panel >>> Ease of Access >>> Speech Recognition)

5. Let go of your need for perfection.

People on the internet can be brutal, but fortunately, they have short attention spans and even shorter memories when it comes to forgiving typos and little mistakes. Make your copy the best it can be, of course, but let go of the expectation of perfection. Save the perfectionism for your print ventures. In fact, what works for print doesn’t usually work well for internet and vice versa. When you let go of that inner critic and give yourself permission to loosen up on perfection, you’ll stress a lot less about proofing and can move through it faster. Plus, the more tense and frustrated you are when you are proofing, the more mistakes you’ll miss anyway.

Reading this blog post is proof positive that I’ve learned to let go of perfection in my blogs! (chuckle)

There, my rambling ideas for speeding up your writing/proofing cycle.

Anyone else have ideas you think would help content writers, post them here in the comments!

What has worked for you?

Keep writing!

Love and stuff,
Michy

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