The Trials and Tribs of a Freelance Writer

Writing online is a lot different than the essay writing we did in school. Going back to finish my English degree was a good experience, but didn't even begin to prepare me for writing online. In fact, it hurt my chances of making money writing online at first. After all, SEO wasn't even in my vocabulary!

Those exercises in essay writing for Victorian, postmodern and women's lit classes were several times longer than the average online article, and using a variety of words was actually considered better than repeating certain phrases (you know, keywords) in strategic places.

As a beginning freelance writer, I thought writing online would be like essay writing. Boy, was I wrong. SEO, backlinks, article marketing -- I had no idea how much legwork went into finding an audience for my writing.

I knew keywords were a necessity, but I had no idea how, when or where to use them. In fact, keyword placement and other SEO issues are still the bane of my writing existence some days.

Search engines change their parameters constantly, making it hard to stay on top of the right keyword percentage du jour.

Article promotion on social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook and MySpace was a mystery to me, since I'd never had any interest in creating accounts with any of these sites for personal purposes. Imagine my surprise when I learned about RedGage, StumbleUpon, Reddit and the plethora of other important social networking sites for article promotion.

I'll admit that I'm still testing the waters with social networking, and I only started a Twitter account a few months ago. I refuse to register with Facebook because Mark Zuckerberg is so proud of violating users' privacy, and friends tell me not to bother with MySpace because no one uses it.

Although I haven't worked too hard at developing backlinks -- I'm always nervous about being spammy -- I've come to appreciate, and even enjoy experimenting with SEO and article marketing.

Whether we like it or not, knowledge of online article marketing and SEO is key for freelancers writing online. So why not have fun with it?

I plan on sharing helpful info about writing online as I find it. And if you have any social networking or SEO tips, I'd love to hear them! Here's a great article by Factoidz writer Sam Montana to get you started.