Writing poetry

Is no easy task

But it

Is not impossible

As long as you

Let your feelings through

Forget about

Rules

Stanzas

Rhymes

Rhythm


Concentrate on

How you feel

Describe

Express

In

Words

Expressions


All you need

Is

A spoonful of

Creativity

A bowl of

Feelings

A pinch of

Luck

And stir

With a pen

A keyboard

Anything

To get the words

Flowing


So, if you want to

Write

Poetry

Remember

There are no rules

Just feelings

Warm

Or Cold

All put on paper

Or typed into computer

Let it all go

Let it spill

And then only

Will your succeed!

Your online freelance writing resources

When you are freelancing, it is often quite difficult to find great sites with freelance writing resources, jobs, gigs or merely to connect others in the same situation as you. It is usually very nice to connect with other writers, bloggers or freelancers who are struggling (or successfully) earning a living through the skilled art of writing.

I've been going around quite a lot of websites and blogs and joined quite a few writing communities (which I barely have time to even participate most of the time) and here are some freelance writing resources which I found in my course of gallivanting around the web.

1. http://www.freelancewritinggigs.com - This site offers writing tips and posts very frequent writing gigs or jobs available for freelancers or even those looking for full time writing jobs. However, some of the jobs posted are sourced from other sites such as Craigslist.

2. http://www.writingcareer.com - This site also offers articles on writing and tips. It also has a job board and again, some of these are sourced from other sites such as GetAFreelancer.com

3. http://www.mywriterscircle.com - This is basically a forum for writers to connect and exchange tips and experiences. The good part is that there is also a job board to check out freelance writing gigs.

4. http://www.freelancewritingtips.com - This is a blog on writing with posts about writing and everything about writing!

5. http://www.journalismjobs.com - This is mostly a job board with full time to telecommuting to freelance writing gigs of all types.

6. http://www.mywritingblog.com - This is another blog by a writer who sometimes posts job opportunities but mostly his posts are on writing and tips.

7. http://www.freelancefactor.com - Another site with more writing tips and the occasional jobs.

8. http://www.dailywritingtips.com - This blog offers quite a lot of complete writing tips for freelance, fiction or non-fiction, so it is really a great place to hone your writing skills.

Hope you learn quite a few tips from these sites. Enjoy and most importantly, continue writing!

Driving traffic to your blog

Is not really easy if you do not join any forums, blogger groups or blogging platform. You seen, to drive traffic to your blog, you need to put in a lot of work.

Firstly, you need to write really good, interesting content. By this, I mean content that people want to read and not only meant for search engines. Also make sure your content is posted on a regular basis so that your readers won't feel as if you had abandoned your blog or something.

Once you get your content in place, next in line is a lot more work than producing content. It is marketing your blog.

Now, marketing and promotion is the most important factor in driving traffic to your blog. Because, without spreading the word about your blog and what type of content you have in it, then it is not easy for readers to find your blog.

So, how do you market your blog?

There are several ways to do it. Let me list it out in point form:

- you tell your friends, family and anyone who'd listen to you brag about your blog. Make sure you repeat your website address often enough to get them to go into your site.

- you submit your blog to search engines and then submit to all high ranking blog directories

- you join some blogging platform like BlogRush and social networking and start blog hopping and making new blogger friends. Soon, they'd come visiting your blog often too.

- you join forums to offer expert advise and remember to add the link to your blog!

- you can also submit expertise articles to article directories for some link love.

Try these out and tell me how it turns out.

Happy blogging!

SEO tips

Any blogger or webmaster worth his salt knows all about SEO and its importance to get his website or blog high up in the search engines. After all, without being highly visible to the public, it is not that easy to get random traffic without the search engines ranking.

So, I am sharing with you some of my SEO tips. I may not be an expert but I've learnt quite a bit about it and just providing tips that I personally use:

1. When you write the blog post or article, do always choose with a keyword you plan to optimize. Say, you want to optimize the word 'SEO tips' like this blog post.

2. You start your post with the keyword within the title.

3. You also insert the keyword into the post, preferably once in the first paragraph, once in the middle and last one in the final paragraph.

4. It is important to remember not to overdo it and use the keyword for every sentence because the search engines may think this is not a real post but one to cheat them.

5. Even the tags for you post must have the keyword

6. Finally, remember to keep the post real, logical and something a real person would appreciate reading and not full of gibberish to 'cheat' the search engines because traffic are real people and if you want them to keep coming back, offer them something they like and chances are they will keep coming back if they really like it!

I hope my SEO tips is useful to you. Since I am far from a pro-blogger and still learning the tricks of the trade, it is just something I learned as I blog along.

Make money blogging

Make money blogging is now a common term that every blogger knows and many do strive to earn something through blogging.

I, for one, am doing the same thing. No, not making a LOT of money from blogging, just enough to pay for some of my blogs. I know this blog is a free blog so this blog's cost is pretty much zero except for the time I need to put in to promote this and keep it updated.

Well, I do have several other domains and I use Wordpress as a blogging tool. However, recently, I started on a membership blogging site.

This site has been promoting itself as a platform for bloggers to make money blogging. The catch? Each blogger needs to pay monthly membership fees and their fees will go to the bloggers that they read. Similarly, they will be paid by the visits by other bloggers to their blog.

Or something like that. I don't know how to explain the full math of it but to put it simply, your membership fees will go to the bloggers whose blogs you visit and vice versa. It seems a pretty fair plan. Your fees are distributed fairly to the blogs you visit and like while you will get a share of the fees from those who read your blog.

I kinda like the thought of that. So, I joined. After a few days, I have earned a grand total of $0.01!!! LOL. Shocking, huh? Oh well, I went back to read the FAQ and realised that total earnings are counted differently as in it will be counted at the end of the other blogger's 'fee cycle' or something like that. It seems like we will only know our true earnings from blogging there after several months.

Which I think is reasonable. After all, it takes several months to build up traffic too. And it also takes several months before we could register for those paid post programmes.

So, what do I blog about over there? Well, I've started two blogs there, one on dieting and losing weight and another one is a general one on my life experience. I truly believe we could make money blogging and this site is one of it!

Do check it out here: