Article Writing and Tools

I noticed that I can write articles much faster when I follow a simple format for each article. For example, write the introduction, the body (key points, etc), and the conclusion.

At least that helped me a lot. Some people recommend Dragon Natural Speaking but I personally never used it.

Are you sure? Any thoughts? (I was thinking that many writers might have some misgivings about replying to someone advertising "spinning" in their signature-file, but if my thoughts on your observations are really welcome, I'll happily take that at face value and offer them ).

With absolutely no disrespect at all, I disagree with most of what you say, above. I think that "trying to write faster" is actually the enemy of success, when it comes to deriving income from writing articles.

I've always found that that's true both from the perspective of someone selling articles, and that of someone writing articles "as her own customer" to attract traffic and build her own marketing business (which is what I do now, instead of selling articles, which was how I started online).

From the perspective of selling the articles themselves, it's of some but very limited value to be able to churn out more $5/$10 articles, selling which is a far from easy way to build a business anyway: what makes the real difference to whether or not people can ultimately make a living from it, unsurprisingly enough, is whether they're selling $5/$10 articles or $100 articles.

It's important to have a broad perspective of the real market involved, here. It's always seemed to me that the prices are in inverse proportion to the number of their respective potential service-providers (not necessarily the number of their potential customers!). By the time you get down (and I really do mean "down") to the $5/$10-per-article market, there are almost more service-providers than customers.

It's all very well working out that you can earn $40 per hour by writing 500 words in 15 minutes (actually I think it's a huge exaggeration, and $20 would be much nearer the mark), but in any case the market realities are that the people who try to make a living that way nearly all fail, and there are reasons for that (and they're good and valid and reliable reasons, too). We can see that from all the threads they start off, here, to a few of which I'll give you links in a minute ...

There are people here selling articles for $200 and quietly providing their regularly returning customers with them, without ever needing to advertise at all. Those are writers whose customers know how to use the product, survive and flourish, and they don't have to replace them all the time. Then there are others advertising $5 articles. Their customers don't know how to "do article marketing" at all (obviously - otherwise they wouldn't be buying them). They know only about "article directory marketing", so their own businesses tend not to survive. So, from their writers' perspectives, they need to replace their clients all the time and therefore need to advertise continually. And those are - clearly - the ones you see advertising. In other words, as is so often the case in all kinds of marketing, both online and offline, what you see "promoted" isn't necessarily what's selling and surviving, and isn't necessarily representative of the true market at all.

Add to that the fact that most people arriving in this forum and asking "How should I start to earn some money online?" are - irrespective of their apparent standard of literacy - told "Write articles for marketers", and you can see why the product-availability at the very bottom end of the market is so huge and therefore those articles are difficult to sell, simply because of the relative proportions of supply and demand. They tend, also, just not to be very good, because they've been written quickly and/or with "tools". (For customers who can't tell the difference between that and something better, and value them accordingly, it may not matter, but those are also the customers whose own businesses don't survive, so they're not very good customers for the writers anyway.)

People who are trying to "write more quickly" are all too often producing something that's an "article" only in the sense of being "a chunk of keyword-optimized stuff, the content of which has been more or less copied from somewhere and fed through a spinner, and a backlink can be attached to it". It's a fundamentally different concept of what an "article" is from that used by another group of article marketers, writers and their (direct or indirect) customers.

In short: in most aspects of article creation and use, in internet marketing, speed and "tools" are actually the enemy of success, and they typify a quantitative rather than a qualitative approach. That's an approach that usually leads to failure rather than to success. Apart from for the people selling the tools, of course, because the turnover of aspiring writers is absolutely huge.

No; I appreciate that, of course.

But still, if you want to see the perspectives of many of those who do actually do (and/or "have done") this for a living, these threads are among the recent ones giving some real insights into the situation: "the voices of experience" - both successful (quality-based) and unsuccessful (speed/tools-based) ...

What's The Deal With WF Writers?

Writing Articles - I'm Done

How much can you make writing articles?

How do I make money writing articles???

Would you still do freelance writing?

Can anyone suggest good pay, high quality writing jobs?

Content Writing - Still Viable?

Are There Many Clients Who Pay $50/Article?

The appropriate rate for written content is ?

You must be a superstar professional writer BUT I can only pay you $2 per article - say WHAT?

Any point in trying to find clients on Warrior Forum..?

Is it hard to make 30K a year from writing?

Me too. It's just that it takes about 2-3 hours of research to reach this stage.

Bottom line: you might be able to help people who are looking to churn out impressive amounts of "articles" per hour, but I don't think there's a big market for serious, professional writers, the ones, as Alexa mentioned, ask and get $200 per article.

If you'd want to help pro writers, you could perhaps build some sort of bank of quality references for writers to get their facts. Writers could add new references as they discover them, review and rate them, etc. This way, a good writer who has no clue about a particular topic could find reliable, peer-reviewed references without having to waste too much time in the process (which is one of the hardest things to do, to be honest). A writer who is already familiar with the topic might discover new references.

I'd like that, I'd like that a lot.

To my success,
Lucian

If you can afford it I would recommend getting dragon dictation its Dragons naturally speaking software and you basically dictate what you want to say and it types it out for you. Of course you have to train it to recognize your voice but once you get it right you can crank out more articles than superman!

Social App Zone... 500 words in 15 minutes is pretty good. You could probably boost your prolificness by purchasing a software like "Dragon Naturally Speaking" software, and speak your articles into existence. I'm confident that within 4 minutes, you could have a 500 word article done. Sure it will require some touch-ups and cosmetic edits, but it's a good way to get articles done fast.

But... i dont think you should work someone else. Work for yourself. Get your own site and create an autopilot business for yourself. Create your own high quality articles and drive traffic to your site, and also repurpose your articles and redistribute them all over the web.

Remember you are competing with very cheap labor via places like odesk, so writing may not be the best use of your time.

You could crack out 4 500 word articles (VERY difficult, when including research) for $10 a pop.

Assuming that you actually put some sort of effort into them, you'll almost immediately begin "burning out".

Producing that much content, day in day out, WILL almost certainly wear you out.

You say you're not a writer, well I've been there, done that, and writing a number of articles at .01-.02 cents per word WILL wear you out.

Believe it or not, there are higher paying markets. MUCH higher paying markets than $10 an article.

$50, $100, and more, if you find the right clients.

By doing this, you can focus on creating QUALITY content, instead of FAST content.

My personal advice, find those markets, rather than seeking to write quickly.

Sorry, but I do not believe that an article written in 15 minutes can be of great quality. Someone said that the slower the better. This is true for article writers. The information needs to linger and you have to clear your head for a while, re-read the article and improve it over and over again until it reaches a perfect form.

I have always been a fan of learning how to write things more quickly. People usually associate speed with lack of quality, and depending on what you are writing about, this can be true.

If you have ever written a term paper, sometimes your best work comes under pressure. It causes you to focus and allows you to create something great. Other people need to do things gradually. All people are different.

So, if you are going for quality that you want to sell for $40 or $50, speed is not an option in most cases because we are not an "expert" in every field. But if you are writing a 10 pack of articles for the purpose of selling them to an IMer that is looking for "good" content for a profitable niche, then you can probably do that.

Look at all of the content spinners on the market and how profitable that industry is. You can easily produce something in 5-10 minutes that is not only unique, but is not so similar to what 100's of other have, it will rank well on its own. So if you are looking for a business angle, and not worried about creating perfect high quality content, this might work for you.

Social App Zone,

I don't know if you have considered this, but maybe it is important to what you're trying to do . . .

Article writing, like book authoring, like photography, like graphics design, like sculpting, like painting, like music composition . . . and a host of other creative endeavors, can't always be compared equitably with other ways to make money.

It seems to me that software development lends itself most appropriately to certain types of industries and pursuits, but maybe not to creative fields that thrive on originality and uniqueness rather than mass produced repetitive output.

I know you mentioned you were interested in productivity tools. But I'm thinking that for creative fields like I've mentioned, productivity may not be a need or even a remote desire of most creative types. I see their greatest challenge as effectively marketing what they produce.

So if your are interested in helping creative types, figure out how to help them sell and distribute the unique products that they are currently making. To me, that would be a very valuable service.

The best to you,

Steve

It's certainly a very interesting concept...and i commend you for taking the initiative.

I'm sure you'll have no issues writing 500 words in 15 minutes... You might even be able to produce high quality articles to begin with...but how long would it be before repititon sets in and the quality of your article suffers as a consequence. It's not an easy way to make a sustainable, long term income..

Too make article writing easier, you should apply the same rules to all your articles regardless of niche/topic. Keep it simple. Have a heading like "5 Easy Steps" "5 Important Tips..." etc. Your first paragraph should should highlight the problem many people face within your topic. Then each subsequent paragraphs should deal with each of the points or tips in your heading.. Finish with a conclusion & final thoughts.

JR