For pro writers, writing fiction, nonfiction and copywriting. Have fun, and become a better writer. Copyright (c) 2004 to 2022, Angela Booth. All rights reserved.
Before you say that any writer who gets suckered only has themselves to blame, you must consider that Author Solutions is extremely disingenuous about how they target customers.
They prey on people who don’t understand the industry. Their whole business model is predicated on customer ignorance – and they are relentless at exploiting that, hounding people with incessant calls, pushing every emotional button they can think of, until they crack.
Everyone loves to hear about the latest and greatest; I’m a news junkie, so I check out sites like Google News, and the Drudge Report daily.
Many writers check out the news for content ideas, but few use the news as a source of ideas for PLR creation. I find lots of content ideas in business, tech, and health news. They’re my favorite topics. You may be interested in sports and celebrity news. Choose any areas which you enjoy, and which you can write about, and then watch these areas for news stories.
To learn to use words economically, I entered short story
contests and, happily, earned some awards. I truly believe this is a great
practice for writers who are developing their writing style. Not only will you
challenge yourself, you will get honest feedback from the judges.
I’ve been blogging since 2000, and have dozens of blogs. When I first started blogging, I had no idea WHY I was doing it. I just liked the idea of instant publishing — being able to hit the “Publish” button, and instantly have my words available to millions of readers.
Hundreds of thousands of people all over the world blog for a full-time income. Some are making millions, others are just replacing a pay check. You can do it too, if you fake it until you make it.
I’ve been working with a couple of writing students who have a big problem: procrastination. However, they’re well on the way to solving it, simply because they’re AWARE of what they’re doing.
Interested in writing Private Label Rights (PLR) content? There’s a huge demand for content, so this week, let’s look at various ways in which you can write PLR for hungry buyers.
When it comes to Private Label Rights (PLR) content (content that you sell to which the buyer buys all rights), most writers stick to the tried and true. They choose topics like pets, health, self-help, social media, etc.
These topics are hugely popular. This means that there’s competition; you’ll need to advertise your own PLR heavily so that you can stand out, and get attention and sales.
“If you were pitching something to Jeff Bezos or other senior managers below Jeff, the first thing you did was write a press release for it — as if it were a product that you were putting out into the world,” says Chris Brown, who spent more than three years at the company and remembers joining at least two pitch meetings with Bezos, the company’s founder and CEO.
If you're a professional writer, chances are you're reliant on the people who hire you. While this is OK, I'm in the camp which says you should stop trading hours for dollars as soon as possible.
Most writers find this hugely difficult. They're not used to thinking in terms of WHO will buy their writing, and WHY.
Read the above quote, and then read the article.
I tend to write the sales pages for the writers' guides and other products before I create the products.
I've never thought of writing a press release first. That's a wonderful idea. It keeps you totally focused on the WHO and WHY.
“Affiliate marketing” basically means selling products on a commission. Amazon and eBay for example, have great affiliate programs, as do many, many other companies. Most of the “reviews” of products you see online are written by affiliate marketers who are hoping for a commission.
Affiliate marketers love content which they can reuse and repurpose to market the products they’re promoting.
Please be creative with all the PLR you develop. As we’ve said, this field is wide open, because few PLR writers display creativity — they don’t think about who is buying their material, and how they can help their buyers to make money.
Put the thing aside for a few weeks, and then list the most powerful moments, from memory. Not the things that are great about your idea, or about your characters in theory. The moments that actually stick in your mind as moments. You wrote the thing, so if a moment sticks in your head as being especially emotional or intense, that's probably a sign that it's closest to the story you were setting out to tell. Once you've got that list, see if there's a story uniting those moments.
This means two things: 1. Students are not questioning the authority of what they find on the internet. They take information at face value. 2. Student research is incredibly shallow. They consistently use sources that are the first few results on a search engine, which are often reference sources. Students are not delving deep into topics, questioning more and more about what they are learning.
Another common mistake is to insert an apostrophe when pluralizing abbreviations. This is almost invariably wrong, however. An example would be, "Members of the UK parliament are known as MPs". It is quite common to see an apostrophe inserted here (MP's), but again this is unnecessary and incorrect in a simple plural.
Unnecessary apostrophes are also frequently seen in expressions such as the 1960s (referring to that decade). Again, as this is just a plain old plural, no apostrophe is required.
Ideally, you’ll write and promote your calendar-based PLR a two or three months before the holiday, so that you can make as many sales as possible.
Once you’ve created a package of content for a holiday, that package will stay online until you’ve sold the number of packages you decided on. If your PLR is “exclusive”, you might only sell 20 packages. You can choose the number of packages you sell, it’s completely up to you.
If I were creating PLR, I’d create a couple of packages for Christmas and the New Year, right now.
Your article title should include both a keyword, and a benefit. (If you're using curiosity in your article title you may not have the space to provide a benefit.)
Benefits are all about helping your readers. Your readers are looking for something. They need your help. If you remember that when you're writing articles you're writing for the reader in order to help the reader, you can't go wrong.
Skills are necessary to achieve your goals. List down the skills you need to accomplish a certain goal, identify the skills you are confident about and spot those that need improvement. Think of ways you can enhance those that require honing. Also, think of other skills you need but presently do not have and find ways to gain those skills.
Okay, here’s the follow-through. After talking to hundreds of authors, helping launch scores of indie books, sitting on panels and writing for several years on these topics, I’ve come to the conclusion that:
There are only 2 things authors ought to be doing: writing, and marketing that writing.
