Making Your Writing Exciting At the Sentence Level Some writers are just a blast to read, from paragraph to paragraph. It almost seems like magic. Your eyes just can’t stop hopping along from one page to the next. How do they do it? Let me wager a guess: sentences. Among other things, of course. A lot of beginning writers — caught up in plot and dialogue and characterization and description — sometimes lose sight of craft at the sentence level. Sentence Beginnings Beware of structuring most of your sentences in the same way. Take a look at these two short example paragraphs: I looked down the street, first left, then right. Or: He grabs the book and scans the lettering etched into the leather cover: The Volume of Secrets. If the above paragraphs inspire a vague sense of boredom, it’s because almost every sentence starts the same: “I verb” or “Subject verb.” Sentence Length Sentence length is another thing you want to take into consideration when you write. The river drifted slowly through the countryside. Now compare to this one:
Donna Baier Stein Writer, Editor, Publisher Donna Baier Stein's poetry and prose have appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Kansas Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Washingtonian, and many other journals and anthologies. Her story collection Great Drawing Board of the Sky was a Finalist in the Iowa Fiction Awards; her novel Fortune received the PEN/New England Discovery Award and is now represented by William Morris Endeavor. Donna was a founding editor of Bellevue Literary Review, and currently is the Editor and Publisher of Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature. Her awards include a Scholarship from Bread Loaf Writers Conference, two awards from the Poetry Societies of Virginia and New Hampshire, a Fellowship from Johns Hopkins University, a fellowship from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, and individual fiction and poetry prizes from various journals and anthologies. Donna lives and works in New Jersey and is the mother of two great children, Jonathan and Sarah. Click to enlarge photo
Idioms How to Get More Customers with Local Search Marketing: 10 Optimization Tips by Vertical Measures Local search marketing online has become the standard for driving new customers to a local business. Below, I will discuss ten solid tips to ensure any local business has the opportunity to outrank their competitors. Investigate Local Directories Keep it Consistent Consistency is key – This is where the spreadsheet comes in handy. Consistency is important so the search engines can recognize your business accurately. Start Submitting Submit your information to any directories you aren’t currently on, except Google places (for now). Google Places Create your Google Places listing. Build those Links Include link building in your local search marketing optimization strategy. Optimize your Site Optimize your site with geo-specific keywords. Create Geo-specific Pages Create location pages on site for multiple locations. Get Blogging Use geo-specific keywords in your blog posts. Be Social Create a local business page on Facebook for each of your locations. Encourage Feedback Let’s keep the list going.
About Freelance Writing — Helping freelance writers find jobs for free and make more money with their writing by Anne Wayman Setting Up Wordpress for SEO WordPress out of the box comes SEO friendly, however there are many tweaks you can make to further optimize it for search engines. We recently covered 10 important tips to optimize wordpress for search engines, however this post will go more in-depth and offering further optimization tips. Here are a number of advanced tweaks and WordPress plugins you can install to help with URL structuring, search engine crawling, handling duplicate content, optimizing title and meta tags, images and internal linking. Setting Up the Permalink Structure In WordPress: Settings >> Permalinks WordPress gives you a number of ways you can structure your post urls. They also have options to set the urls organized by year/month/date, for example www.domain.com/2010/02/07/sample-post/. The most effective way to optimize your urls is by using the custom permalink structure. Setting Up non-www to www Redirect In WordPress: Settings >> General The newer versions of WordPress make this extremely easy to do.
A Manifesto For Free Radicals: Less Paperwork, Less Waiting, More Action In chemistry, the term “free radical” is used to describe molecules with unpaired electrons, those that may have a positive, negative, or zero charge. They are hard to pin down, and as a result their possibilities are endless. They can prove wildly destructive or instrumental, depending on context. I‘ve been thinking about the emergence of a new type of 21st-century professional. I call them “free radicals” because they take their careers into their own hands and put the world to work for them. The commoditization of once-pricey resources like business management services (now in the cloud) and everything open-source is the wind at their backs.Free Radicals are resilient, self-reliant, and extremely potent. We do work that is, first and foremost, intrinsically rewarding. We demand freedom, whether we work within companies or on our own, to run experiments, participate in multiple projects at once, and move our ideas forward. We make stuff often, and therefore, we fail often.
Guest Blogging for Clients: Make Your Next Post Lead to Business! A while back, Sean Platt and I wrote and published a book called How to Build A Blog, exclusively on Kindle, laying out an overview of my entire online audience-building framework. Well, as a special perk for our community members, we've created a special edition print version, and a poster-sized infographic that summarizes the whole thing. And if you want it, it's yours; no charge, no nothing. All you've got to do is pay a few bucks to cover the shipping, and we'll mail the book and the poster straight to your door (and you can't get either of these things *anywhere* else!) So... do you want the free gift? The OnFire Community is a very special place where people can get help and support, learn new things, build relationships, and a whole lot more - a safe, encouraging, professionally constructive space for all involved. We do have a waiting list of people who want to join, and get first dibs to apply when we open the doors.
10 Ways to Increase Blog Readership Last week while attending BlogWorld I noticed a recurring discussion pertaining to increasing blog readership. These discussions were part of the session content, as well as informal conversations I had over a meal or at an evening gathering. I decided to share these with you because, after all, who doesn’t want more readers? Off-site Ways to Increase Blog Readership 1. By building a network or Mastermind group of sorts with other bloggers in your market, bloggers can create coopetition (cooperation + competition) to help each other grow. 2. As you comment on other blogs in your market (not necessarily competitors), readers of that blog will have an opportunity to learn more about you by clicking through to your site. 3. Nothing is more flattering than when a respected blog author posts a comment on your blog, right? 4. Both search engines and readers appreciate when you link to a specific piece of content on your site, as opposed to just the domain name. 5. Yahoo! 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.