CW: CuteWriting

4 Effective Ways to Write About a Boring Topic

2013-03-25T22:51:00.003-07:00

With the plethora of interesting topics to write about, you’re fortunate enough to get the “boring” one. While it can be a pain for many writers to wind up with such a task, I’m telling you now there are ways to make yours more interesting than it is.

So if you find yourself stuck with the dreariest topic to fill in a blog about, don’t fret. Here are the four best ways to unburden yourself.

1. Never a boring topic, only a boring writer.

Here’s the hard fact: It’s never about the topic being boring. It’s about the writer making it boring. For instance, you’re supposed to write about aquariums. I know, how can you continuously make this topic interesting, right? Well, you’d be surprised just in how many ways you can make it an enticing read.

Start by listing down the basic “what”, “where”, “when” and “how” surrounding the topic. You can ask (and research) about “What material was first used to make aquariums?” or even “How the first aquarium was built?” or “What are the most radical accidents that occurred because of broken aquariums?” etc.

It’s all about perspective— you need to have a creative one.

2. Execute free writing.

If you can’t seem to start with a certain structure, have none. Try your knack at free writing and list down all your random thoughts, questions and even experiences you recall that relate to the topic at hand.

This allows a release of ideas and later on, the opportunity to filter them out. Think of it as mind mapping. At the end of the task, pick out the ones that you think will make for an interesting read.

Besides, this is good brain exercise to get your mind going.

3. Be where your readers are.

Even “boring” topics have readers. It’s all a matter of knowing where to find them and being there as they engage about it.

You have so many channels you can look into: Social media, online forums, other blogs and websites where people communicate. Once you’re there, see how they talk about the topic. What are their personal and professional insights? Is there anything worth quoting or mentioning? Are there any interesting points made that’s worthy of writing about?

4. Have a bit of help from a few tools.

Thanks to the braniacs of the online world, there are a lot of tools you can use to make the most out of a boring topic.

First is Quora, a Q & A site that helps to answer all of life’s mind-boggling questions. You could also check Yahoo! Answers if you’d like. Another is AllTop, an online platform that lets you in on what’s currently up with certain topics. If you’re still not satisfied, Google News is another venue for you to have a go at.

The fact is there are so many tools that can help you create interesting content about a not-so-interesting topic. You just need to know what they are and how they can aid you in your creative process.

So the next time you’re handed out a topic you deem unbearably boring, don’t make excuses. Instead, welcome it with open arms and consider these tips to make it as interesting as you possibly can.

Samantha Nicole is a Content Specialist for Webcada, a web design company in Singapore. She spends the rest of her time guest-blogging for various related websites.

Organic SEO: How It Works?

2013-03-06T01:14:00.000-08:00

What really is Search Engine Optimization? (Photo credit: Go Local Search)

In order to have your blog posts reach the top of the search results, you really have to do a lot of thinking. One of these ways that you can experiment with is SEO. Search engine optimization is pretty important even if you have a regular personal blog. Who wouldn't like their stuff seen by more than ten or so people daily?

However, the posts that get seen by a hundred thousand people daily are really profitable. They are simply at the top of their search terms and are meant to be good for earnings.

If you have strong keywords in your article, they are going to rank you the best in search results. Let's look at some of the important SEO decisions you should make as a webpreneur.

1. Building A Lot of Links

If you are keen about getting maximum visits to your blog, one thing you can do is gather as many links as possible from as many sources as possible. A few of the best practices in SEO can help you rank better.

How to build links effectively? It's a pretty nasty question indeed. It is very difficult to say for sure which practice can get you top results. It is not easily available. You could go and take help from a number of SEO firms out there, but most of them are not quite recommended.

Instead, you should immediately jump into collaboration with your fellow bloggers. Build relationships. Someone recently tweeted link building is now relationship building more than link building.

2. Social Media Attention

Image via CrunchBase

If you are a big corporation, this is pretty easy. You could have all your employees, all five hundred of them tweet and like your articles on Facebook. Also, you could have them each create a blog and write some interesting stuff with links to the main site.

This is loose end of things. All the important things that you need to do is follow a great design that gives accessibility to the social media links and promotional tools.

3. Write Good Content

In fact, everything is going for a toss if your website is thin and without content. You should make your point with your content. It should not be some low quality spun article from the resources you got in the Web. It should be something that uniquely represents your opinion. You should take time in order to gather as much information as possible before writing the posts.

Conclusion

In effect, it goes without saying that important articles with outreach should be the most successful. They will gather as many links as possible and will get you there.

5 Simple Ways To Improve Your Writing

2013-01-15T00:50:00.000-08:00

As writers, we’re always pushing the envelope to express ourselves better than we did before. However there are times when we plateau, when our writing just doesn’t feel natural. Worse yet, there are times when we can’t get a good paragraph out. Those are times when we start thinking about pushing ourselves and our writing.

When you need to tweak and boost your writing up a notch, it’s always good to try something constructive. For those who could use a couple of tips, here are a few that are sure to help improve your writing and keep it from going stale.

1.Imitate Different Authors

If you read other writers for inspiration, why not actively imitate their writing? Once you walk in another writer’s shoes for a bit, writing as they write, you get an idea on how to approach writing about things in ways you normally wouldn’t. Moreover, it will force you to pay attention to what makes someone else’s writing style unique which, in turn, will help you find ways to make your own style unique as well.

2.Increase Your Vocabulary

The pay off for increasing your vocabulary is priceless. With a good vocabulary, you literally boost your reading and writing level up a notch. So whenever you come up against a word you don’t know, look it up, write down the definition, and try to remember and understand it. Re-read the entire piece without your definition list and see how quickly you can recall each word. Ideally, you want to read the word over as naturally as possible, like you already know its meaning. If you get stuck, look at the definition again, then re-read the paragraph. This method, while time consuming, will definitely help to expand your vocabulary and make your writing stronger.

3.Read, Read, And Read Some More

Everyone says that in order to write, you need to read. And it’s true. It’s the best way to inform your writing. Not only do you learn something when you read, you also unconsciously soak the writing in. If you read a lot of books from one main author, you start to gradually develop and naturally adapt to that author’s writing style—its diction, phrasing, and sentence structure. Over time, this helps you become more creative and lets you take chances at expressing yourself in different ways. So read, read, and read some more!

4.Exercise Your Writing Muscles Once A Day

The only way to keep your writing strong is to constantly write. Writing regularly is a necessity to getting yourself in top notch writing form. However, when you write, do it with a goal in mind. Give yourself a challenge. For instance, you may want to pick a different topic for each day. Whatever you choose, write freely for an hour or until you feel like you’ve exhausted all you wanted to say. This will get you in the habit of comfortably expressing your thoughts in words. Exercising your writing muscles daily like this will improve the clarity of your writing by leaps and bounds if you just keep at it.

5.Write For Yourself

If you write for the web, you’re undoubtedly writing for someone other than yourself. It can be draining and easy to forget why you love to write in the first place. The result? Writer’s block. Getting burnt out. Unproductive dry spells. Unlike the other tips, this one is focused on sustaining your writing. Keep yourself in the game by rejuvenating your love for it. Write for fun. Write for yourself. If you’re constantly doing something you love, it becomes effortless and fluid. You’re writing naturally and without any pressure.

The best part about this and the other tips is that they’re general enough so you can cater them to your specific needs. Whether you decide to read fiction or poetry, exercise your daily writing in a different language, or increase your vocabulary for a specific niche, how you improve your writing is ultimately up to you.

Bio:

Reena Cruz writes for the Investintech.com blog, where she shares tips about PDF converter technology and software in general. As a tech-geek, she enjoys learning about new tech trends and sharing productivity tool tips online.

Web Writing and SEO – How to Combine the Two…

2012-01-21T02:04:00.001-08:00

The world of search engine optimization (SEO) can seem like a mystery to some people. Whilst there are many guidelines out there that can teach you the basics of SEO, a balance will always need to be struck between writing engaging and authoritative content and following the rules of SEO in order to ensure that your texts are optimized for search engines. With the release of Google Panda last year, the lines between once holy SEO ground rules such as keyword density against the need to create high-quality, fluid text have become blurred. However, being aware of the biggest pitfalls of SEO with regards to web writing remains absolutely vital for your writing career.

Google Panda:

The codeword “Panda” was used to describe the wide-ranging update that Google rolled out across its entire search engine last February. Panda concentrated itself on delivering the best search results possible to web users and Google took great care to actively demote those websites from search results that featured poor-quality or duplicated content. Since Panda, Google has emphasized the aspects of quality, authoritativeness, user intention and freshness in its search results and thus the effect on web writing was clear; texts created for web pages would need to move away from traditional, quick and unoriginal copy.

The effect of Panda:

Websites that relied on freelance writers to create a large array of texts that lacked in originality and creativity were the big losers of the Google Panda update. Ecommerce websites in particular were hard hit by Panda because they would typically consist of hundreds of nearly identical product pages that differed minimally from each other in terms of content. These sites saw their keyword rankings drop dramatically and this should be a lesson to all web writers out there that the old tactic of creating quick and simple text that simply met the basic requirements of a keyword density check would do nothing to rankings.

The solution for your web writing:

To ensure that your web writing passes the Google Panda test there are a number of SEO writing factors that you have to abide to;

. Web user intention: The first rule of writing in a post-Panda world is to create texts online that would fit what the user had in mind when they searched for a particular keyword and landed on your particular webpage. Your text should aim to either answer the questions that the visitor may have, or should otherwise provide relevant, unique and helpful information to the reader that they would not find on other websites.

. Freshness: Whilst Google trusts content found on websites that have existed for years instead of days, this does not mean that your website should feature the same written texts that it featured three years ago. The Panda update now focuses on finding fresh content for the web user as it knows that the user is more likely to be interested in up-to-date information and news about a topic. Thus, keep your web writings topical and be sure to create content on a regular basis. For a blog a new and original article once or twice a week is ideal.

. Length: The length of the text on a webpage is a dead giveaway that your content is written for search engines and not for actual people. Writing at least 600 words in your texts will ensure that your web pages are not flagged up as spammy content by the Google search bots.

. Authority: The “authoritativeness” of a text may seem a little vague to judge at first; however Google judges the quality and authority of a web text on the number of links that are created to it – or more broadly the level of web user interaction with that text. If your goal is to rank with blog articles, then in order to increase the likelihood that people will link to your writings, you have to put a level of dedication and research into your texts. Bring something new to the scene and try to make your article original. If, over time, people are impressed by your writings and frequently interact with your content or create backlinks to your website, then Google will recognize this and consider your writings to have a certain level of quality and authoritativeness about them and will increase their ranking positions in search results.

For us web writers, Google Panda only increased the importance of bringing some originality, freshness and individuality to our writings. The large majority of web writers should have no problem bringing these aspects of writing to the forefront of their work, as these are the main reasons that we entered the industry in the first place!

Author: Robert from twago, a SEO web writer and blogger living in Berlin.

Four Keys to Quality Creative Writing

2011-11-04T22:48:00.000-07:00

This is a guest post from Brandy Olsen

Writing quality creative work is difficult. While there's no other form of writing that's freer from the confines of rules and research, the virtually bottomless bag of material that can be used to craft creative writing leaves many a writer unable to work past the inevitable analysis paralysis of having too much to choose from. The tenacity it takes to overcome this vehement objective standing between you and your fiction will define you as a creative writer. But before you set off down that road, stop and consider the following four keys to quality creative writing that can take years to realize if you choose to go about it by yourself:

UNDERSTANDING WHAT IS UNDERSTOOD

A good creative writer is able to read their own work through the mind of a reader who only has the writing itself to go off of. Otherwise, you can be writing what you think is a detailed yarn, which is in fact a befuddled mess of character actions. Readers don't have the luxury of free psychic readings to determine what your intent is as an author. It's imperative that you always be aware of what your reader is aware of. This helps you include all necessary information and cut out the fat.

AVOIDING OVERWRITING

“Jonathan's eyes began to dribble with shame, and the young lad did all he could to resist the urge to emit tears in front of the other boys.”
Overwriting might sound good, but when “An embarrassed Jonathan did his best not to cry in front of the other boys” works just fine in a fraction of the space, there's no reason to write more than you have to. Lovers of the written word will often pack their sentences, all the while forgetting that readability is key. Nobody likes to read long complicated sentences or an unnecessary number of words.

CHOOSING THE RIGHT WORD OVER ALMOST THE RIGHT WORD

Mark Twain once said that “The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between a lightening bug and a bolt of lightening.” Never let a boring word make it into your writing if you can help it. “It was a dark night” and “It was a black night” say basically the same thing, but “black” sounds just a bit more vivid than “dark”.

MASTERING THE METAPHOR

“Love is a rose.” Creative writing almost invariably comes down to whether or not a writer is able to speak to a bigger truth than the flesh and blood of the story itself. Understanding metaphor, and the ability to create something fictional that represents the real world in some way, is essential in becoming a quality creative writer.
The number of aspiring writers versus professional writers in the world is an indicator of how difficult it is to commit quality creative writing to the world. The freedom of creative writing is incredibly alluring, yet the lack of rules can be the biggest obstacle in a young writer's way. The best strategy is to realize there are no rules, only keys, to writing creative works worth being noted and remembered.