Home with the Kids » writing

Is Your Terminology Confusing Your Readers?

Stephanie — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 14:55:30 +0000

There’s one big problem with knowing your topic well. Sometimes it’s really hard to teach others what you know, especially if they’re a little short on background information.

This is more true in some areas than others. If you use a lot of acronyms, you’re probably going to confuse people who don’t know what you’re talking about. Mentioning SEO or PPC may be obvious to an online marketer, but just try mentioning those to friends who don’t do so much online. Even the word “blog” is unfamiliar to many people.

While the people reading your website are at least tech savvy enough to find you, that doesn’t mean they’re advanced in any other ways.

I started a website design company as my first online effort as I was getting bored with medical transcription. My very first client taught me how difficult terminology can be. She was a dog breeder, and decidedly not into technology. But she knew she needed a website.

She was adamant. Her website must be compatible with “trains.” One of her friends had told her all about them, and it was vital that the site be compatible with “trains.”

She couldn’t believe I didn’t know what she was talking about. Didn’t I know my own business?

After a bit of back and forth, it hit me. She meant search engines.

Once I said that, she agreed that this was what she was after. She’d used the word “trains” to help her remember “search engine.” She just forgot the mnemonic.

You can see that in many people. They don’t go to a favorite search engine. They visit Google, Yahoo or Bing. They probably don’t even think of these sites as search engines. They’re more the brand name than the function.

It Happens in All Industries

It doesn’t matter which industry you’re talking about. There’s what outsiders know, what beginners know, what amateurs know and what professionals and experts know. These are all very different levels of knowledge.

Your site should be friendly to all the levels of knowledge you intend to serve. Have sections that are friendly to those who just don’t know so much about your topic.

Tutorials are one way to introduce information to various groups. Have the most basic information in tutorials that are clearly just the basics. Bring in more advanced information in more advanced tutorials.

You may want to have an email course set up to help beginners get comfortable. This encourages them to come back to your site to learn more information. You can offer more advanced courses as well, but be careful of having too many subscription links all over the place. You might confuse everyone that way.

Talk to Your Friends

If you aren’t sure if your site is friendly to people with different levels of knowledge on the topic, talk to your friends. Have them review it.

Try to have people with different levels of knowledge take a look. The one who says, “Oh, but I don’t know the first thing about (topic), I couldn’t possibly help,” is the exact person you want reviewing your site if you want to be useful to people without any basic knowledge.

Have them go over your site not only for content, but for ease of use. If you had much at all to do with the design of your site, you probably know too much about it to really be able to know where things don’t make sense. Watching other people use your site is very educational.

Say It With Authority and They’ll Believe You

Stephanie — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 14:42:29 +0000

How well do you know your stuff? Pretty well, I hope. If nothing else, you should be able to research your topic well enough to write with authority about it.

Having confidence in what you write goes a long way toward making your site credible. If you don’t sound as though you know more than the person reading on your site, why should they buy from you?

I’ve struggled with this often myself. It’s not that I don’t know what I’m talking about. It’s that I’m not used to being assertive about it. In person I’m very quiet and not remotely assertive. I was the quiet kid in high school who always knew the answer when called upon, but never volunteered to answer. It’s a hard habit to change in my writing.

You Do Know More Than Most

If you’ve done your research on your niche or really dealt with the topic in your own life, you probably do know more about it than many of your readers. There’s a reason people look for information online. They aren’t looking for things they already know. They’re looking for things they want to know.

If you have a large informational site, you’re probably getting visitors with all kinds of backgrounds. Some are completely new to the topic and want to learn everything. Others know quite a bit, but are looking to learn more.

Write for all levels. Some topics will be of more general interest to your readers, while the basics won’t interest the more experienced readers. But leaving the beginners out means they’ll leave your site and find someone who can help them figure things out.

By the same token, the more knowledgeable readers will need content that meets their needs.

Be Honest About What You Know

Some people say fake it until you make it. I don’t like that theory.

I’d rather keep learning about the things I don’t know yet, and then teach them to others. It’s challenging, but then I’m less likely to be called out for being completely wrong.

I don’t mean don’t take risks. Just do your research and have some facts on your side, especially if you’re getting into things where there may be disagreement. Not everything is black and white, and a little controversy isn’t a bad thing at all. Sometimes even a lot of controversy is a good thing… handled professionally, of course.

You can’t be expected to know everything. Sometimes a good strategy is to ask your readers what they think. Many people love to share their knowledge but have no intention of running their own sites. Or they do, and have the perfect link for you.

It’s rather like how the sensei for my kids’ karate class puts it. He says “can’t” is a four letter word. “I’ll try” is much better.

By the same token, you don’t have to say “I don’t know.” You can say “Let me find out” instead.

Enjoy Yourself

It’s fun being the person who knows stuff, whatever kind of stuff it is you know. Have fun with it. Show your personality. Don’t be a know-it-all, be a solid resource.

How Do You Get Ideas from Other People’s Content Without Plagiarizing?

Stephanie — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 15:22:16 +0000

Some days one of the hardest things to get is an idea. It doesn’t matter how much you love your site, your topic or anything, sometimes that first idea is just really hard to get.

A favorite way of mine to get ideas is to read what others have written. But there’s something you have to be careful of. You do not want to plagiarize anyone. But there are a few simple ways you can avoid this problem.

Discuss Their Article and Link to Them

If you really like what someone else has written, there’s nothing stopping you in most cases from linking to the article, crediting a few key points and adding in your own thoughts. It’s a great way to share quality information.

You may get some attention from the original author when they note the link to their site. This makes for not only great inspirations, but a pretty good networking tool. It can also be good for search engines to note that you link out, sharing good information, rather than hiding away on your own site. I read that some time ago on Daily Blog Tips, and I agree with how they explain it.

Disagree with Their Article

Disagreeing with what someone else wrote can be fun. If you’re going to link to their article and explain why you disagree, you might just get some conversation going. Or a bit of anger, whatever. It depends on how you write your own article and on the personality of the person you’re disagreeing with.

You’ll note however, that I said if. Linking isn’t something I always do.

There’s good reason for that. Sometimes what I’m disagreeing with is when I feel someone is promoting a scam or something mighty close to one. If I feel the article is promoting something I don’t care to link to, I won’t.

In that case, my own article is likely more general. It doesn’t need to go from point to point countering everything.

It may also not even appear to be disagreeing with anything in particular. When I’ve read something I’ve disagreed with, sometimes the resultant article is strictly about my point of view.

Sadly, some people will write anything for a chance to earn money. While you may not agree with what they’re saying, you can take it as inspiration to discuss your perspective.

An example of this would be the scads of “Google Money” and similar splogs that were all over the place in 2009. I disagreed plenty with them, but I wasn’t about to link to any. Much better to link to the resources that explained why they should be avoided.

Read Only the Titles

You can get a lot of ideas just from the titles of other articles. Read the title and create one of your own.

When I do this, sometimes it won’t even be on the same topic as the title I read. The other title just gets me thinking on a topic of my own. It might be the type of the title, it might be just one word that makes me sit up and say “hey, that’s an idea!”

Read the Articles and Note Individual Ideas

This is one you have to be very careful with, as it can reach into plagiarism if you aren’t careful. It can pay to take just one or two concepts from an article and note them for a future article.

Generally speaking, if I get an idea from someone else’s article I’m either going to write it up immediately with crediting links, or I’m going to take just one concept and develop things in my own direction in a few days.

I don’t like to write the second kind of article there immediately. My mind is likely too full of ideas from the other author’s article, and I don’t want to accidentally imitate them. Giving it a couple days and reading other things gives me time to develop it into something unique.

If you really want to make the idea your own, take things a step farther and don’t use it directly. Instead, brainstorm on related ideas. You can write it out on paper, type them into your word processor, use Google’s Wonder Wheel or even use a keyword tool to see what comes out.

Read Forums

Reading on forums is a great way to find out what questions people are asking about your niche. If someone is asking the question on a forum, you have a good chance that someone else is asking it on the search engines.

You’ll notice that a lot of these ideas I use are for generating ideas to write about another day. Many times when I can’t think of a topic to write about, even with a topic I’ll struggle more than usual with the writing. Taking a day to generate ideas rather than articles means that the days I’m more into writing are more productive because the ideas are all there.

You can do many of these tips with articles you’ve previously written for your own site too. You can disagree with something you previously wrote because you’ve learned something new. You can go into more detail on topics you’ve written before. You can take a new angle on an old topic.

Just do your best to keep from rehashing the same information over and over again on your site.

My Daily Work Plans for the New Year

Stephanie — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 16:49:33 +0000

One thing that works well for me is to have generic projects that I work on regularly. At need I switch them to focus on particular sites, or drop them entirely if something special needs to be done, but having regular things I do really helps keep things moving.

Write 5 Articles or Blog Posts Per Day

This is actually down from in the past when I could easily manage 7 in a day. But with a baby I have less writing time, and this goal reflects that.

At that, it’s a really challenging goal to reach right now. A lot of days I don’t manage it because time can be just so tight. That and the baby loves to pull up on my desk and pound the keyboard. Not a good thing when I’m trying to write. How I long for an office door some days!

Writing 5 a day means that I can get all the blog posts for one week, Monday through Friday, done in a single day. If I like, that means the rest of the week any articles written for that site can be for article submission.

Since I write for more than one site, it does not mean that I could write four times as much content for distribution as I do for my site. If I could do that, I’d probably just slightly up the blog posting frequency for a better balance.

10 Blog Comments Per Day

This one challenges me much of the time, but it is a bit easier to schedule. I can read through blog posts with my little Busy Bee on my lap, keyboard pushed in on its shelf under the desk, and figure out which posts I want to comment on later.

It’s nice to have something to do where I can spread the effort out a little. It doesn’t work all the time, and I think commenting earlier is better than later for actual views of my comments, but it helps.

10 Forum Posts Per Day

I’ve been slacking off on this one way too long.

Forums can be a huge time suck, but appropriate forums that allow signatures can bring in respectable traffic if you keep your posts interesting. It’s not so much about advertising as it is building a reputation as a helpful participant in the forum.

Finding the Time???

The worst of it all is finding the time for all of this. If you have the budget, I strongly suggest figuring out what you can put out to a virtual assistant. Link building can be a good choice for example… tedious, time consuming and really doesn’t need your personal touch. Let someone else have that headache.

Anything that you need to do on your own, figure out when your most productive hours are and use them! Turn off Twitter, Facebook and anything else that might distract you. Let TiVo get your favorite shows if you’d miss them.

If the kids are awake and the weather’s nice, send them outside. If it’s not nice, have them dress appropriately and send them out for a bit anyhow! Well, not into a blizzard or anything, but if warmer clothes are all that’s needed, they can play outside for a time.

These plans are of course only approximate, and will change regularly. But having a general outline has always worked better than a solid schedule for me.

What works for you?

Writer – Weekly Work at Home Job Idea

Stephanie — Mon, 04 May 2009 16:08:00 +0000

Writing is one of the most popular work at home jobs. It’s something many people can do, even if not everyone loves to write. The equipment needs are minimal and the demand is there. Pay, however, is extremely variable, depending on the kind of writing you want to do and what you ask for.

Qualifications/Training Needed?

Writing jobs don’t always have a lot of qualifications listed, but other times you need specific training or the ability to research unfamiliar topics well enough to write clearly about them.

There are a few kinds of writing. Copywriters, for example, write ad copy. If you’re good at this it can be one of the best paid types of writing job. It involves a lot of testing and practice to learn what works best and what works for particular markets. Little changes can do a lot.

Article writing is very popular now that a lot of websites need it for promoting their sites. However it pays far less on average. The more you get paid as an article writer, the better your research on a given topic will be expected to be.

Any paid writer needs to have excellent grammar and spelling skills. Don’t trust to spell check alone, as it is notorious for missing the use of an incorrect but properly spelled word. If you’re too lazy to proofread, working as a writer is probably not for you.

Job Duties

Write whatever it is you’ve been asked to work on. What you write depends on the kinds of work you choose to look for.

Equipment Needed

You probably have everything you need. A computer with Microsoft Word or Office and an internet connection is about it.

Where to Search for Jobs

Writing job listings at Home with the Kids
Blogging job listings at Home with the Kids
Craigslist (beware of many, many scams!)
Hire My Mom
Go Freelance
Telework Recruiting
Elance
Guru

Related Scams

The main scams to look out for are paid job boards that really don’t offer any jobs, as well as any job posting that offers an exceptional amount of pay for the amount of work done.

Poetry contests and similar are also very common scams for writers, as are writing contests.

Recommended Reading

88 Money-Making Writing Jobs
The Definitive Guide to Making Money Online With Your Writing
ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
6 Figure Freelancer

Write Letters – Free Fun Friday

Stephanie — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 15:43:48 +0000

Take some time and write letters to family members or friends. It’s a great habit to get the kids into, and you don’t have to limit yourself to thank you notes.

Just think of all the people who would love to hear from you in a letter. Grandparents. Friends who have moved away or you’ve moved away from. Pen pals.

You can of course just send emails, but there is something about a handwritten letter that’s a little extra special. If your handwriting is as poor as mine is, you’ll have to take extra care to keep it legible. That’s the problem with typing everything.

For children still mastering their writing skills, this is a great and fun way to practice. They can even write to friends who are in the area. Kids get such a kick out of getting mail, and you can build up a habit between your kids and their friends.

Quick Ways to Earn Money at Home

Stephanie — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 21:56:39 +0000

So often I see people ask how they can earn money quickly at home. It’s a common problem for stay at home parents. Living on a single income is rough, and when the bills pile up you need to do something.

Now, if things are bad enough you may need to look at getting a job outside the home, say, after your spouse comes home. Not fun, but when the need arises it’s one of the sacrifices you make.

You can also do your best to cut the bills. Do you really need cable television, a regular phone and a cell phone? Make cuts in your luxury bills as necessary.

A garage sale is a quick way to make money. Of course, it only works once in a while. But it brings in some money and gets rid of clutter.

There aren’t many ways to earn money quickly from home. Most work at home jobs are really hard to get into. There’s just a lot of competition. Similarly, home businesses can take time to get off the ground, and generally cost money to get started.

However, there are a couple things you can do to earn money fairly quickly. Some of this depends on how quickly you need money. If you need it in a week, there’s not much you can do. But if you need it within 2-3 months you have some time to get things going and get the money coming in.

If you can write, Associated Content pays $3-20 per article through Paypal. You can read on their site on how they decide what to pay you. Your submissions for pay are reviewed within five days. You can also bid for jobs on sites such as eLance.

Another option for writers, or rather bloggers, is to join PayPerPost. I’m doing this one a bit myself. It’s fun at times but a lot of work. There must be a regular post between each paid post, so you have to post quite a bit in order to accept a lot of paid posts. Your blog must be at least 90 days old, have at least 20 posts and no more than a 1 month interval without posting. Pay depends on which opportunity you choose. Not all posts insist upon positive reviews, so you can maintain your integrity and give your honest opinion in most assignments. If you don’t like the opportunity and they insist on a positive review, you just skip it.

In some areas mystery shopping can do well. It depends on how many companies are needing mystery shoppers in your area as well as how many other mystery shoppers are in your area. One challenge with mystery shopping is that many companies pay you at the end of the month after you do the shop… that is to say potentially close to two months after you do the work.

If you can take the financial risk…. not terribly likely if you need to earn money fast, but still worth mentioning, you can try pay per click advertising. Go to Google AdWords (see link on left beneath navigation), Yahoo or other pay per click search engines to advertise a product. Clickbank has a bunch of electronic products and pays every two weeks if you earn enough in that pay period. This is good in that you can quickly figure out if you’re making or losing money.

However, many people lose money doing pay per click advertising, so it is a risk you may not be up for taking. This one takes a lot of research… finding the right product, right keywords, tweaking your ad text to maximize returns… it is not all that easy. But for those who are good at it, it can be quite profitable.

Selling on eBay can also be quite profitable. You can sell things on eBay rather than do a garage sale or get more stuff to sell from thrift shops and such. Be careful how you set your initial prices. Too high scares off potential bidders, but too low risks that you will lose money.

You can offer services in your area. Housecleaning, gardening, running errands… it’s a kind of business, but one that you can ask for payment as soon as you do the job, rather than waiting weeks for payment. You can talk to family, friends, neighbors or post flyers to find work.

Babysitting is another service you can provide. You can do the work involved in setting up a standard daycare, which usually involves licensing and regular inspections, or you can think of a way to just watch kids when the parents need someone on an emergency basis or just to run errands for a few hours.

Earning money quickly from home isn’t impossible, but it can be difficult. If money is often tight for you, have emergency plans and try to come up with ways to make things a little less tight for your family.