At one point, I was a freelance writer. I gave it up because I hated having to chase down payment. Or just not get paid. Good times, those days. Not that this is much different, really.
The best gig I had during those times (because it paid) was as a ghostwriter for a blog. That’s how I learned about SEO and how to improve search rankings, and so on and so on. I wasn’t half bad at it actually.
It was easier than this, though. Sort of. It was on a topic I knew nothing about and the point of the blog was to educate people – or, at least, be informative. Since I knew nothing, I would do my research and turn that into a blog post. The big topics would get broken down into smaller topics and multi-part series.
The key word company suggested daily blog posting of 300-400 word articles, and they were the ones that came-up with the general ideas. It was all well fine and good until I ran out of suggested topics and key words. Then, I was stumped. Absolutely lost. And the client was impossible to get a hold of, so I couldn’t ask for suggestions or ideas even a wish list.
Eventually, I had to give up that gig, but at least I got paid.
I’m not going to lie. It would make things easier if I were working with a key word company right now (or analytic company or marketing company or whatever). And, I suppose I could contact one and pay for their ideas and go that route. But that seem a little disingenuous to me. What right do I have to say I’m a writer if I can’t come up with ideas for my own blog?
Of course, one could argue it was disingenuous for me to ghostwrite that other blog. And, I suppose it is. But, some of us aren’t as good at writing as we’d like to be or need to be to make a successful blog. I think of it as helping others.
Hopefully, by making myself do this everyday, I’ll help myself.
Partly Writing 