Tutorial Blog » Writing

Writing a Query in Four Easy Steps

Jen Nipps — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 17:00:20 +0000

Suppose you have a project in mind for a (potential) client but no current contract with them. Short of waiting for them to contact you, what can you do?

Write a query. A query is a question. Based on this, a query letter is a business letter asking someone to let you work for them.

You can use the SLAP method of four steps to writing a query: (...)
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Plug into Smartphones and Use Google Analytics to Track Your Traffic

Michael Alexander — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 20:06:21 +0000

The growing popularity of smartphones, and of mobile computing in general, is already starting to change the way visitors interact with your site. It’s not too soon to start laying out the blueprint for a version of your site designed expressly for pocket-sized screens.

Times may be tough, but the smartphone market isn’t hurting because of it. According to market researcher, NPD Group, 23 percent of cellphones sold in the U.S. during the fourth quarter of 2008 were smartphones. That’s up from 12 percent of sales in the fourth quarter of 2007. And, for the first time, last year, sales of smartphones exceeded those of laptops, even as netbooks exploded on the market like fragmentation grenades.

Web browsing on the iPhone, which undoubtedly offers the best mobile experience at the moment, is still a pain. Viewing Web pages over anything but Wi-Fi is molasses slow; it’s damn hard to see what you’re looking at; and scrolling makes my finger ache. It’s 1994 all over again.

There’s only so much smartphone makers can do with the platform. The rest of the heavy lifting will have to come from Web site makers.

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10 Tips for Meeting Deadlines

Jen Nipps — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 18:00:34 +0000

If you do any freelance work, chances are you work from home. Everyone who works from home knows what distractions and challenges come with that particular work environment. When that happens, how do you meet deadlines?

Here are ten tips for meeting internal deadlines set by you and external deadlines set by an editor:(...)
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5 Best Sites for Finding Freelancing Jobs Online

Jen Nipps — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:02:46 +0000

The latest news reports indicate there have been over 600,000 jobs lost in the United States in this current recession. Because of this, many people are considering freelancing/contracting who wouldn’t have done so in the past. The question arises, then, what are the best freelancing websites online?

Here is a list of five of the best freelancing sites:

1. Freelance Writing Jobs: This site is dedicated to freelance writers and bloggers. It started as a blog on Blogger and grew, eventually moving to being its own network of blogs. One of the other blogs on the network offers tips and advice for finding freelance jobs online. Leads come from a variety of places including JournalismJobs.com, Craigslist, MediaBistro, Monster.com, etc. This is a free service.

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Why You Should Focus on Widgets, Gadgets and Social Nets in Tough Times

Michael Alexander — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 19:10:43 +0000

In these tough economic times, the smartest companies are using everything–including sticks and rocks–to get the attention of prospects and customers. The most potent weapons in their marketing arsenals include Web 2.0 tools and services, social networking, mobile apps, desktop widgets and gadgets, based on a recent Forrester Research study. Their main objectives are to improve customer service (73 percent) and acquire new customers (71 percent).

Help your boss or client tighten their relationships with existing customers and to acquire new customers is a sure way to prove your worth and to protect your own job from extinction!

Sales of smartphone applications also are going gang busters. For example, Apple reported the other day that the number of iPhone and iPod touch apps sold by the App Store went from 10 million in July to 500 million in December. Most of the apps are free or $0.99. They cover everything from restaurant reservation systems to financial apps that put access to all a user’s accounts under a single interface.

“This is a clear indication that companies facing the current economic conditions are investing in engaging customers wherever they are already spending their time online,” says David Lavenda, VP marketing and product strategy at WorkLight, a developer that designs software to help businesses reach customers using Apple iPhone app, desktop widgets, iGoogle, Windows Live, RSS readers, Facebook and more.

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Here’s What’s on My Apple iPhone Today

Michael Alexander — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 14:20:45 +0000

On the side, I write for a few blogs, one of which is AppCraver, an Apple iPhone applications review site. With each review I do, I get smarter about which apps are truly useful to people like you and me. Here’s what’s been on my iPhone lately:

Bringing in the reads and feeds

The best news app I’ve come across is Mobile News Network. It’s AP news that you can configure in a variety of ways: top news, local news, sports, business, politics and on and on. The interface is super clean. News—whether as text, images or video—comes down surprisingly fast over Wi-Fi. You also get it all in one shot, so you can read it offline. Mobile News Network is ad-supported, but it’s free.

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New Searchable Scanned Docs and a Common Screw Up

Michael Alexander — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 14:06:05 +0000

I mention Google so often that many people must think I’m getting paid by the company. Just for the record, they don’t pay me. I just can’t help myself–Google is always doing cool things.

Recently, Google said it is now able to use optical character recognition to index scanned documents stored as Adobe PDFs. Previously, the company rarely scanned docs because it couldn’t be sure of the search results. According to Google’s blog:

While we’ve indexed documents saved as PDFs for some time now, scanned documents are a lot more difficult for a computer to read. Scanning is the reverse of printing. Printing turns digital words into text on paper, while scanning makes a digital picture of the physical paper (and text) so you can store and view it on a computer.

To take a test drive of this new-new thing, click on this search query–Steady Success in a Volatile World–and you’ll see an excerpt of the PDF doc in the search results followed by the View as HTML link.

Convert scanned PDFs to text

Tech site Digital Inspiration has an angle on this new feature worth mentioning:

If you have scanned PDF files on your hard drive but lack OCR software, you can still convert them into recognizable text, DI says.

Create a folder on your Website (say, your site is abc.com) and upload all your PDFs to the same folder. Then, create a public Web page that links to all the PDFs. Wait for the Google searchbots to spider your stuff. After that’s done, type site:abc.com/pdf filetype:pdf to see your PDFs as HTML.

Lifehacker adds this twist to converting PDFs to HTML:

You can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to reign in what gets scanned and indexed on your site, although you should assume anything you put online can be found by those looking for it.

Can you tell what’s wrong with Lifehacker’s sentence above? Read “21 Words That Sound Alike but Mean Different Things.” What wrong in this picture?

Here’s How to Use Blogging to Promote Your Business

Michael Alexander — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 15:32:43 +0000

When clients ask me if they should write a blog, I always respond: “Heck yeah.” I’m all about quality content and the more keywords you can get into your pages the better off you’ll be, at least I think so. Blogging is just another way to feed searchbots.

After reading Josh Bernoff’s “Time to Rethink Your Corporate Blogging Ideas,” report, I’ll be more inclined to reply “That depends,” the next time the question comes up. Bernoff is an analyst at Forrester Research, a technology-industry market researcher. The firm recently conducted a survey to gauge the opinions of customers and consumers who read corporate blogs. I guess it’s not surprising that less than one-fifth of people who read corporate blogs trust them.

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Why Writing for the Web and for Print Differ and What to Do About It

Michael Alexander — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:10:27 +0000

Visitors to your Web site won’t read much of your content word-for-word. They’ll scan the text, cherry picking what to read. They’re in a hurry, easily distracted and have limited attention spans. If they don’t see right away what they’re looking for, they’ll bail out.

You can look it up. Go to the Poynter Institute’s or Jakob Nielsen’s site. Those guys have done lots of studies on how people read on line.

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Cross This Line and You’re Dead and Other Writing Tips

Michael Alexander — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:44:10 +0000

My first writing job was for a small small publishing company that published magazines for consumer electronics and major appliance retailers. Writing for trade magazines is not as glamorous as writing for consumer magazines but the pay is a heck of a lot better.

It was one of those places where the writers did the work of two times as many people. We pounded copy like crazed monkeys including nights and Saturdays when deadlines were on top of us. I wrote my ass off and I learned a lot, thanks to my working for a particularly skillful editor. I also learned to write quickly.

I’ve been banging out copy since and not a day goes by that I’m satisfied with my work. I know I can always do better. It’s a disease.

I’m sorry to be so long winded. I’ve already violated one of rules I learned about writing and that is get to the point quickly. I’m in a reflective mood. If you want to go read someone else’s blog, I’ll understand.

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