Can You Make a Living Writing Web Content?

Can You Make a Living Writing Web Content?
An email arrived recently: I want to make a living writing content for websites. I have spent the past few decades raising children and working as an elementary school teacher. Teaching just isn't working for me anymore and I intend to return to university in several years for a completely different kind of degree. In the meantime, however, I am a single mother with one ten-year-old still in the nest....

An email arrived recently:
I want to make a living writing content for websites. I have spent the past few decades raising children and working as an elementary school teacher. Teaching just isn't working for me anymore and I intend to return to university in several years for a completely different kind of degree. In the meantime, however, I am a single mother with one ten-year-old still in the nest. What do you think are the most important things for me to focus on and do in order to become a financially successful online writer?

I explained that I've been in a fortunate situation, making a living from teaching while exploring webwriting as a sideline. What I've learned has improved my teaching, but I haven't had to pay the groceries out of my webwriting income.

So I'll turn the question over to people who drop in here. What makes for a successful career as an online writer?

links for 2007-12-28
Tunnels, Bridges, and Terminals Alerts "The Port Authority is launching the first phase of a motorist alert service for our bridge and tunnel customers" (tags: NYC Traffic Travel Mobile) Twitter Facts: First State of the Twitosphere in India (tags: twitter...

links for 2007-12-22
Feature: Getting Things Done with labels and filters in Gmail 2.0 | Geek.com (tags: Gmail GTD) View all iPhone Safari RSS feeds at once (tags: iphone rss safari) iPhone Snow Globe (tags: fun holidays Mobile iphone ipod) Wikio Blogs "Find...

Become a Knowledge Management Ninja with Google Reader
In this era of data smog, the knowledge worker who can act like an agile ninja by consuming vast quantities of information, synthesizing it and getting it in the hands of the right people at the right time is invaluable....

2008 Digital Trends Part I: Media Battle Advertisers for Eyeballs
Over the next two weeks (like in years past) I am going to post a series of essays on what I see as the big digital trends to watch in 2008. All of these are less about individual sites and...

Blogging is Publishing
I wish I could say that "blogging is publishing" was something that I came up with on my own, but that is not the case. However, I have been pondering on this phrase for a while and decided to write an entry on my thoughts.

Its Name is Zookoda
Zookoda is the new leader in professional email marketing for bloggers. It gives you better control on the look and feel of how your feed is sent to your subscribers. The program is similar to what you see in newsletter...

How to Set Up a Portable Personal Nerve Center
There has been some debate the last few days about the merits of web-based vs. desktop applications. This was sparked by a big article in last weekend's New York Times about Google and Microsoft (an Edelman client). Ionut Alex Chitu...

On Foggy Writing
Dave Wood wrote to me the other day: I was somewhat aghast at finding one of my web pages coming in at a fog reading of 15+ - I'm just in the middle of revamping it now and am determined to have an index below 9. I did find a glitch in a site you'd recommended: Readability.info. It wasn't accepting my files and seemed to convert them to a read-only...

Dave Wood wrote to me the other day:

I was somewhat aghast at finding one of my web pages coming in at a fog reading of 15+ - I'm just in the middle of revamping it now and am determined to have an index below 9.

I did find a glitch in a site you'd recommended: Readability.info. It wasn't accepting my files and seemed to convert them to a read-only in my own files. I had to re-start the computer to get rid of that setting. It may be local to my computer?

I did find another site that worked better in that it didn't require me to upload my files but accepted a paste: Gunning Fog Index.

I've had a similar problem with Readability.info. When I try to upload a Word file, it instantly tells me it found no sentences. Put in a URL, however, and equally instantly it provides a number of readability indices. I've written to the owner of the site, and will pass along his response. (Update: He tells me the problem arose after a switch of servers. Look for a fix after Christmas.)

In the meantime, while it's helpful to know the general readability of your website's text, you can do a lot just by following a few simple practices:

1. Keep text columns narrow.
Ideally, the longest line in a column should be 15 words. Ten would be better.

2. Keep words short.
"Magic" is better than "prestidigitation." "Idea" is better than "conceptualization."

3. Keep sentences short.
On some of my blogs, I excerpt articles from print media. Too often, especially in the first paragraph, a sentence goes on for well over 20 words. I don't rewrite such sentences, but I wish I could. Bulleted lists can often replace strings of words and phrases.

4. Keep paragraphs short.
In most fonts used on websites, six or seven lines should be enough for a paragraph. Even if it's a long, complex idea that belongs in a long paragraph, break it up. A long, solid mass of screen text will discourage too many potential readers.

5. Put a little white space between paragraphs.
A short line at the end of a paragraph isn't enough of a break. Just one hit on the Return key can make a world of difference in helping people read your text.

6. Put important words and phrases in "hot spots."
Your sentence's beginning and end are its hot spots. Here readers pay most attention and react most strongly to what they read. Hot spots cool off in sentences buried in mid-paragraph. Then the end of the last sentence becomes hot again.

So a paragraph starting with "There" or "It" has wasted a good hot spot.

7. Use bolded subheads to help navigation.
A subhead every few paragraphs gives readers an overview of the whole document. A numbered list like this one, with bolded and numbered lines, is also easier to understand.

8. Break these rules when you must.
Follow them too closely, and your writing style may start to sound dull and predictable. Too many short sentences (and bulleted lists) will give you too many hot spots. That will make you sound as if you're ranting.

The above text, pasted into the Gunning Fog site, turns out to have a Fog index of 7.396. Out of 517 words, 47 have three or more syllables. I did some revision while writing it, but 7.396 seems like a reasonable level of clarity.

A link to the Gunning Fog Index site is now in the Webwriting Resources list in the left-hand column.

The Revolution is Being Blogged
The upheaval in Burma is setting off tremors on the web as well. An online magazine run by Burmese exiles in Thailand, The Irrawaddy, is covering the protests and the junta's crackdown: High tech gets the truth out. Excerpt: Despite efforts by the reclusive regime to seal off its cowed people from the outside world, pictorial evidence of the crimes now being committed in the junta’s name is getting out,...

The upheaval in Burma is setting off tremors on the web as well. An online magazine run by Burmese exiles in Thailand, The Irrawaddy, is covering the protests and the junta's crackdown: High tech gets the truth out. Excerpt:

Despite efforts by the reclusive regime to seal off its cowed people from the outside world, pictorial evidence of the crimes now being committed in the junta’s name is getting out, thanks in large measure to the ingenuity of young people with the high-tech know-how to sidestep official attempts to gag them.

Worldwide news services such as the BBC, CNN and Al Jazeera are illustrating news reports with clandestine pictures and video footage that confirm the extent of the tragedy now unfolding in Burma.

The Irrawaddy is supplying a wide range of TV stations and publications with material obtained by its own sources.

“We are getting e-mailed pictures taken by mobile phones and digital cameras,” said The Irrawaddy’s Managing Editor, Kyaw Zwa Moe. “They are being sent in by people who hold private e-mail accounts, usually with Skype or Gmail. They don’t worry about the risk they are running—they just want the outside world to know what is happening.”

Many of Rangoon’s Internet shops remained closed on Thursday as the violent suppression of the peaceful demonstrations entered its second day. Traders Hotel in the city center, popular with foreign business people and journalists, was searched room by room for evidence of Internet use.

The worldwide demand for information about what is happening in Burma is so large that traffic on The Irrawaddy’s own Web site has more than doubled since the crackdown began.

More than 1 million hits were recorded on Wednesday, closing the site down for a while.

The Irrawaddy Web site has had 22 million hits so far this month, more than double recorded in a normal month.

Meanwhile, The Independent in the UK is quoting Burma's bloggers bearing witness to the unfolding revolution. For a link to some of those blogs ( mostly in Burmese, but the photos are eloquent), go to Rule of Lords.

Naming Your Blog
Michael Weiss at Slate has an entertaining item: Don't drink the balloon juice: Good, bad, and ugly things to name your blog. He discusses mostly American political blogs, but it's actually a pretty serious question: What's the best thing to name your site? As a compulsive multiple blogger, I have to answer the question more often than I care to admit. Most of my sites have fairly flat-footed self-descriptive titles,...

Michael Weiss at Slate has an entertaining item: Don't drink the balloon juice: Good, bad, and ugly things to name your blog.

He discusses mostly American political blogs, but it's actually a pretty serious question: What's the best thing to name your site? As a compulsive multiple blogger, I have to answer the question more often than I care to admit.

Most of my sites have fairly flat-footed self-descriptive titles, like this one and Writing Fiction. When I started blogging avian flu, H5N1 was also pretty self-descriptive, but set slightly apart from other blogs that played variations on "bird flu," "avian influenza," and so on.

Without realizing what I was doing, I picked names that people tend to Google. Type "writing fiction" into Google Advanced search and my site comes up first out of a million hits. "Writing for the Web" is #7 out of 634,000. And "h5n1" is #5 out of 7,870,000 hits.

In a course blog, where only my students are likely to visit, I may use a flat-footed name or a cute one—in a course on storytelling for media, the blog is Raconteur. But I'm just as comfortable with a course blog named for the room the class meets in, like Cedar 224.

For a blog that I co-author with a teacher in China, the name is English Corner, a reference most Chinese students will understand because every campus and town has an "English corner" where students gather to practice their English on one another—and any native English speakers who wander by.

Now I'm getting interested in climate change, and recently started Homage to Arrhenius, an allusion to the Swedish scientist who first developed the theory about CO² as a greenhouse gas, back in the 1890s. This may be a little too cute.

And for another blog, created as a journal for the second edition of one of my books, I've chosen the flat-footed name Pioneers...since the book is titled Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia.

I'd be curious to know how bloggers visiting here chose the names for their sites. And can you point to any blogs that are either very well named, or horribly misnamed?

links for 2007-12-27
kwout | A brilliant way to quote ""kwout" is a way you quote a part of a web page as an image with an image map." (tags: Blogs lifehacks Bookmarklets) Citizen journalism dominates online news in 2007 : CyberJournalist.net The...

When governments don't understand the web
Between school and a book and other blogging, I've been neglecting this site. But this afternoon I posted an item on my H5N1 blog that has a lot to do with webwriters' problems: When governments don't understand the web.

Between school and a book and other blogging, I've been neglecting this site. But this afternoon I posted an item on my H5N1 blog that has a lot to do with webwriters' problems: When governments don't understand the web.