Victoria Neely

Blogging can help build your reputation, sharpen your writing skills, and expand your online presence. Static web sites are good, but they don’t have quite the go-juice of blogging. When you constantly update a blog with fresh content, you are giving people a reason to come back.

You can get a blog up and running for less than $10 a month. Actually, you can do it for less than $5 a month if you shop around. But what if you can’t spare the cash? What if you don’t want to spend money on a blog until you’re sure it’s something you can keep up with?

You could always get a free blog. It won’t look as professional, but it’s still better than nothing. Here are a few places where you can get a blog for free:

Blogger.com - Blogger is nice because you can tweak the designs to your liking and toss up some ads if you want to earn a passive income. It’s easy to set up, too.

WordPress.com - The advantage of a free WordPress.com blog is that you can create static pages, such as an “About Me” or “Services” page. The downside is that and you can’t display ads on your blog, which may or may not be an issue for you. Also, designs for your blog are limited; you have to pay a fee before you can tweak them.

LiveJournal.com - One of the perks of LiveJournal is that it encourages networking. You can find LiveJournal groups that match your interests. However, LiveJournal comes across as less professional than other options. It’s mostly geared toward teens and the younger crowd.

You can find other free blogging networks if you poke around, but these are some of the most well-known and reliable options. Also, if you sign up for a blog at one of these places and later decide to pay for a hosted WordPress blog, you won’t have a hard time moving all your posts from one of these accounts.

There are three phases of writing: Researching, writing, and editing. The problem is that many people tend to lump these activities together. They can’t resist double-checking some facts, correcting a misspelled word, rewriting the same sentence a few times, or correcting grammatical blunders.

It’s more efficient to keep these activities separate. Flitting back and forth from each task will slow you down. Instead of researching your facts as you write, you should familiarize yourself with the topic first, then start writing. You can double-check the facts later. Instead of revising as you go, it’s better to just write freely without stopping to correct something. You can always clean up your article later.

Here are some steps to help you streamline your writing activities:

1. Write a short outline or a series of questions you want to answer when you write your article. This will give you a focus for your research.
2. Set aside a block of time to thoroughly research your subject. Once you have all the answers you need, you’re ready to write.
3. Write, write, write. Let it flow. Try not to stop, and definitely don’t try to rewrite anything as you go. Think ahead to what you want to say next, but don’t stop to review what you’ve already written.
4. Now it’s time to edit your work. Cut out all the fluff, fix the typos and misspellings, rewrite sentences that just don’t work. Be as ruthless as you like. This is where you make your article look presentable.

Give yourself permission to write something less than stellar. Your inner critic won’t abandon you when it’s time to play the part of editor.

One way to make money with your writing is to set up a blog or a web site and add Google AdSense. If you get enough visitors and clicks, you could start making a few dollars or more each day. However, it’s important to learn the rules of the AdSense game. If you’re not careful and end up doing something that violates the TOS, Google could boot you from the program.

Here’s a list of 8 things you should never do:

1. NEVER click on your ads for any reason. Don’t tell your friends, family, or co-workers to click on the ads either. Google is pretty good about sniffing out click fraud.

2. Don’t keep refreshing your page. Google pays for clicks, but the page impressions matter a great deal too. A page impression is whenever someone looks at your site. It’s OK to look at your own web site and refresh it if you’re tweaking the design, but if you keep refreshing it over and over again to increase page impressions, Google isn’t going to be very pleased with you.

3. Don’t trick people into clicking your ads. An example of such trickery would be to make your ads blend into the content to such a degree that it’s easy for people to mistake them for navigational links. Making an ad look like an image caption is a bad idea, too.

4. Don’t mess with the AdSense code. You can choose the colors and styles when Google walks you through the ad creation process, but that’s about it. Cut and paste the ad into place, then leave it at that. Google frowns on ad tweaking.

5. Don’t encourage people to click on the ads. Asking people to click on your ads is a big no-no. Don’t even have little gimmicky images pointing at the ads.

6. Don’t send AdSense ads in email. Apparently since you can format email with HTML, some people got the clever idea of pasting AdSense ads in their messages. Not good. AdSense should be displayed on web sites only.

7. Don’t use paid-to-surf or paid-to-click programs. Google doesn’t like anything that artificially generates traffic and clicks. Keep it real.

8. Don’t display more than three ad units on each page. I take that to mean displaying an AdSense ad in each blog post is out of the question.

Now that we’ve gone over a bunch of the don’ts, here’s one important thing you SHOULD do:

Post a privacy policy. Recently Google made it a requirement for all AdSense publishers to post a privacy policy on their web sites. It’s not an option. Don’t worry, though, it’s not hard: You can have a policy created at Serp Rank.

There’s a lot more to know, but those are some of the biggest issues. Check out Google’s official AdSense Program Policies to learn more. It will also tell you what kind of content is and isn’t allowed on your AdSense pages.

I do most of my writing on the computer, since just about everything I come up with has to end up there anyway. Even so, I also enjoy writing with an actual pen and honest-to-goodness paper. The act of putting pen to paper creates a different writing experience altogether. Hammering away at a keyboard can be satisfying, but it also feels mechanical and a bit cold in comparison. Also, paper doesn’t strain your eyes the way a glowing monitor will.

That’s why I have several notebooks lying around. I’ll often jot down ideas, make lists, and record my activities for the day. Sometimes I’ll just start writing about some random thing to help clear my head. It’s therapeutic, and it helps me get more things done.

Typing at the computer doesn’t stop me from writing content I’m happy with, but the act of writing with a pen or a pencil engages my mind a bit differently. Sometimes I’ll write some of my best articles in a notebook and transcribe them to the computer later on.

If most of your writing is done straight at the computer, consider writing in a journal or notebook as well. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. If anything, the thought of filling the pages of a beautiful leather-bound journal with my less than beautiful handwriting makes me a bit uptight. When it’s “just” a notebook, I feel free to write as casually, messily, and wildly as I please. I’ve written more about choosing the perfect writing journal over at Squidoo.

Try it. You might like it.

Welcome to this blog’s very first post! Here are the topics I plan to cover here:

• Writing: The art of writing, the importance of writing, how to be a better writer, where to make money with your writing, and other topics that would be of interest to writer-types.
• Web 2.0: Yes, I know you’re probably sick of hearing about “Web 2.0″ all the time, which is a trendy term for websites that focus heavily on user interaction and collaboration. However, sites like Twitter or Squidoo that are all about this kind of networking can be extremely useful if you’re trying to promote yourself or your business.
• Announcements: If sometime down the road I offer new services or products, you’ll hear about it here.

Thanks for stopping by!