Irrespective of what niche you write in, there are major industry events that you need to be aware of. Reading about them is a terrific way to get ideas for new topics.

In addition, when you are well informed about your niche, you will be able to generate new ideas and base your writing on solid facts, as opposed to opinion alone. It is not just the major events that you should concern yourself with – it significantly helps to keep up to date on your niche in all aspects.

If you are able to blog about an event early in its life-cycle, you can gain several advantages as a blogger, which may not be as apparent at first. Continue Reading

Online job marketplaces are billion dollar businesses today, ducking the recent recession and expanding at a tremendous rate. No wonder then that more and more sites open up every day catering to a small niche of freelancers.

The two biggest general online job marketplaces are Elance and oDesk, but there are many smaller ones which are specialized, offering differentiated options for freelancer. These marketplaces have potential to add value at every stage of a freelancer’s career.

While online job marketplaces are a current trend worthy of your attention, you should consider the pros and cons before investing your time and energy into one. Let’s take a closer look. Continue Reading

Freelance writers need to deal with web content all the time, as more and more of publishing goes online.

Although the basic principles of good writing don’t change in the online realm, there are certain differences that writers should be aware of. One of the most important aspects of online content is that it should be easily searchable by search engines, especially Google.

This is what ultimately gives power to online content, because people are able to search and get to the content they are looking for.

Irrespective of what kind of online content you write, it always helps to know about search engine optimization, or SEO. If you are new to SEO, you should look at our SEO guide for deeper information on the subject.

It helps to know that SEO is not about keyword spamming or including some peculiar grammatically incorrect keyword into your writing as many times as possible. This is, in fact, the worst thing you can do from an SEO point of view.

SEO trends change all the time as search engines evolve. It should be noted that the ultimate goal of search engines is to deliver the best quality information on top. The means to this end differ all the time and thus the changing SEO trends. Here are some of the things you need to be aware of in 2012 with respect to what is good SEO and what is not. Continue Reading