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The “just the facts” approach to your website may cover all of the bullet points you need covered, but it’s not engaging enough to keep people around.

What exactly do freelance copywriters write? Everything! From ad copy to newsletters, from policies to blogs, from business proposals to brochures, and from catalog blurbs to t-shirt taglines, there's nothing off-limits. James told me she's worked on everything from tweets for non-profits to ghost writing a book for a motivational speaker to writing taglines for Nike. So, if you are after variety, it appears that the freelance thing delivers. Sure, some freelances have specialties, but generally speaking, they are just really skilled at writing and they help businesses who need someone with that skill to produce written content. Unlike traditional writers, these people don't get their names in the byline, but they do get paid hourly for their work. Did you catch that? HOUR-LY.

If you sit down at a blank screen every day and simply do nothing then you are a writer. If you write one word, even better. Some people will disagree. Maybe you will disagree. That's fine. We also can all disagree. Meanwhile, our DNA is telling us we are pretty much exactly the same.

I try to read pieces or chapters in 3-4 books a day or more. I read at least from one non-fiction, one or two quality fiction, and one inspirational. I try to read at the level I want to write. I do this in the morning before I start writing.

Destroy every gatekeeper.

Spend a few minutes setting up an email system that you can use to contact potential clients. The ideal system will let you contact many people at once, based on a custom list that you create.

you need to spend the time to create a custom pitch to that matches your potential clients very closely. Once that is done, set your email system to send the email out at 8am on Tuesday

look for potential network possibilities. This should only take about 5 minutes of your time. You want to check Meetup.com for both freelance writing networking as well as networking opportunities within your writing specialties. Check for local community meetings such as School board and city/county council meetings. All of these are great places to meet potential clients.

iWriter is perfect for both the beginning and the established writer that wants to add another writing site to their list.

The range of these topics is considerably greater than most writing sites and includes pretty much anything you would want to write about and probably a few things you never considered.

This goes beyond setting goals for individual projects and instead spans all parts of your writing life, from pitching to craft to the business side.

Brainstorm all the things you’d love to see yourself accomplishing as a writer. Once you’ve got your ideas down on paper, streamline those thoughts by writing in one sentence that encompasses your overall objective for writing.

Each big picture requires a different set of tasks. And each short-term goal will flow naturally from your big picture goal.

The easiest way to write well is to edit your writing. The best person to edit a manuscript, article or blog post is the author herself.

Leave your writing alone for a while

Pay attention to what jumps out at you as awkward.

How, then, do writing opportunities work? To be paid for writing, you need to look for a person with two characteristics: They’ve got money to spare. They’re looking for writers. This could be: A magazine editor who is looking for feature articles. An aristocrat or multi-billionaire who wants to support the career of an aspiring artist. A blogger who makes money from advertisements, or from selling information products, but is too busy to do all their blogging themselves. A book publisher who is looking for the next Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter. A business owner who needs help from a writer to promote their business. Do you see where this is going? There are writing opportunities out there, if you know where to look, and if you know the right people.

MadContent.com is a bit unique in that they cater to customers and clients who are in need of SEO services. SEO, or search engine optimization, is a method that involves strategically placing specific keywords at predetermined intervals in articles, product descriptions, and more. Through using SEO, customers and clients of MadContent.com may be able to boost their search engine rankings organically when the specified keywords are searched for.

The Writer’s Market and Mediabistro’s How to Pitch guides both offer information on their listed magazines for what percentage of the publication is freelanced out, and of pay rates. If the magazine you want is in there, you’re set with the info you need.

Many magazines have their writer’s guidelines right on their website these days. Poke around there and see if you can turn up any “write for us” information.

Don’t overlook the insights the mighty search engine might bring you if you do a search on “pay at X magazine.”

Comment on their posts.

If you want to build a blog, the reality is that Twitter is one of the most important platforms for sharing, probably followed by Google+, at this point. If you’re in a home/food/how-to niche, Pinterest may be important to you as well. If Facebook seems like a place people talk about your topic a lot, it might be useful, too.

There are plenty of tools out there — among the most popular are AddtoAny, ShareThis, and Sharebar (which is what I’m currently using).

Are You Likely to be Interrupted?

What Can You Hear?

Are You Sitting Comfortably?

Search, and Google in particular (with 90% of worldwide share), still drive vastly greater quantities of traffic than all the social networks combined (some good research from DefineMG here). Given Google’s 3.5+ Billion searches performed each day, that shouldn’t be a surprise, but to many bloggers, thinking about search, Google, and all that “SEO stuff” has been put aside in favor of Facebook shares, likes, tweets, +1s, and the more visible feedback and applause that come from social sources.

Thankfully, you can resolve to make this a priority in the future. It may sound like a bad infomercial, but you can substantially upgrade your blog’s SEO potential with less than 5 minutes per post. Here’s how:

The other keyword research source I’d encourage you to pursue is Google’s autosuggest.