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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.

I’m a freelancer, but I have a couple of contract gigs that play a big role in my monthly and daily cycles. I’m the science editor at BoingBoing.net, a technology and culture blog with 6 million monthly readers. I also have a monthly column with The New York Times Magazine.

The rest of the day really varies a lot, depending on what I have on my plate at that given time. I have ADHD and it’s really easy for me to get distracted and be unproductive, so I have lots of little tricks I rely on to keep me focused throughout the day. I used to use a timer on my computer a lot, just to have something that, periodically, forced me to look up and think about what I was doing and what I had to do next. But I find now that the two hours between breast pump sessions actually does that job pretty well. I also jump back and forth between stuff on my to-do list, depending on what I feel motivated to do. If I just can’t get myself to write during a given two-hour block, I’m better off answering email or sending out interview requests than just sitting there, staring at a blank page.

Skype, Call Recorder, and Stickies.

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).

Imagine again that you’re a blogger looking to leverage Facebook.  You begin to click on multiple posts titled “How to get more traffic using Facebook” and bunch of other variations. What happens?  All of the posts begin to run together becoming indecipherable to your brain.  Psychologists call this cognitive overload and you passively read post after post after post.  You never truly connect with the blogger or the message.

By adding a quantifiable benefit, you’re accomplishing two things.  First you’re laser targeting the type of reader you want to see the post.  And second, you’re giving them a realistic goal to strive for.

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.

Every day in January, write for 20 minutes. By every day, I mean every day. Including weekends. Including the Martin Luther King holiday. Including the days that get crazy.

To become a better writer (whether it’s for text, podcast scripts, video scripts, or anything else that needs words to be strung together effectively), you need to write. And the best way to write more is to build the habit of writing every day. Give it a try for 31 days, and let us know how it’s going! And if you’ve ever tried a daily writing practice, we’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Spreading an idea means getting it from your brain into someone else’s. It means putting together the essential facts, the logical arguments and your insightful conclusions together in exactly the right way to recreate your brilliant idea in the mind of your reader.

Try to describe your audience with this simple formula: X who Y. For example: “Bloggers who want to get more traffic”.

If you can’t explain what your post is about in one simple, short sentence, it’s probably too complex or unfocused.

Abstract nouns such as courage, cowardice, intelligence, and happiness are mass nouns because they cannot be combined with an indefinite article. For example, one can’t speak of “a courage” or “a cowardice.” Mass nouns cannot be preceded by a numeral without specifying a unit of measurement: “a ton of coffee,” “a modicum of intelligence.”

Silly is a synonym for ludicrous; using one to intensify the other is overkill.

Ridiculous seems to me to be less judgmental than ludicrous. Something ridiculous provokes laughter because it is incongruous. For example, a man wearing a lampshade for a hat presents a ridiculous sight. Something ludicrous is both incongruous and contemptible. For example, a nineteen-year-old with the full use of his legs riding on the shoulders of his bodyguards while touring the Great Wall of China presents a ludicrous sight.

The author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll (real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), continued to work day jobs throughout his life.

Other authors who held down day jobs throughout their writing careers include Bram Stoker, Philip Larkin, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, among many others.

she wrote the bestselling book Interview With The Vampire while working her day job as an insurance claims examiner.

cynic comes from a Greek word meaning “dog-like, currish, churlish.”

The word cynosure comes from a Greek word meaning “dog’s tail.” This was the name given by the Greeks to the northern constellation Ursa Minor, the “Small Bear” in whose tail is the Pole-star, also known as the North Star. Because the North Star is bright and a means of finding the direction of north, the word cynosure acquired the figurative meaning of “something that is bright and serves as a guide.”

When it comes to formal speaking and written text, however, reserve the abbreviation for adjectival use and write out United States as the noun.

Stop making failure a negative thing and start writing. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes and start creating. And if you do mess up, do your best to learn from it. Trust me, you’ll be much better off.

If you have more time on your hands, you can of course choose to engage in more social networks. Just don’t overcommit and end up spreading yourself too thin!

Get 10 successful bloggers from different niches in a room and ask them which social networks are best for driving traffic to their blogs, and you’ll get a different answer from each one as to where their readers hang out in greatest numbers.

One of the things that I’d highly recommend you ponder when it comes to this is to think about developing a rhythm to your sharing.

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.

In modern usage, the form a is used in front of words that begin with a consonant sound; an is used in front of words that begin with a vowel sound.

While visualizing your story may seem like the right way to approach writing, it turns out that for full-time writers, the brain performs a bit differently. When Dr. Lotze watched writers from a competitive creative writing program perform the same tests, he found that experienced writers, while brainstorming, used parts of their brains associated with speech instead of vision.

Novice writers, Lotze suggests, are more likely to watch the story unfold like a movie inside their heads.

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.

To get people interested, you need to start with the Why — even when the Why seems obvious.

A great destination postcard is inspirational, taps into emotion, and paints a clear picture.

Good tutorials mix straightforward how-to’s with stories and examples to both educate and entertain.