Welcome to the latest edition of Writing Lab News. In this issue, I focus on content: making it work for you, rewriting for different formats and how to write keyword articles. There's also a guest article from DailyWritingTips which deals with the times when you just can't be bothered to write. For subscribers only, there's my review of Performancing Ads, a new way to make money with your blog. See you next month! Next edition: October 3.

In this issue:

• Making Your Content Work Harder
• Moving Your Article From Mag To Web
• Make Money With Performancing Ads
• Writing Keyword Articles: KISS
• Seven Things To Do When You Don't Feel Like Writing
• Diary Of A Working Writer September 2008

Making Your Content Work Harder

by Sharon Hurley Hall

This is an excerpt from a guest post on PiggyBankPie. As writers, we produce a lot of content, but we don't always need to reinvent the wheel. Here are some tips.

If you’re like me, your daily tasks already take up a lot of your time, so you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Instead, take the content you already have and put it to work for you. Here are three ways to do just that.

Squidoo And Hubpages

Squidoo is based on the principle that everyone has expertise in something, so if you have an old post that has done well, why not use it as the starting point for a new lens. Creating a lens is simple. You can sign up for Squidoo in seconds, then choose a title, some keywords and a layout which you can edit later. I usually go for ‘do your own thing’ which means that I can add the modules I want. I usually ad some text boxes, an RSS feed box for my blog’s feed, some Amazon books and a comment form.

To reuse your blog content, create some text boxes on your Squidoo lens page and copy the text from your post into it. I find it works best if make each subheading start a new section. You can even use the images you used with your post and you can add money making modules for Amazon, Ebay, Cafepress and others. Once you hit your stride, you can produce a lens in half an hour to an hour, depending on how complex it is. Hit publish and you’re done.

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Moving Your Article From Mag To Web

by Sharon Hurley Hall

Still on the theme of making content do double duty, here's an issue that many writers face: how to write the same basic information for two completely different markets. In this article published on WeBooks, I make some suggestions for how to do it successfully:

Write Like The News

When writing magazine articles, you may take some time to build to your point. That won't work for the web. Attention spans are short, so use the inverted pyramid structure used for writing the news. That means putting the most important information at the top and the least important at the end. This structure also applies to writing individual paragraphs.

Be Conversational

You can use a variety of writing styles when writing for magazines, but when writing for the web, only one style really counts – the conversational style. Web articles tend to address readers directly as if the people who are reading are in the same room. It's like having a conversation with your readers, so throw out the third person and go for the first and second. Let your writing voice show your personality; there's no need to be standoffish.

Short And Simple

Part of that conversational style is keeping the language clear and simple. When you talk to your friends, you don't use a lot of jargon and big words. Generally, you use short, simple sentences to describe the events that you're talking about. This is even more important when writing for the web because your readers could come from anywhere in the world and may not speak your language fluently. Jargon is out; simple is in. You will probably need to cut the length of your article, too, as web articles tend to be short.

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Make Money With Peformancing Ads

It's time for another subscriber bonus. You're the first to see my review of this new ad network.

by Sharon Hurley Hall

I've been trying a new ad company on my blog - Performancing Ads. Launched by the people who run the successful Peformancing blog, the Performancing hive and who have released several great WordPress themes, this ad service had to be worth a look. Sign up took only a few seconds, then I downloaded the Wordpress plugin, placed the code in the right place and set up ad regions on my site.

Performancing Ads works with 125x125 ads, and you can decide how many you want to feature. If no ads are booked, then you can book the region yourself or Performancing shows ads from one of its partners. Once the region is booked, you get a confirmation email showing the booking and your revenue share (75% I believe). Displaying ads buys you credits which means that your own ad is shown on other blogs. I've picked up a bit of traffic from this.

One of the keys to success is to set up a good blog profile. Performancing Ads displays an automatic screenshot and stats from Alexa, Google, Technorati, Yahoo and Bloglines. However, you get to choose the categories and write some blurb about your site.

I've been using Performancing Ads for just over a month, and so far I'm happy with the process. There have been a couple of teething troubles with ad display, but the owners respond to queries quickly, so no problem has lasted long. Most publishers set their ad prices between $2.50 and $20 a week, which can add up to a tidy sum. So far, I have increased the income from my blog by 50% with Performancing Ads so I'll be keeping it around for a while.

Writing Keyword Articles: KISS

by Sharon Hurley Hall

When you start writing, you don't always know all the techniques you need. This post on Daily Writing Tips outlines a simple way to nail these bread and butter articles.

Keyword Density

Once you have the keywords, then it’s time to start writing. Sometimes clients ask for a specific keyword density, such as 3%. Although this is not the best way to write keyword articles, if that’s what the client asks for, that’s what you have to provide. Two tools which work well for checking keyword density are Textalyser and Live Keyword Analysis. in both cases, you paste your text into a box, hit a button and find out your keyword density. (Alternatively, you can work out how many times you need to mention the keyword phrase to achieve your target density and find and count them manually in your word processing program.)

Seeding The Keywords

It’s much rarer now for writing clients to request a high keyword density. Using keywords 10-15 times in a short article can make it virtually unreadable, so most go for using keywords around five times. Whichever method you use, key positions for keyword placement are at the start (first words, first sentence or first paragraph) and end  (last words, last sentence or last paragraph) of the article. Then the other keywords are sprinkled around in the middle.

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Seven Things To Do When You Don’t Feel Like Writing

An excellent post from Ali of Daily Writing Tips. Here's an excerpt:

2. Read some great writing advice

Daily Writing Tips is a good place to start.  But there are lots of other blogs out there devoted to all aspects of writing – and hundreds of different books that could help you. Look for something aimed at writers in your genre (poetry, science-fiction, article writing, academic journals, etc). Don’t just skim through a load of advice, though: take a note of any points which make you think “aha!” and scribble down ideas of how you can apply them to your own work in progress.

3. Organise your writing files

This is one writing chore I always put off: organising my files. If you have bits of your novel in a dozen different places on your computer (emails to yourself, Word documents, notes in your journal software, bits you keep online in Google docs…) then get it all sorted out. If you’re a freelancer and write for dozens of different markets, start a folder for each. That way, you’ll know exactly what you need to invoice for at the end of the month.

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Diary Of A Working Writer - September 2008

I really enjoyed August. It may have been hot and muggy, but I was able to balance parenting and writing so that neither suffered too much. I'm not saying it was easy, but like all of us, I managed. I've been spending a lot of time on sites such as Twitter and Plurk, so I asked my friends there what they wanted to know about me. The result was this readers' interview, which was fun to do. Some people wanted to know about organization, so I wrote a separate post on that.

August also saw the completion of the Blogging Start group writing project, with lots of great posts from some of my favorite bloggers. Meanwhile, I did a lot of blogging myself on PiggyBankPie, TechGerm and MommaHelpers. Looking forward a bit, I've got some new ventures coming up. Hush-hush for now, but look out for news of them in the next edition of Writing Lab News. Until then, have a great month.