Actually, there’s no way to underestimate how important taking a little time off to do frivolous things has been. Taking a vacation is like hitting the reset button on your life–it takes you outside your normal, day-to-day existence and gives you a glimpse of the bigger picture, the portrait-in-process that is your life.
A nugget of wisdom I’ve gleaned from a month or so of hard-core slacking:
Content writing is a great way to make money, but has been detracting from the rest of my writing. This is somewhat ironic, since I have been beginning to see some success on the magazine front. It was becoming harder and harder to churn out fifteen dollar articles about topics I care nothing about while receiving checks from publications I’m proud to be associated with. (BTW, thanks to my friend Lacey for mentioning my article that came out in the July/August issue of Plain Truth Magazine. She totally had my back on that one!) So, since we don’t really need a ton of extra money right now, I decided to back off on the content writing and focus on other projects, things that will hopefully pay off in the long run but come with no guarantees. I can always kick the content writing back into gear later, if I want to or if the income becomes necessary. That is the beauty of writing for the internet.
So, I will be focusing more on submitting to magazines and working on my novel. The income is erratic and the writing more demanding, but the hard-won successes are much more satisfying. It’s what I really want to be doing–writing things that really matter, instead of churning out articles of no real benefit to anyone, unless they really, really, really need help figuring out how to rent a helium tank.
The one exception to my internet writing hiatus is that I may post more articles on eHow. They don’t pay anything upfront, but you can write about anything you want, don’t have to obsess over meeting editorial standards, and you earn residual income every time someone clicks on an ad posted on any of your articles. Plus, it’s kind of fun, and anyone can do it–no application needed. 🙂 I’ve written a few articles for eHow just because, but I’ve learned quite a bit about SEO (search engine optimization) from content writing, and am going to experiment to see if I can actually make some money on eHow. I wrote a new article for them last night–How to Clean Your House for Last-Minute Visitors–and it already seems to be getting more views than my other articles. So we shall see. Yay for SEO!
That’s all for now–hopefully it won’t be so long until my next blog post!
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