If you want to be a successful freelance writer, whether fiction or non-fiction, creativity keeps you productive and adds an element of fun and the unexpected to your profession. Creativity can help you turn an average story into an exciting tale, it can help you turn research material into a fresh and original article, and it can help you when you have to write 25 articles about 1 topic. And it can help you market yourself to others. But even very creative writers run out of their creative juices from time to time. Here are some suggestions for finding your creativity when

There are many ways to grow a business, and the best strategies usually embrace a multifaceted approach. It’s unwise to overly depend on one area as your primary source of growth, as there’s no telling to what could disrupt this trend. However, it’s often a challenge for businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises, to effectively diversify. Resources and labor are thin, and it’s a real challenge to expand into new areas without diverting too much away from other primary functions. One area that has a lot of people excited is the use of blogs and websites as a way to

By Simon Phillips of TouchLogic.co.uk: More and more consumers are using mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to access the Internet and make purchases. If you are a business owner, one of the most important questions for you is: Is your website mobile-friendly? If not, do you realize that you may be losing business due to not reaching prospective customers who are mobile users? Mobile marketing is the future and can be a very profitable option for your business. Those businesses that ignore these changes in technology do so at their peril and will lose customers who get frustrated

By Jonathan Kane of BuyRealMarketing.com: YouTube is probably the best video website out there that can help give value to your videos and put a little extra cash in your pockets. Hosting user-generated videos and placing ads all over the site is how YouTube earns money. Yet, they are graceful enough to split the income with the community that made everything happen for them. However, are you part of this beneficial money-making schematic? If not, get some insights from the following steps on video marketing: 1. Get creative with content Content will always be king. The theme, plot, message and

By Susanne Evens of AAA Translation: Going global is not an act of good will – it is a smart and necessary business strategy. Establishing a global web presence provides one of the most affordable means of tapping into the international marketplace. An information-rich, well published web site sells your products and services to potential clients around the world 24/7. In addition, multilingual content optimizes the effectiveness of your site by communicating with your customers in their language, and it doesn’t cost the world! Studies show that all Internet users are just like the rest of us: they rely heavily

The advantages of using an e-mail campaign as part of your marketing strategy are that you can exactly measure your efforts and then fine tune your future campaigns based on your findings. To optimize your e-mail campaign to be the best it can be, take a look at your variables, test them and measure them in order to harness the best possible outcome. Examples of variables to test in your e-mail campaign: Sender: Measure opening rate by: using your company’s name, an individual’s name, a keyword etc. Find a successful sender name and then stick with it for branding and

SEO, or search engine optimization, has became very popular in recent years and for good reason. Search engines are such a powerful means for driving traffic to your site that you can’t afford to leave your site un-optimized. ‘SEO’ usually refers to ‘organic SEO’, meaning applying techniques that get your site listed higher in the SERPs (search engine result pages) without paying for advertising. When you use SEO techniques, chances are that your site will rank well with search engines for particular terms, which in turn will bring more visitors to your site. When your site ranks well for your

One of the first things many new webmasters do in an attempt to conquer the top positions in search engines is to rush to on-page SEO. While on-page SEO is a powerful tool, relying solely on it isn’t enough. On-page SEO alone is simply not powerful enough to drive your site to the top of search engines. What Is On-page SEO and Off-page SEO? Basically, on-page SEO includes all the techniques you apply to the text and meta of your pages. Just about all these techniques involve keywords. To get relevant keywords, use and analyze your site’s stats. Examples for

SEO is changing constantly and even SEO pros can’t always make sense when search engines implement new search algorithms. But regardless of the changes, one technique you can implement is to use longtail keywords. What are longtail keywords? Basically, longtail keywords are 3-6 word keyword phrases that bring you few visitors per month per phrase, but very well targeted visitors. The power of longtail keywords comes from the amount of longtail keywords you’re using. For instance if you are in the mortgage niche, most likely you know that the keyword ‘mortgage’ is very competitive both in terms of search volume,

Website maintenance is often overlooked in the drive to get a new site up and running. The focus is on getting content on the website asap, images added, all sorts of bells and whistles installed, and a multitude of pages uploaded to the web server. But considering the following issues as you’re creating your website won’t cost you any more and will assure that you’ll end up with a website that’s easy to maintain and update. 1. Keep Your Web Page Structure Simple How often have you visited websites where each web page looks like it was created by a