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How I Accidentally Became A Writer

  Hello, and thank you for dropping by to devote these microseconds to a meeting of our minds. That's an appropriate opener for the year 2020. This article was the editor's idea. No really, they said to tell everyone about the life of a writer. I will tell you right now that I press buttons on a flat electronic device in patterns that cause checks to arrive in the mail. Now that I have that dunked, a whole article is left to fill.  I just don't do autobiography well, but as I understand it some of you out there are clamoring to adopt my path to freelance autonomy. And now I'm going to tell you why that's impossible.  History cannot repeat this career path:  As a kid, I was the weird one who read books all the time. The most boring book was more interesting to me than most of the people I had to talk to, so early on I decided I wanted to be a writer. Wait, correct that, I mean to say that I wanted to be an author. Most of what I had read until then was fiction, and genre fiction at that. The…
Score: 1.33

Top SEO Factors BESIDES Keywords

  Hi, I'm "Penguin" Pete Trbovich, and you overthink SEO!  That phrase is a tag on my own blog, for the occasional content marketing post. Really, I don't measure my expertise by my own website's ranking; I'm a freelance writer for the web who only needs a website as a virtual business card. Instead, judge my SEO expertise by the writing I do for clients - linked from my site on a regular basis.  In 20 years of freelance writing for the web, I have had the same argument with the majority of clients. That argument is that clients never stop making demands on how I write, while completely ignoring all the non-text factors on their site that are tanking their traffic, conversions, ad impressions, sales, and so on. I posted that argument on Reddit's r/freelancewriters forum and got a lot of agreement, so I know this isn't just me.      SEO (Search Engine Optimization if you just started playing along at home) is supposed to be the science/art of attracting web traffic through search engines. But…
Score: 1.36

Amazing New SEO Method Discovered : Write Like A Human Being!

    Are you an eCommerce entrepreneur depending upon content marketing to gain exposure for your product or service on the web?  Do you want to know the secret of having your site rank high on Google?  Do you want your website to shoot to the top of a Google SERP (Search Engine Result Page) like greased lightning?  If you answered "yes" to all of the above questions, TAKE A NUMBER, because everybody in the whole wide world answered "yes" to all of the above questions too!      No, but really, SEO content marketing is the field within which I have based a 20+ year career in freelance content hacking for the web. And yet, it is the one discipline which is jam-packed with more hoodoo, voodoo, snake oil, urban legends, conspiracy theories, and outdated alchemy than any other tech field. Thanks to this topic being saturated on the web, you can scream about it all day every day and not get heard over the noise.  Let's start with some obvious, concrete logic. For once, everybody can drop their wacky schemes…
Score: 1.33

Social Media Optimization - The Other Digital Marketing

  Hi, I'm Penguin Pete Trbovich, and you overthink SEO.  You overthink SEO because everybody has told you that Search Engine Optimization is the only kind of marketing in the entire universe. SEOSEOSEO! Just churn out text copy for the Great Lord Google, because Google gobbles keywords like a goblin.  Seriously, why do we even make media visible to human beings? Why do we even have an Internet? They should just have it set up where every morning we all take a bucket of keywords and walk it to Google headquarters and dump it into their volcano, and later they mail us a postcard with our organic search stats for the day. The humans in this equation are superfluous.    It's not like there's an alternative way to get visitors to your website. Not like people click links shared to them by trusted peers, confidants, family, influencers, and the occasional hashtag. Oh wait, there is a way to do this!    SMO - Social Media Optimization!  Now you have SEO on your eCommerce website squared away, from my…
Score: 1.29

Freelance Writing in a Post-COVID-19 World

    How long will the shadow of the Corona Virus pandemic darken future history?   We do not know. Therefore, there's no way to know how much I should exposit COVID-19 in this here paragraph. Obviously, if I'm talking to readers in the short term, you're all sick of hearing about it. But did the pandemic gets cured by, say, 2021? Do I have to go back over what it was like for audiences in the 2030s? Or is it indelibly ground into the pages of history textbooks like the 1918 Spanish Flu was?  Just from this point, you can already see how Corona Virus affects media. There are things we could normally talk about that we can't talk about now. In my freelance online writing career spanning its third decade now, I've seen disruptions that I never would have seen before. Yet insight from my experience has helped me maintain a grip on the situation, and I'll start bypassing some of these aphorisms on to you:    Disaster-Proof Freelance Axioms:      #1: Money always goes SOMEWHERE.  No matter how much the…
Score: 1.38