Tuesday 29 July 2014

The Pros and Cons of Writing Articles Online


There are pros and cons of writing online. If you want to write an article about anything at all then there will be somewhere to get that article online and seen. This is possible if you are good at writing and it is possible if you are not. It always surprises me that people with very little skill in the way of grammar or punctuation still manage to make a living from the printed word.

The difficulty arises when people of varying skills use the same platform to write their articles. Online writing sites are a great way of making yourself known and practising your writing skills, but they also mean you are linked to people who do not write so well. Does this matter? I don't think so.

Whoever you are, and wherever you write there is the possibility of building up your own following. If people know your articles will appear regularly in a certain place hen they will hopefully look for them anyway. This is a great plus. For example, I write a regular "Catblog" where I am the ghost writer for my real cat. It is a regular feature of one online writing site, but friends and relations are now beginning to access it as are facebook and twitter contacts. It really doesn't matter what others are writing as people who really want to see what I, personally, have written go to MY article. I will confess. That one is a money earner. The cat, yes, my real cat, as I base the Catblog on what it actually does, earns its own catfood. I earn more from the Catblog than anything else. People like cats and I like writing.

I don't despise others who write on the site I use (Bubblews in this case,) because I think it is a good thing for people to write, Some will, through feeling safe on a site with a lower standard of grammar, start to realise and hone their writing skills. People use such sites to try out novels and all sorts of things. Along the way, they may also pick up the necessary grammatical skills and learn what people want to read. The comments on a post are going to be a good gauge of that!at

These blogs, wherever they are written are good for publicising other things you have written. Look at the top of the page. I once wrote a book of poems. That book is for sale. I have put a picture here. If you read this free blog, which of course I have linked to other things, you just might want to look at my book. I may even make sales. That is another pro. You see, if you link your other blogs to whatever or wherever you  also write people who like what they read may then start to click on the links. They get to your other blogs and then hopefully to the book you started off writing online but then took offline and changed into a book and then uploaded to sell. I am working on the first edition of the Catblog now as I think it will be popular. My online blogs are the rough draft to see what works and what doesn't.

The cons are possibly getting less as online writing or blogging becomes popular. It used to be the case that an online article written for a writing site was seen as less than good by traditional publishers, but now we have the success of so many self published writers and independent blogs to make the point that it is  not where you write, but what you write is important. My guess is that traditional publishers have now realised the original disdain for the online blogger or writer must give way to practical common sense.

I give these online sites a big thumb up. We are becoming nations of writers thanks to the ability to have free online blogs.

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