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Today I was procrastinating about writing my next article. I went into my secondary email account to clean some things up and see if anything really important had come in.

Because I wasn’t focused on what I should have been doing (or because the universe wanted me to see it, so I could pass this warning along to you), I noticed an advertising email telling me I could make money selling my articles.

I’m always on the lookout for new online (and off line) article sites, so I opened the email.  It had a link to a webpage that gave unrealistic figures for the income you can earn for writing blogs and articles. I quoted REALLY high rates for writing fiction and non-fiction short stories. This pinged the scam alert warning in my brain, but I decided to investigate further.

There was more hype about how you could work as much or as little as you wanted to make the income you chose. AND lucky me, they were having a sale!

Most of their figures were how much you could make per hour. Since no two writers work at the same pace, most projects are measured by words, pages, or complete jobs.

Also, without knowing how well someone writes, making an assumption about income possibilities is impossible.

The normal two week fee was $69. However, right now, and right now only, I could get in for only $2.95. After the two weeks, the cost was ONLY $47 per month.

Later, as I was reading email from my local RWA chapter, I saw that the same company had purchased a Google Adwords ad that showed at the top of the page of my Gmail.

I did some checking online. It seems this company had lots of writers questioning it about a year ago. It also has an affiliate program. That means if you send someone there and they sign up, you get part of the sale.

The Google search results showed an even balance of ads for the sites from the company and the affiliates, and warnings or questions from writers about the company.

Beware of companies that › Continue reading…

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Do you know that writing for the web requires a different writing style? People read from the computer differently than they do physical pages.

I recently visited a friend’s website. She has great information to share. However, her site has a big problem that will cause her readers to click away without reading her information.

Her great information is presented in blocks of dense text. To the reader, it looks like too much work to dig out the information. She would do better by making a few simple changes.

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We all have times when life interferes with our plans.  Sometimes it seems that everything goes wrong at once. That really throws off your writing schedule.

Lately, my life has had far more downs than ups. I have family members with severe medical crises on both sides of the family. The holidays didn’t help me keep my schedule either, but because of the circumstances, I ignored them for the most part.

Everyone is out of the hospital now.

(At least as of this very minute.) Still, there are three or four of my family members who will never truly be well again.

I’ve come to some realizations lately. The most important is that writing keeps me sane.

We lose sight of the need to care for and nurture ourselves in the middle of all the chaos. We can’t care for others until we take care of ourselves.

Writing help me stay sane when things go wrong by…

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