by Elizabeth M Young

Created on: December 28, 2009

What an intriguing topic! Self challenging and testing is a great way to make progress and improvements as an internet writer. Beginning with challenging oneself to publish (but not necessarily write) a blog, article, or post every day for a year is a great way to get used to deadlines and to the idea of steadily producing quality work.  As a citizen journalist, we should be able to keep up with the professional columnists and journalists. As a tip, many of them keep a few extra articles stashed away in case of emergencies or illness.

Next, improving multimedia, formatting and layout skills is a must for the on line writer. Setting a goal of learning how to take original photos, to upload and store them at a photo hosting site, then how to insert them into the article is a great enhancement for a writer or journalist.  Add in learning how to obtain open stock images and to use good formatting will lead to a blog page that is a beautifully laid out magazine article. Knowing how to do basic editing to crop, add text, and to resize photos and videos, then  to wrap words around them in the article is also essential. Learning how to take care not to publish people's photos without permission is also a good skill to have.

In learning multimedia skills, the test of our ability to do photo safaris,to illustrate our works, and  to write compelling content to go along with the photos actually becomes a way to keep fresh ideas available for the year of blogging madly.

After improving multimedia, formatting and layout skills at blogging sites that do the web layout for the writer, the next test is to try to improve audience. Writing in writers forums, where comments and feedback is allowed will tell whether the audience appreciates, does not appreciate, or hates our writing and why, allowing for a test of our ability to take everything from criticism to stalking! Our ability to serve as bouncer, host, and hopefully develop into an appealing writer is also tested in the real word with rapid feedback and discussion.

Audience marketing and improving visibility is something that has many facets, and the author is learning about Digg, Reddit, linking Helium articles and so on. Most artists are just fine with the art and with making their improvements in skill and quality, but have great trouble with the marketing, and that is also the test of an internet writer, given the competition that is out here in the ether!

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