Let’s be honest here - when it comes to writing articles, most of us do our research online. Of course, ordinarily we would cite our sources by providing links to the websites where we found the information in the first place. Unfortunately, when it comes to PLR jobs - and, in 99% cases, if you’re writing for someone else, it will be a PLR job - the client will not appreciate a product cluttered with links to sites other than their own. Every such link is another opportunity for the reader to go somewhere other than the client’s site, therefore defeating the whole purpose of an engaging and informative article in the first place.

On the other hand, if you are not citing your sources - and, as a PLR writer, you’re forced not to - then you’re effectively exposing yourself to accusations of plagiarism. One way to avoid it is to “mix up” the information a little bit by using multiple sources. However, what do you do when there’s only one source on the topic you are writing? How do you avoid plagiarizing the work, since there’s only so much content you can write and so many ways in which you can write it?

The best way to avoid this danger is by taking notes. Read the site first and note all the information you find relevant, preferably in your own words. Once you feel you have everything you need to start writing, close the website and refer exclusively to your notes. This will force you to write everything in your own words and you will no longer subconsciously copy the writing style of the website. You can further reduce the risk by rearranging the logical sequence of your notes - in other words, by avoiding using the same content structure (Point A followed by Point B followed by Point C) and instead replacing it with your own (Point D followed by Point A followed by Point C - you get the idea).

Of course, none of this will change the fact that you are effectively engaging in plagiarism (since it is defined as using any ideas that you found in other works without citing your sources) - but it will, at the very least, help you cover your tracks a little bit. Plagiarism is an unfortunate but inevitable part of life for every PLR writer, and it is probably the only part of article writing that I genuinely loathe.

One thing that I recently found myself doing is writing non-stop whenever I was awake and not helping my girlfriend. This is a great way to make some extra money and improve my skills as a writer, yes - but it’s also a terrific way to burn out faster than a candle doused in kerosene. The sad truth is, money is useless to you unless you set aside some time to enjoy it.

Now, I’m not suggesting you spend your first paycheck on a lavish party that will impress your friends and leave you penniless and broke until the next writing contract. However, I am suggesting that no matter how little money you earn, take a portion of it and spend it on yourself. What exactly you do with it is up to you and depends in large on how much you were paid in the first place - for example, I’m probably taking my girlfriend out to celebrate March 8 (we’re both from Eastern Europe, so we still celebrate the International Women’s Day). It doesn’t matter how exactly you spend your money - the point is to spend it in such a way that will bring you enjoyment.

Obviously, the vast portion of your income should be allocated to whatever expenses you need to cover, now or in the future. In my case, for example, most of the writing income will be set aside for the future to cover my tuition fees, while another significant part of it will be used to cover monthly bills.  However, always remember that unless you’re spending something on yourself (or your significant other), then you won’t get nearly as much enjoyment out of earning money as you normally would.

So stop being greedy and take yourself out for a treat. Go on, you deserve it.

Well, $191.90 after PayPal tooks its transaction cut - but it’s still nothing to sneeze at given my current financial situation. Finally, however, I’m able to cover all my bills - not only the oustanding ones, but also the ones coming up in March. It’s such a relief to no longer have to dread the moment when you open your Credit Card/Mobile Phone envelope containing the bill.

Anyway, sorry for the lack of updates - I’ve been terribly busy with an extensive writing project (for which $200 is only the first payment). It’s the biggest thing I’ve ever had to work on as an article writer, and, though I’m very excited, it also takes up a lot of my time.

No, I’m not talking about surfing here, but rather about the importance that long-tail keyphrases can play in your search engine optimization efforts.

What’s a long-tail keyphrase? Suppose, for example, that you had an article-writing blog and decided to optimize it around the seemingly most logical keyword - “articles”. Sadly, if you were to do that, you’d find yourself competing against 905,000,000 other sites in Google, with FindArticles.com - a PR8 site - getting the top spot.

Obviously, you will need to optimize your site around something less competitive that still gets the meaning across. After all, you want targeted traffic, right? So, imagine then trying to optimize your blog around the keyphrase “writing articles” - you’ll find yourself competing with 1,110,000 other sites, with Goarticles.com being the first.

But here’s one important observation - the second you made your keyphrase longer by adding another word to it, your competition went down by 899 million!

And that, my friends, is the whole purpose of a long-tail keyphrase. You may be surprised, but people enter long search strings into Google every day. For example, there is no way I could ever hope to compete for the term “articles” - however, if you were to Google up the phrase “how to write and sell articles”, you’d find my Squidoo lens at the very top of Google search results.

Long-tail keywords are amazing in their capacity to attract targeted traffic without having to compete with bigger and more established sites. Instead of facing them head-on, you’re pretty much slipping under the radar, and getting far more targeted traffic than they are.

I just added some categories to make my blog easier to navigate. “Article Writing Techniques” is pretty much self-explanatory; “The Money Trail” will include all posts documenting my progress to hitting $1,000 a month (and hopefully, one day, more!), while the “Personal Experiences” are just general commentaries and observations that I have come up with while working as an article writer.

I’ll be adding some more categories for SEO, Keyword Research, Copywriting and Marketing in the future as I actually get more involved in this fields.

I am sure many of you have seen countless sales letters promising to sell you a magic way that lets you earn full-time income from home without ever going to work or even investing as much effort into your daily job. The purpose of this post is to dispel the popular myth that working from home and earning money on the Internet means that you will not have to work nearly as hard as you would on a regular job.

Pure and simply, this is nonsense. Having been working online for over a week now, I can tell you a little bit about what my schedule looks like.

I wake up a bit later than usual, some time between 9am and 11am, and normally like to lie around in bed if the weather outside is a bit sunny. In this respect, all the stories you hear about working from home are true - you have much more flexibility, since you no longer have to head to office every morning.

However, after when you get out of bed, that’s when the real work begins. Expect to invest as much into your online job as you would into the regular one. Spending 8-10 hours a day writing articles is a perfectly regular occurrence to me now, sometimes staying up until 2-3am to finish off the articles. Just a few hours ago, I had to tell my girlfriend that I no longer have as much time to help her with her university stuff as I did before, simply because of how time-consuming article writing is. While you gain a lot of flexibility by not having to be in the office every day, it also means that you no longer have a natural limit on the number of hours you will work a day (for example, you won’t have a reason to stop working at 8pm because none of the key personnel you need are at work any longer).

Any online job - article writing, copywriting or Internet marketing - is equally arduous and requires tremendous amount of investments in terms of both time and effort. It is true that passive income opportunities do exist online, and many have successfully pursued them - however, to reach the point where you can simply sit back and do nothing even as you watch your bank account grow every day from residual income, you will have to work harder than you can imagine.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise - the Internet is not a silver bullet for aspiring millionaires who wish to have it all without investing any effort. At the risk of making a sweeping generalization, I will say that, for the year or so of working online, the only main advantage will be greater flexibility in working hours. Don’t expect to have sufficient residual income right off the bat - that’s just not going to happen.

I’d like to apologise to everyone subscribed to my feed, as, due to the way the old content of the blog was restored, you’re going to end up with 20+ blog entries all made in one day. This is unfortunate, but it was the only way I could repost all the content.

Please bear with me and my apologies for the inconvenience I know this will cause you.

Having thought about it, I’ve decided against installing a new WordPress theme for this blog. Having had a look at the number of free templates available, I came to the conclusion that none of them seem to offer what I have in mind. I won’t say that I’m terribly happy with the template I’m currently using, but, to me, it’s a heck of a lot better than most of the stuff you’ll find for free (Andreas generally makes very nice templates).

In short, I decided to stick with this template for the time being - and, in the future, I will probably hire a professional WordPress theme designer to develop a theme that actually reflects my long-term design vision for the blog. I’m thinking Cre8d Design - Rachel did a great job on Darren’s Problogger (and, if I remember correctly, she also designed Mike Arrington’s TechCrunch, but I’m not 100% sure). Her prices are a bit steep - starting with $1,000 for a personal blog and $2,000 for a professional or business blog, but I strongly feel they reflect the quality of her work, and it’s sometimes worth paying a little extra to make sure that the blog not only has a unique theme, but is also functional.

One of the plugins I installed after the whole Wordpress import/export is one that removes all NoFollow tags on all comments made. Which basically means that anyone leaving comments on my blog will be able to benefit from an active one-way inbound PR4 link to theirs.

Why am I doing that? Well, the only point in using NoFollow is to cut down on the amount of spam that blogs receive - however, recent research shows that removing Nofollow does not seem to increase the number of spammers (and the spammers that I already get on this blog I filter out manually, anyway). Since their post entries never make anyway, the only side that actually suffers from NoFollow are the people whose comments I actually approve - in other words, all the valued bloggers and users whose feedback I appreciate and encourage.

If you have Google Toolbar installed, then you know that e-commerceblog.com has PR4, which isn’t too shabby. At the end of the day, what little success this blog has had would have been impossible without its readers and its community. Therefore, free one-way inbound PR4 links are one way for me to give back to people who take time and effort to leave constructive and valuable comments on my blog.

I will be monitoring the situation to see if I start receiving more spammers in the future - however, I am pretty confident that the situation won’t change as drastically as many NoFollow proponents would have us believe.

I just checked Google and found out that my Squdoo lens has been indexed at long last. It took about 3 days, in spite of a PR4 link from this blog (the entry containing the link was indexed the same day as it was posted). My other lens with no inbound links has not yet been indexed at all.

In terms of ranking, the Squidoo lens beat all the competition - including Ezine Articles - and landed at the very top of Google results for the specific keyphrase. Go figure! Heck, I might as well come out and say it - google up “how to write and sell articles” and the first result will be a Squidoo lens owned by me.