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10 Copyright Myths Busted!

The Benefits of Beginning in Creativity

By Michele Venne  |   Submitted On November 28, 2014

  0 

Sometimes our dreams seem like a wound that we work to heal, but it remains open, festering, bothering us just enough that we keep picking at it. There are many people who believe they have a book inside them. 83% of Americans, in fact. Some of them dive into their project and string word after word together until it forms a kind of story. It might be complete, it might be harder than they thought it was going to be, so some finish later and others never get around to typing "The End" on the last page. Beginning anything can be hard, and something that requires pieces of us can keep us locked in fear and therefore not having the courage or trust to just start. How does one begin writing? There are more ways than there are books in a library. One just begins. An idea, a conversation, a picture, an event, a realization or epiphany, a dream or a job can all spark a person to just begin. Most people can begin anything, but it takes a lot to complete that same project.

Every artist creates differently. However, what many of them would agree on is that the creating needs to come first, then the editing. But what can happen, especially with someone just starting out, is that they begin to write, think about how their readers may interpret what they've written, then change their words, the direction of the story, make the characters less evil, less broken, less flawed. And that changes everything. Only with practice do we get to understand how the creative process works for us. What we need to begin, how to keep going when things begin to slow in the middle, and how and when to end our session comes with familiarity. We figure out what works for us, and we apply that time and again. And if we get stuck or blocked (for a number of reasons) then we change that familiarity.

Practicing for a sports team begets familiarity with the plays, the bat, the ball, the field, the equipment, teammates, and opponents. We begin to focus on the game, the fundamentals of the plays, the rules, the possible scenarios. Then we notice how we think, how we move in our body. With familiarity, comes understanding, and then trust. It's helpful to create anything if we can understand the workings of it. And once we understand, we come to trust that it will operate in a particular way.

After the novice, or the tenured, begins once, we return to the starting point. For some, all they want to write is just one book, one poem, one song. That's fine. For the rest of us, we begin again because we become addicted. Whether it's the feeling when we're entrenched in our project, the elation and exhaustion of completion, or the opening of the floodgates of ideas from our Muse, we begin again and again and again. Sometimes we discover something vital about ourselves. Other times the dream of being a professional artist, of challenging ourselves to overcome the critic or the fear that holds us back becomes the driving force to return to the beginning. The more times we begin again, the more practice we get, the more familiarity blossoms, laying the groundwork for understanding and trust.

Michele Venne published her first novel in 2008, which was followed by another five novels and two collections of poetry. All of her books include an introductory "Dear Reader" letter and concludes with "Questions to Ponder", as she encourages readers to contemplate their opinions and beliefs of societal ills. Michele lives near Cave Creek, Arizona, and devotes herself to the joys of riding her horses, tutoring, writing, and yoga.http://www.myjoyenterprises.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Michele_Venne

A great Gesture For Article Writers To Show Appreciation

Have You Thanked Your Readers Lately? With the holiday season in full swing, it’s important to reconnect with family members, enjoy good food, and most importantly, give thanks. On the business end, it's essential to reflect on ways to thank your readers, customers, and niche followers. Giving thanks is a win-win for you and your audience because both sides feel the positive energy through the message. If you’re looking for ideas to accomplish this, we have a few to consider. It’s the perfect time to show others how much they mean to you. Seize the opportunity! 1. Send a Thank You Email: This is perhaps the most common form of thanks to reach a wide audience. Send a thank you email to those who recently purchased a product, commented on an article, or interacted with your business in a positive way. Write a personalized message for your most active or engaged customers. It may seem old-fashioned, but it’s still an effective, genuine method of expressing your gratitude. You may be surprised on the feedback you receive from something as simple as this. 2. Shoot a Video: Videos are a crucial aspect in promoting your brand and vision. They are a potent force of influence due to their personal nature. Thank your readers by giving a behind-the-scenes look at an aspect of your business, or share a personal experience that means a lot to you. These videos don’t have to be long; keep it short and sweet! 3. Ask for Feedback: Many companies rely heavily on consumer feedback. Asking for suggestions and actually following through is a great way to give back to your audience. When you’re due for some changes in your business, reward customers by choosing their best ideas, and praising them publicly or personally for their brilliant contributions. They will appreciate your dedication to take their feedback to heart. 4. Offer a Freebie or Special Deal: Corporate gifts are always popular around the holidays; however, they can also be very expensive. If you don’t have the budget to give away free promotional items, consider running a special. Slash prices on existing items or plan a new promotion around the holidays to give back to your customers. “Special deals” can be focused on recurring customers where only a select amount will be thanked in this way, which creates a feeling of exclusivity. 5. Interact with Them: If you have a large following, it can be difficult to respond to all comments and feedback. Don’t slack off in this area. Make the time to comment back to those who gave you a line of appreciation or inspiration. There can be some real gems in the comment sections of your articles, blog, social media pages or app reviews, don’t let them go unrecognized. They’re your biggest fans; let them know you’re listening! 6. Put Them in the Spotlight: Dedicate a portion of your website to feature your best followers or customers. You can point out their exceptional talents, thank them for their efforts, and also showcase their business or product. When you reach out to them to get their permission, you can also ask a few questions about themselves and their business. Let them know they deserve recognition for whatever it may be that you find to be exceptional. 7. Provide Quality Content: We couldn’t end this list without pointing out the most obvious, and sometimes neglected way of thanking your readers... new content! Reusing old material is not going to win over your audience. You need to work for their praise and trust, and original content is a sure way of making an impact. Strategically plan new articles and promotions, and keep things interesting for your readers. There you have it, 7 ways to give thanks as an article writer! If you’re pressed for time, focus on the most accessible forms of thanks from the list above. If you’re pondering these ideas, but are unsure if your readers have really done anything for you lately,this post may be up your alley. Do you have any great ways to thank your audience? Please share! As always, THANK YOU for reading!

To Your Article Writing/Marketing Success & Passion! Courtney, EzineArticles Member Support Manager http://Blog.EzineArticles.com/ http://EzineArticles.com/

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How Many Ways Are There To Create Wealth?

Before You Can Create Anything, You Must Do This Important thing first "--">

THERE ARE ONLY 8 WAYS TO CREATE WEALTH

"To the average person, it may seem that there are many hundreds of ways, of creating wealth but in reality, ONLY eight ways exist! Most entrepreneurs try to create wealth all by themselves, while the very rare successful ones, focus only on the few vital characteristics in which they are the strongest."

1. The Creator - Builds innovative products
Examples: Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Richard Branson

2. The Star - Builds an influential brand
Examples: Oprah, Paul Newman, Bill Clinton

3. The Supporter - Builds high performance teams
Examples: Steve Ballmer, Jack Welch

4. The Deal Maker - Brings deals together
Examples: Donald Trump, Rupert Murdoch

5. The Trader - Buying and selling commodities
Examples: George Soros

6. The Accumulator - Buying and holding assets
Examples: Warren Buffet, Paul Allen

7. The Lord - Controlling cashflow producing assets
Examples: Lakshmi Mital, Ingavar Kamprad

8. The Mechanic - Creating a duplicatable system
Examples: Michael Dell, Ray Krock

WRITE TIGHT

Behlor Santi is a 23-year old freelance writer living in New York City. She's published in such magazines and ezines as New England Entertainment Digest,WritersWeekly.com, and GC Magazine. This article was originally published in WritersWeekly.com. E-mail Behlor at madeiragrace@juno.com.

Flip through the latest edition of Writer's Market, and read what editors want:"Break in by writing short pieces..."

"Break in with our department articles..."
"Break in with short news articles about our industry..."
These days, more editors expect beginning writers to submit short articles—newsbreaks, book reviews, short humor, anything under 500 or 600 words. Editors want to see which writers have the talent and professionalism to succeed. They're wary about granting feature assignments to writers they haven't worked with before.

How can you write, submit, and get paid for your shorts?
Ideas Ideas for shorts come from the same places as ideas for feature articles. Dig into your personal experiences and memories. What have you observed in your town? What have you read in magazines, newspapers, and books? Many magazines may talk on and on about some new medical treatment or beauty regimen. Go against the hype.
Many shorts start as pieces from feature articles or even books. Recently, USA Today ran an article about how a lack of sidewalks in cities leads to obesity. You can take the information from this particular article, do some original research, and write a short about convincing your city's civil engineers to make your hometown more walker-friendly.

Find a willing editor, and receive a check!

Writing How do you query for short articles? The same way you query for feature articles. Many other articles and books tell you how to query editors. I suggest that you emphasize the turnover time when it comes to short articles. Don't query an editor with an idea unless you can finish it within a week. After a month or so, many editors forget pitches for major articles. Imagine them forgetting about your book review or filler. Follow the writers' guidelines. E-mail your query with contact information (your name, address, phone number, and e-mail address). Snail mail your query with a self-addressed stamped envelope and any available clips. Wait for a reply. Editors can respond anytime from ten minutes to three months or longer.When you receive a go-ahead from an editor, write your short article like your feature articles. Create a compelling lead, add the meat in the middle, and tie the thematic elements tightly at the end. Many experts tell writers to write tight. With short articles, you must write extremely tight. Stay away from digressions and pretty prose that don't contribute to the slant of the article.

Most feature articles need five to seven sources-interviews from experts, books read, statistics researched. Over a three-week turnover (from go-ahead to submission), you probably spend 50% to 75% of your time researching. On the other hand, most shorts require fewer sources. You can research and write the article within a week. Even though shorts require less research, they demand the same accuracy as feature articles. When submitting the final manuscript, you'll need to provide your editor with a list of contacts for fact checking. Whether you write a 100-word newsbreak or a 5,000-word expose in Harper's, accuracy is part of professionalism.
Next you revise your article, taking out unnecessary information and words. Submit the revised article to the editor, on or before the deadline.

Getting Paid So your editor accepts your short article. What about payment? Just by word count alone, the average feature article pays more. It's obvious-at ten cents per word, you receive a bigger check for a 1500-word article than a 500-word article. Editors may pay more for a feature article, but short articles are easier to sell. They're perfect for the beginning writer.
They also work for the professional writer. How?

It's hard making a living as a freelance writer. Most writers have several projects going on at the same time. Say that you're working on a couple of major articles. With research, writing, revising, and the waiting that the editor puts you through, it often takes weeks or months to get paid for your work. With short articles, you can write quickly, in between your major projects. You can use some of your "big-article" research to create a newsbreak or a book review. Many national publications pay up to a dollar per word for short articles. So a 200-word article can pay some of your bills.

Paying MarketsSo I explained why writing short articles makes sense. Below are ten paying markets that purchase short articles. Request writers' guidelines from the editor before submitting queries.


ASPCA Animal Watch
Contact: Marion Lane
E-mail: editor@aspca.org
Web site: http://www.aspca.org
Needs: Animal Watchers profiles, Light Watch humor, and Animals Abroad essays
Pays: $75-$225 on acceptance
Air and Space/Smithsonian Magazine
Contact: Pat Trenner
E-mail: editors@airspacemag.com
Web site: http://www.airspacemag.com
Needs: Sounding newsbreaks
Pays: $150-$300 on acceptance
True West
Contact: R.G. Robertson
E-mail: editor@truewestmagazine.com
Web site: http://www.truewestmagazine.com
Needs: True Reviews book reviews
Pays: $20 minimum on acceptance
Fine Gardening
Contact: Todd Meier
E-mail: fg@taunton.com
Web site: http://www.finegardening.com
Needs: Book, video, and software reviews
Pays: $50-$200 on acceptance
Guideposts For Kids on The Web
Contact: Rosanne Tolin
E-mail: gp4k@guideposts.org
Web site: http://www.gp4k.com
Needs: Cool Kids profiles and Animals, Animals! Articles
Pays: $50-$500 on acceptance
Backpacker
Contact: Peter Flax
E-mail: pflax@backpacker.com
Web site: http://www.backpacker.com
Needs: Backcountry essays, Weekend Wilderness articles, and Signpost newsbreaks
Pays: $200-$1000 on acceptance
The Horse
Contact: Kimberly S. Herbert
E-mail: kherbert@thehorse.com
Web site: http://www.thehorse.com
Needs: Short horse health news
Pays: $50-$400 on acceptance
Yankee 
Contact: Ms. Sam Darley
E-mail: queries@yankeepub.com
Web site: http://www.yankeemagazagine.com
Needs: Short food, home, and travel articles
Pays: $50-$200 within 30 days of acceptance
Golf Tips
Contact: David DeNunzio
E-mail: editors@golftipsmag.com
Web site: http://www.golftips.com
Needs: Stroke Saver tips
Pays: $300-$850 on publication
Sacramento Magazine
Contact: Krista Minard
E-mail: Krista@sacmag.com
Web site: http://www.sacmag.com
Needs: City Lights articles
Pays: $50 minimum on publication

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Home - Lena Kovadlo's Creative Passion

Home - Lena Kovadlo's Creative Passion

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How To Research A Niche Market

What is A Niche Market?

A niche market is a segment of the market on which a specific product is focusing. Any market can be further divided into smaller market segments with specific interests and demographics. For example, the love market is huge. Within the love market, you can find niche markets focused on soulmate search, ethical polyamory, green dating, sacred sexuality, and more. These can also be drilled down into sub niches, such as “over 40 soulmate search” or “sacred sexuality for gay couples”. Some sub niches can be highly profitable, so it’s worth doing some analysis to determine if the one you are passionate about has profit potential.

What is Niche Marketing?

Niche marketing involves the art of defining your particular niche and marketing your product or services to this niche. Many business owners view the idea of niche marketing as a strategy that will cut their profit margin or limit their sales, but the truth is, having a well defined niche can give your business more power, especially if the niche has enough demand and money in it.

The better you can define your market, the higher the likelihood you can hone your marketing message to resonate with this market, turn this audience into fans, who will buy and rave about your product.

The Science of Researching Profitable Niche Markets

Researching profitable niche markets can be tricky. It’s easy to assume that a market characterized by high demand is profitable, but that isn’t always the case. A great example of this might be the cookie baking market. You might be great at baking cookies, but starting a blog about cookie baking may not be profitable for you, especially if all your visitors are seeking quick recipes and not really interested in buying anything.

I’m going to share with you a basic methodology, as well as some free tools, commonly used by Internet marketers for niche research. While this approach is oriented towards entrepreneurs who want to create a revenue generating website in the niche of their choice – which is essential if your business is entirely online – it is also extremely powerful if you are a brick and mortar business seeking to grow online income streams.

While niche research techniques might differ slightly, depending on whether you intend to sell digital products, physical goods, or services the principle remains the same.

Step One: Identify Your the Audience

If you are an early stage entrepreneur looking to start a viable business in a market you are passionate about, rather than focusing on what product you want to sell, start first with understanding your audience. Why should you concentrate on a niche audience first, instead of products?

According to Chris Ducker, outsourcing guru and Internet business entrepreneur, there aretwo solid reasons to prioritize finding an audience to promote to over identifying products to promote:

Products come and go, but niche audiences stick around forever. If you’ve ever been promoting a product profitably and then had it decline in popularity (or pulled off the market entirely), you know what I’m talking about.

When you choose a niche audience and take the time to understand their needs deeply, a whole new world of options open up to you. You switch from struggling to find ideas for products, to instantly knowing exactly the types of products you should be promoting – because they’re in tune with your niche audience’s needs.

While his advice is geared towards affiliate marketers who earn commission from products they promote online, it’s great advice for any entrepreneur seeking to better connect with a targeted audience of customers who have both the inclination to buy AND the capacity to pay.

Step Two: Research Your Niche Market Keywords.

In this step, you want to identify what keywords your audience uses when they research topics related to this niche market, especially searches related to their problems, pain points or deepest desires.

This information will not only tell you what topics your audience cares about the most, it will tell you whether or not there is enough profit potential in this niche.

A fun and easy too to start with is the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool. You can use it to identify the keywords your audience is using to research products, services, solutions, and information related to this niche market.

The tool provides lots of useful data related to these keywords (especially if you use this tool while logged into your Google Adwords account) such as local and global search volume, level of competition, average cost per click (CPC) and more.

What we want to pay attention when we research industry keywords is the monthly search volume. The higher the search volume, the bigger the market. As a rule of thumb, anything over 1,000 exact match searches a month is worth looking into. However, there are some niche markets with smaller monthly volume that have profit potential as well, especially if the market is hungry, and there isn’t a lot of competition.

Let’s take the personal development market. Within this market, at 49,500 exact match searches a month, globally, this is a sizeable segment of people interested in all things related to the Law of Attraction.

Step Three: Analyze the Competition

The level and quality of competition in a niche is a good indication whether the niche is lucrative or not. The most lucrative keyword niches, are typically characterized by:

• High average cost per click (CPC)
• Multiple pages of ads
• Advertisers in the top 3 premium positions
• Ads that are highly targeted to the search keyword

While the Law of Attraction niche is pretty sizeable, competition appears to be medium to low, and with the average CPC less than $1.

This raises the question of whether or not this niche has enough money in it to make it worthwhile to establish a business there. The best way to get an idea is to see if there are any pay-per-click (PPC) advertisers bidding on “law of attraction” keywords in Google Adwords. Google Adwords ads are the text ads that appear at the top and on the right side bar areas of Google search results pages.

As you can see, while there are a lot of competing pages in the organic search results area, this high key phrase is devoid of PPC advertisers.

The lack of PPC advertisers suggests that this key phrase isn’t particularly lucrative and that the law of attraction may be a tough market to make money in. At 48 million competing pages, it will be extremely tough for you to launch a new website and rank on Google page 1 for the term “law of attraction.” Chances are, it won’t be worth your time.

Not to say that it isn’t a profitable niche. Asking yourself why no one is advertising will yield a lot of insight. A great way to find answers are in the list of keyword suggestions presented by the Google Keyword Tool. Are most people looking for Law of Attraction books? Could it be that most people are looking for free information. Beyond the book, are there other kinds of products this target audience would actually buy? Coaching? Courses?

At this point it may be worthwhile drilling down to long tail keywords related to the the niche market’s pain points and desires. For example, people who believe in the Law of Attraction, are finding it’s not working that well for them and are seeking help in unleashing its full potential.

You can see here that there are advertisers in this keyword niche, which suggests there is money to be made. However, the number and quality of the ads and advertisers suggest that “law of attraction courses” is not a hyper competitive market, and that there may be room to accommodate new players.

However, just to be sure, it’s good to circle back to the Google keyword tool and see if there is enough search volume for this keyword niche to support a viable business. With only 36 exact match global searches a month, it would be tough to build a business focusing solely on selling a Law of Attraction course.

Step Four: Research Industry Trends

Another critical piece of information to have is where the niche market is going. A great free tool to use is Google Trends.

As you can see, interest in Law of Attraction peaked in 2007 and has been on a steady decline ever since. This indicates that it is a declining market. This means, it will be increasingly difficult for you to grow traffic to your website, if overall traffic in that niche is shrinking. If you want your business to be a long term business, it’s better to establish yourself in a market that is growing or at least relatively stable, rather start your business in a pie that’s shrinking.

Step Five: Decide if You Want to Enter the Niche Market

At this point, you’ll need to decide if the market is worth getting into. As I mentioned before, the Law of Attraction courses sub niche indicates profit potential, but not a lot of competition. Unfortunately, it doesn’t show a high enough monthly search volume to be viable on its own.

As a rule of thumb, if you see a ton of highly targeted ads at the top and in the right side bar, on multiple pages, with the top brands in the market consistently in the 3 premium spots, it will probably be tough to break into that market as a newbie. You’d be up against established brands with large marketing budgets.

That being said, there may be other profitable long tail keywords (thus audiences) in the Law of Attraction market that you can target. It’s up to you to drill down into the niche to identify what profitable keywords exist and what services, products and solutions this market might be eager to pay for. So if you are determined to be in the Law of Attraction market, the solution would be to establish a web presence around a less competitive keyword, and go after the audience associated with that niche market.