Times are evolving and the internet is slowly but surely pushing printed news to one side, leaving itself a clear path to the future of how people will gather their news.

Every media organisation has had to move forward with this evolution by producing websites in order to continue competing in their market.

If you have even bothered to read to this fourth paragraph (all will become clear later) then the rest of this article will try to help those journalists who are struggling to make the change from printed to online journalism.

The Reasons for the Nets Popularity

There are so many reasons for why people are now looking towards the internet for their daily fix of news.

The Web is constant and can be updated at the touch of a button when needed, compare this to a newspaper which is out of date the second it is printed. By the time it hits the newsagents most of the stories are old news to those who have already logged onto the internet in the morning, or even the night before.

Add to the convenience of being able to access the internet wherever you are as long as you have the correct device, when before people would have gone out of their way to buy a paper you have to of the main reasons why the net has boomed.

Websites also have the luxury of being able to use audio and video to capture their audience on top of pictures and text which is all newspapers have to offer.

Fact

• Web users will generally ignore any unnecessary information on screen.
• A massive 79% of people who read pages on the internet will simply just scan the page instead of reading it word for word.
• Of the small percentage of people who read 100% of an online article they will actually only take in 75% of the content.

Why?

• When reading from a computer screen the process is 25% longer than reading from a paper article.
• Computer monitors increase eye strain and fatigue much more that a newspaper does.
• Web users want to find the information they require quickly and easily if they cannot do this then they will not waste their time looking for it.

Tips for Journalists

The longer the text is for an online article the more you are reducing the chance that readers will actually perform the important act of reading it, so keep it short!

Try and tell your story in the first four paragraphs, that way you will hit the reader with everything they need before they even have a chance to look away.

Long blocks of text are for newspapers so stay well clear, break your text up by using headlines, sub headlines and captions in order to capture your reader.

Whatever you do though do not substitute your style for high-quality journalism, so remember your facts but do not put too many in the main body of your text. Make them attractive to the reader by putting them in a snazzy fact box separate to your text.

Finally it is a general rule that online text should be 50% less than what it would have been if it was published in a newspaper.

So if you remember anything from this article then it is to keep your paragraphs short and snappy, try and keep them below four lines where possible.

But keep your sentences shorter.

Facts and figures taken from the Nielsen Web Writing Research Report.

Resources You Recommended

• Story Mash
• Associated Content
• Helium
• Shvoong

In addition to these resources you have been gracious enough to list, I would like to add several others. You can submit articles to various magazines online. (I would advise you to familiarize yourself with the magazine first-something you can also do online.) In addition, you can enter writing contests and join various web sites provide writers with a plethora of resources. (I would, however, advise you to read how you can tell genuine Internet writing contests from fake ones prior to entering here.

Magazines that Pay for Your Submissions

• Analog
• Open Spaces
• Apex
• The Rose and Thorn
• The Pedestal Magazine

Magazines that Do Not Pay for Submissions

• Planet Magazine
• Women Writers
• Word Riot

Writing Contests

• Poets and Writers
• Once Written

Web Sites for Writers

• Writers Write
• Freelance Writing

Once again, the Internet has many resources for the freelance writer. Please let me know if you would like me to continue listing some of them.

First in order to earn a living as a freelance writer and be successful, a person should be creative in their thoughts, writing techniques, and have a good business sense with accounting background.

You need to learn to be creative in marketing techniques, and advertising your work. It is neccessary to have a personal and professional attitude in attire, speech, and business clientele.

• Know your work AND your market
• Obtain a tax ID
• Make up examples of your freelance writing works; or if you have any tear out sheets from previously published work
• Purchase a good accounting system either manual or software. QuickBooks is excellent software that takes care of all your accounting needs including tax preparation and information. It is presented with business contacts and addresses, invoices, online banking, payments, and purchasing. It comes equipped with company web site information and QuickBooks support services.
• Make up price lists for each type of work you will perform
• Always, always, write up contracts with your clients

Second: Opportunities for your writing profession draws closer by interviewing clients and presenting your talents with professionalism in your presentations.

To have a successful interview there has to be an exchange of information, both from the interviewer and the interviewee. The first requirement of the interviewer is to begin with the introduction of your name, business name, and state the reason for your visit with that specific client. If you know what the business is about it will give you a clue how to present your specific skills that will meet the needs of their establishment.

Example: You walk into a floral shop and one of your specialties is the knowledge and or experience working with flowers; you may offer the fact of photographing their flowers, putting it on a CD or DVD and write a special advertisement for their business that is appealing and eye catching.

Your main objective is to know what you are qualified to do prior to entering the door of that business and speaking to the manager. Do not extend services that you know you are not qualified to pursue or you may find yourself struggling to complete the task. Your quality will suffer and you won't be able to present a professional quality product.

Below are the 10 priorities before meeting and presenting your quality product:

• Type a presentation page or poster with your company name and what your company is about. List specialties and personal contact information and make plenty of copies
• Plan ahead what specialties you will present to which contact
• Write down what you want to represent to each business and rehearse
• Practice your introduction and presentation prior to entering the establishment
• Above all, dress professionally, smile, speak clearly, and get to the point immediately
• Try to glance around to utilize anything you see in the establishment that would reflect a part of your presentation to the manager or owner of the company. This will give them the impression you are interested in what they do.
• Begin with the introduction of yourself, reach your hand out to shake theirs, then hand them your page or poster to look at while explaining why you are there
• Make reference to something about their establishment that will bring their attention to why your services are the greatest and why it will be useful to them
• Present some of your previous work and a price list so you can show them why and how you are qualified to satisfy their needs
• Smile and thank them for their time and they can contact you for further information when they are ready to hire you to write their special project

Third: Have a Strategy, Process Analysis, Topics & Development Structure

• Classify and divide the categories of your best quality writings
• Process and analyze each step that shows great effects, definitions and exact meaning with variations
• Write examples
• Summarize your qualifications and special techniques
• Anticipate possible market and give examples why they will be best marketing strategies for clients
• Develop your market
• Go for it!!!

Believe in your capabilities and develop a "nitch" in the market that no one else has.

• Start small. The easiest way to get into print is to write letters. Choose a magazine you enjoy or a local newspaper. If you enjoy a particular magazine then it is probably written in your style and about subjects that interest you and this is a good place to start. Study the letters page, the language used, count the number of words, their subjects. When inspiration strikes write a letter as close in style as possible.
• Write some fillers. These can be jokes, recipes, poems, tips. Readers Digest is a good place to check on fillers. Featured poems are often ones that create a mood, perhaps reflecting on nature or relationships.
• When you feel confident from these successes you might care to try a personal experience story. Avoid the magazines that go for high drama and concentrate on something sincere which will appeal to readers of your favourite magazine.
• Short stories are a further challenge. Read a variety of them carefully. Choose a suitable theme and check the length of the average short story in the magazine of your choice. Some magazines offer guidelines upon request.

Finally, to enable you to achieve your first and most important aim, to write well, I would recommend that you join a Writers Group. A writer's life is a lonely one and you will meet like minded people there who will encourage you. A good group with an experienced leader is educational and challenging.

I cannot conclude without mentioning Triond where you can try out your ideas and get into the habit of writing regularly, indeed they encourage you to do that, and you will get some feedback as you go along.

Getting published is all about practice, patience and perseverance. Go to it and enjoy yourself immensely in the process.

I buy weekly women's magazines, you know the sort, with real women's stories, photos, jokes and puzzles, fashion and beauty items and tips. It dawned on me that the majority of the features in these magazines are all sent in by the readers and the magazine pays it's readers for supplying the content.

You can earn money by sending in letters, photos, funny stories, real life stories, fiction, tips and jokes, you can earn anything from £10 upwards for a letter or a tip, up to a few hundred pounds for a two page story.

Everyone knows at least one joke, or has a few household tips up their sleeve, probably things you just automatically do to save yourself money or time - why not share it with others and earn some cash.

If you have an unusual story to tell, it could be one of love, heartbreak, sadness, happy times, funny situations or anything as long as it will draw readers in, you could be paid up to £500.

So, you've submitted a tip, or a joke or letter, photos etc, just sit and wait. I've had a few rejection letters, but also some success, and it is a nice feeling when a cheque for £20 comes through your letterbox for a letter you sent them a few months ago, as it's totally unexpected and a nice surprise.

Why not have a go at the puzzles, they only take a few minutes each and you can enter them all or just the ones you like. They are usually simple puzzles such as wordsearches, easy crosswords and sudokus. The prizes are great, anything from £50 up to a holiday or a car or £5000 for example. Surely that's got to be worth a few minutes, having a go at these while you sit in front of the telly, after all as they say, you've got to be in it to win it, and believe it or not, some people actually make a living from doing competitions - Ok, on a much larger scale than a few crosswords and wordsearches a week, but that's a good way to start.

So, it's not going to make you a millionaire, but a few extra pounds here and there for sharing your stories and photos with other readers has got to be worth it, and the competitions are an extra bit of fun, that you could be lucky with too.

Use them as ideas for articles

Get out your stash of magazines and cut out any articles that you might be able to use as an idea generator for an article of your own. Of course, you never want to copy or plagiarize another article, but magazine material can serve as a great stimulus for new ideas. For example, an article on how to choose a good doctor might motivate you to write an article about choosing a good chiropractor. Once you've removed these articles, create a filing cabinet of inspiring articles you can use when you want to create online articles of your own to post on your blog or submit to article sites for pay.

Study the ads

If you sell any type of product online or through online classified ads, you'll want to flip to the back of your magazines and study the way successful ads are structured. You can glean an enormous amount of information about how to sell through classifieds using this method. Which ads catch your eye and motivate you to want to take action? Cut those ads out and create an ad idea older you can refer to when you're ready to write a classified ad of your own. If you have consecutive copies of a magazine, see how long an ad has been running to get some idea of its level of success. Generally, if an ad is running in consecutive issues, it's probably a profitable ad.

Start a back issue service

There are people out there desperately looking for a particular issue of magazine that contains an article they need for instructional or research purposes. If you have the room, you can collect back issues of magazines from yard and estate sales as inventory for a back issue magazine service. You could then set up a website offering back issues of hard to find magazine issues. Some people will pay dearly for a particular issue that has the specific information they're looking for. To make this business successful, you would want to concentrate on high quality niche publications that have instructional information that's in high demand. Avoid buying common magazines such as Ladies Home Journal or People unless they're very old. You could also offer hard-to-find back issues on auction sites such as Ebay.

Reselling magazines can bring in a tidy profit while recycling good reading material. Why not give these ideas a try?

I don't have the software to make pages flip electronically on my site. I prefer to just have the info laid out on the site where it can capture the eye. There is not much for 2007 because I am just getting started. I am still making ideas about trading cards and trying to create. I need content and info for the trading card blog. It's not easy. You can see the lay out here.

Since writing and ideas don't come easy, having a once a year lay out page of a magazine is easy for me. I make up the magazine as I go from day to day, just like I would on my blogs. By the end of the year, I should have enough for a whole magazine. For right now, the magazine pages and layouts will only be intended for the site. The more content and info that you have, the better it is to be able to have things to choose from, and things fall in place.

When you are only beginning, placing things on a page is hard. The more I write, things fall into categories like on a color wheel. More ideas will come, and you know where to put things. There will be times when you just don't know what to write or how to present something. There will be times when you will just have too many ideas but you can always narrow things down. In the end, you might have many magazines to publish or just one whole book.

Keep writing, coming up with ideas, and brainstorming. People might laugh at what you do, but don't let that stop you. Don't let rejection stop you. Your ideas and your interest can help create something new. Then people that like what you do might give you ideas to add or advice. Sometimes a helping hand is needed. It does not always have to be a professional, but it is good to have someone that knows a little bit more than you know.

A professional who has been in the business for years may not have the time to look at your work or may not even like it. You can always get an idea from what they do to be better. If you have an idea in mind for a newspaper or a magazine, publish it, and you should publish it yourself. The internet has made a way for you.

Your first step is to research the market. What publications are currently on sale and how many of them are you aware of? There are many books such as the Artists and Writers Year Book that offer lists of newspapers, magazines and digests that may consider printing your work, but the world of media moves very fast, and the best thing to do is actively go down to the newsagent and make a list of the ones that stand out. You are unlikely to have time to list every single one so start with your key interests or areas of expertise and then turn to the internet to research the titles you have listed in more detail.

For each publication write up a note card with the name of the title, a summary of their content, a summary of their tone and the editorial contacts you will need to submit an article pitch, which in the case of an unknown is usually the editorial assistant. Going through this process may seem quite arduous in the first instance but once you have completed it you will have a solid base of information on the magazine market which you can access whenever you want to approach a new magazine with an article. For those who are more PC savvy you could just as easily load this information into an Excel document, which makes it easier to find what you are looking for.

Before you start writing your article, you need to know which publication you want to pitch it to. Never write anything without first pitching it to a publication. It wastes your time and leads to unnecessary work. You might finish a 2000 word article and then on approaching a magazine find that they only accept articles of 1200 words. You must then spend precious time and effort re-editing the piece before the editor of the magazine even sees it. Once you have a feel for a magazines tone and approach you can start pitching articles to them, if they commission it then you write it. Doing it this way means if your ideas are rejected you haven't wasted time writing something they won't accept, and you can now take that idea away rework it and pitch it to somebody else.

When pitching an article you need to be as articulate as possible. You need to demonstrate an understanding of the publication in question and explain why the article you are pitching would be of interest to their readership. Before making your pitch it is important to read at least one issue of the publication in order to get a sense for their tone. Every title has a “voice” with which it speaks to readers. In order to write effective articles for a magazine you need to mimic this voice in order to make your work fit with their publication. The National Geographic for example will have a very different voice to Grazia. Both use a specific tone that fits with their readership and this is something you need to be aware of.

A further point to be aware of if you are pitching an article to a magazine is that you must have an “angle.” An angle is a perspective that gives a point to a piece of writing. For example, imagine how many articles a travel magazine receives on an annual basis about New York simply because it is a popular destination. Waffling on about the wonders of the Empire State Building are unlikely to get you published. It's been done. If you're going to write something about New York you need to find something new and inventive to say. You need to demonstrate that you're not just somebody trying to rehash their holiday experience for a bit of quick cash and that you take your writing serious. Be inventive and surprise an editor that's probably the best way to get them to say yes to an idea.

If you pitch your idea and are successful then you need to go back and study their publication once more before writing your piece. Do they write formally or is it okay to draw on personal experience and use the first person? Small details such as this must be noted otherwise you will completely undo all your hard pitching work. Once you have studied their publication all you need to do is write your piece making sure you stick within the guidelines given to you by the magazine and including all of the details they ask for in your brief - leaving elements they have asked for makes it look like you aren't meticulous about your work, which is not the impression you want to give.

Make sure that you back up any perspectives with facts and figures - just like at school sweeping statements without any evidence don't go down well either with editors or readers so make sure you do some research around your topic and credit any reports or research that you use. It's probably best to start out by writing about what you know. Maybe you studied psychology and did some important research into conformity that you want to document. Maybe you have become a parent and have picked up some skills that you want to pass on or perhaps you worked in a bank and are able to write articles on personal finance. Whatever your field of expertise, remember that you don't know everything about the subject and researching some basic facts will give your work a lot more credibility.

A final piece of advice when writing for magazines is to remember that you need to draw the reader in as quickly as possible. Start with a strong statement and then tease out the finer details by arranging them into paragraphs with a common thread. Developing a strong flow as a writer and being able to draw conclusions is a difficult skill to master, but can be improved by making a commitment to write something every day, even if you do look back on it and cringe. The very act of writing is practice for someone wanting to break into the industry, and like any skill, the more you do it the better you will get.

Avoid companies that do not answer query letters that would supply you for information on the cost involved and avoid companies that call each time with another agent trying to get you to finish your book. They are not your agents and are not interested in the creative process what they want is your money plain and simple and you should be the one to decide who you will go with.

It is sometimes difficult to know if the publisher will work in earnest. In Italy I visited a small publisher at his home office who told me of the few thousand dollars he would need to get a certain number of books out on the market but he mentioned distribution problems. I found packages of books on his floor that had not yet been distributed and they had nothing to do with the fictional market that I wanted to break into. So I questioned whether he was the right outlet for me and I questioned what kind of distribution problems he had. It was clear that there was a third party to deal with, newsstand in this case and that newsstand owners had a preference for the kinds of books they would carry and when they would receive new orders.

Another small book publisher in Canada, mentioned in the early 90's that I should have at least 400 people to break into the market. At that time I was looking to pick up ideas about the popularity of certain titles. This publisher was working on another biography of Trudeau and experience told him that this was a guaranteed sale because there was sure to be more than 400 readers for a topic that already had a following. The late Prime Minister was a charismatic man he was in the focus f the news while leading the country and also created a following of admirers along the way so the publisher knew he would have less difficulty advertising this book as opposed to advertising a book about a less appealing subject.

Avoid the editing houses that send you letters on how your poem has been considered for publication because of its outstanding form and content. The company will likely be sending you a form to fill out for the purchase of an anthology and you would have to pay for your own work to get in there. Here is where the company is not only making money on the distribution of your poems but the author is not getting any royalties on that. If the writer wants to send his poem to be included without purchasing the anthology, to get his name out, that is his business.

Be aware of forwarding material to publishing companies that only issue magazines seasonally especially if you are looking for a regular income. It would be best to balance this time of work with other publishing firms that would complement that schedule. Also keep abreast of what the journal or university review publishes so that you eliminate one cause of rejection and that would be writing for a market the company does not touch.