Freelance Fun

So I have been a freelance SEO consultant for quite some time now, and I have to admit that one thing that really struck me is, that i do not think I could ever go back to an office environment. The whole 9-5 grind, shitty wage for a mind numbing job. Sure, I have been writing about iPhone space games now for a month, but I can do it wherever I want, whenever I want.

One thing that has also become increasingly apparent is that building up a knowledge set is an amazing way to break free of this and launch your own career. I am not talking about an education here. There are two major problems with just having an education, the first is it denotes lack of experience (unless you have experience to back it up) and secondly it means that you have been taught from textbooks not from experience.

This sounds stupid, but in many fields the texts that are being taught are out of date. Case in point, my brother was being taught about web design and his lecturer had the audacity to say that keywords were an important factor in SEO, this has not been true for around half a decade.

The worst part is that if the students do their own research and learn the correct methods of SEO, they fail their exams.

If you have experience on the other hand, you know what works and what doesn't, because you have had to do it.

In an effort to stay on top of this!

In an effort to stay on top of this I have decided to post yet another blog post. This is twice in a month, unheard of since my hectic move to America, but I really do think I should pay a little more attention to this long neglected labor of love which I created.

Today i will mostly be talking about how the American Government decided to shut down for a while. The reasoning behind all this seems a little bit weird (I think it goes along the lines of , the republicans stone-walled democrat decisions until the democrats ran out of money to the point of having to shut down everything for a week or two. then the Republicans said the Democrats couldn't make any decisions on time and that they must be an inept government for having to shut everything down). I have to admit it beats the English version of politics where you sit a bunch of private schooled 'toffs' in to a room and watch them hurl polite abuse at each other.

But I cannot help but think that shutting down the government for a few days sounds like a remarkably good idea, I mean, just think of all the work that could get done without all that bureaucratic nonsense.

In more personal news, I will hopeful have my American drivers licence soon. I am pretty sure my eyes closed when the guy took my photo, so I am looking forward to around ten years of piss taking in the future.

Life Continues!

Life is going past pretty smoothly in the United States right now, so I thought I would give you a quick update, not on my life - per say, but more on my time at SXSWi, a huge festival in Austin which covers films, games and music over an entire month.

Unfortunately I didn't attend much of the film or music side of things, since I did not have a ticket (Though I did get to see the Strokes play a free show at the Auditorium shores). I did however spend quite a lot of time at the interactive part of the festival.

The interactive SXSW festival was a surprisingly big event, with booths from some of the world's largest games companies, including Capcom, Mortal Combat, Sony, and more. There was even a surprise visit from Mike Tyson himself.

Despite my first thoughts, Mike Tyson has not developed a WoW addiction, but he is launching a new game for the iPhone. This game is free, and you can find it under Mike Tyson - Main Event.

Another game which caught my eye was the soon to be released Traveller-AR. This fantastic iPhone game is kind of EVE style, but it works straight from your iPhone. Not only is Traveller-AR one of the first iPhone MMORPG games, but it also incorporates cutting edge technology such as Augmented reality to create an insanely immersive gaming environment!

All in all the event was pretty amazing, while the new Mortal Combat game looked highly appealing, I suddenly started to feel incredibly old as 14 year old girls whooped my ass. This seemed worryingly familiar, until I realized that I used to beat my dad just as easily. Are the years catching up?

Probably.

The Joys of Article Writing

I am doing pretty well nowadays as a freelance SEO consultant, but I have to admit, a lot of my job is tedious. Since SEO is in the most part about getting high quality backlinks I spend a huge amount of my time article writing.

Now I do kind of love writing articles, it is fun. However when you have to write 50, 100, even 1000 articles surrounding one subject, the joy does kind of get spread a little thin!

To stop each and every article I write from becoming Internet dredge I try to follow three simple but effective components of article writing.

The first is to structure my article.Giving it a beginning, a middle and an end really helps keep my writing in check, and on point.

The second is to not ramble. This is a hard habit to break, especially when you are writing 100 versions of the same. However re-reading the article is a god way to spot dross that is just in there to fill space. If you cannot stay interested in your own writing, how do you expect anyone else to care?

The third and final thing I try to do is increase my own vocabulary. A few words which stretch your readers limits will definitely keep them interested!

By keeping myself on point with these three simple techniques I have seen a vast improvement in traffic, and people staying to read my articles!

An Exclusive Article Directory

Over the last few months I have been working incredibly hard on getting people up and running on my latest site, This is Freelance. This site is an exclusive article directory with a stringent application process. This allows us to weed out the spam artists and make This is Freelance a safe haven for high quality writers across the Internet.

If you are looking for a great place to write online, and feel as if you can write high quality articles, please feel free to check out This is Freelance today. There are plenty of opportunities to make money online, get some free do-follow backlinks, and maybe even meet some fellow writers in the process!