There’s a lot of junk out there in the Internet that will waste your time or mislead you. But as those wise prospectors used to say, “There’s gold in them hills.” Here, I’ve sifted through the sand and filtered out the Pyrite to bring you some gold nuggets you’ll want to keep safe in your bookmarks folder.
1. Quora.com
Quora.com is a question and answer site that functions much like Yahoo Answers (a bonus site for you to add to your arsenal). Visitors can post questions and helpful folks offer answers that range from helpful to, um, not helpful in the least. The site itself is helpful to writers because you can type in any keyword you may be writing about, and you can find out what people are asking about surrounding that keyword. So if you’re stumped for new ways to write about project management, for example, you can type that in the search box and discover what people are most interested in learning about project management.
This site lists opportunities for busy writers to get funds from grants and scholarships, win contests and more. If you’d like to take a sabbatical from copywriting to work on a lengthier piece that won’t pay off until the long run, you might find a way to fund your life while you work on your next tome.
3. KeyHero.com
For all you hunt and peckers out there, this site will help you to increase your typing speed and improve your typing accuracy. The game measures both and provides insight into why you might be making certain mistakes.
If you fell asleep in high school English class but still want to be a successful copywriter, you’ll appreciate the quick and dirty approach to the information on this site. Just stick to the home page and find quick links to the facts you need to learn about thinks like capitalization rules, commas, clauses and more. The site owner also offers a newsletter subscription with more free grammar tips delivered to your inbox.
Are you bored with your word supply? Would you like to add more colorful vernacular to your prose? Sign up with this site to get one new vocabulary word emailed to you daily. These words will have your clients reaching for the dictionary. Better yet, your clients will be highly impressed with your mastery of the English language and bookmark your website so they can hire you again!
It’s worth it to pony up the dough for a premium membership to this popular plagiarism detection site. You may be thinking, “Why do I need a Copyscape membership when I obviously already know I didn’t plagiarize?” But if you ever find yourself writing about niche topics with specialized terms, you’d be surprised at the results that might turn up from your original work. It’s better to pay five cents per search and run your work through Copyscape before submitting it, than to be falsely accused of the P word.
Now that your bookmarks are all in order, all that’s left is to be the best freelance writer you can. Write on!
Kate S writes on a variety of topics and is more than happy to share her resource materials with fellow writers. I have no personal or business affiliation with any of the companies mentioned above.
