Tips For Writing Your Own Articles
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One of my online friends has sent me more emails in the last hour than he has in the last 6 months…
Why?
Because he has a new toy that he is enjoying immensely.
For the longest time, I have told him that “If he could communicate an idea, and write as he speaks, then he has the potential to become a great writer.”
So he started down the road to writing his own articles, and he has been doing pretty good with it. His articles are finding publishers interested in the story he has to tell.
But it is getting close to Christmas, so he bought himself a gift…
He bought his own copy of “Dragon – Naturally Speaking”…
It is a voice-to-text software that permits a person to speak into the headset and see the words typed into the screen for him…
The average person can speak an average of 120 words per minute, and in the article writing game, that is fast. In essence, one only needs to talk for 8 minutes to crank out a 1000-word article.
I am one of those exceptional people who can type pretty fast, depending on my focus, it varies between 80 and 120 per minute. I challenged the Naturally Speaking test and the voice-to-text beat the hell out of me… I actually only did 60 wpm in the test.
I told my buddy that when I get my own copy of this software, I would be trying to set it up where I could run it while talking to people on the phone. If someone were to ask me a question, I can crank out a 10-to-20 minute answer without thinking about it.
And as I have often said, some of the best article ideas come from customer support questions…
I figured that if I ran the Naturally Speaking software while talking to a customer, all I would have to do is to go back and put the punctuation in later, as it would probably annoy the person on the phone if I were saying “stop” at the end of every sentence.
My friend Gary said it has an automatic punctuation feature, and he has been practicing all day to get it to work correctly for him… But like he said, there is a “training mode” where the software is getting a handle on “how you speak” to weed out the mistakes that it would ordinarily make.
Gary actually sent me an email a few minutes ago, lacking only a bit of punctuation, but otherwise, almost perfect…
So there it is… Dragon – Naturally Speaking will actually let you answer a support question and capture all of your conversation and auto-magically put your conversation to text, so that you could “write” dozens of relevant articles a day.
Nothing will be more relevant than a customer support or a sales question and answer put to text…
I am sold… As soon as I get a couple hundred extra to invest in software… I am there, getting my own copy of “Dragon – Naturally Speaking”, so that I can start writing more articles, by simply speaking into a microphone…
Here is a tip not related to the voice-to-text software…
When you need to set the focus of your article, just look at the Table Of Contents of an existing book, and pull the chapter titles or chapter sub-headings as the outline for your next article. Don’t steal their content, just borrow their ideas…
You can actually search for books on Amazon by keyword, and many of those book sales pages have a link so that you can take a look at the Table Of Contents of the book. This comes in very handy.
Once you have a direction set for your article (a bullet point list of items to talk about), you can usually crank an article out in less than half an hour, before editing.
I hope this helps you…
And do consider getting your own copy of “Dragon – Naturally Speaking” to add to your arsenal of online marketing tools.
Bill Platt, owner of The Phantom Writers
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