Temperament Important for a Writer

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To be a successful writer you must first have the proper attitude. In everything from sports to politics, attitude is the starting point. Having the wrong perspective or outlook will greatly hamper your efforts and leave you feeling discouraged and defeated.

Why?

Writing is a vocation that puts you in a vunerable position. When you write, you bear your soul before everyone. In the case of writing on the internet, you expose yourself to hundreds and maybe even thousnds of people everyday. Putting yourself out in front of so many people makes you an easy focal point for someone’s praise or someone’s scorn.

Don’t be naive, everyone on the internet is not nice. Just like there are spammers who are constantly trying to infiltrate legitimate online operations there are people who roam the internet with nothing more in mind than to drop some unkind, malicious comment on your post.

Trust me, I speak from experience. Which brings me to my next point>

The Proper Attitude Toward Comments

Don’t take comments personally, especially if they are negative. Everyone has their right to their opinion. Just because they don’t happen to have the same point of view that you do doesn’t make them a bad person. Just different. Disagreement is what gives the world some color and bite.

Remember, even though they may have vehemently (got to throw an $8 word in every now and then) disagreed with you, your attitude has to be “that’s another page view.” After all, page views are what we are all after. So negative or positive, you looked at my work and in the end that’s all that matters.

Besides, you may find that person who disagreed with you coming back to see what else “that idiot has written about!” That’s even better. Now you’ve got a regular customer who doesn’t even realize they are helping you every time they visit your site.

Controversy is good, especially when it ends up paying you.

The Proper Attitude Toward Pageviews

Page views are the life blood of internet writing. There is no doubt about it. Without page views you don’t have anything to be writing for….or do you?

You should look at page views like the stock market. Some days they are up. Some days they are down. Some days they are almost level to the ground. Just like the stock market page views are unpredictable, and in more ways than one.

There are topics you can right about and really feel good when you are writing it, thinking that the article will really do well. Then when you look at your page views you find out that it didn’t do so well. Your heart is broken…..but it shouldn’t be. That article is going to be in cyber space until Jesus comes, so don’t worry about it.  As I told you in another article I wrote, people are fickle. What is trash today is treasure tomorrow.

Don’t worry be happy (now I’m dating myself but I don’t care, yeah I’m old so what?). 

Now  on the flipside, you might write an article that you feel okay about but don’t expect much from it and that piece takes off like a rocket ship. Why? Wait for it…..because people are fickle! You can’t guess what they want because they don’t even know what they want. So just give them what you have and let the chips (or dollars) fall where they may.

Forrest Gump said “life is like a box of chocolates, you never know what you’re going to get.” And he was right.

The difference between page views and the stock market is you don’t run the risk of losing anything with page views…unless you stay up at night worrying about them.

Don’t. It’s not worth it. Remember, you are a small fish in a big pond. You’ll get caught eventually.

The Proper Attitude Toward Writing

No matter what happens, don’t stop writing. If you are a true writer, and I know many of you are, you can’t allow yourself to get discouraged because of what happens with your articles. If you are a true writer, writing is who you are not what you do. It’s as natural as breathing, at least it is for me. Readers come and readers go but writers don’t go with that flow ( I just made that up and I don’t care if it wasn’t good, I already have your page view. just kidding).

In baseball, a hitter doesn’t stop swinging at the baseball because he hasn’t gotten a hit since Truman was in office. He keeps swinging because he knows the only way to get out of a hitting slump is to…wait for it…..get a hit.  And the only way he can get a hit is to…..swing at the ball. A basketball player does likewise. If he’s not hitting any shots the only way he can hit a shot is to take a shot.

So you do likewise. If you are not getting the page views that you want the only way to get them is to keep on writing. There is an old saying that an elderly gentleman told me once, “even a blind squirrel finds an acorn every now and then.” Well, you’ve got a leg up on the blind squirrel, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t find an acorn or two.

Keep writing. It’s who you are.

The Proper Attitude Toward Praise

More often than not, if you are producing quality material you will get comments of praise. Don’t let it go to your head. Just like you shouldn’t take negative commemnts to heart, you shouldn’t let positive comments swell your head.

Stay humble.

Allowing your ego to get the best of you will affect your writing. I have seen some content that you could teli was written by a pompous, arrogant, swelled headed snob who thought they were God’s gift to the universe. There is nothing more irritating than to find yourself reading something that wreaks of condescension ($13 word, sorry about that).

Praise as well as criticism should be taken in stride. Don’t allow either one to sway you too far one way or the other. Try to stay somewhere in the middle and you should be okay.

Remember, it’s here today and gone tomorrow, so don’t put too much into either one.

for more writing tips see:

http://writinghood.com/writing/overcoming-writers-block-in-four-easy-steps/

http://writinghood.com/online-writing/internet-content-writing-tips/