While my Blog is primarily directed at people who don’t write for business unless they have to, I am aware that some of my readers [at least] are, in fact, freelance writers themselves.
As such, it’s likely that even if they don’t write material for the express purpose of publication to raise the individual writers’ visibility quotient, they have at least heard of the basic reasons for doing this. As more than one successful freelancers has termed it, this kind of effort is part of “building a writer’s platform.” Many kinds of activities can go into building a platform, such as self-publishing materials that your client prospects find useful and interesting: and that function as a form of sample of your work. Guest blogging, reviewing other writers’s blogs, participating in forums and many other activities can all form a part of building a platform.
Another activity that some writers choose to participate in in terms of building a platform is submitting articles to a ‘visibility site,’ a site that in itself gets high search engine ranks which then ties back to the author. Such sites usually have ways of back-linking that can help lead to passive revenue, but you can get some visibility benefit just from having an article presence on that site. These sites are also moderated, so there is a potential for article rejection, although the reasons for article rejection are far more limited than the reasons a site that pays for articles may apply. The articles are not directly revenue-producing: the currency is the potential visibility they provide you as a writer.
That is to say, to try to come around to the premise of this Blog post: a moderated visibility site is less free-form than one’s own blog, and more free form than client-assigned web content articles.
I have been participating in such a visibility site since about the middle of January, or a bit before that.
I have found that there is yet another reason to include writing for such visibility sites, at least one or two good ones, in your efforts to build a writer platform.
What I have found is that just the nature of the process of submitting to such a visibility site has a positive effect on one’s scope as a web content writer.
Even though, through training and long practice in planning my documents rapidly and upfront, I am typically a fairly fast writer, I found the work there challenging in terms of coming up with a variety of interesting articles primarily in two specific topics: writing [and reading as applies to writing development]; and the crafts of knitting and crocheting [with an occasional foray into personal development or book reviews.]
However, I found also that although I always am aware of audience profile . . . again through training . . . I found myself with a refreshed awareness of that.
I also found that the renewed audience awareness drove my article writing there so that, for the most part, I was writing faster than normal for me: even though I’m a fairly fast writer for web content writing for the most part anyway.
Although the rejections were minimal, those too, taught me some more things about better audience evaluation principles.
So, if you are in the process of building a writer’s platform, consider writing some articles for at least one of the better visibility sites as part of your business-building activity.
If you would like to see some of my work of this type, visit
and look up articles there under my byline [which is Christine Lebednik there.]
You can also get information on my own range of services as a freelance business writer at my professional website at:
I do hope to get this Blog back on track over the next few weeks, but I will be working on-side, full-time for several months and am uncertain how that will affect my mental gears for the first couple of weeks.
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