Free Ways to Make Your Article Look More Professional for Beginners

in #steemit5 years ago

One of the best things about article writing as a job is there is little to no overhead. If you have the internet you have access to both research and the tools you need to post your work. Once you are done you can pay for an editor or buy licences of professional photos to use to improve your work. But if you are low on funds there are a lot of free ways to increase the quality of your article.

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Make Sure You Add A Commercial Free Photo (Or Two)

If you can afford Shutterstock it is a great source for a lot of very high quality work. They cover every topic and you can easily find photos for your piece no matter the topic. But in order to use these photos you will need to pay for a subscription and you might now want to do that until you are bringing in money first (this is advice for any business, try not to spend too much money until you know money is coming in).

Another option for high quality photos are sites like pixabay and pexels. Pixabay is one I use a lot and you will see some examples of them on this article. The good thing these sites are they require no-attribution and are also commercial-free. Commercial-free means you can make money off of them. You might think that the quality will not be great on these sites as they are free but you would be surprised. There are some amazing photos that you can use and regardless of what your article is about you really should add a photo or 2 from one of these sites.

Take Advantage Of The Blogging Tools

Depending on where you are blogging there will be free tools for you to use to jazz up your work. On steemit for example there are ways to make your post look more professional like adding * before and after text to add italics. If you use ** you can add bold to your text like this.

Make sure you take advantage of the tools of the site you are using, especially if you feel you need to improve as a writer, as it can help to make your article look cleaner.

Research

No one is an expert in everything. And even if you are an expert it is easy to forget a fact or two. But if you are blogging you have the entire internet at your hands to learn and check up on topics you might not have written about for awhile. You want to be careful of the source, remember a lot of sites at not the same as academic papers, but with effort and a discerning eye you can comb the web to find the facts you need.

And it is not only fact checking you can use the web for but spelling and language. Search new words to help improve your lexicon and make sure you look up words that you are not 100% sure the meaning of before you use them. Trust me you don't want to use a word to look smart only to find out it means something else.

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Preview And Going Back To Your Work

Before you post your work you can preview your post to make sure it looks like you think it will look like. This is important because the editor you are using and the final result are not always the same. Use this to make sure the final article looks like you want it to look like before you hit the publish button. Just scroll down on steemit to see how it looks in the preview box.

And don't forget to go back to your old posts and clean them up from time to time. Maybe you learned something about SEO that you could add to an old piece or have a link to a new article you can add. It doesn't cost anything to go back to old

Remember there are a lot of free tools online that you can take advantage of. Spend some time when your work is done to give your article a little shine to it.

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that's indeed some extremely useful ways to make your article-post look more professional and i think each beginner should invest a little bit of him time to do all these. The outcome would be in a whole other level

@trafalger may I ask why I got downvoted?
This is a 700 word SEO friendly post that would be consider high quality on other sites?

Dear @whatageek

Solid and refreshing read.

It's a real shame that those kind of publications are not "going viral". Many users out there would benefit from it.

I think your advice to preview our publication before posting is the one that should be remembered the most.

Hope you're gonna have an easy monday :)
Yours,Piotr

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