Whether you are an aspiring blogger or a home business owner, learning to craft online content is becoming more essential by the day. Content marketing is king in 2012 and likely beyond. Writing for the web is a different beast however. Your content needs to be visible, clickable and created for the speed reader.
There are several web writing courses out there that cost a pretty penny. If you are a bootstrapping business owner, you likely can’t afford to drop several hundred dollars for a writing course.
Yahoo! Voices, previously Associated Content, used to be a great place to earn a little extra cash writing. As with most similar sites, that has changed in the past year or so. Signing up as a contributor does still have its benefits however. Yahoo! Voices is offering a free web writing course to its contributors right now.
This is a self-paced workshop that covers many aspects of online content creation. Level One in the Academy primarily covers the Yahoo! system. I skipped ahead to Level Two which covers the following:
- Writing for the Web 101
- SEO Basics
- Crafting Headlines That Click
- Common Pitfalls in Word Choice, Grammar and Spelling
- Sentence Structure
- Punctuation
- Proofreading
- Citing Sources
- Copyright, Trademarks and Defamation
In Level Three you will find:
- Personal Branding
- Facebook and Twitter
- Blogs
- Social Bookmarking
- Niche Communities
- Backlinking
As you can see, there are several essential online skills included. Regardless of your online endeavor, you will eventually need to embrace these marketing techniques to continuing expanding your reach. These are easy-to-digest courses that include images and examples. There is a quiz at the end of each segment.
Similar courses are now being offered through many of the “content mills” or user-generated content sites. Teaching these skills to their contributors is to their benefit after all. In most cases however, there is an application process involved and only a select few are accepted. This free course is available to all contributors.
Though you will need to create a contributor account to access this course, I wouldn’t recommend investing time in writing for Yahoo! Voices. Instead, take these skills back to your own property. Use them for creating content for your blog, guest posting to market your business, etc.
Have you gone through the Yahoo! Academy? Please share your experience in the comments.
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About Angie Nelson
Angie,
Thanks for this info. I may head over there and check out some of these courses.
~Allie
No cost and no pressure, Allie. Those are my favorite! It’s definitely worth a look.
This is awesome! Everybody needs a refreasher when it comes to creating content. I’ll definitely be checking this out. Thanks for sharing!
You are welcome, Katie!
As I write blog posts for my pizza website, I am always tempted to submit items to Pizza Today or PMQ, a couple pizza industry magazines. I do find there is a difference and writing for the web seems a lot easier because I’ve been doing it more as of late. But I still haven’t mastered web writing yet. So, since you said it’s free….. I am up for some learning more about the craft of writing. Thanks.
Thanks for this! This is a great resource for writers. I’m sharing!