As freelance writers, entrepreneurs and small business owners, we are constantly finding ways to effectively improve the marketing of our services and products online. Since most of us are not large corporations and cannot afford a team of marketing consultants and employees to do the groundwork for us, learning to formulate and execute new ideas on our own for as little money as possible, is essential.

Freelance writers are not web designers or SEO (search engine optimization) enthusiasts, but every freelancer has the ability to effectively improve his/her website’s performance, one step at a time. As writers, authors, editors, copywriters and anything else related to your services, the content on your website is your most valuable asset. The problem is, that as important as your content on your website may be, you may be overlooking some very fundamental aspects of SEO, that can dramatically impact the way your website is indexed and ranked by Google, Bing and Yahoo.

Here are a few quick and easy SEO changes that you or your web designer can easily implement to better your website’s exposure.

Pay Attention to Keywords and Keyword Terms

For those of you who are web savvy freelance writers, you probably already know that keywords in your content play a big role in user searches.

As an example: “We are a copywriting and marketing firm helping our clients achieve professional writing services.”

The simple sentence above includes keywords like “copywriting” and “marketing firm,” however they don’t pertain to any location per say.

- A simple easy fix would be adding a location you are trying to target.

The results: “We are a Boise Copywriting and Marketing firm helping small businesses achieve professional writing services.”

Now your keywords relate not only to your service, but also who and where you are trying to target. These tips are often times easily overlooked, especially when constructing your first website. And lastly, be careful not to get carried away and put too many of the same keywords in a paragraph or page, as Google will penalize your rankings. This is known as “keyword stuffing.”

Stay Relevant

Back in 2011, Google did a major search engine algorithm update, which put the importance of relevant and fresh content higher than ever before. What does this mean? All of those websites from 2002 that haven’t been touched or updated since then, will take a huge drop in rankings. Google continues to give higher-ranking power to websites that keep fresh and relevant content on a weekly basis. As writers, this means that now is the time to update your content and keep consistent with updates.

The best way to keep fresh content on your site is by utilizing a blog. For many writers, their website is a blog. If that’s already the case, try to always blog about useful and relevant information at least a few times a week. It is also important that whatever topic you find yourself writing about; make sure that it’s relevant to your online audience.

The most popular blogging platform available today is WordPress and is free to everyone. If you are using WordPress, be sure to take advantage of some free extensions that are available for you to download, including ones that help with the SEO of your site. These plug-ins are designed to do most of the in-depth work for you. They help optimize each post by allowing you to enter in the post title, keywords and a description of each page.

Relevancy of your content mixed with the importance of keywords will continue to play a huge role in your online marketing. Following these quick and easy on-page SEO tips will prove to make a difference with your website’s rankings.

About The Author:

Josh Olswanger is a web designer and owner of Thrive Web Designs, a Boise web design company who offers custom website design services, content creation and SEO for their nationwide clients.

“I simply have a penchant for INTELLIGENT conversation.” – Megatron, Beast Wars

Ego issues aside, rambling to myself has actually helped me come up with a lot of great ideas. Often my mind wanders to certain topics, which naturally leads me to trying out joke lines, to laughing to myself once I stumble on a nearly-perfect gag to use. Of course, as mentioned in the title, this only seems to work when I’m in the bathroom. Hey, what else am I gonna do in there when I’m finishing up?

Still, that got me thinking. Many writers advocate writing a terrible first draft to get everything on paper and avoid censoring yourself. Same’s true for joke writing. I’m thinking that this tendency of mine to make up material in the bathroom is my own way to bypass self-censorship and really get my creative juices flowing. And if it works for me, why not anyone else?

So here’s what I want you to try. It might by silly, but do it at least one time. Go to a place where you can be alone and do something to keep your hands busy. While you’re doing that, let your mind and mouth wander, speaking aloud what you’re currently thinking about. And as you do this, try to let your natural thoughts and reactions to things bubble through. You’ll find that, even as the risk of looking like a mad person, the lack of a barrier can summon some authentic and truly original material.

Of course, this might not work for everyone. If you’re like me and you tend to bop through life and make jokes, this will feel more natural to you. Even so, I think it’s worth a shot. Who knows? Jokes on the can just might turn out to be a valuable tool in your comedy arsenal.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

The Comedy Writing Workbook, by Gene Perret
I absolutely adore this book, and if you can get only one book on comedy writing, I’d make it this one. It covers a variety of techniques with detailed examples and exercises for you to try. If you can’t find it, though, you can make do with The New Comedy Writing Step by Step, another book by Perret that condenses this information. Either one is worth reading if you’re serious about improving your jokes.

Step By Step to Standup Comedy, by Greg Dean
This book is primarily geared to developing stand-up comedy routines and improving your performance, but it also offers the “joke prospector” system to help create great jokes. I’ve adopted some of the tips in this book into my own writing, so even article writers can get some mileage out of this one. Definitely a worthy purchase.

And Here’s The Kicker, by Mike Sacks
Sacks has gathered interviews with 21 fine folks in the comedy writing business, from column to film, in this neat little volume. There’s the obligatory advice on how to break certain markets and how to get your material in the right hands, but the strength of this book is reading where all these people came from and how they got to where they are now. And some of these cats come from poor or unpleasant backgrounds. It just goes to show you (and me) how you can get anywhere you want as long as you keep faith and stay tenacious. Without that, no dream is possible, especially one as tricky as comedy writing.

There are a few other books on comedy writing out there, but these are some of the best as far as I’m concerned. Of course, you can be sure I’ll feed you helpful comedy writing advice as well! Learn from everything you can, I say. And keep on laughing.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

Remember that jokes start with a setup and end with a punchline. The trick to using other jokes is to change the setup or the punchline to create a fundamentally similar line. This way you can preserve part of the original joke while putting your own spin on it.

Let’s demonstrate with one of the jokes I wrote for Twitter:

Life is full of disappointment and pain. Most of it comes from my performance of The Mikado.

Now, let’s try switching out the setup. Remember, it should still logically flow to the punchline in some way. Feel free to modify the punchline’s wording as well in order to accommodate your new setup.

Every year, hundreds of thousands of people fall ill from contagious airborne substances. This is why my performance of the Mikado was labelled a “biohazard”.

And now, let’s try switching out the punchline.

Life is full of disappointment and pain. But that’s not a very marketable name, so instead they called it “Spider Man: Turn Off The Dark”.

You can do this to both setup and punchline, creating your own new wording while keeping the essence of the joke idea intact. As long as the idea’s funny, it should work.

Of course, I still recommend you make your own original humor when you can, and if you feel bad about stealing from other writers, you can always rephrase jokes you’ve written yourself. But like they say, nothing is original…might as well take advantage of it a LITTLE bit, wouldn’t you say?

Until next time, keep on laughing.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

How do you catch these? Simple. Just read it out loud and use your head. I’ve mentioned before that written and spoken humor flows differently, and what constitutes “unneccessary words” in either of these mediums is different. Spoken humor needs to get to the point while written humor can lollygag a bit. Still, if you can cut out any extra words, the better.

Read humor aloud. See what words you can trim. Remember, you need to convey all the information the audience needs to understand a joke in the smallest amount of space possible. Besides trimming words, can you replace bigger words with smaller ones? Can you pare down phrases to their bare essentials? You’re not dumbing it down, per se – think of it as removing the joke’s barrier to entry, so the most amount of people can enjoy it. That can be a fun challenge in its own right.

Like all writing, make sure you hammer it out first before revising. It can be tempting to capture the flow of the words as you go, especially for something as short as a joke. Resist the urge, get everything else done first, then go back and clean it up. You’ll be glad you did.

Until next time, keep on laughing.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

Of course, you have to be careful of whom you mock. Using a joke like that against a celebrity or a politician is fine, since they’re acceptable public targets. But busting out the “takeout lane love” routine at a friend’s party could land you in a world of hot water. How far should you go?

Let’s look at each target and see how to handle them:

1. Public figures: Celebrities, politicians, companies, big websites…comedians mock these all the time, since everyone knows who they are. And since the media tends to report on every blooper they make, you’ll find a ton of potential topics to joke about. My only obvious warning here is that you can’t make stuff up. Do your homework first, and make sure what you’re talking about is true and recognizable by your audience. Other than that, you’re home free – how exactly you mock these figures depends on your style.

2. Big events: Approach these like public figures – don’t make stuff up and make sure the audience knows what you’re talking about. And, of course, if it’s too soon, DON’T make a joke about it. Don’t even try the most polite joke you can think of. Professional comedians have the experience to walk around huge tragedies, so if you don’t, just don’t bother. Trust me.

3. Friends and family: You can definitely get away with poking fun at the people you know, but you have to set boundaries. Don’t mock any problems they may be struggling with. Stick with the things they already make fun of themselves about. Exaggerate traits they already have or boast about. Poke fun at the stuff that ultimately doesn’t matter, and everyone will come out of it with friendships intact.

4. Yourself: Yep, making fun of your own faults is also possible. Comedians do it all the time – it’s a great way to build a connection with the audience. The best way to do this, I find, is to discuss a topic that most people are familiar with and occasionally remark about how it affects you. The trick is to come off looking like the fool, and there’s no limit to how you can do this. Just make sure it’s funny.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

Confronting the impact of your work is something all cretive minds have to deal with. This is especially true in comedy. A badly framed joke gets you blank expressions if you’re lucky…or gets you cussed out nine ways to Sunday. Standup comedians have to face a tougher heat, since they deal with a live audience, but even writers can feel the burn when their work tanks, and it can be difficult to move past that and get back into the groove.

Here are some things to keep in mind to help you cope with a bad reception:

1. Seperate yourself from your work. It’s very easy to invest your identity into a work and use a good reception to fuel your ego. Of course, this becomes harmful to your self-worth when you inevitably tank. Pull back. Don’t concern yourself with the outcome. Instead, make your goal to improve your work through any kind of feedback. It’ll keep you humble, dedicated to the craft, and most importantly, sane.

2. Get yourself laughing again. If you’re stuck in a funk, load up your favorite funny videos or comedians and get to laughing. This serves two purposes. Most important one is to get out of that funk and put your brain towards doing better. The other is to give you a little subconcious help – by refreshing your mind on what makes good humor, you’re more likely to pull it off next time.

3. Look towards a brighter future. Just because you’ve tanked once doesn’t mean you will again. Writing terrible material is part of the process anyway – you just published it when you thought it was finished. It happens to all of us. Still, I believe a good idea with a poor execution is worth revisiting. And even if you don’t feel like rewriting, you’re not doomed to write poorly forever. Pick yourself up and try again – pressing on will always solve the problems of the human race, as the quote goes.

That’s it for this year, folks. Thanks for sticking with me for this long – stay frosty and I’ll see you in 2011!

As a freelance writer, though, you’re stuck with writing, and not all comedy fits snugly in there like a nice little puzzle. What forms of humor should you attempt when writing, and which ones can you safely pass over?

Observational comedy: Humor that makes fun of everyday life. It works best when you talk about topics a lot of people can relate to, or when it speaks to the target audience. It fits primarily in articles or columns discussing specific subjects, but characters can get away with making these comments in humor fiction on occasion.

Character comedy: This brand of humor stems from how a character reacts to something, usually in an exaggerated or unexpected fashion. Works great in either fiction or witty commentary, though if writing an article, I’d mix some normal jokes in there as well. Of course, you also see this in sitcoms and comedy movies, so it naturally fits in those kind of scripts.

Slapstick: This is humor that relies on physical movement – pratfalls, mock violence, things like that. You could definitely incorporate these into a script for a play, but otherwise, don’t bother. It relies on the audience being able to see what’s happening, and it’s far less effective when described on paper.

Wordplay: Puns, twists of language, and general playing around with words makes up this style of comedy. Good wordplay, if you can manage it, fits practically anywhere. I’d advise using it all the time, though – it can get pretty annoying quickly if you’re not skilled enough at it to keep it interesting and diverse.

Satire: Basically, it’s making fun of current events, wit with an undercurrent of social criticism. This often falls under the banner of topical comedy. If you’ve seen Conan O’Brien deliver a monologue, you have a basic idea of what to expect. This works best in regularly-updated columns due to how quickly topics change, though columns that target long-standing issues and mocks those work just as fine.

Parody: A good parody recreates an original work while making fun of its flaws at the same time. Airplane! is a parody of disaster movies, while The Onion parodies serious news bites. Parody is another of those catch-all forms of comedy that works well in different mediums – it’s not too hard to mock a famous story or a celebrity. Like always, strive to make a clever and creative parody. If the parody isn’t up to snuff, it usually falls flat.

For the most part, humor relying exclusively on words tend to work fine on paper. (What a surprise!) But every situation is different, and not all types of humor fit in all types of writing. Use your head – if it doesn’t feel right, don’t leave it in.

Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

1. I usually start with the idea. I brainstorm ideas ahead of time, trying to think about topics my readers and listeners want to hear about. I deal with geeky humor, so this means thinking about video games and cartoons and the like. I keep a running tab of all my ideas, and only pick the ones I feel people will get the most excited about. (I’m not perfect at this yet, though ;) )

2. If I’m writing an article, I go ahead and create the basic article first – draft, revise, that whole jazz. If I’m writing a script, I like to do some brainstorming first. Remember how I’m always talking about using relationships to make jokes? Brainstorming things related to the topic helps. It also helps me plan out what details my script will cover, and using thing, I draft and revise the script as usual.

3. Here’s where things get admittedly tricky for me. When I’ve got a completed article or script, and I’m starting to write gags for the ends of paragraphs, I have to approach it real casual, otherwise I have a tendency to overthink things and give up. Here’s what I’ve settled on – I look at my setup and throw out as many improvised punchlines as I can, without a care for quality or technique. It’s my version of the terrible first draft. If I don’t get it out of the way right then and there, I’m just going to cause problems down the line.

4. Once I’ve thrown out punchlines for each setup and I’ve let them sit for a while, I come back. Now I’ve got room to pick the best punchline and revise it for stronger imagery or more clever language. I let myself fiddle with each one – without getting the first draft out of the way, I usually find myself doing this from the outset, which really kills my productivity.

5. With a script, I revise the overall dialogue to sound more natural when I speak it, but at this point I’m pretty much done. From here on out, it’s all a matter of posting and promoting. Don’t ask me about how to get more hits – even I still struggle with that ;)

Now I’d like to turn it over to you. Do you have any questions about humor writing that you want me to answer? What would you like to see me cover in future columns? Leave me a comment telling me what you’d like to see!

1. The Simpsons: Skinner’s Sense of Snow
The Simpsons have a few episodes dedicated to Christmas (especially its first episode) but this is one of my personal favorites. When the kids of Springfield get snowed in their school and Principal Skinner tries bringing order, the kids overrule him and start running amok. The plot’s kinda…off, but the jokes are great and the ending scene is randomly hilarious. Watch this if you want to learn more about weaving funny lines into your stories.

2. A Christmas Story
I tend to watch the end of this movie first and catch the beginning later. Hey, it’s always on marathon – works fine for me! You know the tale behind this one – a boy named Ralphie desperately wants a Red Ryder BB Gun for Christmas even though everyone keeps telling him he’ll shoot his eye out. And, of course, you remember the leg lamp, the kid sticking his tongue to the pole, the decoder ring, the furnace…the film does a great job making comedy through all of these little details and events and the character’s reactions to them. Watch this if you want to learn more about populating your stories with funny little occurences.

3. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation
Watching this film has become a recent tradition for me every Christmas whenever I visit my aunt’s house. I never want to, but after I’m dragged into a seat surrounded by the family and start watching, I get reminded every time that this is a great film. Chevy Chase is absolutely insane as Clark Griswold, and probably one of my favorite examples of a comic character – he just wants to give his family a perfect Christmas, but takes it waaaay too seriously, which results in tons of hilarious bits. Watch this if you want to see great examples of comic characters in fictional stories.

4. Blackadder’s Christmas Carol
This is a new favorite of mine. Blackadder is a British series about several reincarnations of a sarcastic schemer named Edmund Blackadder who is always trying to increase his status despite the antics of the stupid people surrounding him. In the special, this Blackadder is kind and gives almost everything away, leaving him and his servant Baldrick with nothing. But, once he’s visited by the Spirit of Christmas and shown that his descendants will become powerful if he becomes mean, Blackadder adopts his familar persona and gives all the idiots he knows what they deserve. Watch this if you want a great example of a snarky antihero.

These are just a few of my holiday favorites. What are your favorite funny Christmas specials?