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Confessions of a Keyword
Writer
By Sarah Skilton
Thursday afternoon. A new
weekly message arrives from my employer.
He needs twenty 200-word articles on his desk by
Sunday. It'll be a
stretch, but I can manage it. Oh, and did I
mention each article must use the keyword "volcanologist" combined
with one of the fifty states,
as in "volcanologist Alaska," which is a phrase that will never, ever,
in any context, make sense? My
sister laughed so hard when I told her
this I feared she might crack a rib. Why would
I spend a single hour
churning out this claptrap, let alone several
hours per week?
Well, for one thing: cold, hard
(PayPal) cash. You may have heard of
it. Then again, if you're a freelancer like me,
the concept of money
may be something you only recognize from fairy
tales or hushed rumors. I make 60-90 dollars per week from these strange
articles, which isn't
bad because they require minimal effort (though
at times maximum will
power.)
Am I proud of my articles?
Let's just say I don't mind giving up all
rights the second I reach the mandatory word
count.
Sometimes the client
deliberately misspells the keyword phrase,
knowing the average Googler will search for it
that way. It galls me
to incorporate misspelled words throughout the
piece (sometimes as
many as 15-22 times per article), but I grit my
teeth and do it,
because that's what my employer is paying me to do. As long as the keyword
phrases appear with the
required frequency and I manage to string
together enough sentences to justify the
article's existence, my
PayPal account gets fuller.
Besides the infamous "volcanologist
Alaska" series, in which I
actually used a pun based on the city of Juneau,
I've also written
about such disparate topics as diaper fetishes
in adults (don't ask), endometriosis, bad credit, christening
gowns, and "vampire contact
lens manufacturing." (No, really, don't ask.)
I used to worry that this experience would somehow permanently mar my ability to
write. Because how would intentional spelling errors and constant
keyword-counting help me “improve” my craft? They're more likely to trigger a
latent obsessive compulsive disorder. But because the articles are so short,
I'm learning to zero in on a subject quickly, to get the point across
immediately, and condense big ideas into manageable nibbles. Perhaps the
random bouts of research will
shoot me off toward a path of topics I would never have otherwise
pursued, or even lead to more
thorough discourses in which a byline
would be a blessing, not a curse.
It's a challenge to write 30 different articles about the same topic. And there
is certainly a peculiar challenge to making ridiculous topics seem normal-- or
at least of general interest to people who aren't doing, say, an Internet search
using keywords. This skill may prove useful in years to come, when I'm asked to
edit or completely re-work a piece. The strict Sunday deadlines force me to
focus, organize my time, and buckle down. Most importantly, the work reminds me
that writing is exactly that: work. A job. Not all of my assignments will be
fun or even interesting, but I still have to get them done on time. So for that
day or that hour when I'm typing up a storm, I'm a writer. Someone's waiting
for my words and I have to deliver.
I'd like to think I'm not completely kowtowing to The Man. In my network
marketing articles, for example, I warn readers about pyramid schemes instead of
simply touting the technique as a glorious, infallible money-maker. Though I
feel obligated to sprinkle a little personality into the articles, my employer
honestly doesn't care either way. He'll only send something back to me if I
forget to save it as a plain text document, not if I split infinitives,
disregard subject-verb agreement or write mind-numbingly dull prose.
I don't know how much longer
I'll continue at this gig. I do know
that while I'm querying, submitting speculative
fiction, and working on
various labors of love, it's comforting to
receive a weekly stipend.
Sometimes that's all I need to keep going, to
keep aiming higher and a
bit higher after that.
Sarah lives in Los Angeles
where she previously worked in television
production and currently attempts to merge the
professional blood
enemies of writing and modeling. She has
written voice over scripts,
Hollywood columns, short fiction, and personal
essays for CD, print
and online publications. To jump on the Sarah
bandwagon, head to
www.moviebytes.com/writers/projects.cfm?siteID=568.
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