One big part of make money online as an online writer is article marketing where you will be submitting your articles to several of the top free article directories. Now, although these directories have their own editors, you still have to do your own editing beforehand to increase the chances of your article being accepted.

Typically, even short articles will have a first draft. The idea is to simply get all the information out of your head and onto the screen. Typing out your best ideas while they’re fresh in your mind is more important than grammar and spelling in your first draft.

Once you’re at the point that you think you have churned out enough to call it a finished draft, then it is time to read it over and clean it up as you go.

The great thing about technology and being an online writer is that you have spelling and grammar tools built into whatever program you are using to write your articles.

Here are the basic editing stages that you will typically go through after letting your inspiration and thoughts flow freely for the first draft:

1. Check spelling and grammar.
This is the easiest part,especially since you’ll have a built in tool that will highlight all the common mistakes. However, don’t rely only on what your tool highlights as mistakes. Its quite common that you’ll find an error or two that either isn’t an error or maybe simply appropriate slang that you purposely added for effect that suits the article.

2. Read it out loud
Sometimes you can catch errors that you wouldn’t have otherwise noticed if you read the article out loud.

3. Word limit
There will be times when you have a word limitations (a minimum and/or maximum).  Now’s the time to find areas of the article that can either be cut down or expanded on as needed. Just make sure the article still flows and makes sense after your edits.

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