Q. What style of writing are you training your editors in?
A. We have three main focal points for our free writing training at BellaOnline.
* Journalistic. BellaOnline trains its writers to present helpful information in a journalistic style. BellaOnline's articles provide how-to and inspirational content. The main focus of our articles is to help our readers learn to improve their own lives. Our content is not personal stories about "I went to the park" or "I played with my children." We are not a diary blog. We can recommend several blog sites to you if your desire is to write a personal blog!
* Timeless. Our articles will be live this week, but also next week, next month, next year, and next decade. They should be just as useful in that future. We help our writers learn how to build a library of content which can be sold, used, and provide benefits for years to come. Our articles do not talk about "this week" or "a few days ago." They are written in a way that makes sense even when read months from now.
* Family Friendly. We write for a world wide audience. Our article are accepted in libraries that have family filters installed, and in countries where certain issues (explicit sex, explicit violence) are considered forbidden and illegal.
Q. Are you a publishing corporation? Where are your offices?
A. The BellaOnline website is owned by and developed by one of our editors. We have no offices; we all work from our homes. We make most decisions by majority vote. There is a volunteer team of managers (who are all also writers in our network) who manage the training and day to day activities of our site. We are not a big company. We are a collective of passionate writers who bring knowledge and happiness to the world, supporting charities, with a minimal amount of ads shown solely to support the website's costs.
Q. How many editors are there per Site?
A. One. Each editor is the sole writer of content for her topic area. Visitors come to hear her unique voice. BellaOnline does not run press releases or paid promotions. We are all about the honest, unique voices of our writers.
Q. What should a Site cover?
A. The simple answer to this is that anything within a topic range is fair game - but that the editor needs to stay on topic. If an editor is writing about bowling, she should be covering bowling techniques, bowling events, reviews of bowling equipment. She shouldn't be writing about virusses on Windows XP. We already have a software editor covering that area.
Q. What about topics that are nested?
This is where it gets more complex. Because of the way our site has grown over the years, we have ended up with what we call "synoptic" sites. In these cases, one site is the general synopsis of the topic - while other sites are covering specific sub-topics. One example is Hawaii and Island Travel. We first made the site for Hawaii because that content was in such high demand. As visitors asked about other islands, we realized that we could not possibly make topics for every single island in the world. So we made an "Island Travel" site to cover all other islands. If that island travel editor covered Hawaii, it would be redundant. We already have an editor specifically covering Hawaii! The Island Travel editor should be covering all islands BUT Hawaii - all the islands without a voice.
Please make sure that you look through our Alphabetical Site List to understand what sites we have in our system. If you take on a topic, you will be expected to write about your topic - but NOT to write extensively about a topic that is already being covered. If you are the Gardening editor, we already have a site on roses and one on orchids. You can certainly talk about roses and orchids - but to write a 12 part series on all forms of roses and their care would be inappropriate.
Q. I would like to apply. Where do I go?
A. Once you've read all of the pages in this section, go to our BellaOnline Editor Application. We look forward to hearing more about you!
