Write what you know and how I had

If you start reading various sites that are designed to help writers, sooner or later all of them will mention one thing.

That you should write what you know.

Which is also exactly what I tell people when they are looking for inspiration for an article or a blog post (If they need help with fiction, I send them to the Almost Totally Random Prompt Generator). And I also followed that advice, always picking the article topics I knew something about. Mostly because it required less research from me, and we all know time is money.

After I gave it some thought, at the very beginning of my freelance adventure, I decided to write about something I know and what other people are no doubt interested in. Writing.

You can see my interest in that topic from the numerous posts at Scribophile (when I was still writing for them) and from my various articles at Helium and AssociatedContent.

But recently I decided to start sharing my knowledge about another topic I'm quite familiar with. Studying Abroad.
Apart from being a freelancer, I have a full time job at the University where I work with international students and help students of our University apply for different student exchange programs. That means I not only have the know-how, but I also know quite well what the students are most interested in.

So just to see what would happen, I wrote the first article in December (How important is studying abroad for your career?). I was surprised to see it become one of my top earning articles. So to continue with the experiment, I wrote three more articles (yes, an article a day. It happened without me realizing it):

Determining if studying abroad is right for you
Advice to people thinking of studying abroad
Studying abroad without blowing your budget

Each of them turned out to be among my most popular articles. I am THRILLED.

And just because I didn't want to slow down when I'm on the roll, I did something about one of my New Year's Resolutions and I created a Helium Zone connected to, you guessed right, studying abroad.

You can easily say that three days into the 2010 I'm rediscovering how awesome it is to track my statistics.

So when next time you read how you should write what you know, BELIEVE IT.