I'll be doing a lot of writing. With my anemic budget, I can't approach professionals for their services. Their rates are expensive and after the learning curve I'm still going through with writing articles, my hat goes off to them. Whether I'm writing an original piece or reworking PLR, I can not afford to stumble around without a plan.

What plan? For me it finally turned out to be an outline. I finally set up a fill-in form that let me write down my decisions and, when I had finished, acted as a checklist. It didn't happen all at once. My outline draft went through a few revisions before it worked for me.

If I'm working on PLR content, I read it through. My first decision then is 'title'; gets filled in on outline. The next decision is determining exactly what point the finished work intends to communicate to readers. That info goes in as a subtitle and, in expanded form, the introduction space on the outline.

Okay, just what smaller points do I need to include to support the major statement in my introduction paragraph? I have a choice of listing these points as subheads for paragraphs, or placing them in the paragraph space for further development. Thank goodness for the computer and word processing. My pencil's eraser would be used up by now!

The information I need to write my piece is now available in the outline at my elbow. This certainly keeps me on track; especially when I read and revise, read and revise to make sure of proper grammatical and spelling usage. Especially in this revision process, it's important for me to make sure I've supported and expanded the main theme in the introduction.

When these revisions produce a final product, I then will need to write the summary paragraph. From lessons in school and observing other article writers' styles, I know this paragraph should

* be short
* must reprise the idea the entire piece was written to express be conclusive, not wishy-washy

I follow basically the same pattern when I work with PLR content. The differences being my decision on what I feel the content should be exploring. Once that is done, it's a matter of rearranging the content, deleting some of it, adding more current information.

Through all this planning, I record my decisions on the outline for this work. Except for obvious differences between creating original or reworking PLR content, I'm finding the rest is pretty much similar. With time, thought, and patience I get an article worth submitting. If I've done my work thoroughly and accurately, an article directory might publish me.