Born Yesterday with Questions

[HeatherLynn]

Hello all! My name is Heather and I just signed up with cc yesterday. I've been lurking about trying to get my bearings and see if this is something I want to invest my time in and I'm happy to say it's looking good. However, I am very new to writing 'articles' so I am quite nervous. I have a few questions that are worrying me more than my others, and if I could get some opinions from experienced writers here on cc I think that would help me a lot.

Like most newbs around here, my biggest worry is stopping before I get to start. I've seen several people fretting over the 'three rejections' rule and almost all have been answered with encouragement and reassurances that it is not a hard and fast rule. Is that still true?

I value con-crit more than anything- more than getting paid by a long shot- so I can say with some certainty that a rejection will never be over-looked or ignored by me. However, that's not to say that my writing is exactly up to par for this site (or this field in general), yet. I'm hoping to gauge that by submitting one article and seeing how it goes before I pour myself into writing. If it comes back riddled with criticism, then I know I have a lot of work ahead of me before I should try again.

Before I can do that I have to figure out what to submit. My background so far consists mostly of opinion pieces and fiction I would not be able to submit here. I do have some experience writing 'how-to' and 'ten things you didn't know' style articles for my personal blog. Do these kinds of articles tend to do well here? From what I've been able to gather, it seems most informative articles are arranged like short, dense research papers. Would you say that's a fair way to describe them?

And just one more for my curiosity: How, exactly, does someone end up in the "Expert Groups"? I've been reading through some profiles for the authors listed there, and as reading is always a learning experience for me, I'd like to know who my teachers are and why. lol

[Celeste Stewart]

Hello,
Welcome! Yes, "How to" and "Ten Tips for ___" type articles do well here. Think about what webmasters need: They need interesting, useful content to attract readers to their sites. When you think about it from that perspective, it's a little easier to find topics to write about (at least for me).

From what I know about the "experts" groups, I believe that these groups are generated automatically based on the number of articles a writer writes (perhaps sells?) in that particular category.

[HeatherLynn]

Awesome. Thanks for the help! The more I look around the more I'm looking forward to this.