This post gives tips on how to write a post a day on average and asks other bloggers to share their top three (3) tips for writing a post a day.
Before reading this post, you might want to read my article …
Top Reasons Why Posts Are So Important To Your Blog
- We’ve all heard that Content is King, but why? The article gives an initial top 8 reasons why content is so important – specifically posts – because content just isn’t all about posts.
- More reasons are added on occasion and readers are also asked to share their thoughts on the topic.
Keep Your Day Job – For Now
It is important to remember that if your blog is a second source of income – even if you plan to tell your boss that he’s fired one day – you need to make sure that your primary source of income does not suffer.
You need to make sure you get adequate sleep, food, fitness and family and friend time so that you don’t become a zombie. If you find that you are starting to feel and possibly even look like a zombie, you are working too hard and or not smart enough.
You then need to check out Zombies in Plain English or Surviving a Zombie War: Complete Protection From the Living Dead on one of my other sites, Beyond 2012 HQ.
Techniques for Writing A Post A Day ON AVERAGE
The important words are ON AVERAGE. This means that you can write 7 posts on the weekend and this will count towards your one per day goal. If you write 14 over a weekend, you are a week ahead of schedule.
Eventually, after your initial burst of writing in your development / establishment phase, you can change the frequency of your posting depending on your business plan. If you want to grow and become successful more quickly, you might want to consider maintaining gusto with your posting and /or getting somebody to help e.g. guest posting, partnership.
On Thesis Theme HQ at the moment, because I am in my second year and have established the site nicely, I am probably averaging only 1-2 posts per week. This is a deliberate interim decision on my part because I have an important (currently hectic day job) and my children are on school holidays. I’m also working on establishing another site. When Feb 2010 comes I will ramp up again and will be in writing mode for several sites either before breakfast and/or after the kids are in bed and/or on weekends. I don’t always plan to be working so hard, but I do plan on finding my defined level of success sooner than later.
Here are some quick tips on how to write posts quickly and more importantly on a regular basis with the occassional burst of expression.
1. A fast post is not always the best post
- Be considered about what you write. If you aren’t too sure about it, let it sit in draft mode overnight and then re-read it again later. Check for spelling and grammatical errors and make any necessary changes.
- It is always better to have a draft handy that needs a little bit more work and perhaps more research, proper source attribution or that amazing photo image that will make all the difference – than to publish a half-baked article that people will stop reading half-way through and click away from your site as a result of coming into contact with it.
- Worse still, you may think and plan to come back to it later and update it – but what if time gets away, you forget or couldn’t be bothered and it is that article that people judge your site and your credibility on as a budding-blogger?
2. Make yourself a bit of a template
- Work out what you would consider to be sufficient for a really short post. For example 300 or 600 words. How many words would you like to write for a medium length post? Where will you get your images from and how will you reference your sources? You might want to make yourself a checklist of items for different types of posts.
- For example, if you are going to do a mashup, when will these be published, how often, what structure, how many external links, etc?
- What structure or formula will you follow? Some people have their own systems, there are many written about on the internet. Or, you may just wing it having total faith that you will generally get it right – that’s great!
- What keywords do you want to use? You need to know what your site is targeting and keep these handy. If you have access to a keyword tool, even better.
3. Brainstorm titles
- What titles will you use for regular types of articles, so that your urls have some kind of consistency?
- If you have thought about a need for a particular article and have a title or more to choose from, writing the article will be a lot easier. Remember you are writing to meet the reader’s expectations about the title. If it says 10 things to do on Sundays, leave the other days of the week out of it. Keep focused!
4. Have an Idea What You Will Write About and Have the Research Ready
- The planning and time management is the hard bit. Finding 30-60 minutes before breakfast or an hour after the kids are in bed are my most productive times. I can draft 1-2 posts if I have the research and screenshots ready.
5. Scheduling is Your Friend
- Aim at scheduling a post a week for about 3 months and then add an additional post to each month until you are 3 months ahead with a post for at least 3 times per week.
- It’s essential when you get started that you get a lot of content up – for your readers and search engines – and then it just gets easier as you find your rythym.
6. Plan the Types of Articles You Will Write
- Identify for your site the different types of posts you will write, e.g. list post, reviews, features, mashups, referrals, personal updates, etc.
- You will find some articles are quicker to write than others. Finding a great video on YouTube and referring to it including what you learnt by watching it should only take 300 words.
7. Find Your Time and Place
- You need to have a place and your own space where you can write /type with few distractions.
- More importantly, you have to be in this place at the right time without pressure to be somewhere else or doing something different. Feed the kids, take the phone off the hook, get your exercise routine over and done with…and anything else that can deter you from your goal… and get writing.
8. Practice Makes Perfect – Write More Often
- If you are experiencing writer’s block, read Make Your Blog A Success: Overcoming Writer’s Block for some ideas to overcome it.
9. Keep Focused
- I often find that I draft two or more articles at once because I find the content spilling out into different sub-topics or different lessons.
- For example, I wrote the introduction to this article but found that it was so meaty that it deserved fleshing out into its own article: Top Reasons Why Posts Will Make or Break Your Blog.
10. Break It Up
- Just write /type like there’s no tomorrow and then break your article up into pieces.
- You might find that WordPress craps itself after saving quite a bit, so if you are going to employ this strategy you might want to write in Word or your text editor of choice.
- Then, work out where the logical breaks are in the piece of writing and divide it up into a series of posts (with several parts) or many different related posts.
- Keep in mind that your different articles (from your mega piece of writing) may have a very different order to that in which they were created in. For example, you might write about rain, the weather and global warming followed by Polar Bears and endangered species. While they were all interelated, work out how best to publish them. In what order will they be published? What posts will refer to other posts and if they are scheduled, what will the urls be?
- Tip: if you schedule a post and view it, the url in the browser will be the final url, not just a preview url.
What Are Your 3 Top Tips for Writing A Post A Day ON AVERAGE?
Leave your best tips and techniques in the comments…
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{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
This is an amazingly in-depth writeup on how to write a post per day! Definitely bookmarking this now. Thank you for writing this. I am currently on a challenge to write one article per day to submit to content websites. Hopefully I can do the same for my blogs.
With Writer’s block, what I always do is to take a nap first. Being too tired or stressed is one way of setting yourself up to be faced with Writer’s Block. So, rest your mind by taking a nap. Allow your mind some time to recover and soon you will be right back to writing.
Andrew@BloggingGuide´s last blog ..Comments Policy
The thing I struggle with is thinking of WHAT to write about. But one thing that really helps me is thinking, “What would I want to learn about?”. If I don’t know the answer, I go find it and write a really good post about it… It’s easy because there are endless things that I want to learn about, so I probably won’t run out of ideas.
Josh´s last blog ..Effective and Easy Solutions for People with Acne
Good article about organizing ones self to get an article a day up. One element of this process I think can be useful is to state your blog’s objective: ie: To present easy ways to exercise daily, and then to make an endless list of titles/ideas for articles…at least 50. Then read key websites for more ideas. Then each day try to write up 2 ideas. This will gradually get you a head of your goal and take the pressure off. Every 3 months make another 50 article idea list–even better every day add 2 or 3 new ideas to the list.
Add all these ideas to a strong discipline and you’ll have tons of articles.
James Todd
Publisher: BuildMySiteforFree.com
With Writer’s block, what I always do is to take a nap first. Being too tired or stressed is one way of setting yourself up to be faced with Writer’s Block. So, rest your mind by taking a nap. Allow your mind some time to recover and soon you will be right back to writing.
1skyliner´s last blog ..Find Blogs Using the Top Commentators Plugin